News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
BY THE TIME it moves downtown next year, the University of the Pacific’s dental school will have made room for a lot of attractive — and expensive — new housing in the neighborhood. Trumark Urban has now bought the dental school’s longtime home at 2155 Webster Street, at the corner of Sacramento, and will convert…
THE USUAL CROWD wasn’t sitting in the sunshine this afternoon in front of Royal Ground, the neighborhood’s oldest coffeehouse. “The coffee shop for locals,” as it was known, ended its 25-year run Sunday as the final notes of the annual Fillmore Jazz Festival were drifting away in the late afternoon light. Ibrahim Alhjat, Royal Ground’s…
FIRST PERSON | MARK J. MITCHELL I moved to San Francisco in September 1978, following the woman who would become my wife, Joan Juster. She had gone ahead and found a studio apartment at California and Fillmore. The rent was a whopping $210 per month and the Murphy bed sagged as deeply as the Mariana…
IT HAD BEEN WHISPERED on the street for weeks: The venerable New Chicago Barbershop had closed and another black Fillmore institution, Marcus Books, would soon be closing, too. Roots run deep for both the bookstore and its building. Before the historic lavender Victorian at 1715 Fillmore that houses Marcus Books was moved from its original…
Q & A | JASON OLAINE Last year you left Yoshi’s on Fillmore to join Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. How’s the new gig going? The job is great — challenging and rewarding. Maybe that’s why it’s great. We just wrapped our 25th anniversary season and it was a home run, so there is some…
IT’S THAT TIME of year again — Fourth of July weekend — and the Fillmore Jazz Festival is back and will take over the street for the 29th year in a row. With more than 100,000 people expected for the two-day street party, the Fillmore Jazz Festival means different things to different people. For artists,…
FILM | Barbara Kate Repa JIM TRACY, longtime running coach at the neighborhood’s University High School, never set out to be a film star. But when life conspired to deliver a record-setting team, a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease and a community that rallied around it all, he could be no other. The result is…
SIGNALING IT WILL be harder for chain stores to open on Fillmore Street in the future, the city’s Board of Appeals on May 15 revoked the building permit secured by German-based clothing company Oska for the space at 2130 Fillmore, where it had intended to open a new boutique. Now that Oska has been adjudged…
NEW NEIGHBOR | Liz Fanlo Hair and makeup specialist Liz Fanlo lives near Fillmore and already knew she loved the neighborhood. So when she decided to open a beauty boutique, she persuaded a friend to rent her the tiniest storefront on the street at 2335 Fillmore. “Isn’t it cute?” she beams. “It’s tiny — 50…
NEW NEIGHBOR | ELITE FINE JEWELRY A dream of a new jewelry store is now open in the neighborhood. But it began as a nightmare. Jeweler Simon Khurin and his family lived only 80 miles from Chernobyl when the Russian nuclear reactor imploded in 1986, spewing radiation across the landscape and forcing the relocation of…