What’s New on Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights

Petsche has cut hair on Fillmore Street for close to 25 years, first upstairs from Pure Beauty, then at the Soaps salon at Fillmore and Sacramento, and since 2012 in a second-floor suite at 2001 Fillmore. On April 24, 2026, he got a letter telling him he had to be out by the end of May.

If you've walked past that corner this summer and wondered why the old Noosh space sits behind construction fencing, or driven past the shuttered Clay Theater three blocks north and noticed scaffolding on a marquee that hasn't lit up since 2020, the two projects are not a coincidence. Both buildings belong to the same person. An investor named Neil Mehta began buying property on Fillmore in 2023, starting with the Clay Theater and several neighboring buildings, according to New Fillmore's coverage of the theater's preservation review. He added the corner building at Fillmore and Pine to his holdings in 2024, according to New Fillmore's report on the tenants displaced by construction there. Three years into his buying spree, both properties are under construction at the same time.

That's the part worth understanding if you live here. What looks like a chaotic year of tenant turnover and shuttered storefronts is actually two different stories running in parallel: one funded by a single private buyer, and one saved at the last minute by a nonprofit and a handful of community sponsors. Here's how each is playing out.

The corner that's been empty since Noosh closed

2001 Fillmore has cycled through restaurants for decades. It was Pacific Heights Bar & Grill for years, then Thai Stick, then Noosh, which closed and left the ground floor dark. Mehta bought the building during that same buying spree, and the space has sat empty since, according to New Fillmore.

The wait is supposed to end this fall. Junsoo and Hyunyoung Bae, who run the Michelin-starred SSAL on Polk Street, signed a lease to open Monami, a Korean barbecue concept, on the ground floor. Junsoo Bae told the San Francisco Chronicle he wants it to be "a Korean barbecue version of House of Prime Rib." Construction began June 1, 2026, with a target opening in fall 2026.

The upstairs tenants are the ones covering the cost of that timeline. A letter dated April 24 told everyone on the second floor, Petsche's salon along with an aesthetician, a milliner, a marketing consultant, and an online trader, that they had to vacate by the end of May. The scope explains why the notice landed so hard: the work includes replacing the roof entirely and structural repairs to the second floor, not just a kitchen buildout for the new tenant. "The community upstairs is a great, supportive collaborative," Petsche said. "I really hope we can keep it. It's made my life so special. I can't imagine losing it."

Three blocks north, the same name shows up again

Walk three blocks up to 2261 Fillmore and you'll find the Clay Theater, the single-screen cinema that has operated there since 1913 and has sat dark since 2020. On April 1, 2026, San Francisco's Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously to approve its restoration, the biggest procedural hurdle the project has cleared to date.

The renovation is being funded by Mehta, the same owner behind 2001 Fillmore, under the banner of the Upper Fillmore Revitalization Project. Project director Cody Allen made the case to the commission directly. "It's gonna be a great day when the Clay reopens its doors," Allen said, predicting the theater's "next and most glorious chapter."

The plan keeps the theater's 200-seat count and preserves the historic neon marquee and facade while adding seismic upgrades and new projection and sound systems. One preservation detail took real negotiation: rather than removing the theater's historic arch, the project will relocate it to the rear wall behind a new, larger screen, where it stays visible from a green room built for live events, a compromise New Fillmore's coverage of the review described in detail. When finished, the Clay is expected to run seven days a week with more than 500 annual screenings of new releases, revivals, and 35mm presentations, with creative direction from Ted Gerike, previously with the New York microcinema Metrograph and founder of Now Instant in Los Angeles, according to reporting on the theater's creative plans. The restoration is expected to cost around $5 million. Reopening estimates range from summer 2026 to as late as summer 2027, depending on how construction goes.

Here's what the two addresses look like side by side:

Same investor, same four-block stretch, two very different tenants losing their spaces to make room for what comes next: an upstairs salon community on one end, four years of a dark marquee on the other.

The other half of the story: a festival almost nobody saved

Not everything reshaping Fillmore this year traces back to one buyer. The Fillmore Jazz Festival, the free two-day street festival that has run every Fourth of July weekend since 1986, nearly didn't happen last year. Organizers faced a funding gap of roughly $400,000 for annual operating costs and briefly canceled the 2025 event before reviving it days later with support from Chris Larsen's nonprofit, Avenue Greenlight, along with additional community sponsors.

This year's festival, held July 4 and 5, 2026, came back bigger: three new main stages named for jazz and San Francisco musical figures including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tony Bennett, and Johnny Mathis, with performances from more than 25 local and national artists.

That contrast is worth sitting with. The Clay Theater and Monami exist because one person put private capital into two buildings he owns outright. The Jazz Festival exists this year because a nonprofit and a handful of donors decided, with days to spare, that a 40-year tradition was worth keeping alive. Both are reshaping the same sidewalk this summer. Neither would have happened without someone writing a check nobody was required to write.

What the walk down Fillmore looks like by fall

By the time Monami opens, the corner at Fillmore and Pine will have gone from a shuttered restaurant to a full-service Korean steakhouse, at the cost of five small businesses losing their upstairs offices for a season. Three blocks north, the Clay's scaffolding will likely still be up. If Gerike's timeline holds, moviegoers could be back in those 200 seats by next summer. If it slips, the wait stretches into 2027.

Nordstrom Local has already lived through its own version of this adjustment. The retailer's first Northern California location opened at 1919 Fillmore on October 9, 2025, after neighbors raised concerns at Planning Commission meetings about double-parking and whether a merchandise-free service hub would actually bring foot traffic to nearby shops, as CBS San Francisco reported at the time. Ten months in, it has settled into a routine: online order pickup, alterations, and validated parking at the Japan Center Annex Garage for anyone running errands on the block, per Nordstrom's own announcement of the opening.

None of these four projects, the restaurant, the theater, the festival, the retail hub, started or will finish on the same calendar. But they're compressing into the same twelve months on the same four blocks, which is why the corridor feels like it's mid-renovation no matter which direction you're walking. Some of that disruption is temporary. Some of it, like Petsche's search for a new chair, is permanent. Either way, the block you walk through this August will look different by the time the Clay's marquee lights up again.

Fillmore Street's mix of century-old buildings and fresh investment is exactly the kind of change Kia Amini pays attention to for a living: what gets preserved, what gets rebuilt, and what that means for the people around it. If you're curious how shifts like these ripple into property values or renovation potential on your own block, let's connect to talk through your home's potential.