A collection of photographs of people who lived in Sunnyside.
Photos of places and things in Sunnyside here. Main photo page here. Do you have a photo to add? Write me.
Sunnyside History in Photos: People
Category: People in Sunnyside
Dancer, Director, Dreamer: The Work and Life of Ann Marie Garvin
Sunnyside Resident Ann Marie Garvin passed away recently at the age of 82.
“Dance is all that’s left that’s real. It’s another world, all yours, and no one can take away the thrill of it.”
Ann Marie Garvin spoke those words to a reporter in 1976, shortly after she had founded her studio on Monterey Boulevard, Dancer’s Synectics Group. They were words she lived by over the course of her long working life–performing, teaching, directing, and choreographing, in San Francisco and beyond.
For 45 years, in the pink-striped building, she taught thousands of dancers, from near and far, her particular fast-paced jazz style and much else as well. Many Bay Area dancers studied with her, such as Ed Mock, Snowy Winter, Greg de Silva, and Craig Innes. Jazz dancer and instructor Ann Barrett noted in an artist’s bio how performing in Ann Marie Garvin’s ‘Dance Between the Lines’ had been invaluable to her understanding of choreography and theater, and for that she was “eternally grateful.”[1]
In assembling and choreographing her own companies of dancers, Ann Marie Garvin rode the crests of several trends, including the push for a greater diversity of body shapes and skin colors in dance that happened in the Bay Area the late 1970s.[2]
“The distinctive thing about Ann Marie is her disregard for height, or color of skin. She is unaware of anything except this: Can they dance? So [her] company has tall and short, plumpish, tan, black, white, but all marvelous dancers.”[3]
Continue reading “Dancer, Director, Dreamer: The Work and Life of Ann Marie Garvin”
Immigrant Dreams and Long Hours: The Delicatessen at Monterey and Edna
The deli on Monterey Boulevard at Edna Street is popular with locals as well as those passing through Sunnyside on their way elsewhere. But few know it has been a deli continuously for the last 72 years, with a succession of owners. This is a story about running a local business, but also about immigrants and opportunity—and danger.
The building was constructed in 1947, part of a strip of postwar buildings that went up on previously empty lots.
The delicatessen first opened that same year, founded by two women well into their fifties, both of whom had some familiarity with restaurant work: Alma Fitch and Frances Swensson.
The deli’s first name—Vienna Delicatessen—was Frances’s choice; she was born Franziska Anzengruber in a little town in Austria, and came to San Francisco in her late teens sometime after the Quake and Fire of 1906.
Continue reading “Immigrant Dreams and Long Hours: The Delicatessen at Monterey and Edna”
The Quest for a Sunnyside Hall
Meeting places make possible gatherings that can give rise to group action. Without a place big enough to meet and plan, speak and listen, how do members of a group know they have the number and consensus that can become a force for change? These points seem obvious, but for the real estate speculators laying out Sunnyside in 1891, even the provision of a park space where such a meeting place might be located was not a perceived need. Large union halls were numerous elsewhere in the city in areas with industry, but the rise of mainly residential areas in the late 19th century didn’t anticipate the needs of neighborhood activism.
Sunnyside had no park or public common space in the 1890s, but within a few years, common needs drew people together in private spaces. The first order of business at the first large public gathering of residents was the need for a school. There were 80–100 children in the area, even as sparsely populated as it was then. In January 1896, resident Eugene Dasse called the meeting at a hall he had built a couple of years before (where 54-56 Monterey is now) — Dasse’s Hall. There was such energy at that meeting that the first Sunnyside Improvement Club was spontaneously formed.
George R Reilly and the first LGBTQ legal victory in US history
By Amy O’Hair
George R Reilly (1903–1985) was a powerful player in midcentury San Francisco politics who was born and grew up in Sunnyside, a member of one of the first families there. He was on the State Board of Equalization (BOE) for 44 years, the agency that regulated taxes and liquor licenses. The position gave him a lot of power in the state, and he used some of that power to sanction regular harassment of gay people in public places.
Under his chairmanship, the BOE targeted bars where gay people gathered, in order to revoke their liquor licenses. Reilly’s program of hate and harassment failed; the legacy he ended up leaving was his name on the important 1951 California Supreme Court case, Stoumen v Reilly, the first victory in the fight for LGBTQ civil rights.
The case involved the famous Black Cat bar in North Beach. The owner, Sol Stoumen, took the BOE to court and fought for the right of his patrons to gather at his bar. The case weighed the basic human right to free association, regardless of sexual preference. The court ruled against the BOE. George R Reilly lost the suit, lost the right to use liquor-licensing to enforce harassment and deprivation of basic rights for LGBTQ people. It was an historic win—although harassment persisted for years after this for other reasons.
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The Sunnyside Coalyard and the Williams Family of Joost Avenue
By Amy O’Hair
The Williams family came to Sunnyside and stayed for three generations, being a vital part of the neighborhood for most of the twentieth century.
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Gloomy Gus Goes to War: Stan Staub, Cub Reporter and WWII Soldier
By Amy O’Hair
In the course of doing a house history for local residents in Sunnyside I unearthed the story of a young man whose star shown briefly and brightly. Stan Staub was a junior reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle in the late 1930s, who then felt called to join the military in anticipation of World War II. He left an account of his training as a soldier before he was shipped out to the Pacific Front, as well as nearly a hundred bylines at the Chronicle.[1]
Stan’s family lived on Flood Avenue for many years—it was his home as a teen and young adult. The house was originally built about 1900, and underwent several renovations over the years. Continue reading “Gloomy Gus Goes to War: Stan Staub, Cub Reporter and WWII Soldier”
Growing Up on Congo Street in the 1920s
The account below by Phyllis Jensen Marklin of being a child growing up in a little house on Congo Street, on the Sunnyside/Glen Park border, includes some fabulous details–the sort of domestic history that is all too often lost with the passage of time. She wrote it when she was in her sixties. Her daughter has graciously given me permission to reproduce it here, along with a photo that includes the family in front of their house at 511 Congo Street.
Her parents Axel and Olga Jensen came originally from Arhus, Denmark, but lived in Canada for years before coming to San Francisco. Although not all the children stayed in the neighborhood, Phyllis’s brother Gordon made his home as an adult just a few blocks down Congo. Read that story here.
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The Ballad of Ellen Furey
By Amy O’Hair
The death of a dairy woman near Sunnyside, run down by a speeding Southern Pacific train as she took her cows across the tracks to better pasture, captured the attention and the hearts of San Franciscans in 1896. A reporter showed that to keep to their schedule, SP drivers were required to break the law daily by exceeding the City speed limit—often speeding to four times the limit on the downhill patch of pastoral land where Ellen Furey grazed her cows. One young girl witnessed the collision, and spoke bravely before the press and the coroner, revealing the hegemonic company’s lies.
A Savior on a Rocky Knoll
In 1913 someone who was far from home, new to the City, and despairing of his future came to a lonely hilltop at the northern edge of Sunnyside to do away with himself. But he didn’t count on the appearance of a local man, Hugo Ekenberg of 400 Joost Ave, who would save his life. The “knoll” where it probably happened is one of our hidden treasures, the rocky outcropping now called Dorothy Erskine Park, at the top of Baden Street.
Here is the news report in the San Francisco Call (19 April 1913):
