Beloved North Beach fixture, roving Polaroid photographer
Mildred Fishman Gardiner, a roving photographer who spent decades wandering North Beach taking Polaroids of people in cafes and restaurants, died Thursday at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital. She was 94.
But to say she was just a photographer would be akin to saying Caffe Trieste is just a coffee shop or City Lights just a bookstore. For more than 60 years, “Millie,” as everyone knew her, was as much a part of the North Beach fabric as Gino & Carlo, the bar on Green Street, or SS Peter and Paul Church on Washington Square.
She was around for so long and such a part of the streetscape that it seemed she had always been there.
“I knew her before I even knew I knew her, before I even moved to North Beach,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years. “She was this incredible fixture, the bohemian spirit of North Beach.”
The basic biographical in-
formation about Millie is somewhat mysterious, which is how she liked it. She was born in Cleveland in 1923, made her way out to Los Angeles and eventually drifted north to San Francisco. She married a veteran named Butch, who had lost an arm in World War II. He was hit by a car and killed in front of the San Francisco newsstand he owned. She never married again.
“I’m just a poor Jew, and I don’t talk about myself much,” she told The Chronicle in 2009.
As a widow, she lived in inexpensive residential hotels around the neighborhood. At first she sold cigarettes, then flowers, finally ekeing out a living by charging $5 for the Polaroid photographs she took in the cafes and restaurants that line Grant and Columbus avenues and Green Street.
On Friday, as word spread of her death, North Beach folks were rummaging through drawers and pulling out some of the Polaroids Millie had shot of them. Most people didn’t have to look very far. Peskin reached into the glove compartment in his car and pulled out a shot Millie had taken of him with former Planning Director Dean Macris at Tommaso’s Ristorante Italiano on Kearny Street.
Attorney Rick Levine, who moved to North Beach in the late 1970s, found a box full of shots Millie took of him when his son was a baby four decades ago.
“She would grab my son’s cheeks and say, ‘What a nice Jewish boy,’ ” he said. “I don’t know how many pictures we have that she took — lots and lots.”
For decades Millie set up shop at the Old Spaghetti Factory, which closed in 1985 after a 30-year run. Wearing a manypocketed cape and beret — she carried her own spoon and tin cup for coffee — the diminutive woman with the deeply wrinkled face made her rounds to Enrico’s, the Gold Spike, New Pisa, Capp’s Corner, Jazz at Pearl’s and the Washington Square Bar and Grill. Those places are all gone. At one place that is still around, Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe — where Millie would drink black coffee and sometimes nap at a back table — a refrigerator is covered with her Polaroids.
“Her face would light up as she took the shot and shook the picture, waiting for it to develop,” said Specs regular Gail Gailman. “Then she would say, ‘Be good to each other,’ and she was gone, on to the next place.”
For years, Millie’s last stop was Da Flora Restaurant at Columbus and Filbert, where former owners Flora Gaspar and the late Mary Beth Marks would play Yahtzee after the last diners had left. Millie didn’t play, but she liked to roll the dice. The chef would make her scrambled eggs and duck liver.
Gaspar recalled that Millie was religious and wore out her Muni pass traveling to visit the city’s temples: Beth Shalom, Emanu-El and Adath Israel. She went to the Jewish Community Center on California Street and the Jewish Home for the Aged on Silver Avenue.
As Millie strolled into her 80s, Marks and Gaspar began worrying about what would happen when she wasn’t healthy enough to walk the neighborhood shooting pictures. At the same time, when Polaroid announced that it would no longer manufacture film for the instant cameras, North Beach sprung into action, scouring the Internet and stores for film for Millie.
“People went out and bought her as much film as they could so she could continue,” Peskin said.
Soon after, Millie made the news in 2009 when she vanished from North Beach and turned up at a hospital in Reno. Levine, the attorney, tracked her down with help from the San Francisco and Reno police.
Jenny and Phillip Antoniolli, who owned a cutlery store on Columbus and took care of Millie as she got older, drove to Nevada and found her at a Reno hospital. She returned to North Beach to a hero’s welcome.
North Beach has been on a losing streak of late, bidding adieu to many of the free spirits and misfits who have defined the neighborhood since the 1950s. Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner died in January, followed by top hatwearing pirate Patrick LeBold, known as “Captain Cool,” Vesuvio doorman Paul Grady, and Saloon bartender Huck Pease. Richard “Specs” Simmons, a bon vivant who owned and operated Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, died late last year.
“It’s been a really hard year for North Beach,” said Gailman, an affordable housing developer. “With all the folks fading away, the neighborhood is fading away, too. It will be interesting to see if North Beach produces a new set of characters and oddballs.”
The last time Peskin saw Millie was in 2016 at the 150th anniversary of Laguna Honda. He tracked her down. When Millie saw the North Beach pol she started screaming, “I want to go back to North Beach! I want to go back to North Beach!”
“She made it to 94,” Peskin said. “It shows how North Beach is a small village, that she could walk into Tommaso’s or various bars and be treated like royalty. It speaks volumes about why San Francisco is still a place worth living in.”