Ella Fitzgerald singing to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Richard Rodgers in 1950.

April is jazz appreciation month, all month long, and there’s something special to appreciate at the Fillmore Heritage Center at 1330 Fillmore. “Jazz Giants: the Photography of Herman Leonard” is a collection of some of the finest jazz photographs ever taken by one of America’s greatest living photographers. In addition, there’s a full program of other special events this month.

Photograph © Herman Leonard Photography LLC

Polo Ralph Lauren's store at 2040 Fillmore.

By Barbara Kate Repa

Almost exactly two years ago, when Polo Ralph Lauren became the first business to encounter San Francisco’s new ordinance limiting chain stores in the neighborhood, the company’s leaders promised that their Fillmore store, if approved, would become engaged in the neighborhood and support local causes.

They even put it in writing.

“We feel the proposed shop, which will carry both men’s and women’s fashion, will be a perfect fit with this neighborhood,” wrote Wayne T. Meichner, president of Polo Ralph Lauren retail stores. “Our team has compiled a list of actions to demonstrate to you how we can best use our skills and resources to partner with the local community.”

Two years later, Polo’s promises to become involved in the local community have not been fulfilled.

Among Polo’s promises:

• “We will seek to adopt a local high school” by spring 2009 to teach students about careers in fashion and retail.

• “Ralph Lauren commits to hosting a minimum of two annual in-shop events to raise funds for reputable and nonprofit organizations.”

• “Ralph Lauren would like to contribute to the cohesive feeling on Fillmore Street through increased communication. To do this, we propose using a local community board, which can be used by retailers and residents alike.”

• “Up to three times per calendar year . . . Ralph Lauren is willing to make visible within its shop reminders for events that are sponsored by the Fillmore Merchants Association.”

• “To continue our commitment to diversity in our team members, we would be willing to consider working with a nonprofit or government-supported employment agency in an effort to identify potential employees to work at our shop.”

[Full text of the letter.]

Paul Wermer, a director of the Pacific Heights Residents Association, led the group’s opposition to the store before his group was persuaded — in large part by Meichner’s letter — to withdraw its objections. Wermer says the one civic-minded act he’s aware of since the store opened was a fundraiser for some of the area’s private schools.

Thomas Benjamin Chamberlain, assistant manager of Ralph Lauren on Fillmore, says the store recently hosted “a lovely event” with California Pacific Medical Center, but could give no details, nor would he confirm the local school drive. “I am actually not allowed to give any additional information,” he says. “I would have to redirect you to our corporate liaison.” Ironically, Meichner’s letter emphasized Ralph Lauren’s “original commitments to the community,” which specifically included “giving the manager of the shop the authority to deal directly with neighborhood concerns or requests.”

Nor has Ralph Lauren become “an active and participating member of the Fillmore Merchants Association,” another of Meichner’s commitments.

Soon after he wrote his April 4, 2008, letter to the residents association and merchants association, Meichner was elevated to president and CEO of the entire Polo retail group. No one from Ralph Lauren’s corporate hierarchy provided information about the company’s local activities.

Wermer says the company’s apparent failure to fulfill its promises points up one of the weaknesses of the city’s planning process: a lack of enforcement.

“The number one problem I see is that the conditional use laws are substantially toothless,” he says. “Enforcement depends on the local community paying attention and being engaged,” says Wermer. “Unfortunately, communities that have lots of problems are the ones that tend to be engaged. People get active when their ox is getting gored. And let’s face it, on upper Fillmore, the ox is pretty safe.”

Wermer also finds an irony in the changes that chain stores — known to city planners as formula retail — can bring to a neighborhood. “The reason Ralph Lauren wanted to come to Fillmore Street was because it didn’t look like a mall,” he says. “We had a good laugh, because that just made our case about formula retail,” he says. “But I don’t think the landlords heard that message.”

Wermer blames landlords for making empty spaces on Fillmore hard to fill. “I’m very worried that the only ones that will be able to get the property are the chains that have the money it takes,” he says. “Landlords are aggressively reaching out to these guys rather than trying to get creative in renting their properties. Instead, they follow a simple business model: I charge as much as I can. Ultimately, they’re not building a community that will be successful in the long term — and ultimately, the businesses won’t be successful either.”

But Pam Mendelsohn, a commercial real estate broker with Johnson Hoke who has handled a number of local listings, says the blame is misplaced. “Landlords have been incredibly fair — particularly on Fillmore Street,” she says. “Currently there are just some landlords on the street who aren’t in as big a hurry to have the spaces filled as the retailers are. Fillmore is pretty stable — and most landlords here are in for the long haul, not the short term.”

Mendelsohn adds: “The whole thing about chains running up rents — there’s no truth to that. Chains pay less.”

She maintains the chain store ordinance has had the opposite of its intended effect. “It has scared off some retailers,” she says. “Unless someone has the money and time to go through the process, it can be offputting. It takes a major corporation. So I wonder whether we didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot” with the chain store rules.

“We need a balance between small businesses and recognizable names,” she says.

Despite the city’s attempt to limit formula retail, many residents and retailers say they prefer chain stores to empty storefronts — as long as they are “the right kind of chain store.”

Werner says the problem is in the definition. “We lack a robust assessment about what is good and what is not good about formula retail,” he says. “Formula retail stores that participate in the neighborhood and support the community and get involved — by bringing clients to the area who will also shop at other stores, by joining the local merchants association, by helping keep the streets organized and by supporting activities like the small merchant used to do — they may be an asset to the neighborhood,” he says. “But the sort of chain operations with the main focus of bringing in as much revenue as possible, not contributing to the community, hiring people at minimum wage — they’re problems.”

By Chris Barnett

Locals have been clamoring for better and more authentic Mexican food on Fillmore Street even before La Posada said adios a few years ago and the fast food chain La Salsa shuttered its shop at the end of last year.

They may soon get their wish.

Tacobar, at the corner of California and Fillmore, seems destined to be far more than a typical taqueria. Owner and top toque Jack Schwartz, 40, has fashioned a mini-Mexican restaurant with organic food considerably above the ordinary and a whimsical design that promises to be lively and fun. Just check out the handpainted mural on the ceiling of el bano, the unisex bathroom.

The Tacobar menu has the predictable categories: quesadillas, tacos, burritos, salads, soups, sides and desserts. But Schwartz promises that the ingredients will be fresh, flavorful, imaginative and pesticide-free. And the prices are surprisingly reasonable.

Schwartz lives in the neighborhood, which has helped to elevate his aspirations. “I’m trying to do simple but good quality food at reasonable prices because we want to be part of the neighborhood,” he says. “We believe the more you give, the more you get back.”

Born in Mexico City to a Romanian dad and a Colombian mom, Schwartz has packed plenty of surprises into the 900-square-foot spot on a key corner at the heart of the neighborhood. In recent years it was home to La Salsa. But for decades it was the Rolling Pin donut shop, open all day and all night, and before that the Donut Hole.

An advance look at the menu is promising. A diner might start with the jicama ensalada with grapefruit, dry roasted peanuts, diced avocado and cilantro for $4.50; then a Veracruz pescado taco — with grilled line-caught mahi mahi, cabbage slaw and Baja lime sauce, $4.50; topped off with a potent tequila ice cream homemade by San Franciscan Neveria Abel, $3.50. In addition to Mexican beers and sodas, Tacobar will serve a citrus red wine sangria, plus fresh lime margaritas and fresh lime pomegranate margaritas made by Soju, a South Korean company.

Fillmore is festooned these days with outdoor seating and Tacobar will go al fresco as well. It will also offer takeout.

Schwartz, a 1998 graduate of the California Culinary Academy, later cooked at Maya in San Francisco and was sous chef and consultant for 1550 Hyde Cafe and Wine Bar. He knows design is a critical component, even in a tiny taco emporium. So he hired Lauren Geremia and Rusty Wadatz, partners in Geremia Design in San Francisco, and gave them relatively free rein. The firm also designed Fraiche, the yogurt store at 1910 Fillmore.

The designers squeezed extra space out of the small spot, installing a communal table, a long bar for solo seating, several tables with chairs and an energizing color scheme. The plain wooden stools are a vibrant Mexican pink, bright yellow and lime green. The tiled walls are straight from Mexico. An accordion-like panoramic decal of endless cornfields cover the windows, but diners inside can look out. And a collection of cacti are scattered around the room.

By Anne Paprocki

Tucked in an unassuming office behind two Fillmore boutiques, longtime local residents Elise Papazian and Scott Pritikin hope to expand the horizons of coffee connoisseurs everywhere with their recently launched online service GoCoffeeGo.

“Nobody should be drinking the same cup of coffee every day,” says Papazian, “It’s just boring. Would you eat the same food day in and out?”

The website includes a selection of coffee beans from 18 different roasters, including Zoka, Ritual, Cuvee, Atomic, Equator Coffees & Teas and Johnson Brothers. Papazian and Pritikin — who admit to testing up to 10 different coffees a day — have vetted each offering.

Married in 1991, Papazian and Pritikin have worked together as writers and in real estate. But as the idea for GoCoffeeGo began incubating, the couple traipsed around the country, visiting roasters in locales as expected as San Francisco and Seattle and as far-flung as Leeds, Alabama and Spicewood, Texas. They met with the head roaster for each coffee they considered and picked those that met their personal standards for both taste and quality.

“San Francisco residents live in a food mecca, but they still might not have heard of the amazing coffee coming out of some of these towns,” says Papazian.

Though both Papazian and Pritikin — who grew up skateboarding through
Pacific Heights — love the shops of Fillmore Street, they decided a website, rather than a brick and mortar store, would allow coffee to be shipped directly from roasters to customers as soon as it’s roasted.

“Would you drink a champagne that’s gone flat?” asks Pritikin. “We want customers to experience freshly roasted beans.”

GoCoffeeGo’s online operation could have been based anywhere, but Papazian and Pritikin wanted their office in the neighborhood.

“Fillmore Street is not a snotty street,” says Papazian. “There’s a real community and personal experience here that we want to bring to GoCoffeeGo.” Pritkin and Papazian bring some Fillmore flavor by personally responding to customer email and are happy to suggest coffees and talk shop.

Papazian and Pritikin, who frequent Peet’s and Royal Ground for coffee on Fillmore, acknowledge that GoCoffeeGo is not a substitute for the neighborhood coffee shop culture. “We don’t want to be competitive with Peet’s,” says Papazian. “Coffee shops have really become places for the community to congregate. Our function is different.”

Still, Papazian and Pritikin hope that GoCoffeeGo will help foster a new online community of coffee fans who connect with each other and a wide variety of beans. Customers of GoCoffeeGo can also become members, which allows them to rate the various coffees, receive personalized recommendations and use an auto-ship function.

“People should play the field and take a risk,” Papazian says. “You should never settle for just one coffee.”

From the Chron: roasters sign up

Photograph of Allen Brandstein by Kathi O'Leary

After more than two decades of offering up good cheer and wry observations while ringing up groceries and restocking the shelves, Allen Brandstein has retired from Mollie Stone’s. His last day was March 31.

Stoking his decision to leave were two life passages: a bout with colon cancer last year and his first Social Security check, which he received a few weeks ago after turning 62.

“Those things give you an immediate dose of perspective that life is finite,” he says.

Brandstein’s retirement comes only a few months after James Moore left the store’s express line. Both had become like members of the family to many in the neighborhood.

Contemplating his impending retirement, Brandstein penned a few well-considered lines: “It has been my privilege to be a part of the fabric of this neighborhood for over 21 years. As I enter this new chapter in my life, I take with me good friendships and many wonderful memories.”

It’s classic understatement from a friendly neighbor who has been a constant presence for so long. He started at the store in 1988 working on the night crew — a world little known to most shoppers when trucks line up in the parking lot and staffers help unload the goods and stock the store.
Less than a year later he was transferred to the day shift. “They thought that would be a better fit for me,” he says.

The first stop in Brandstein’s retirement will be Panama, where he intends to take a true vacation for most of a month, staying at three different eco-lodges. “I’ve decided the perspective on the next moves in my life will be better from the white sandy beaches than from my own living room couch,” he says. “I’m also taking some time to concentrate on something that’s become increasingly important to me: cultivating my friendships.”

Still, Brandstein says he will miss Mollie Stone’s. “What I’ll miss is the give and take of working in a busy upscale neighborhood place,” he says. “And this job has been a big part of my life. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinners and Passover seders with customers who’ve become friends. I’ve even gotten a couple of dates out of it.”

And he’s beloved by many of his co-workers, including manager David Parrisher — although the two got off to an uncertain start when Parrisher was hired 14 years ago to manage what was then the Grand Central Market. “One of the first things Allen said to me was, ‘You will never make it here,’ ” Parrisher recalls. “I smiled and said, ‘You should go ahead and quit now because you’ll never make it under my iron fisted management style.’ We stared at each other for a few moments — and then burst into laughter. And we quickly became good friends.”

While Brandstein leaves his post without regrets, he’s somewhat hesitant about leaving a place with so many memories. “Six months down the line, if they call me and say, ‘Could you come in for a couple days a week?’ Well, that would be hard to resist,” he said the week before his retirement.

It turns out that might happen.

“I love the guy. He’s like a brother to me,” Parrisher says. “I won’t let him completely retire. I’m retaining him as a part-time retired employee who can fill in for us on occasion. That way, we can still enjoy Allen’s big smile and quick wit for years to come.”

The Presidio Branch Library, now under renovation.

The Presidio Branch Library on Sacramento Street, now undergoing renovation, became legendary in literary circles after author Richard Brautigan used it as the setting for his imaginary library of unpublished manuscripts in the novel, The Abortion.

In Brautigan’s novel, published in 1970, the library was always open for authors to personally deposit their manuscripts. Through the years, quite a few writers took the story literally and submitted manuscripts or asked if the library really existed.

The Presidio library maintained a small display about Brautigan’s novel, but never actually accepted manuscripts. But in 1990 one of the author’s fans opened the Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont, and accepted several hundred manuscripts. That arrangement ended in 2005 when negotiations were announced to bring the manuscripts to the Presidio Branch Library. But it never happened.

Now the manuscripts have found a new home. The Brautigan Library will become a permanent collection in the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Washington. Brautigan was a Washington native.

Local aficionados, including library volunteer Marcia Popper, continue to push for an expanded display about the Brautigan connection when the renovated Presidio Branch Library reopens in late 2011.

NY Times: A homecoming for Richard Brautigan

The couple operated Stewart's Market at 2498 Sutter.

A taste of the old Fillmore will be on display today at a special celebration being held at Jones Memorial United Methodist Church honoring local residents Norman and Mable Stewart on their 70th anniversary.

“We are so proud of their accomplishments in business and marriage and we want to share it with everyone,” says granddaughter Anassa “Kandee” Stewart, who helped organize a lunch to honor the couple after the Sunday morning service at Jones Memorial. The Stewarts have been members of the church for more than 55 years.

They were married in 1940 in Texarkana, Arkansas, where they ran a grocery, cafe and service station. After they moved to San Francisco, they owned and operated a neighborhood market for more than 30 years. Although they retired in 1976, Stewart’s Market at 2498 Sutter Street still bears their name.

Beginning tonight, Sweet Bird of Youth will be
presented at the Queen Anne Hotel.

It was soon after the new year began that Diane Bailey approached the Queen Anne Hotel on a scouting mission. The veteran actor and director was looking for just the right Victorian hotel in which she could bring to life the classic Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth.

As she entered the historic old hotel at Sutter and Octavia, she knew she had found the perfect place. “I walked in and the lobby was so grand — with curtains framing the doorway into the parlor,” she says. “It was just so gorgeous. It looked so authentic to me.”

The public rooms of the Queen Anne Hotel are exuberantly Victorian.

Later, as artistic director of the Sonoma County Repertory Theater, Bailey directed a variety of classic American plays in an intimate arena setting in which the audience surrounded the stage. So the notion of performing plays in an appropriate real-world setting stuck with her — along with the hope of breathing new life into classic works.

In the fall of 2008, she decided to take the plunge and create Theatre Anew — a theater company dedicated to producing established plays in unique venues. The audiences would be surrounded by environments appropriate to the settings the playwrights had envisioned — a church, a museum, a Victorian hotel — any venue, even a funeral parlor, that could immerse the audience in the world of the characters.

One of the plays high on Bailey’s list was “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which Tennessee Williams set in a grand Victorian hotel with a palm courtyard.

“It was a creative challenge to rejuvenate a classic American play to resonate with a contemporary audience,” Bailey says. “Restaged in a real Victorian hotel, it demands a more naturalistic presentation.”

Diane Bailey and Luke Woodruff play the leading roles.

The two main characters in “Sweet Bird of Youth” are Alexandra del Lago, a rattled has-been actress from Hollywood seeking to forget her descent into drugs, sex and obscurity, and her handsome masseur-gigolo, Chance Wayne. He takes her to his hometown and holes up in a hotel, hoping her money and faded glamour will provide one last desperate chance to make his own dreams of stardom come true. The play was originally performed on Broadway in 1959, with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page in the lead roles. In 1962, they starred in the film version.

In this production, Bailey decided to take on the lead role herself. “It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time,” she says. But she was always too young, since the female lead is 20 years older than her lover. “Now I am of the age,” Bailey laughs. “But it’s really precarious. If I wait another five years …”

Luke Woodruff appears as Chance Wayne — and just as rehearsals were getting under way, he was accepted into the master’s drama program at Harvard. He plans to attend this fall.

The play will be performed in the Queen Anne's salon.

The play takes place in the salon of the Queen Anne, with seating for 65 to 70 people.

“I expected it to be difficult to persuade the hotel owners,” Bailey says. “Often people don’t get it.” But Queen Anne manager Michael Wade was enthusiastic from the beginning. “And the setting was exactly what Tennessee Williams described,” she says, “with the audience voyeuristically engulfed inside the hotel with the characters as they discover their fate.”

Onsite rehearsals have been tucked in between the hotel’s buffet breakfast and its afternoon wine hour. “It just so happened that it fit in perfectly,” Bailey says. “We’re performing just before the heavy wedding season begins. Everything has fallen into place — the location, the actors, the timing.”

Theatre Anew will perform “Sweet Bird of Youth” on Fridays and Saturdays from March 19 to April 17 at the Queen Anne Hotel at 1590 Sutter Street. Tickets are $25; $15 for seniors and students.

The song “What You Finna Do?,” released earlier this month by Fillmore District rapper DaVinci, opens with a vocal sample from the 2001 PBS documentary The Fillmore. It condenses the gentrification process the area underwent from the 1960s into one slogan, lamenting, “Basically, after the urban renewal, it was basically Negro removal.”

As the gloomy beat kicks in, DaVinci starts to rap, eventually coining his update on the situation: “Down the corner of the street used to be the spot/Till they replaced all the liquor stores with coffee shops.”

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