Author: Todd_Lappin

Bernal Heights Looks Magical from International Space Station

/ Todd_Lappin / 2 Comments

Fellow Bernalnauts, here is  VERY unusual view of our glamorous neighborhood. This photo was taken two days ago by European astronaut André Kuipers, who is currently living aboard the International Space Station, roughly 224 miles above the summit of Bernal Hill.

The photo was discovered yesterday by an analyst from the Bernal Aeronautics and Space Agency. The full image is stunning, but unfortunately the resolution is… not so much. So when we zoom, crop, and enhance to take a closer look at ourselves, the quality is lacking. Here’s what we see:

PHOTO: André Kuipers via European Space Agency

Sad Foodie Laments Closure of Los Pastores Restaurant

/ Todd_Lappin / 4 Comments

Horror! Neighbor Otto (and friend) are moving through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief and loss, because Los Pastores, the 4.5 star Mexican restaurant on Mission near Cortland, is gone.

Otto mourns:

Los Pastores, the best Mexican restaurant in the ‘hood has closed. It is now becoming the Cave Grill.

Not much known about the Cave Grill yet, but Grubstreet anticipated Otto’s response. They tell us what there is to be told:

A beloved, tiny neighborhood Mexican restaurant, Pastores (3486 Mission Street) in Bernal Heights, has closed, and many a neighbor will be sad to find they can’t get their chilaquiles or chile relleno anymore. Owner Irma Caderon built a loyal following over the past six years for her homey food and reportedly excellent soups and huevos rancheros. She received some early assistance from La Cocina back in 2007, but it appears she may want out of the business — though Grub Street has not yet confirmed if she’s moved on elsewhere. The new owner of the space is Ana Flores, and the new business moving will be called The Cave Grill.

PHOTOS: Neighbor Otto

Your SFPD Bernal Heights Crime Summary for April 2012

/ Todd_Lappin / 3 Comments

Valiant Neighbors Sarah and Edie, who cover the Bernalwood Crime Beat so assiduously for us, attended the SFPD’s Ingleside Station Chief’s Meeting last week (so you didn’t have to). Here’s Sarah’s summary of the latest Bernal Heights crime news.

Edie Williams and I attended the Ingleside Community Meeting on 4/17, as did several other Bernal neighbors.  Edie typed up great notes, which I am pasting below.

[Ingleside Community Meetings are held on 3rd Tuesday of the month from 7 to 8 pm in the Community Room of the Ingleside station, 1 Sgt. John V. Young Lane at San Jose Avenue.  All are welcome to attend and ask questions. This is a great opportunity to discuss crime and other issues affecting the district.]

Captain’s report 4. 17, 2012
by Captain Daniel J. Mahoney
daniel.j.mahoney@sfgov.org

CRIME STATISTICS

Note that month = the last 28 days. YTD = 1.1.2011 – 4.17.2011 as compared to 1.1.2012 to 4.17.2012

Aggravated Assault:
19 incidents, down 39% from last month, up 24% YTD. 14 arrests made.  Primarily domestic violence, plus two shootings in the Sunnydale (more on this below).

Robbery:
24 incidents, up 14%, but down 33% YTD. 5 arrests made. Most robberies continue to be cell-phone-related, with an uptick in those occurring on MUNI buses. Captain has asked every officer to ride MUNI twice a day, especially the 8X, 9, and 14 buses.  MUNI has great video surveillance; many arrests stem from video captured on MUNI.

Sexual Assault:
3 incidents this month, but two occurred years ago (three years and 26 years, respectively) and were only just reported. One arrest made.

Burglaries:
48 incidents, up 41%, up 31% YTD. 2 arrests made. Up around Randall and above, most are bike thefts from garages. Thieves are still burgling homes with Asian symbols outside. Thieves have explained they target these houses because they believe members of the Asian community don’t trust in banks and keep lots of money in their houses.

Auto theft:
56 incidents, down 32% this month, up 25% YTD. 4 arrests made.  CHP arrested a man living in Bernal, and suddenly the number of auto thefts around Precita and Cortland has decreased, but now there’s someone new in the Excelsior region. Bernal area went from highest to lowest.  Excelsior area around “European” streets (Vienna, Naples, Madrid, etc) is now highest area.  Tomorrow chief will start targeting parolees that are in the area but haven’t checked in with their parole officer to see if they’re committing either auto theft or burglaries.  Most stolen car is still Honda – 90% are Hondas from late 1990s.

Auto burglaries:
Pretty stagnant number, so when it goes down, it usually means people just aren’t reporting the crimes.

Quintuple homicide in Ingleside at 16 Howth St.
Perp was in custody within 36 hours. Police believe he targeted that home – not a random crime. Captain set up a town hall meeting at CCSF; no new information was reported, but meeting served to allay concerns and get information directly from the police in charge. Five days afterwards there was a  homicide in the Taraval, a few blocks away from this one.  The victim there was also targeted, police believe.

SIGNIFICANT ARRESTS

Burglary on 200 block of Delta, an Asian house. Perps were two men from Bayview who broke a metal gate but didn’t make it inside. An alert neighbor was watching and immediately called it in. Police caught one on the stairs, the other around the corner. Police got their tools and an admission of guilt.

Just afterwards, chief and a plainclothes officer were walking down the street, and two officers were chasing a man with a gun towards them. Perp tossed a 9mm gun onto a roof and they caught him. This activity was because the head Towerside gang member was killed, body found on the street under the Bay Bridge approach.  In response, the Sunnydale gang taunted Towerside at a vigil and began carrying more guns. Sunnydale and Towerside gangs fought – they don’t like each other anyway. At the funeral, Towerside wanted to parade the casket through their area, so they rented a motorcycle with a glass carriage trailing it, and they paraded it all around the area. They wanted to go into Sunnyside, but police wouldn’t let them.  The police met with community liaisons to convey their disgust with the theatrical display glorifying this gang member.

ADDITIONAL UPDATES

Bike registration campaign:
Bike thefts are serious, but many, many owners don’t even know their serial number to report the theft and reclaim their bike, even for a $2000 bike. Police will set up an online site to register bikes, and put in owner name and serial number. Once the bike owner registers, he/she gets an Ingleside sticker. If someone notices the bike with the sticker, they can stop the rider, check their name, and check the database to confirm ownership and return the bike. Can also stick GPS on the bike to track it.

Traffic enforcement:
If there are hot spots that you think the police should pay close attention to, you can tell them directly at the Ingleside Police Station website / Contact Us.     http://www.inglesidepolicestation.com

Pedestrian v. vehicle:
Big operation in the Sunnydale tomorrow – checking licensing and vehicular safety.

Ops are two parts: 1) pedestrian safety (incidents result in many pedestrians being hurt). 2) look for pedestrians coming out into the middle of the street without looking.  The captain wants to improve safety by looking for all violators – not just one type.

Bike v. vehicle:
Will also do an operation to stop drivers in bike lanes, etc. Then will do the same to stop cyclists from running red lights and stop signs. Bicyclists running stop lights or signs are subject to same tickets that autos get for doing that.

Mission and Russia:
Traffic problem, people cross to the Burger King there, which is legal, even in this case where there’s no marked crosswalk. At 5pm teens gather at bus stop and get into fights, and the Captain has put more officers on it.

Safe Haven:
A program where merchants put up a sign in their window. If a person walking down the street and feels intimidated, they can go into a business with a sign and ask for help.

URGENT REMINDER

Police department will lose around 400 officers by 2014 through retirement. Without budget increase, there will be no new Police Academy classes to train new officers. This means that police will be taken off all the proactive programs that prevent crime before it happens, such as beat patrols, in order to react to the crime that takes place. Oakland, Vallejo, and Sacramento have all had to gut their police forces and now lack key departments like narcotics and gang task forces.  Basically, all they can do is respond the most urgent emergency calls.

