Bob Burnside is much more than your local Castro handyman.
After completing Peace Corps service in Peru and teaching in New York, he arrived in San Francisco in 1968, drawn by the idea of communal living. Since then, he’s lived in different communes and been a community activist, a newspaper editor, a gardener, a published author, an artist and, of course, Your Castro Handyman.
We caught up with Bob at his home and learned some more details about his very productive tenure here in the Castro.
How did you get into being a handyman?
“My dad had a shop, I learned basic carpentry skills from my dad and the rest I learned from taking things apart and being curious and paying attention. Before I started my own business as a handyman, I had a business called Custom Services, where I made fabric covered office dividers and reconfigured peoples offices. I also worked at a cabinet-making shop. When both of those stopped, I just started doing handy work around the neighborhood and it developed into my handyman business.”
What do you like about being a handyman?
“I like the hours, I have a lot of free time, and I enjoy helping people out and problem-solving. I also appreciate other peoples’ homes. Actually, I have a site called Unusualsfarchitecture.com. I appreciate going into different buildings, new buildings, old buildings, Victorians ... I’ve even done jobs in the new developments around the Castro.”
What’s your take on all the new development?
"I think it's largely done by speculators. I think they haven't taken into full consideration the impact on San Francisco, especially the traffic."
You're also a sculptor. How did you get into that?
“My sculpture started with a senior project at RISD in 1964. Using the ability I have to visualize in three dimensions, I developed a geometric language based to the basic joint of 12 intersecting triangles. I did large-scale sculpture in the 1980s, both civic and corporate sculpture. I have pieces in Alaska, Reno, Wisconsin, and of course here in San Francisco (you can see them here). I got into sculpture because I got my degree from Rhode Island School of Design in industrial design, so it kind of led to that.”
What’s the biggest sculpture you’ve ever made?
“Probably the one in Alaska. It’s 12 feet high and it’s made of aluminum. I got $30,000 for that one.”
You used to run a publication called The Castro Star. Tell us about that.
“The Castro Star was started in 1995 by me as a member of CAPA (Castro Area Planning and Action), a community organization I was active in for ten years. I recruited volunteer writers because the Castro didn’t have a neighborhood paper. It’s kind of like what Hoodline’s turned into. We, like you, wanted to introduce important, interesting people living in the Castro, plus we dealt with neighborhood issues. We also published historic pictures of the Castro.
"Our print circulation was 2,000 copies. The only person paid was the delivery person, who we found out later was a homeless person living in Golden Gate Park. The newspaper ran for two years. After that, we combined with The Western Edition and became the San Francisco Observer for two years.”
You and your partner David started the Corona Heights Community Garden. How did you do it?
“We spent two years getting the garden set up, over neighborhood opposition because they said we’d take up all their parking. We started bringing kids to the Parks Department meetings from Rocky Mountain School. They pleaded for the park and started to make the old people look silly. After that, the Parks Department granted us the space and actually gave us money to develop the plot and gave us fruit trees, etc.”
You also have a website called Plantpersonalities.com. Tell us more about that.
“There are over 2,000 pictures of plants, shrubs, and trees I’ve taken that you can download for free and turn into a background, a screen saver, or make anything you want. I just thought the way people trim shrubbery sometimes, or the way Japanese people treat plants was interesting, so I put this all together with trees from the tree line of the Sierras and many other places, along with shrubs and trees from the neighborhood.”
Tell us about your involvement with Positive Resource.
“I started Positive Resource as a work referral service in my living room in 1989 using a word processor with a search function to join people with HIV with people wanting to help them by offering work. I left the organization when it combined with AIDS Benefit Councilors and became the Positive Resource that it is today.”
You’ve self-published two books. What were they?
“The first was a children’s book called The Adventures of Ed the Head. I had met a guy on a queer connect website, and instead of having sex, we decided to do a project together. That’s his head featured in the book. We each submitted concepts, and he liked mine better.
"I wanted to do a children’s book. My mom was a kindergarten teacher and I’m interested in child development. The other book is a book about foraging in San Francisco. There was an older guy who had a garden plot in the community garden, and he had all this knowledge about local edible plants. We followed him around Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, taking pictures of things he identified as being edible. Both are available for purchase online at Blurb.com.”
What’s your favorite tool?
“My Makita drill and driver. It’s powerful, it’s very portable, and I use it everyday for anything from hanging pictures to carpentry projects.”
If you’re in need of Bob’s handyman services, you can reach him by phone at (415) 336-7330, or at yourcastrohandyman (at) gmail [dot] com. He charges $70 per hour and claims that “no job is too small”.
