News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
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…
RUTH DEWSON, the longtime proprietor of Mrs. Dewson’s Hats and the self-proclaimed Mayor of Fillmore Street, helped start the Fillmore Jazz Festival in 1984. She recalls approaching promoter Terry Pimsleur, who had started the Union Street Festival, about creating a similar street fair on upper Fillmore, where new businesses were opening and trying to improve…
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…
Bella the swan — who returned last Sunday to lagoon at the recently restored Palace of Fine Arts after recovering from an injury to her foot — is moving to Petaluma, the city’s Rec and Park Department announced today. While Bella was away, her sister-in-law Blanche gave birth on Memorial Day to a baby swan…
A rt patrons Michael and Sarah Stein lived in the Fillmore, then primarily a Jewish neighborhood, before they joined his sister Gertrude and brother Leo in Paris in the early 1900s. So did Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas. The Stein family owned and operated some of San Francisco’s many cable car lines, which Michael…
For more than 40 years, the School of Dentistry of the University of the Pacific has called the neighborhood home, providing no-cost and low-cost dental care through its clinics and enlivening the area with more than 1,100 students, faculty and staff. But that may soon change. School officials have signed an agreement to leave their…
CRIME WATCH | Barbara Kate Repa Battling what appears to be an upsurge in prostitution, officers at Northern Station have stepped up enforcement efforts in recent months, making a growing number of arrests on Van Ness Avenue. In April, 88 people were arrested or cited on charges related to prostitution in the district — up…
DISPATCH | Elizabeth Moore Last year the New Fillmore reported on the reversal of the decision to close Stuart Hall High School in San Francisco in the July 2010 article, “Elite private school will live on.” Just short of a year later, there is another tremendous example of the same community coming together, this time to…