News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By MARJORIE LEET FORD Like Robin Hood and his band of merry men, Mary Risley and her crew of Food Runners take from those who have too much and give to those who don’t have enough. It all started when she realized she had a problem at Tante Marie, her cooking school: Her student chefs…
SALOONS | Chris Barnett The first long bar I ever bellied up to was reputedly the original Long Bar, inside Raffles Hotel in Singapore, birthplace of the cloyingly sweet Singapore Sling. During Fillmore’s jazz era, the Long Bar at 1633 Fillmore, next door to Woolworth’s, boasted of having one of the longest bars in the…
FIRST PERSON | Lynn Harrison “Got some new drawers, I see — finally. I don’t see how you keep ’em up.” “Barbara, didn’t I have a pair of green . . .” “Threw ’em out. Totally shot. You’ve been needing new ones since God was a baby.” Barbara Conway retired June 25, 2008, after 40…
By THOMAS REYNOLDS Sultry, soulful, swinging singer Kim Nalley remembers when she got her first big break in San Francisco. It was the early ’90s, and the manager of Harry’s on Fillmore called to see if she might fill a slot for a band that had cancelled. But Nalley was otherwise engaged. She had a…
FILLMORE HAS ALWAYS had a claim on guitarist Carlos Santana, and not only because of his many appearances at the Fillmore Auditorium. For a number of years his studio was on Fillmore Street next door to the Clay Theater. Now he’s back as part of the first special exhibition at the Fillmore Heritage Center. “A…
In the springtime, a few weeks after the cherry trees blossom and the air turns fragrant with rosemary, the roses of Rose Court begin to bloom. There are roses of many colors and kinds, some brought from the altar of nearby St. Dominic’s Church. They’ve been given a chance to live on in the garden…
By Don Langley While helping to form the Webster Street Historic District in the late ’70s, Marie Cleasby insisted she wanted to paint her house purple. Like her neighbors, she wanted to form the district as a hedge against further expansion of the California Pacific Medical Center, which abutted the back of her property. But…
Fillmore milliner Ruth Garland Dewson took a stroll down the red carpet in the heart of Hollywood on April 27, 2008, when she was honored for her ceaseless — and ultimately successful — efforts to free a woman imprisoned for more than two decades. On an evening of Tinseltown glitter in the grand ballroom of…
Observing the local market, you would never guess the national real estate market is in a much different state. We’ve recently had a large influx of properties on the high end, and many of them have gone sold quickly. We are also seeing homes being quietly shown before going onto the multiple listing service, two…
Perhaps the last word to come to mind on the leafy outer blocks of Jackson Street is “bitter.” Yet it was here, at 3680 Jackson — during an afternoon of fund-raising in the neighborhood on April 6 that included an earlier stop at the Getty mansion on Broadway — that Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama…