Storied: San Francisco

Ken Walton grew up in Sacramento always considering San Francisco a special place. He got inspired to do street photography after watching a documentary about Vivian Maier. In 2016, he founded ​ StreetFoto San Francisco , an annual international street photography festival. We caught up with Ken at this year's festival and chatted with him about San Francisco in 1990s and what street photography m...

Specs is special. In a city with a history of providing safe harbor (literally and figuratively) to so many over the years, the bar encompasses the spirit of San Francisco perfectly. In this podcast, Elly Simmons, whose parents Specs and Sonia opened the bar in 1968, talks about the documentary movie she's making about the place, its history, and her folks. If you love Specs and want its history d...

North Beach is still alive. And one of its best and longest-lasting watering holes, Specs, is still a San Francisco treasure. In this podcast, the current co-owner of the bar, Elly Simmons, tells the story of how her parents got together. Elly's dad, Richard "Specs" Simmons, and her mom, Sonia, met at Vesuvio across Columbus Street in 1952. It's a wild ride that takes us all over the neighborhood...

In this podcast, artist William Rhodes talks about the 3.9 Art Collective and how it influenced his latest show, Threaded Memories. The exhibition, up at the  African-American Art and Culture Complex  now through Aug. 2, celebrates the community that lived in the Fillmore during that neighborhood's "Harlem of the West" days. To kick off the show, William held a party called Juke City in which he i...

In this podcast, artist  William Rhodes  talks about growing up in Baltimore, some similarities between there and San Francisco, moving to the city, the art of the Mission, and establishing his own art experience here. Williams's show, Threaded Memories, is up at the  African American Art and Culture Complex  now through Aug. 2. He'll be giving an artist's talk there next  Thursday, July 25 , at 6...

At SF State, Joy Ng's senior thesis covered the history of hip-hop as resistance and using the art form to make something out of nothing. Since graduating, she has run a website of critical essays with the tagline, " Hip Hop x Asian America ." In this podcast, Joy discusses the cultural context that gave rise to hip-hop, the history of the genre, local artist  Ruby Ibarra , and her deep dives into...

Joy Ng  is a born-and-raised San Franciscan. In this episode, Joy talks about her childhood, in Chinatown, North Beach, and a couple other neighborhoods. She ends with her time at SF State, where she changed her major and got involved in community organizing. A large influence in that shift was Curtis Choy's documentary,  The Fall of the I-Hotel . FoundSF has more info on the story of the  Interna...

We're not quite sure how Joe Bagale keeps up with all the music he's created or been part of performing or recording. In this podcast, he takes us through his journey after arriving in San Francisco back in 2003. It involves several living situations with in-house studios, his first visit to the Boom Boom Room, a serendipitous date, playing and touring with Mickey Hart, joining Jazz Mafia, and eve...

It's kinda fitting that this is the 80th episode overall for this podcast (49 in Season 1; 31 and counting in this current season, Season 2). Through all but two episodes so far, the intro and outro music has been by the subject of this episode. Joe Bagale moved to San Francisco from New York State in 2003. In this episode, Joe talks about his life back east, which centered heavily around music. H...

In Part 1 of this podcast,  Project Open Hand volunteer Dana Dawson took us through the history of the non-profit and told us all about what it does for the sick and dying of San Francisco and the Bay Area today. In this episode, Dana is joined by four of her fellow volunteers who've become like a second family for one another. They talk about meeting through their volunteer work and what it means...

Project Open Hand , which today feeds more than 2,500 sick and dying people, started in 1985 when Ruth Brinker made meals for her friends and neighbors who were "wasting" from AIDS. In this podcast, POH volunteer Dana Dawson takes us through that history, talking about how the operation that started in a residential home today serves healthy meals and groceries with the help of more than 125 volun...

Since deciding to stay in San Francisco (see  Part 1 ), Margaret Casey has done a lot—been a poet, worked for various event spaces and event production companies, and moved into a houseboat on Mission Creek. In this podcast, Margaret fills us in on her life since she heard that saxophone in the Panhandle (also in Part 1). We recorded this episode on Margaret's houseboat, the Battlestar Gloriana, i...

​The theft of a Picasso in Australia. Getting framed by an old teacher. Cocaine shipments from South America. San Francisco cults in the 1970s. And someone playing the saxophone in the Panhandle on a random night in the early 1990s ... All of these things are involved in the story of why Mission Creek houseboat resident Margaret Casey came to San Francisco—and why she stayed. In this podcast, Marg...

Originally known as "Last Gasp Eco-Funnies," the publishing company that Ron Turner and others founded celebrates 50 years next April. In this podcast, Ron talks about starting  Last Gasp  with  Slow Death , an underground comic that featured art by Greg Irons, among others. Over the years, he's worked other artists, including R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Trina Robbins, and more. Ron also shares sto...

Before he moved to the Bay Area in the late-1960s, Ron Turner spent his life in the San Joaquin Valley of California. In this podcast, he talks about various experiences he had around the valley, including time at Fresno State working on an underground newspaper where he exposed corruption at the Peace Corps and at the DA's Office in Fresno. He moved to San Francisco to go to SF State, hung out at...

La Cocina  serves as a resource for women of color and lower-income women who want to start a food business. Rosie Ortiz sure could cook, but she needed to learn business and other kitchen skills she didn't already have in order to get  Mission Boricua  off the ground. In this podcast, Rosie talks about her experience in the La Cocina program, which she began three years ago. She hopes to launch h...

Born and raised in the Mission District, Rosie Ortiz learned to cook by watching her mother. In this podcast, Rosie, the owner of  Mission Boricua , talks about San Francisco back in the day. She says that, over the years, her love of cooking evolved to the point where she found herself making more and more Puerto Rican dishes (Rosie is half-Puerto Rican herself). Join us Thursday, when Rosie will...

No living situation is permanent, especially in San Francisco. The residents of the houseboats on Mission Creek, which are nestled amid one of the hottest areas of development in the city, are always are aware of this. In this podcast, Ginny Stearns and Bob Isaacson talk about their efforts to secure their homes on the water, the only such dwellings in San Francisco. Bob talks about a couple of bo...

Before there was the ballpark where the Giants play ... before the elevated I-280 freeway ... before most of the northeastern half of what we call the Mission District ... before the Gold Rush, there was Mission Bay. It was fed by many sources, the biggest of which was Mission Creek, which flowed over waterfalls down from Twin Peaks, by Mission Dolores, and down into the bay. Today, all that's lef...

​Bernadine Sewell (aka, Pinky Winchester) opened her restaurant,  Pinky and Red's , last summer in the UC Berkeley Student Union building. It was the culmination of a long journey—she and her daughter (Red) took courses with  La Cocina , the San Francisco non-profit that cultivates "low-income food entrepreneurs as they formalize and grow their businesses." In this podcast, Pinky talks about that...

To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we'll be rerunning those episodes the rest of this week. Bernadine Sewell has an alter ego: Pinky Winchester. When you meet this incredibly colorful woman, you know why. She and her daughter went through the La Cocina program and opened their restaurant,  Pinky and Red's , in the Berkeley Student Union building last summer. This podc...

To help elevate the voices and stories of Black San Franciscans, we'll be rerunning those episodes over the next few weeks. We'll be back with new stories from your neighbors down the road a bit. Darnay McPherson likes to stress that, when he was a kid growing up in San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood in the 1960s, "no one locked their doors and police officers walked the beat." It was even more...

Stephanie Smith is a tattoo artist. It's an industry that, even in the Bay Area, is fairly male-dominated. In this podcast, Stephanie talks about a life and a career with its share of misogynistic experiences. Through them, she says, her sense of feminism was formed. She prides herself today on the quality of her art and her group of clients in and around San Francisco. Film photography by  Michel...

Stephanie Smith grew up on the East Coast, but never felt like she fit in with the general mindset out there. When it came time for her to (reluctantly) go to college, she picked the University of San Francisco in large part because of where it is. In this episode, Stephanie talks about moving to San Francisco, getting a degree in fine arts at USF, and then pursuing both getting her body covered i...

When we sat down to record with this week's podcast guest, John Law, he launched right into the research he did to get to know us better before meeting us. For the next seven minutes, we were delighted to hear John's telling of Ep. 15 storyteller and Mission Creek houseboat resident Sarah Davis's first LSD trip. Hold on tightly for this doozie of a meta-Storied podcast!