‘Thank God for Browser Books’

By DONNA GILLESPIE Book lovers discouraged by the proliferation of chain stores and websites deserve a leisurely afternoon at Browser Books. It’s an old-fashioned bookstore that emanates warmth — wood paneling and music greet you as you enter, and there are lamp-lit nooks that beckon patrons to sit and read. Carefully chosen classics line the […]

Finally there’s a book of her stories

FIRST PERSON | FRAN MORELAND JOHNS It started as a casual conversation in our old Sacramento Street kitchen. “I can’t write stories!” I remember saying. “Real writers write stories!” This was about 30 years ago, early in my marriage to the Great Encourager. “Sure you can,” he said. “You’ve got stories that deserve to be […]

Painting the ladies

SAN FRANCISCO ARTIST Kit Haskell has established herself as the gold standard for pen and ink drawings of the city’s Victorian homes. The newest book to feature her drawings lets children of all ages choose their own favorite Crayola colors for the Painted Ladies. It’s a coloring book featuring 20 of Haskell’s meticulously accurate drawings […]

‘The book is a must’

WHAT A TREAT — a visual treat of exquisitely reproduced photographs and a textural declaration of the reproduction of numerous articles from the neighborhood newspaper, the New Fillmore. Publisher, attorney and gallery owner Thomas Reynolds and co-author Barbara Kate Repa have compiled a compelling book that offers a smorgasbord of vignettes of San Francisco’s Fillmore […]

She’s pulling up her roots

By BARBARA KATE REPA Traci Teraoka, the personable proprietor of Poetica Art & Antiques at 3461 Sacramento Street, believes in synchronicity. Growing up, her family moved every few years to accommodate her dad’s career in air freight. But after she landed in San Francisco two dozen years ago, she noticed roots growing out of the […]

A love letter to Our Town

BOOKS | NORA JACKSON When you compile a “best of” book from a neighborhood newspaper that’s outstanding to begin with, you’re bound to get an impressive result. Our Town: Best of the New Fillmore packs into one volume the New Fillmore’s shiniest nuggets, and the stunning final product leaves even a longtime resident like me […]

Celebrating the neighborhood

WE ARE DELIGHTED to announce the publication of a lavish new book of stories and photographs celebrating one of the world’s great neighborhoods: our own. This collector’s edition pulls together favorite articles and images from our pages of some of the people and places that make the neighborhood special. We hoped to create a book […]

How a coffee shop saved my life

FIRST PERSON | JAMES DeKOVEN On February 4, 2000, I arrived in the Fillmore under dire circumstances. Six months earlier, my fiancee had given the ring back — a devastating blow that occurred weeks after I gave up a well-paying job to write fulltime. Broken-hearted, half-mad and facing an uncertain financial picture, I fled from […]

The Brown Bag served up an eclectic mix

FLASHBACK | BARBARA WYETH Every time I walk past the corner of Fillmore and Pine, I am transported back to the Brown Bag, the stationery store that was a mainstay on the northeast corner for many years. Back in the day, I owned a small business in North Beach, but was struggling. I met Dawn, […]

VIVA VIVANDE!

By CHRISTOPHER BRUNO “Smell this!” Carlo Middione said, as he thrust two handfuls of fresh, limp, uncooked spinach fettucine in my face. I was the newest hire in the spring of 1985 at his gastronomical time machine, Vivande Porte Via, which masqueraded as a restaurant on Fillmore Street. I inhaled deeply and was shocked at the […]