We don’t want that. Support Chief staffing plan for 5 classes next year by calling or sending an email to Supervisor Campos:(415) 554-5144,David.Campos@sfgov.org.

PHOTO: Telstar Logistics

A Stoneman Connection Links Bernal Heights to Levon Helm

/ Todd_Lappin / 7 Comments

The death of Levon Helm, the former lead singer for The Band, late last week prompted a lot of media remembrances, yet the most interesting one I read was an oral history of the The Band’s signature song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Levon Helm sang the lead vocals in the song, of course, but here’s a version of it from “The Last Waltz” in case you need a refresher:

Anyhow, back to that excellent oral history of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” This passage jumped out at me:

[“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”] was the track that came to be seen as most typical of The Band album. Levon sings the song in the persona of Virgil Caine, a Confederate ex-soldier who served on the Danville supply train until General Stoneman’s Union cavalry troops tore up the tracks. The Richmond and Danville Rail Road was the main supply route into Petersburg where Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were holding their defensive line to protect Richmond.

Stoneman was a pretty obscure character. You have to get into detailed histories of the Civil War to find him mentioned.

David Powell

General George Stoneman, c. 1860

In the closing days of the war, Major General George Stoneman, as the commander of the East Tennessee district, oversaw a raid by a division of Union troops across the rugged Blue Ridge Mountians into northwest North Carolina and southwest Virginia. Their orders were not to fight battles but to punish and demoralize the Southern civilians. Stoneman, having previously served under General Sherman in the Georgia campaign, had learned Sherman’s methods of “total war”– the concept of targeting civilian as well as military objectives in order to destroy the enemy’s will to resist. Stoneman’s cavalry troops were still exacting revenge on the Southern civilians at the time that General Robert E. Lee was surrendering at Appomattox. Stoneman’s forces plundered & destroyed tons of supplies, including foodstocks & grain, along with miles of railroad supply tracks. Even after the shooting war ended, they assisted in chasing down and capturing Confederate President Jefferson Davis. After the war, Stoneman remained in the regular army until he retired in 1871 at the rank of Colonel. He moved to California and lived on a large estate called “Los Robles” near Los Angeles. As a Democrat, he held several public offices and was Governor of the state from 1883 to 1887. Stoneman died on September 5, 1894 in Buffalo, New York. Even though Stoneman, on the surface, may appear to be just a footnote in the history of the Civil War, in that part of the U.S. where the borders of Tennessee, North Carolina & Virginia meet, his name lives in infamy. The exploits of his plundering cavalry troops in the last days of a defeated Confederacy are still a part of local legend. In this respect, I feel that Robbie Robertson succeeded in capturing this sentiment accurately in the song. 

I hadn’t realized that part of the song referred to an actual historical figure, and I immediately wondered if there was any connection between the Stoneman that Levon Helm sang about and the street by the same name in Bernal Heights.

Thanks to our excellent friends at the Bernal History Project (and their webpage devoted to the history of Bernal Heights street names), the answer soon became clear. Bernal’s Stoneman Street is indeed named after the same person:

Stoneman Street
A West Pointer who came to San Francisco in 1846 as a lieutenant in the Mormon Battalion, George Stoneman (1822-1894) was a career military commander with an uneven record in numerous Civil War campaigns. A major general, he freed the prisoners at Andersonville and led cavalry raids into the Confederacy. After leaving the Army, he settled in the San Gabriel Valley and was elected California governor, 1883-87. Camp Stoneman, a 2,500-acre Army base opened in 1942 near Pittsburg in Contra Costa County, was the jumping off place for more than a million troops headed for the Pacific Theater in World War II. It was later the separation center for soldiers returning from the Korean Conflict. The base was shut down in 1954. The cavalryman’s name was remembered in a different context when The Band, in a 1970 song by Robbie Robertson, included this couplet: Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train/Till Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.

In addition, let us not forget that Gen. Stoneman also leant his name to the chairlift that carries skiers and snowboarders up Bernal Hill’s steep north face. There’s no evidence in the historical record that Stoneman himself ever actually skied here, but even if he did, I very much doubt that The Band would have written a song about it.

PHOTOS: Top, mr.nunez.sfo, via Flickr. Gen. George Stoneman, via Wikipedia

Chaos on Precita as Speeding Car Flips Over on Saturday

/ Todd_Lappin / 6 Comments

Some of you may have noticed all the commotion in North Bernal late Saturday afternoon. There were a lot of sirens, and the thump-thump-thump of the Bernalwood ShadowTraffic helicopter hovering overhead. Most unhappy of all were those motorists who tried to drive along Precita from Shotwell toward Mission street… and ended up getting stuck in a full-stop traffic jam.

The cause of the chaos was a vehicle that somehow managed to flip over near the intersection of Precita and Coso. Neighbor Christel was live on the scene, and she filed this report:

Accident on Precita. Road blocked. Cops everywhere. Look at that car!

Cop told me car was speeding and hit one of those trucks that collect junk, then rolled over. No one was hurt.

After the beflipped vehicle was finally berighted, here’s how it looked. Ouch!

PHOTOS: Top, Neighbor Christel. Below, Telstar Logistics

Artist Captures Dog vs. Gopher Confrontation on Bernal Hill

/ Todd_Lappin / 6 Comments

Neighbor Laurie, who has a wonderful propensity to paint watercolors instead of snapping photos, brings us this terrific image that captures the Wild Kingdom drama of a canine/rodent confrontation on Bernal Hill. She writes:

This dog was staring intently at a hole on the west side of the hill, which was inhabited by some small rodent (a gopher?) that kept poking its head up and then ducking back down again. I was amused by the idea that this large muscular dog was completely powerless to catch the tiny rodent.

The Lost History of the Oldsmobile Dealership on Army Street

/ Todd_Lappin / 13 Comments

An interesting bit of Bernal Heights history recently surfaced on the blog of Hemmings Motor News, a national website for serious automobile collectors.

As part of a regular feature on defunct car dealerships, Hemmings profiled the former Lesher-Muirhead Oldsmobile in San Francisco. Truth be told,  I didn’t recognize the site when I first saw the photograph, but Lesher-Muirhead was the original developer of the property on the corner of South Van Ness and Army (Cesar Chavez) that’s now home to McMillan Electrical Contractors and our new, artisinal AutoZone auto parts store.

Hemmings says:

As is the case with most old dealership images we’ve run across lately, this mid-1960s postcard of Lesher-Muirhead Oldsmobile in San Francisco comes to us from Alden Jewell. And like many other dealerships we’ve researched for the Lost Dealership Project, Lesher-Muirhead’s history isn’t as straightforward as one photo would lead us to believe.

At the time the photo was taken, we’re rather certain that Lesher-Muirhead was owned at least in part by Edgar J. Fleck, a German who fled his native land for the United States before World War II. We’ve yet to find out when he bought into the dealership, but according to his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, by 1974 he held enough control over the dealership to move it away from its location at 1515 South Van Ness Boulevard and into a new facility at 780 Serramonte Boulevard in Colma, south of San Francisco. It was there that the Oldsmobile dealership remained (at some point prior to 1980 renamed Serramonte Oldsmobile) until it was dissolved in 1993 by its then-owner, Tom Price, who appears to still own the Oldsmobile dealership’s successor, Stewart Chevrolet Cadillac. […]

Interestingly, property valuation references for 1515 South Van Ness, the location in the photo, show that the building was erected in 1948. That building still stands today.

Fun! Judging from the vintage of the cars in the (obviously heavily retouched) postcard, it would appear that the photo was taken roughly around 1965. And obviously, the building that now houses the AutoZone was erected in the former used car display lot on the corner sometime after the dealership closed in 1974.

Here’s a (somewhat dated) Google StreetView image of the site, for your then-and-now edification:

And here’s a closeup of the former dealership building:

Bernal Heights Progressives Adopt Resolution Supporting Suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi

/ Todd_Lappin / 57 Comments

This week the progressive Bernal Heights Democratic Club issued a resolution in support of Ross Mirkarimi, the San Francisco Sheriff who was suspended from his post after pleading guilty to one count of false imprisonment stemming from a dispute he had with his wife on New Years Eve. The Huffington Post carries the tale:

In a resolution passed earlier this week, the Bernal Heights Democratic Club has officially come out against Lee’s filing of misconduct charges against Mirkarimi and called on the mayor to reinstate the suspended sheriff to his post.

The resolution passed immediately following an appearance by Mirkarimi at the club’s Tuesday evening meeting.

“A friend of Mirkarimi’s called us up and asked if we would invite Ross to come speak. We extended an invitation for him to come and he accepted,” club president Tom Gallagher told The Huffington Post. “He talked about the whole story and how he was going to keep fighting…He seemed determined although he did break down a couple times. It seemed like a very difficult performance for him. It may have been one of the first times he’s really talked about what happened in a public setting like this.”

Noting San Francisco’s long-standing reputation for tolerance and forgiveness, the club argued in its resolution that, “the alleged misconduct stems from an incident that took place prior to Sheriff Mirkarimi taking office and was not in relation to his duties as Sheriff…Whereas Sheriff Mikarmi and his wife and child have been publicly humiliated and disempowered by a criminal justice system that seemed more intent on getting a conviction then helping a couple that was having marital problems.”

The resolution goes on to state, “the charge of ‘conduct that falls below the standard of decency, good faith and right action impliedly required of all public officers’ is vague on its face and would leave a cloud of fear and suspicion over every elected and appointed official in a City that has a legacy of free speech and action.”

So to review: The progressive Bernal Heights Democratic Club believes that the problem in the Mirkarimi case is the “vague” wording of the misconduct charges, NOT the behavior of an elected law-enforcement official who became a criminal after he admitted guilt in an unfortunate case of domestic violence. It is tempting to call this sort of logic self-parody, but that would be deeply unfair to many of Bernal’s hard-working comedians.

PHOTO: Luke Thomas via Fog City Journal

Brand New “Bernal Heights” EP Inspired by Bernal Heights

/ Todd_Lappin

Okay, this is fun. The Chocolate Penthouse are an electronic music duo, and for a time they lived (and recorded) in Bernal Heights. The result was a brand new collection of music that they’re calling the Bernal Heights EP:

Here it is, after 3 years of sitting on my harddrive, I am pleased to release The Bernal Heights EP. The Bernal Heights EP contains some of the very first Chocolate Penthouse Songs. Julian and I would spend a good part of our practice walking around Bernal Heights, we would explore the many staircases, gardens, and spectacular views. The music is noisy and quirky, we had always wanted to play dance music, but neither of us had a dance music background. However, we like synths and distortion, so those two things together became the cornerstone of our songs.

You can listen to the whole thing (for free!) on Soundcloud. But for an immediate preview, we bring one track from the EP, called Bayshore Sunset. Here are the liner notes:

Bayshore Sunset is tribute to Bayshore Blvd. Blazing trees at night on the 101 overpass is f*cking great. You get the solitude of being away from everyone, the buzz on 101 below you, and the vantage point of looking out on to Bayshore. Bayshore comes alive at certain times of the night, especially when the clubs start getting out. People dip into the jack n box, there are line of cars out the lot and on to the boulevard, everyone feeling good trying to get their eat on before the next adventure. This song captures the beauty and grittiness that is Bayshore Blvd.