Storied: San Francisco is an ongoing documentary about people and life in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Featuring audio and photography of some of the folks who make the city so special, the podcast delves into San Francisco’s history, what’s going on here now, and guesses as to where we’re headed. We invite you to get to know your neighbors, and, with us, try to put into words what makes this place unique.
Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group.
Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of We Players, a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can.
While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as throwing banners off the clock tower and tying bodies to sculptures around campus. She discovered that art would be her life’s work, not just a hobby.
One idea she had while in Palo Alto was to do a production of Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet held all around the Stanford campus. It was a success, as the audience grew and grew as it moved around, picking up more and more people along the way. Ava was able to turn this type of theater into an independently designed major.
After graduating, she moved to the East Bay and started doing theater productions there and in The City. She started partnering with the National Park Service (NPS) in 2008 and then with SF Recreation and Parks in 2018.
Ava’s first production at Fort Point, the Civil War-era fort under the southern base of the Golden Gate Bridge, was in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, she had a three-year residency on Alcatraz, further deepening her relationship with the NPS. In 2013, she kicked off Macbeth at Fort Point. But a funny thing happened—a government shutdown that year effectively ended that run under the bridge.
Fast-forward nearly a decade, and the NPS reached out to see whether Ava and We Players were interested in trying again to produce Macbeth at Fort Point. That brings us to the present day.
Ava’s friend Ann had left theater and had been working in movies. She’d also been taking epic walks—as in hundreds of miles at a time, all over the world. She was on one of these walks when she and Ava connected over Zoom and Ann offered to play the part of Lady Macbeth to Ava’s Macbeth in We Players’ upcoming production.
Ann would not only play one of the two major roles in the play, but she would also be there for Ava to help with various aspects of putting it all together, including casting. It was somewhere in this time that the decision was made for this to be an all female-identifying and non-binary cast. We Players is run and was founded by women, but they hadn’t done a production with a cast like this before. It was 2024, before the election. It just felt right.
Ann and Ava talk about the themes of Macbeth and how they relate to the current times we’re in, no matter who we are. Ava touches on how important it is for her to foster a caring, kind, nurturing environment among her cast members, and how poignant that is for such a violent play like Macbeth.
Then we pivot to talk about how times have changed, 10 years removed from the last time they did this at Fort Point, and how they have not. Ava also describes what it’s like inside of Fort Point, something we in San Francisco might not all know about. One point they want to emphasize for anyone who comes to see their show—it’s cold as hell, even by SF standards.
We Players’ production of Macbeth at Fort Point opens on April 11 and runs through May 18. All shows start at 6 p.m., Thursday through Sunday (with a few exceptions), rain or wind (duh) or shine. Tiered tickets (for equitable access) are available at the We Players website.
We recorded this episode in the Gramercy Towers in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850.
In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of SF Heritage. But he’s so, so much more than that.
He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco.
On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His dad’s mom was single and fell on hard times in Texas. She came to San Francisco, where she had a step-brother.
Woody’s parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard (where Boudin Bakery is today). Donut Bowl was a combination donut shop/hot dog joint. At the time the two met, his dad worked as a cook there and his mom was in high school. His mom and her friends went to nearby Washington High and would hang out at the donut shop after school. The next year or so, his parents had their first kid—Woody.
They came from different sides of the track, as it were. Woody’s mom’s family wasn’t crazy about her dating his working-class dad, who didn’t finish high school. But once his mom became pregnant with Woody, everything changed.
The couple had two more sons after Woody. One of his brothers played for the 49ers in the Nineties and lives in Oregon today. His other brother works with underserved high school kids in New Jersey, helping them get into college.
Woody shares some impressions of his first 10 years or so of life by describing The City in the mid-Seventies. Yes, kids played in the streets and rode Muni to Candlestick Park and The Tenderloin to go bowling. It was also the era of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jonestown, and the Moscone/Milk murders. But for 10-year-old Woody, it was home. It felt safe, like a village.
Because I’m a dork, I ask Woody to share his memories of when Star Wars came out. Obliging me, he goes on a sidebar about how the cinematic phenomenon came into his world in San Francisco. He did, in fact, see Star Wars in its first run at the Coronet.
He attended Sacred Heart on Cathedral Hill when it was an all-boys high school. He grew up Catholic, although you didn’t have to be to go to one of SF’s three Catholic boys’ high schools. Woody describes, in broad terms, the types of families that sent their boys to the three schools. Sacred Heart was generally for kids of working-class folks.
After school, if they didn’t take Muni back home to the Richmond District, Woody and his friends might head over to Fisherman’s Wharf to play early era video games. Or, most likely, they’d head over to any number of high schools to talk to girls.
Because parental supervision was lacking, let’s say, Woody and his buddies also frequently went to several 18+ and 21+ spots. The I-Beam in the Haight, The Triangle in the Marina, The Pierce Street Annex, Enrico’s in North Beach, Mabuhay Gardens. There, he saw bands like The Tubes and The Dead Kennedy’s, although punk wasn’t really his thing. Woody was more into jazz, RnB, and late-disco.
We chat a little about café culture in San Francisco, something that didn’t really exist until the Eighties. To this day, Woody still spends his Friday mornings at Simple Pleasures Cafe.
And we end Part 1 with Woody’s brief time at UC Berkeley (one year) and the real reason he even bothered to try college.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Woody LaBounty. And this Thursday, look for a bonus episode all about We Players and their upcoming production of Macbeth at Fort Point.
We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making.
We last talked with poet Josiah Luis Alderete back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer.
Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back.
One of his coworkers at City Lights came up with the idea of doing poetry out the window onto Columbus Avenue. The first poet to read up there was Tongo Eisen-Martin. Josiah says that the reaction from passersby, the looks of joy on their faces, is one of his favorite memories from this time.
Then we talk about Josiah’s monthly Latinx reading series, Speaking Axolotl, which has been going strong for more than six years now. It started pre-pandemic in Oakland, pivoted to Zoom from early in the pandemic, and resumed in-person in the Mission once that was possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves now.
Josiah reminds us that he was evicted from his home in the Mission back during the first dotcom wave of the Nineties, and that he hadn’t been able to move back until recently. Before getting the job at City Lights, he owned and ran a taco shop up in Marin for 20 years. He told himself toward the end of that long run that he never wanted to own a business again.
But then he went into Alley Cat Books one day and was talking with that store’s owner, Kate Razo. Josiah had been putting on events at Alley Cat for his friend for years, but now, Kate mentioned that she was considering selling the bookstore. To explain his reaction, Josiah begins to talk about how much the Mission means to him.
Having given so much to him, his life and his poetry, Josiah felt he owed the neighborhood. He knew that if he didn’t step up and take over the space as a book store, it would be prone to whatever trendy gentrifying business happened to move in. But he also knew that it would take a lot of work and a lot of money to do what he felt had to be done.
And so he assembled a group of folks and they approached Kate Razo with an offer. That was in August. They opened Medicine for Nightmares a few months later, in November.
He originally envisioned keeping his job at City Lights while helping to open the new store in the Mission. But the enormity of the task had other ideas. Some of those folks he’d gathered to do the work also fell off, which seems natural in hindsight.
Nonetheless, defying odds and perhaps expectations, the new book store opened. Originally, after having gone through the Alley Cat book inventory and given much of that back to Kate, they opened “bare bones.” Around Day 2 or Day 3 of being open, Josiah realized that he couldn’t be both there and City Lights. It was obvious that he needed to quit his job in North Beach, a tearful process he describes.
We end Part 1 with Josiah taking listeners through the space that Medicine for Nightmares inherited from Alley Cat Books.
Check back next week for Part 2 with Josiah Luis Alderete.
We recorded this podcast at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery in February 2025.
Photography by Mason J.
We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in.
In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs Ask Me SF, a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode.
We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed.
Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town, and so she found it hard to relate fully to folks around her. Her family was in North Carolina, and Alabama before Ellen was born, because her dad, who’s a doctor, went to school but also wanted to go to small towns in the US to run his practice. He did well in that sense, but his American-born Chinese kids not so much.
The family moved to Taiwan when Ellen was 10, and that presented new challenges because of her decade in the US.
Before that move, she had taken up violin and piano (“like a good Asian kid,” she says) and dabbled in visual art. She drew and did some painting at home and at school, back when schools had art classes.
She kept that going in Taiwan. But she experienced culture shock just the same. Remember: She arrived when she was 10, and so she spent those very formative early teen years in a familiar but also not familiar part of the world. Other kids at the American school she attended were mostly relatable. But Taiwanese folks who’d never left their homeland presented some friction for folks like Ellen.
When it came time to choose a college, her parents encouraged her to do a pre-med program, but left room for that track not to stick with their daughter. She chose Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and ended up minoring in Visual Communication.
We go on a short sidebar here about Ellen’s older sister, Helen. Despite the age difference and their varied experiences back in Taiwan, the two have always been close.
[There’s a brief pause in the recording at this point. We relocated to the backyard at Ocean Ale House when the band began to play.]
Nowadays, in hindsight and with some life lived between then and now, Ellen has come to appreciate her ancestral homeland.
She says it was never a question whether to come back to the US for college. A counselor helped her choose a school that was both good for pre-med and had a solid art program. She chose Washington University sight-unseen.
She did pre-med, but only for the first two years. Then she switched, with her sister’s encouragement, to business with a vis-com minor. Ellen graduated in four years and set off for the East Coast.
Check back next week for Part 2 and Ellen’s move to San Francisco.
We recorded this episode at Ocean Ale House in February 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
Nato Green started hanging out at San Francisco comedy clubs when he was in eighth grade.
Nato’s parents met when they both still lived in the suburbs of Chicago. They got married in 1968 and moved to San Francisco soon after that. Nato says that they “were in the counter-culture, but bad at it.” What he means by that is they didn’t take their subversive lifestyles all the way like many of their peers did.
But they were definitely left-leaning folks. They settled in Noe Valley, which was quite a different neighborhood back then. It was much more working-class than it is today. Think: blue-collar Irish- and Italian-American families. They had their first kid, Nato, and five years later, their second, his younger brother.
When Nato was in middle school, his parents split up. He went with his dad to live at 22nd Street and Dolores, and then up to Bernal Hill. He split time between there and his mom’s house in Noe Valley. Nato is quick to point out that Bernal Heights was also very different back then. There were even unpaved roads on the hill when he was a kid in the Seventies.
Today, Nato uses history and some pop-culture references to date his own memories here in San Francisco. He remembers things like the Mosone/Milk murders and ensuing “White Night” riots, to name just one. The Forty-Niners’ string of Super Bowl wins in the Eighties are another.
Nato admits that he wasn’t the best big brother. He lists off some of the SF schools he attended—Rooftop Elementary, MLK Middle School, and Lick-Wilmerding High School, where he went on a scholarship. His dad worked to the SFUSD for 35 years and worked on desegregation, among other things. He also taught in SF public schools.
Nato says he was a “sensitive, depressed kid.” He read a lot, especially comic books. He graduated from high school in 1993, when the local music scene was overtaken by thrash/funk. Bands of that genre were plenty. Nato went to those shows, where he was able to, anyway. He wasn’t yet 21.
The first indie comic book store in The City was on 23rd Street in the Mission—The SF Comic Company, and two doors down was Scott’s Comics and Cards. Nato became a Scott’s regular. Others who hung out there a lot became his buddies.
The SF band Limbomaniacs lived next to Scott’s. Nato goes on a sidebar here about how bands in the thrash/funk scene never really blew up, mostly owing to what a uniquely live experience the music was.
In 1990, when the Niners won the Super Bowl in a blowout, the Limbomanics played with guitar amps at the windows of their Victorian on 23rd Street, facing out. As Nato tells it, skater kids poured out of that house, and other neighborhood kids flocked to the scene. A mosh pit soon emerged, of course, on the asphalt.
Nato goes on another quick sidebar here about all the different neighborhoods and scenes interacting on a regular basis. At least when he grew up, they did.
Nato’s main modes of transportation in San Francisco were his feet and Muni. The main bus lines were the 24, the 49, and the 67. His high school was on Ocean Avenue, but he mostly hung out in the Mission. One of his good friends lived in Lower Haight and had a car, so Nato would sometimes take Muni over there.
