News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
ORNITHOLOGY | Monte Travis When I saw a golden crowned hummingbird up at Alta Plaza Park near the tennis courts, I was confused. I was unaware of any species that sports a golden crown. But then I watched as she dipped her bill into the long red tubular-shaped flowers adorning the bushes and witnessed the…
By ERICA REDER It’s 7:30 on a Tuesday evening, and nearly every seat in Dino’s Pizza at the corner of Fillmore and California is taken. Couples and families crowd the tables, sharing pizzas, draft beers and sodas. Three television screens broadcast the Tennessee-Vanderbilt basketball game, while mob movie stills and portraits of famous athletes stare…
[nggallery id=10] It didn’t take a cynic to question the need for another coffee shop and cafe on Fillmore Street — especially one in the exact same spot, at 2123 Fillmore, where Bittersweet and Sweet Inspiration and several others had tried and failed — and next door to recent arrival Citizen Cake, a superstar of…
BOOKS | KEN SAMUELS A customer walks into Browser Books on Fillmore and approaches the counter with a sly smile on his face. “Hey,” he says, “are you guys happy that Borders is closing in Union Square?” “I’m not happy for the people who lost their jobs,” I reply, “but it doesn’t surprise me.” I…
A fter retiring as a high school English teacher, Eleanor Burke decided she needed a project to keep busy — and an excuse to explore the city she’d called home all her life. A few years earlier she had sketched architectural highlights of Russian Hill and published a small guide to the neighborhood. So she decided…
Naturally they’ll have a green living roof on the new eco-conscious assembly building now nearing completion behind Drew School at California and Broderick Streets. But they’ll also have a vertical garden created by Parisian botanist-artist Patrick Blanc — a rock star among gardeners credited with inventing the concept and planting gardens on walls around the…
“I couldn’t do this without him,” Elena Basegio-Carpenter says of the Fillmore Bakeshop she and her father operate at the corner of Bush Street. “I wouldn’t do this without her,” her dad Doug tells Chronicle reporter and neighborhood resident Julian Guthrie. Read more: “No loafing around”
Ex-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak might consider moving to the neighborhood, suggest our colleagues at the Bay Citizen, since the Egyptian government has a lovely clinker-brick mansion with a fascinating history sitting empty at 3001 Pacific Avenue. It formerly housed the Egyptian consulate in San Francisco.
Many in the music world are still scratching their heads about the Grammy Award for Best New Artist that went to bass player Esperanza Spalding Sunday night. But not jazz fans in the Fillmore, who know her from her performances at Yoshi’s. EARLIER: At Yoshi’s, beauty and the bass
Fillmore’s newest establishment — originally to be called Sweet Jane, but now just plain Jane — is open for business at 2123 Fillmore. And there’s nothing plain about it. This location has been home to many other sweet shops: most recently the Bittersweet chocolate cafe and earlier Sweet Inspiration and half a dozen others. But…