It had big windows on the back giving a view due east over Noe Valley. By the mid-1950s the family lived in the freshly built house at 118 Midcrest Drive, in Midtown Terrace, on the south slope of Twin Peaks. Read Paul Gilmore was born to Polly and John on 12 June 1947. They were married in April 1946, and promptly went off to Guam to work on post-war insurance claims. He also went into insurance, so presumably the two met in the course of their work. There she met her husband, John Robert Gilmore, who was from Upstate New York and had served in the US Navy from 1943-1945. Theater work was a family tradition.ĭuring the war, in 1943, Polly came to San Francisco to work in insurance industry. Her mother Caroline Stanley Felver, was involved in a women’s drama group that put on all-female productions Caroline did the makeup. Her father was Paul Felver, an actor in musical theater who went into his father’s confectionery business when he got married. Polly was born Pauline Felver in 1920 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Many of Read’s associates and friends found a home there, including well-known dancers with SF Ballet, actors, and musicians. Polly lived on the top floor, 97 Miguel, and Read lived on the middle floor, 196 Laidley. “Teresa Bell was happy here,” Read would tell his friends. Polly and Read embraced what they knew of the house’s history, and found meaning for themselves in it. She may also have been influential in the authors of an architectural guide to the city choosing the name “Poole-Bell” for the house in 1982. She did original research on the house in the Holdredge Collection at the San Francisco History Center, although she lacked discernment and historical rigor. Despite Polly’s predilection for sensationalizing the legends surrounding it, she brought energy to the matter of publicizing its history, and graciously opened the house on numerous occasions to the public. They renovated and restored the building, and it was the center of their social lives and the site for their frequent parties. That they loved the Poole-Bell House is clear. They were avid patrons and benefactors of the opera, the ballet, and the theater. They belonged to All Saints Episcopal Church on Waller Street. They were both active members of the fledgling Victorian Alliance. Polly dealt in real estate, especially Victorian houses. He died of AIDS in 1992, after he and Polly had left the Laidley Street house, at the age of 45. But like so many who prospered in the rich tolerance of San Francisco in the 1980s, Read fell victim to the plague that decimated the community. He also served as the Wardrobe Master for SF Ballet from 1972 to 1982. Read was notable, in that in the 1980s he owned three prominent gay restaurant and bar hot spots, bringing consistent excellence and aspiration to their ambiance and cuisine, and joy and pleasure to many thousands of patrons. The lives of Polly Gilmore and Read Gilmore reflected and embraced these momentous changes in the city, and both of them contributed to its character and richness during these years. New interest in the unique beauty of the city’s Victorian houses brought restoration and historical accounting. San Francisco blossomed as a mecca of intense and affirming community for gay men and lesbians. This energized the arts scene in a city that had previously had a backwater reputation. The social conservatism that marked the midcentury years in the city gave way to a hedonistic magnetism that drew people from all over the US and the world. Fairmount was one of the numerous neighborhoods in the city that became bastions of the bohemian, the artistic, the countercultural, in the two decades or so after the Summer of Love and before the full weight of the AIDS Crisis permanently altered the city’s social and political world. The Bay Area suburbs had been luring many away from the city’s traditional working-class districts since the 1950s San Francisco’s population would reach its nadir in 1980. In the 1960s, Fairmount was about to enter a new phase, when it began to outgrow its working-class character.
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