That buddy with a car would also swing by and pick up Nato and his friends. They’d often go to the west side of town and hang out in coffeeshops. Nato rattles off several of those shops, also letting us what occupies those spaces today—Farley’s (still there), Higher Grounds in Glen Park (still there), Higher Grounds in The Mission (closed), Café Macondo (Gestalt today), Blue Danube (still there), and the Horse Shoe (empty today).
There’s another sidebar about Jello Biafra. Nato says, “Don’t meet your heroes.”
As mentioned up top, he started hanging out at comedy clubs in The City when he was in eighth grade. There was a show on KQED called Comedy Tonight that featured local comics. Originally, the show was shot at Wolfgang’s (now Cobb’s), but it later moved to Great American Music Hall. Alex Bennet was on Live 105 in the morning and Comedy in the Park was drawing 50,000 people to the Polo Fields. There were five seven-nights-a-week clubs in SF, and at least five more around the Bay. People made a living as regional headliners.
Around this time, Nato’s eighth grade science teacher’s roommate was the doorman at Cobb’s. Word got around to that guy that a kid was into comedy, and so he started taking him to that club. He saw comedians such as Greg Proops, Dana Gould, Paula Poundstone, Mark Pitta, Johnny Steele, Will Durst, Greg Behrendt, and Margaret Cho. He watched these folks, some of them anyway, become headliners.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode on Nato Green.
We recorded this episode at Nato’s home on Bernal Hill in January 2025.
Photography by Nate Oliveira
One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari. In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at Gratta Wines in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners" (yum!). These involved aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as the older generation. Barbara and her immediate family lived upstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Because of this set-up, she says it was more like one big family. And every week culminated on Sundays, with as many as 30 people coming in and out of these get-togethers. The sauce was on the stove starting early in the morning. And if more people came, it simply meant more pasta. If, like me, you're thinking of the "Fishes" episode of The Bear, you're not far off. Saturdays were spent going "up the street," which meant shopping at places like Sears or Macy's. Maybe they'd stop at White Plains Diner for lunch. But they always ended up back at her grandmother's house for cake and coffee. Her mom's youngest brother went to school with Barbara's dad's youngest sister. They came from different towns, but all ran in the same circles. And thanks to this, as well as a tight-knit Italian-American community in the area, her parents met. They got married in 1958 and had their first kid, a son, in 1959. Then Barbara was born in 1960. The family is Catholic, but that manifested more in traditions than any religious sense. They went to church on big holidays, and Barbara shares a story about her grandmother giving her money for the Easter Sunday collection. But she and her cousins pocketed the money and spent the service on the church roof. After she was confirmed, around eighth grade, her parents gave her the choice whether to keep going or not. Barbara chose to hang up her career with Catholicism at that point. By the time Barbara was in high school, her immediate family moved to Florida, in the Sarasota area. She says it was a hard time for her, being torn from all the people and places she knew. There wasn't a lot of Italian culture in her new home. Her mom searched for ingredients to make the food she was accustomed to. She spotted a sausage truck one day and followed it. Only through this was she able to maintain some semblance of her cultural past. Barbara stuck around after high school down in Florida. She got a degree in physical therapy and worked for about 10 years on the west coast of the state. Still, neither she nor her two brothers (one older, one younger) loved it there. Barbara left Florida around 1989 or 1990 for California. Her first visit, before she moved to San Francisco, was a vacation with a coworker in the mid-Eighties. They stayed in a hotel on Van Ness near The Bay. They did what tourists do—Fisherman's Wharf, drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, that sort of thing—and didn't travel to any SF neighborhoods. The visit involved a quick drive down to Monterey to see a former coworker of theirs. The entire trip left her wanting to visit again someday. When the time came to move here, her job set her up with a place to live for a few months. Barbara kept renewing these contracts every three months. She started in the southwest corner of The City, within walking distance of Joe's of Westlake in Daly City. We end Part 1 with stories of Barbara's early friends in SF showing her around The City. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of my episode with Barbara Gratta. We recorded this podcast at Gratta Wines in the Bayview in December 2024.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
It's been a damn year, y'all. In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show Vandor Hill, owner and creator of Whack Donuts. His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead. This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event:
Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram for more info. And if you're able to, please donate to help offset some of the costs of putting on this event. We'll see you there! We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in January 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt