Still Waters

To picture Kate Rosenberger Waters, get the image of the Bay Bridge over the water somewhere between Treasure Island and the city skyline, feel the frigid air of the San Francisco Bay in the early morning, and cutting through traffic suspended over fog put a graying yet youthful woman on top of a motorcycle with the confidence of someone who’s been riding since she was 15. Even if the wind wasn’t peeling back her face at 60 or 70 miles per hour, there would be a small smile there and if the wind wasn’t deafening your ears you’d probably hear her laugh a little. But wait, make sure to factor into the picture you’ve got of her in your head now with the fact that she normally stands before you wearing Crocs. Now, watch her disappear past the rest of the cars and the chaos knowing that she’s pulling away to a job much, much better than yours.

Kate Rosenberger Waters, 48, rides her “iron horse” every morning to go run one of three bookstores in San Francisco. Some days it’s the one she started when she was 24-years-old.

It was 1985 and Waters and her then-partner Kirby Desha discovered a community that to them, was an old hippie neighborhood. “At the time, Noe Valley was the kind of place where people really valued books and were seemingly on some sort of quest.” Young and green, they had been looking for a storefront to house their future business venture and decided to take a place right on 24th where Phoenix Books still is today.

“It was a different time then. I worked over at the Berkeley Half Price Books on Telegraph Avenue,” Waters explains. “There wasn’t this huge financial crisis and this economy. When you’re 24, maybe you don’t know the pitfalls so you think, ