There was sadness in La Lengua when Nervous Dog Coffee closed down last December. But this week, Andrea de Francisco contacted Bernalwood to tell us about the new Portugese-style cafe she’s planning to open inside the former Nervous Dog space on Mission Street just north of Cortland.

The new place will be called Cafe St. Jorge, and her press release brings the deets:

Cafe St. Jorge will open in San Francisco’s Mission district Bernal Heights this summer at 3438 Mission Street. Named after the Açorean Island birthplace of owner Andrea de Francisco’s family, Cafe St. Jorge is a Portuguese-inspired cafe featuring Stumptown Coffee. From 6:30am – 3:30pm, staying open later once they get their beer and wine license, customers can choose from an array of meals, snacks and share portions, alongside fresh juices and smoothies.

Cafe St. Jorge’s Kickstarter campaign is open until June 15th and offers an array of thank you gifts including bottomless mugs, barista classes, monthly baked goods deliveries and use of the spacious cafe for private events.

Truly passionate about food and coffee, de Francisco has worked in the San Francisco food industry for over a decade. The former manager of Lower Haight’s beloved The Grind Cafe, de Francisco also founded and runs her own vegan and gluten-free bakery, Test Kitchen Bakery.

Every dish at Cafe St. Jorge will be made from scratch using only the freshest organic produce, grains, cheeses, herbs and spices. With an array of vegan and gluten-free items available, Cafe St. Jorge will deliver Portuguese fare with a San Francisco sensibility, alongside healthful and delicious California cuisine–all based in tradition and rooted in community.

Cafe St. Jorge’s seasonal menu includes several selections from each of the following categories: breakfast and pastries (orange blossom waffles, shirred duck eggs, grain bowls, toast series), entrée style salads, sandwiches (hot and cold), savory share snacks/petiscos, freshly squeezed juices and smoothies. Portuguese sweet rolls will be baked and served every morning, as well.

Pantry items and packaged Stumptown Coffee will also be for sale. Hard-to-find Portuguese items will also be available for purchase.

The menu is already online, if you want to take peek.

PHOTOS: Cafe St. Jorge nterior build-out photos, courtesy of Andrea de Francisco.

Neighbor Lori Eanes is a photographer and gardener who lives on Precita Avenue. She just published a new book on urban farming, and she’s invited all of Bernalwood to come celebrate:

I’m having a slideshow/book signing for my new book, Backyard Roots, on Thursday May 23rd from 6-7pm at Omnivore Books, 3885 Cesar Chavez St (at Church). I’ll be showing photos from 35  urban farms, with  stories and tips from each. Featured farmer Heidi Kooy, who lives in nearby Excelsior, will be on hand with one of her very friendly chickens.

Backyard Roots (Skipstone Press) is about urban farms from San Francisco to Vancouver. It features over 200 photos with stories, tips, and inspiration from each farmer, including 10 Bay Area farmers. Check out the blog for more info.

Start shoveling out your closets and reorganizing your storage spaces, because the 2013 Bernal Heights Hillwide Garage Sale is happening on August 10, and Neighbor Michael encourages you to mark your calendar:

Hello Bernalicious People

The Bernal Hillwide Garage Sale is happening on the 2nd Saturday of August. SAVE THE DATE – AUGUST 10th.

The Hillwide is quite possibly the city’s largest single day garage sale.

It’s easy to participate. All you have to do is put your stuff out in the front of your home and sell it. The Hillwide team will be promoting the event thruout the city.

This year is also the Bernal Neighborhood Center’s 35th anniversary. We’ll be asking for donations to advertise your location on the Official Hillwide Garage Sale Tracker Map and help with advertising. Last year, we had over 44k views on the map and were covered in SFGate, SfFunCheap, Bernalwood, Craigslist and even Broke-a** Stuart. WOAH! That’s a lot of eyeballs!

There are a lot of details to still work out as we’re just starting the planning process now. If you’d like to help out, have some fun and get to know your neighbors better, please email me at mtminson@yahoo.com. We’d especially love some help with creating a poster, getting the word out to the local blogs and newspapers and working out the details of the event.

All volunteers are welcome! We’re having a planning meeting on Tuesday, June 4th at Precita Park Cafe at 630p. Please RSVP so we don’t overwhelm the good folks at the Cafe with a crush of people.

Thanks and I look forward to meeting you!

Michael Minson
Hillwide Garage Sale Leader and Realtor, Zephyr Real Estate
415.606.2625
mtminson@yahoo.com

ILLUSTRATION: Bernalwood

Reinvention is underway at the iconic Bernal Heights Produce store on the corner of Cortland and Ellsworth. The old business has shut down and workers are busy rebuilding the interior, but paper covers the windows to hide the transformation taking place inside.

The only clues that hint at what’s coming next are a new awning and  a series of cryptic signs taped to the windows, all of which are written in the voice of a very cute young girl named Hannah.

Baffled by the ambiguity of these signs, several Cortlandia residents contacted Bernalwood to seek our help in sorting out what the store will become next. Happily, when we visited the Bernal Heights Produce site, the answer immediately became obvious.

Indeed, many residents of Precitaville probably could have solved the mystery as well. The signs in the windows were the big giveaway: The notes from Hannah use a distinctive typeface and graphic style that’s familiar to many northsiders, particularly those who shop at the Harvest Hills Market on the corner of Folsom and Precita. Thus, immediately after visiting Bernal Heights Produce, the Bernalwood Action News Team rushed to Harvest Hills to verify our hypothesis.

Here’s what we saw when we walked into Harvest Hills:

Ah-HA! Different subject matter, but a near-purrrrrrrfect graphic design match!

We asked the woman working behind the counter at Harvest Hills if there was indeed a link to the new Bernal Heights Produce store. Here is what we were told:

Confirmed! The owners of Harvest Hills have acquired Bernal Heights Produce. The Cortland location had a vent hood, which is very exciting, so the new owners plan to take advantage of it by offering more cooked and prepared food, in the style of a delicatessen. In addition, they also plan to offer lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (much as they do at Harvest Hills). We were also told that the name for the new store has not yet been chosen.

So there you have it. A riddle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery… but a secret betrayed by some distinctive typography.

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s candid discussion about the impact of gentrification in Bernal Heights, here’s an item that’s both appropriately inappropriate and inappropriately appropriate.

Songwriter Thao Nguyen is currently enjoying some much-deserved success in the indie scene. She doesn’t live in Bernal, but she has strong ties to us; she lives in San Francisco, her management company is a Bernal-owned business, and she did a glamorous photo shoot on Bernal Hill last August.

The hit from Thao’s new album is a song called “We the Common,” and it’s rather terrific. For the Citizens of Bernalwood, the best way to enjoy it is by watching the video, which interweaves hilltop scenes from Bernal Heights with screetscape scenes from Brooklyn — a place which is in some ways the Bernal Heights of New York, but even more so.

Plus, the video includes a cameo by NPR celebrity Ira Glass! (Swooooon!)

Plus plus, the video includes a cameo by Bernal celebrity Jackie Jones!

Thao’s video makes the cultural affinity between Bernal and Brooklyn look seamless and more than a little glamorous. And it does all that with an infectious hook that’s really so now right now — just like us. Listen, watch, and enjoy:

Bernal Heights is changing.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Actually, Bernal Heights has been changing for about 180 years.  Change is often difficult, yet my sense is that the changes that have taken place here during the last decade or so are particularly unsettling to the generation of residents that came of age in Bernal roughly between 1970 and 1990.

Neighbor Orlando is one of those residents, and since I have great respect for his perspective, I  also appreciated his comments in response to a recent Bernalwood post about the transformation of Bernal Heights into an enclave for the so-called “Creative Class” (though he just as easily could have written it in response to the data which shows that Bernal real estate prices are going up, up, up.)

Neighbor Orlando writes:

Bernal Heights originally was a village made up of blue collar, very low educated immigrant families that moved here because they could not afford to live in many other areas of the city. I bared witness to such because my parents were of this class as many of their neighbors also were.

The last time I checked, a home in this neighborhood sold for one-million dollars. This must have made my father roll over in his grave. No home on the hill was ever of such extreme value during the sixties up here. As a matter of fact, it was quite the opposite considering that the hill was a wasteland of debris due to the fact that many San Franciscans would use it as place to dumb old odd size household goods such as mattresses, ceramics tubs, toilets, and wooden furniture.

So rugged a hill it once was, that I as a young boy learned to ride a motorcycle; a honda 50cc that my father bought me one christmas “motorcross” style on many of the trails still visible today! Yes, you read rightly, one once was able to ride a motorcross cycle on that hill.

Todd, I am curious to ask you when was the last time you met a low income non-english speaking family move in recently? I believe you have met many of the original dwellers moving out since this is one of the overall goals of this recent gentrification that is popular for real estate values.

After all, is it not true that before such a movement (when bernal was predominantly made up of these uneducated, non-english speaking middle class families) the prices of homes were indeed affordable to someone whose job was to clean upper middle class homes or work as a baggage handler at SFO?

This is hardly the case when a home on the same property sells for one million dollars. The same block of land ten times more the costs simply because folks that clean houses or work as baggage handlers have recently moved away so that these creative scientist, lawyers, and managers can move in. Who by the way, are not likely to be of negro or hispanic ethnicity.

I only ask that if you truly cannot see this Todd, that the next time you meet the new family on the block, you check off my list to see if this new family fits the Bernal enclave that it once was for many, many generations. Myself included.

Good fodder for discussion. So, dear and respectful neighbors, let’s discuss.

PHOTO: A recent billboard modification on Cortland, photographed April 30, 2012 by Andrew

Now that all the squabbling over the plans has been settled (knock wood), California Pacific Medical Center has released a new set of renderings that show what the new, redesigned, 120-bed St. Luke’s Hospital on Cesar Chavez at Valencia will look like when it’s done.

SF Appeal provides the overview:

A previous development agreement reached between city and hospital officials last year called for a smaller-scale hospital at St. Luke’s and a larger one at the Cathedral Hill site at Van Ness Avenue and Geary Boulevard, but was shelved by supervisors unhappy with the deal.

One of the aspects of the previous proposed deal that supervisors criticized was an escape clause that could have allowed CPMC to close St. Luke’s if its operating margin stayed negative for two consecutive years.

In addition, residents near the proposed Cathedral Hill site had complained about the prospect of increased traffic congestion from a hospital being built at the intersection of two of the city’s main thoroughfares, he said.

Supervisor Mark Farrell applauded the new agreement in March, which he said “incorporates the needs and concerns of our neighborhoods.”

Supervisor David Campos, whose district includes St. Luke’s, said that hospital is “very personal to me” because he had received care there when he was uninsured as a young adult.

He said the new plan “ensures the long-term viability of St. Luke’s.”

With luck, construction should begin by the end of the year. Find more detail about the project at the RebuildCPMC website.

Just when you thought there were no more clever ways to photograph Bernal Hill’s (sort-of) beloved Sutrito Tower, along comes Steve MacDonald —  ramblinworker on the Instagram — with this funky-phresh new snap that makes Sutrito look wonderfully sculptural.

PHOTO: ramblinworker

Chalk this up as one of those things that could have been really really really really bad, but instead turned out to be just dramatic and messy.

Yesterday afternoon, a fire broke out on the grassy hillside behind the Ellsworth Street projects, just east of the Alemany Farm, facing I-280. The San Francisco Fire Department responded to the blaze with an impressive display of manpower and specialized equipment, such that no homes were lost in the fire, and (according to the SFFD scanner) only two houses were slightly damaged.

Neighbors Evan and Anne, who took the photos you see here, bring the summary:

There was a fire today on the hillside south of Bache & Andover Streets.  Thanks to quick action of many neighbors and the SFFD, serious property damage was averted.

Nice work, people. Also: Whew!

PHOTOS: Neighbors Evan and Anne

Miss Mutsumi from 903 (and Sandbox Bakery) has launched a Kickstarter campaign to install a cute little parklet in front of 903 Cortland, just east of Gates:

There are currently no parklets in Bernal Heights. We at 903 are taking steps to be the first to provide this amenity, and with the help of the residents and friends of the neighborhood we can make it happen. Not only would 903′s parklet be the first in Bernal, it would continue to inspire and facilitate the on-going revitalization of the community happening along Cortland while providing a convenient and central gathering place for friends and family. Imagine meeting up at 903 to enjoy a delicious outdoor lunch on the sunniest street in San Francisco!

The parklet will replace two parking spots on Cortland Avenue directly in front of 903, a restaurant and offshoot of Sandbox Bakery that has quickly become a go-to lunch spot for many residents of Bernal Heights. At 40 feet long, the parklet will boast seating for up to 25 people, a canopy for shade, greenery consisting of native plants, and it will, of course, be wheelchair accessible. The structure itself will be constructed out of reclaimed wood and steel scraps.

The City of San Francisco has approved our permit and all the fees have already been paid.  Now, we are trying to raise funds in order to begin building this much-anticipated addition to Cortland Avenue. Our current goal is to start construction as early as June.  After that, the parklet will be completed in only a few weeks!

If the number of emails I’ve received and tweets I’ve seen about the project are any indication, the Citizens of Bernalwood are very enthusiastic about the idea. You can contribute to toward the parklet’s $12,505 goal here.

Here’s the video: