From Fillmore to Punta del Este

Posted on January 8, 2012 by editors

Los Dedos (The Fingers) photographed by Tom Bergin

FIRST PERSON | Tom Bergin

Life flies by so fast. It has been almost 10 years since I sold Tom Bergin Goldsmith on Fillmore Street to Eric Trabert. I miss the customers — many of whom became friends. I miss the neighbors who popped in to say hello as they passed by on their daily routines — especially people like Rose, who shared her family recipe for Italian gravy, and Bruce, who often brought his latest baked goods for us to try. And of course I miss the ones who came by to keep me informed about the ups and downs of the neighborhood.

I feel honored to have shared in many happy moments as a jewelry designer on Fillmore Street for nine years, and for eight years before that at Union Street Goldsmith, whether it was working with customers to design a wedding ring, resetting a sentimental gemstone or finding a special keepsake. I miss the jewelry business and have fond memories of being involved with the Fillmore Merchants Association — which involved, among other things, climbing up the trees along Fillmore Street like a monkey to wrap them with Christmas lights.

After working hard for so many years, I thought I would just kick back. But life has brought me new adventures. Now I live between San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. I’m in Uruguay because it is the childhood home of my partner of five years, who I met right in front of my house in San Francisco.

Going back and forth to Uruguay the last few years has turned into something of an endless summer. The shortest day of the year in the U.S., December 21, is the longest day of the year in Uruguay and the first day of summer. So while I sometimes miss being in retail at Christmas time, it is fun to spend Christmas near the beach and watch the water drain down the sink in the opposite direction.

In Uruguay, life is quiet. I enjoy doing travel and portrait photography and posting the photos on my Facebook page, Thomas Bergin Photography. The photograph above is part of a series I took in Punta del Este.

I don’t know what is around the next bend, but for now I’ll keep my seat belt fastened and enjoy the ride. My wish is that we all have a new year filled with good health and a happy journey.

Nos vemos amigos. I’ll be seeing you around.

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From Fillmore to Harvard

Posted on January 8, 2012 by editors

FIRST PERSON | Amy Bernstein

When we started telling friends that we were moving from San Francisco to Boston, we could count on getting one of two responses: an incredulous “Why?” or “Boston’s great. It’s a lot like San Francisco.”

My partner Nanette Bisher and I were moving because I had just landed a dream job. We’d always sworn we’d never leave San Francisco. After years of hopscotching across the country for work, we’d found our way to the Bay Area in 1999 and for 12 years we were happy — Nanette as the art director first of the Examiner and then the Chronicle, me as an editor at several business magazines. But the new job — as editor of the Harvard Business Review, where I’d get the opportunity to build on the success of a storied publication — was too good to turn down. And it was in Boston.

So we reluctantly agreed to give ourselves three years. In that time, we figure, we’ll either fall in love with Boston or we’ll come back home.

And by home, we mean our place at Bush and Fillmore, because nowhere we’ve ever lived has felt so much like home. We love our apartment in the Amelia. But home is much more than our condo. It’s our daily visit with Gary at Barry for Pets, where he’d ply our Corgis, Harry and Sadie, with treats and sit for a few minutes to discuss our beloved Giants. Home is our daily visit to the Fillmore Bakeshop, where I’d take way too long deciding which cookie to buy, mostly so I could spend a little more time with Elena and Doug, the daughter-father owners. Home is Alta Plaza and Mollie Stone’s, Osaka and Woodhouse Fish Co. The great people and frames at Invision. And home is the neighbors who became dear friends — our family, really.

Leaving was not easy. “Why?” indeed.

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Still modern after all these years

Posted on January 7, 2012 by editors

Photograph of Vasilios Kiniris at Zinc Details by Drew Altizer

Q & A | VASILIOS KINIRIS

Zinc Details has turned 20. How did it all begin?

I was fresh out of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley and simply had an idea and some very strong feelings. At the university, Wendy Nishimura and I had developed an understanding and shared a passion for the modern classics of furniture design. In travels to Europe and Japan, we came face to face with new styles hatched from traditional forms. And naturally, we began to form strong relationships with young artisans and designers in the San Francisco Bay Area who were creating excitement with simply styled, highly functional and innovative pieces.

What led you to put your architectural education to use in a retail design store?

It takes a long time for architecture to actually be realized and influence a person’s life. Retail design is a lot more immediate. You can touch people on an everyday level. Personally, we love to collect, admire and interact with beautifully designed products and the store is a reflection of our vision and taste. Having the knowledge of history of architecture and art is also a great reference when dealing with modern design products. All products designed today have references to the past. We can appreciate all the thought process put in to develop the products. And even when creating a display, we can visualize space relations to the products better.
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Fillmore Center, Safeway kill benefit district

Posted on January 6, 2012 by editors

By Carina Woudenberg

Floyd Trammell — whose position as president of the Fillmore Community Benefit District ended when the group was defunded in mid-December — walked the blocks of Fillmore south of Geary on a recent morning and took note of the changes he was seeing in the neighborhood. The sidewalk was littered with plastic bags and other trash. Here and there were clumps of cigarette butts and piles of leaves. “This used to look spotless,” Trammell said. “Up until November, all this was spotless.”

The community benefit district (CBD) was created in 2006 amid optimism that better days were ahead for the area with the imminent opening of Yoshi’s Jazz Club, the Fillmore Heritage Center and several new restaurants. With city support and a “yes” vote from the area’s property owners, the CBD was poised to help clean up the neighborhood and promote its new attractions. The special property tax brought in annual funding of about $300,000. A board of directors made up of property owners, local residents and business owners took responsibility for using the funds to pay for cleaning, marketing and security.

Initially there was considerable infighting among business owners and local residents. But most board members said the organization had made a positive difference in an area still struggling to move past the devastation of redevelopment in the 1960s.

In mid-December the CBD was up for renewal and many of the 300 property owners in the district supported it. But the votes were weighted based on the size of each owner’s property. Representatives from two major properties — the Fillmore Center and Safeway — were against it, and renewal was defeated by 66 percent to 34 percent.
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Journal of a woman’s life — in paint

Posted on January 5, 2012 by editors

Self Portrait (1977) by Joan Brown

ART | JEROME TARSHIS

Joan Brown (1938-1990) may have thought of herself as an unclassifiable artist. “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,” the survey of her paintings at the San Jose Museum of Art, positions her as one who portrayed women’s lives, beginning with her own. Curators need to say something, but it’s an idea that hardly narrows things down. A woman is called upon to play many parts — and Brown tells us that she enjoyed most of them.

Joan Brown (nee Beatty) was born in San Francisco and received a Catholic education through high school. Her teachers seemed to offer her a choice between becoming a nun or becoming a 1950s wife and mother. By sheer chance, she saw an ad for the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, visited its campus, saw people with beards and sandals, and thought an entirely different world had been opened to her.

As a child, she had played with paper dolls, putting different costumes on a single figure, and as a teenager she had copied photographs of glamorous movie actresses. When she applied to art school, the drawings of actresses were enough to secure her admission. They were girlish rather than feminist, but they prefigured much of her career, which was dedicated to making a body of work that was a journal of a woman’s life far more than it was a product offered for sale.

For a time Brown considered herself the least qualified of art students and thought of dropping out until one of her teachers, Elmer Bischoff, changed her sense of what she could do. Bischoff told her that she didn’t need to master academic drawing — that experience would teach her what she needed to know. And as for what to paint, a cup of coffee in her studio was a perfectly legitimate subject for art.

She became enormously successful. The paintings of her student years, much admired at school, brought her to the attention of an outstanding gallery in New York, where she sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art in her early twenties. In San Francisco at that time, being a woman artist was no great handicap; in lifetime career terms, both Brown and her next-door neighbor on Fillmore Street, Jay DeFeo, outstripped their artist husbands, Bill Brown and Wally Hedrick.

Brown was notable for getting paint on herself; she seemed almost eager to look like a mess. But she also enjoyed being pretty and dressing up, and the show includes a painting in which she and her third husband, Gordon Cook, are on their way to a performance of San Francisco Opera.

One of the most teasing works in the show, a summation of cliches about women and women artists but also an example of her refusal to be only one thing or only another, is Self-Portrait (1977). In it, Brown sits in her studio, painting a still life of a flower, and instead of wearing a paint-stained artist’s smock, she is wearing a handsome dress and high-heeled shoes and looks as if she has dressed for
a party.

Her paintings tell us that she could embrace the most varied possibilities: she could be physically strong, as a long-distance swimmer; she could be a painter; she could be a wife or mother or lover; by the 1980s, she could be a spiritual seeker in India. For her, at least, there was never any contradiction between looking terrific in high heels and being a serious, successful, and, if one wants to use the adjective, feminist painter.

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Farewell to a big man with a tiny trumpet

Posted on January 4, 2012 by editors

Mike Pitrie made the Fillmore his home base.

JAZZ | Anthony Torres

Mike “Coffee Picasso” Pitre, a true original local jazz talent and music scene treasure, died of a heart attack on December 18, leaving friends and admirers stunned at the sudden departure of the Bohemian Knuckleboogie lead man. He was 44.

I can still vividly remember that first sighting of Coffee and Bohemian Knuckleboogie a couple of years ago at Sheba Piano Lounge on Fillmore — the sound offering a unique blend of New Orleans jazz, soul and blues. It was difficult not to notice Mike Pitre, a larger than life black man, blowing a tiny pocket trumpet with an electric guitar draped over his torso. He sang with a style and voice that was incredibly hip and uniquely his own.

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More casual dining options arrive

Posted on January 2, 2012 by editors

State Bird Provisions made its debut on New Year's Eve at 1529 Fillmore.

PROVING ONCE AGAIN that more casual eateries are gaining in popularity in the neighborhood, a number of new restaurants opened just in time for the new year. Among them are spots helmed by two husband-and-wife teams with impeccable pedigrees:

Roostertail — a new restaurant specializing in free-range chicken cooked on a rotisserie spit — is now open for lunch and dinner at 1963 Sutter Street, formerly the longtime home of Cafe Kati. With its snappy logo and slightly naughty name, Roostertail is the brainchild of Gerard Darian, formerly of Bix, and Tracy Green, formerly of Chapeau. They met while working at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio. The menu is heavy on free-range chicken and wings, but also offers beef brisket and pulled pork sandwiches and a number of chopped salads. The space has been totally revamped and now sports a modern, airy feeling with an open kitchen, walnut tables and a black granite counter with red stools. A patio out back will open soon.

State Bird Provisions — the first of three restaurants to open in the old Progress Theater building at 1529 Fillmore in the jazz district — brings a new concept and a new home for former Rubicon chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski. A number of staffers from Rubicon, their far more formal Financial District mainstay, have joined them. The concept focuses mostly on small plates offered on carts and trays. It’s named for California’s state bird, which stars in Brioza’s signature crispy spiced quail dish. The restaurant opened on New Year’s Eve and serves dinner every night except Tuesday.

The space next door at 1527 Fillmore later this year will become the home of Hapa, from Nopa veteran Richie Nakano, who will keep his Hapa Ramen stand at the Ferry Building. Still to be announced: plans for the even more ambitious restaurant coming to 1525 Fillmore.

Across the street at 1552 Fillmore, Holy Dog has opened as primarily a carry-out shop downstairs offering sausages, hamburgers and wings. Upstairs there’s a dining room for eating in. It’s open daily from 11 a.m. to midnight and until 2 a.m. on weekends.

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An exceptional year for mansions

Posted on January 2, 2012 by editors

The new home at 2845 Broadway has been reduced from $65 million to $38.5 million.

REAL ESTATE | Maria Marchetti

We had an exceptional year for mansion sales in 2011, with 15 homes selling for more than $5 million. And we still have a handsome selection of high-end offerings available, including eight mansions listed over $10 million and nine more listed between $5 million and $10 million.

Among them: The still-under-construction new limestone home at 2845 Broadway has been relisted at $38.5 million, reduced from its previous asking price of $65 million. It was withdrawn in January 2010 after nearly four years on the market. The elegant Hellman mansion designed by Julius Kraft at 2020 Jackson has been impeccably renovated, including solar panels, and is still available for $20 million. At 2808 Broadway, the 1927 home designed by Willis Polk is listed at $25 million, and offers a prime position for America’s Cup viewing from the pentroom. The completely restored home at 2701 Broadway, offered at $28.5 million, has a basketball court and unobstructed views. Two blocks west, towering over the heart of the Gold Coast and now listed at $38 million is 2901 Broadway, the stately mansion with a private tennis court that’s been on the market more than four years.

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Citizen Cake calls it quits

Posted on December 9, 2011 by editors

Photograph of Elizabeth Falkner in Citizen Cake on Fillmore by Daniel Bahmani

BARELY A YEAR after moving to Fillmore Street and then struggling through several changes in concept, Citizen Cake closed just before Christmas.

“I can’t do it anymore,” chef-owner Elizabeth Falkner told Inside Scoop. “I just have to start over.”

Falkner took over the hallowed brick-walled space occupied for nearly 30 years by Vivande and was acclaimed a worthy successor. But then it took her almost a year to get the restaurant open, and it never found a loyal local following. Falkner’s other restaurant, Orson, closed in October except for special events.

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It’s the symphony’s centennial

Posted on December 8, 2011 by editors

NEIGHBORHOOD RESIDENT Michael Tilson Thomas is one of the best things to happen to the San Francisco Symphony in its first 100 years. Join in this sing-along for the symphony’s centennial — today, December 8.

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