News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
SALOONS | CHRIS BARNETT So did swashbuckling blues guitarist John Lee Hooker really own the Boom Boom Room as a side gig? If you believe the sign above the door, he did. And if you listen to the current owner, Alexander Andreas, he did. But don’t bet your booty on it. Fillmore jazz genealogists Elizabeth…
GOOD WORKS | Carol McLaughlin If anyone knows what it means to keep going in the face of adversity, it’s Olushade Unger. She grew up shuttling between her mother’s home in the Fillmore district and her father’s place in Hunters Point, where violence and gang activities were commonplace. Unger was in high school, planning on…
A neighborhood icon with historic roots experiencing a renaissance — that was the cause for celebration in mid-July at the Elite Cafe. It was a 30th anniversary party for the Elite, held more than 80 years after its well-preserved Art Deco home first opened in 1928 as the Lincoln Grill. But the rejuvenated Elite and…
WHILE 30 YEARS can be more than a lifetime in San Francisco’s ever-changing restaurant world, Fillmore’s venerable Elite Cafe on July 14 will celebrate three decades of serving up New Orleans cuisine in its historic Art Deco home. And that’s only its third incarnation. The woody, warm and welcoming spot at 2049 Fillmore is rich…
By Jesse Hamlin A sea of sun-drenched people flowed along Fillmore Street on Saturday, partaking of the musical and gustatory pleasures — not to mention the beer, wine and margaritas — served up by San Francisco’s biggest street bash. Blues and barbecued oysters. Fried catfish and Nigerian folk songs. Those were some of the sounds…
FIRST PERSON | Charlie Greene The corner of Jackson and Fillmore was the center of the universe when I was growing up at 2449 Jackson Street in the 1950s and 60s. You could get anywhere in the city on four Muni bus lines — the 22-Fillmore, 80-Leavenworth, 3-Jackson and 24-Divisadero — plus the Washington-Jackson cable…
For the 27th time, Fillmore Street will celebrate the Fourth of July by hosting the Fillmore Jazz Festival, this year on July 2 and 3. It’s by far the largest street party in the city, stretching from Jackson Street in Pacific Heights south through the Fillmore Jazz District to Eddy Street. Ruth Dewson, the long-reigning…
St. Dominic’s School closed for the final time at the end of the school year after more than a century of educating economically disadvantaged children in the neighborhood. Yet the future for both the school and its Gothic home on Pine Street, erected in 1929, seems filled with promise. The school has been known as…
After more than a year of exploring the possibilities, the San Francisco Film Society is coming to the neighborhood — but to Japantown, not the Clay Theater. The Film Society announced this morning that it will establish a year-round home and take over the programming of the stylish and high-tech Viz Cinema at the New…
Globetrotting jazz vocalist Kitty Margolis returns to Fillmore — source of some of her earliest musical inspiration — for her debut performance at Yoshi’s on June 24. “When I was a kid, barely 12 years old,” says the fourth generation San Franciscan, “I would go to the Fillmore and Winterland and see all sorts of…