S.F. gallerist, art promoter championed North Beach
Marsha Garland was an aspiring lounge singer when she discovered the Old World romance of North Beach in San Francisco. That marked the end of her singing career and the beginning of the North Beach Chamber of Commerce.
Operating as a onewoman promotional machine, Garland started in a tiny office above Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store. She came up with ideas like striping utility poles in Italy’s colors — green, white and red — and getting the street signs on Columbus Avenue changed to Corso Cristoforo Colombo. Garland rebuilt the North Beach Festival, boosted the Columbus Day Parade and worked so hard for so long that Sept. 25, 2006, was declared Marsha Garland Day in San Francisco, by decree of thenMayor Gavin Newsom.
Garland died March 16 in the onebedroom apartment in North Beach where she’d lived since 1982. Her Manchester terriers, Rosa and Duca, both 13 years old, were by her side, and she was surrounded by the work of local artists she’d collected for 40 years.
She succumbed to brain cancer, which she fought for seven years, said her half sister Sandra Croshaw. Garland was 78.
Though Garland was born in England, she became an Italophile to the point of learning the language and financing her own trade missions to the old country. She sang opera to her pet rat Pavarotti and opened an art gallery in North Beach called Buon Gusto. It did not last and, in the end, neither did the North Beach Chamber of Commerce. But Garland was happy for every day she woke up at the corner of Lombard and Taylor streets.
“The spirit of North Beach spoke to her ever since she got there,” said Croshaw. “She was intellectually curious and kept learning things.”
Marsha Rose Cowen was born Feb. 20, 1943, in Romford, a market town east of London. It was after the Blitz, but bombs were still falling on London. Her father, Wilfred James Cowen, was a flight engineer for the Royal Air Force whose plane disappeared during a secret mission over Germany. Neither the plane nor his remains were ever found.
Her mother, Frances Cowen, married Wilfred’s older brother, Leslie Spencer Cowen, and the two immigrated to the United States in 1952. The family settled in Santa Barbara, where Frances would sing melancholy songs from the war and tell stories about dashing into a bomb shelter when the air raid siren rang.
“My sister was influenced by the stories she was told,” said Croshaw, “and the fact that her dad was missing in action and his plane never came back had a profound influence over her.”
After graduating from Santa Barbara High School in 1961, Garland spent some years in her native England before being drawn to San Francisco, in 1967 amid the Summer of Love, said her longtime friend and artist Richard Perri.
Garland had played guitar and piano, but her marketable skill was in typing 120 words a minute. So she worked in law firms, and she sang in bars and lounges on Polk Street.
In the late 1970s, Garland answered an ad for a singer in a bar called Cavanaugh’s in the Outer Mission. She nailed the audition, but the bar never got the proper license, so the gig fell through. But she and wouldbe bar owner Perri became a couple and moved into a flat on Chestnut Street in 1977.
Garland soon figured out that she was better at promoting other people than herself, and that’s how she came to start the North Beach Chamber of Commerce as a private agency in 1986. By then, she already had a reputation from helping found the North Beach Neighbors community organization and serving as its first president, from 198183.
“North Beach is an enclave of tribes, and she thought she could bring all the tribes together as a business community,” said attorney Jody Weiner, who coowned Live Worms Gallery with his wife, painter Nancy Calef.
Garland could be counted on to attend every opening at Live Worms, among other galleries in the neighborhood, usually making a purchase for her own walls. “She never walked out without a painting under her arm,” recalled Weiner.
But Garland also did the grunt work, helping small businesses negotiate regulations. “She was a champion of the shopkeepers,” said Francine Brevetti, a local historian and writer. “If a local business needed to stand before city government, Marsha was there for them.”
After 9/11, Garland planted American flags in the lawn at Washington Square Park.
“From helping save the Grace Marchant Garden in the 1980s to founding the North Beach Chamber of Commerce ... to becoming a restaurant reviewer in the 2000s, Marsha Garland was an inextricable part of and contributor to North Beach community life,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin.
Garland’s last stop was working in the gift shops at the de Young Museum and Legion of Honor, where she became known as “Museum Marsha.”
“Her coworkers soon learned that Marsha could sell a $3,000 necklace or a $1.50 postcard with equal charm and knowledge,” said Mary Ann Stein, who worked with Garland at the gift shops until 2016.
A brief marriage in the early 1980s to Peter Garland ended in divorce.
She was not afraid to live or travel alone. She even had a solo trip to Turkey in the planning stages at the time of her death.
“Marsha was a driving force of charm and beauty that followed her everywhere,” said Perri, who remained a great friend for 50 years. “She was always smiling and she laughed at my jokes.”
Even when Garland became weak with chemotherapy and knew her time was short, she was still hitting the galleries, looking for work to buy and artists to support.
“She made you want to live, because she suffered,” Calef said. “But she held on to the end.”
Garland’s art collection — at more than 200 paintings, works on paper and objects — will be liquidated for an art sale benefiting KDFC, the nonprofit classical music radio station. (Visit www.northbeachneighbors.org for details.)
In addition to her dogs, Garland is survived by her half sister, Sandra Croshaw, and nephew Jeff Croshaw, both of Columbus, N.J., and niece Heather Croshaw of Denver.
A memorial is being organized by North Beach Neighbors.