Mimi’s great sorority

Posted on August 2, 2012 by editors

Photograph of Mimi Lawrence by M. Christine Torrington

By Marjorie Leet Ford

MIMI LAWRENCE ALWAYS wanted to have her own store.

“I started in retail when I was six,” she says, recalling her childhood in New Jersey. “I loaded an ice chest of soda pop into a little rowboat with a one-and-a-half horsepower motor, like an eggbeater, and rode around the harbor selling pop to people in sailboats.”

Years later, she worked for Lord & Taylor in New York, then for Joseph Magnin in San Francisco. She especially loved J. Magnin because it bravely broke the rules.

“At that time the only lingerie you could get was black, white or cream,” Lawrence says. “Suddenly a runway show had shortie nightgowns in orange, green, and purple. People were shocked!”

Twenty-six years ago, she opened her dream store — Mimi’s, on Union Street near Fillmore. To stock it, she says, she searched far and wide to find fashions that were comfortable and practical, great for travel — and “a little adventurous.”
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Creating a new public space

Posted on July 9, 2012 by editors

Photograph of the Fillmore Stoop by Daniel Bahmani

DESIGN | NICK KINIRIS

Three years ago, the concept of the Fillmore Stoop was born, with the intention of making the northern stretch of California Street near Fillmore more pedestrian friendly and softening the harsh visual of the busy four-lane highway. The idea was to create a public space where neighbors could meet, relax, take a break from shopping or just hang out.

San Francisco has embraced these kinds of parklets — usually two parking spaces converted into mini urban parks. The parklet movement originated here, but was inspired by beautification efforts in New York that reclaimed dead urban spaces and transformed them into parks and plazas. The idea also takes its cues from European cities, where urban pedestrian zones have always been valued. The parklet concept has since expanded across the globe.

Each parklet in San Francisco has its own flavor. The Fillmore Stoop was designed by architects Jessica Weigley and Kevin Hackett of Siol Studios at Fillmore and Clay. Its multi-tiered sculptural form provides several levels for pedestrians to sit. It both creates more space for people and also acts as a barricade against the busy California Street traffic. The $25,000 project was funded by Chase Bank, which recently opened a branch across the street from the parklet.

EARLIER: “Parklet sprouting on California Street“

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Now there’s a Fillmore app

Posted on July 9, 2012 by editors

FOR MORE than a decade, Fillmore merchants have provided a lively illustrated folding map of the shops, entertainment and dining opportunities in the neighborhood. The map, which is updated regularly, helps locals and visitors alike navigate the thriving local business community.

With more than 200 businesses in the neighborhood, there are constant closures, openings and remodels — and lots of special events — it was the launching pad for an interactive app that provides up-to-the-minute notification of news and shopping events generated by neighborhood merchants.

So now there’s an iPhone app for Fillmore Street — one of the first neighborhood apps. You can download the free Fillmore app at the iTunes store or at the neighborhood’s Facebook page.

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Kim Nalley: back home on Fillmore

Posted on July 5, 2012 by editors

Photograph of Kim Nalley and her new daughter Lydia by Kathi O’Leary

By Pamela Feinsilber

IF THE FILLMORE were a university, rather than a school of hard knocks, jazz singer Kim Nalley would long ago have been awarded an honorary doctorate. Though she lives with husband Mike Lewis and their new baby girl Lydia in the saddle between Nob Hill and Russian Hill, looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Fillmore considers her one of its own.

And the feeling is mutual.

“The Fillmore is my home away from home,” Nalley says. “I cut my eye teeth in the Fillmore.”

She got her start on Fillmore Street in the early ’90s singing at Harry’s Bar, the Fillmore Grill and the Alta Plaza Bar & Grill. It was during those gigs that she started claiming an ever-widening circle of fans. Since then, she’s performed around the world as a solo artist, with her band — even, for a few years, as the performer-owner of the Jazz at Pearl’s club in North Beach.

Nalley has been appearing regularly at the Fillmore Jazz Festival for a decade. This year she’s the jazz artist in residence, closing both days of the festival on the California Street stage.
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It’s all about the music

Posted on July 5, 2012 by editors

Jai Uttal is world music artist in residence at the Fillmore Jazz Festival.

THE LINEUP | Jason Olaine

It’s that time of year again, when San Francisco’s swingingest, bluesiest and funkiest street party comes alive. The 2012 Fillmore Jazz Festival is July 7 and 8.

This is the 28th year of the festival, which was created in 1984 to celebrate Fillmore’s jazz heritage at a time when much of the music had stopped. I had the honor of programming the music on the Sutter and California Street stages again this year and I can honestly say: If you had fun and were turned on by the eclectic and energetic music last year, then you’ll surely want to get to the Fillmore early this year. We have some amazing talent lined up. [Schedule of entertainment]

And if the diversity of music isn’t enough to get you up and out, the myriad food and arts vendors and the participating restaurants and merchants up and down the strip should be. The more than 200,000 people who attended last year can’t be wrong.

For the second year in a row we have both an artist-in-residence for the California Street stage (a jazz artist) and the Sutter Street stage (a world music artist), both of whom will be performing Saturday and Sunday.
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Crackdown on booze at jazz fest

Posted on July 5, 2012 by editors

By Barbara Kate Repa

FOR THE FIRST TIME in its 28-year history, those who wish to drink beer or wine at the Fillmore Jazz Festival this year must buy and consume it within the confines of one of seven “beverage gardens” — designated areas within the festival carpeted in artificial turf and enclosed by white picket fences.

In the past, police suspended the laws against public liquor consumption during the festival. As long as drinks were in plastic, festivalgoers were allowed to walk around with them, wherever purchased.

Northern Station Captain Ann Mannix tightened the rules on bars and restaurants last year, no longer allowing them to sell outside. This year, she barred alcohol at the festival, except when consumed in beer gardens or inside bars and restaurants.
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A designer who’s just our type

Posted on July 4, 2012 by editors

POSTER ARTIST | Carly Lane Plaskett

She was a high school art teacher in London before moving to San Francisco four years ago to study new media at the Academy of Art. Carly Lane Plaskett flourished in the “digital meets old school design” program.

For a class in typography, she was challenged to design her own font. Since she lived near Fillmore Street, she decided to evoke the neighborhood’s jazz era. “I wanted something local to inspire me,” she says. “All through school I’d worked at Harry’s on Fillmore.” She studied mid-century typefaces, with their thin and thick letters, as she created her own Fillmore face.

Once she’d created the font, she had to demonstrate its use. Last year’s Fillmore Jazz Festival had just come and gone, so she imagined what the next poster might look like, and how the design would work on postcards and street banners.

“I’ve been to every Fillmore festival since I got here,” she says. “Fillmore is real — it still has a cultural element that’s gotten lost in the more commercial areas.”

She got an “A” on the project and graduated to a job at Sparkart, an agency in Oakland. And when she emailed a copy of her Fillmore Jazz Festival project to the festival’s organizers, they promptly suggested it be featured on the poster for this year’s festival.

“It’s really exciting to see my design all over,” she says. She was especially flattered when the poster was reproduced in chalk on the blackboard at Kiehl’s.

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The $100 million man

Posted on June 5, 2012 by editors

Pascal Rigo at Boulangerie Bay Bread on Pine Street.

IT BEGAN in a former dry cleaners on Pine Street in 1999. “I just have this thing about bread,” said Pascal Rigo, the Frenchman realizing his dream by launching his own boulangerie and living upstairs above the shop. “The flavor, the smell, the texture. I can’t tell you why. It wasn’t as if I came from a long line of bakers. I was just fixated on bread. And not only bread. I was crazy about the bakery, too.”

Yesterday Rigo and his investors sold the company and its 19 La Boulange cafes to Starbucks for $100 million. During the next year, La Boulange products will be added to every Starbucks pastry case in America, Rigo says. And the La Boulange brand will expand to 200 to 400 units nationwide within the next four to five years.

Inside Scoop: Starbucks buys La Boulange

EARLIER: “I just have this thing about bread“

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Blessed by our time and place

Posted on June 4, 2012 by editors

BOOKS | Thomas McNamee

While writing my new biography of Craig Claiborne — The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat — I traveled far, in my mind, from our quiet Victorian home near Fillmore Street and from the fresh, simple food that for me is the best of San Francisco. Whether cooking the wondrous provender that my wife and I find every week at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market or dining at Florio or SPQR — our local favorites — I always try to remember how richly blessed we are by our time and our place.

My work took me to places and times long lost and in them I found a certain sweet melancholy. I was obliged to occupy my own past, 35 years and more ago, when I was living in New York City with my young bride and learning to cook from Craig’s New York Times Cook Book. Thanks to a rich uncle from Mississippi who visited often, we were able to dine in New York’s finest restaurants of the day, the ones Craig esteemed above all others, and gave his highest ratings. These were mainly French and formal: La Grenouille, La Cote Basque, Quo Vadis, La Caravelle, Le Cygne, Lutece.
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Sexual crime and punishment

Posted on June 4, 2012 by editors

BOOKS | Eric Berkowitz

It took 25 years, but I have returned — to a city that feels like home even after a decades-long absence; a city that warms my spirit even as its fog freezes my bones; a place where I can be the public interest lawyer I want to be; and where a local publisher is publishing my book.

The epic journey of the human spirit, which forms the basis for every good story since Homer’s Odyssey, involves a person leaving home, undertaking a long journey, then returning with the benefit of experience. Odysseus did it. Forrest Gump did it. And, in my own small way, I did it too. I left San Francisco in 1985 an unhappy young attorney who felt that deep inside he was really a writer, and came back a writer who happily gives legal services to the poor — and just had a book published.
My new book, Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire, published May 8 by Counterpoint Press, was researched in Los Angeles and written in Paris. But the book’s true roots, like so much else important in my life, are here in San Francisco.
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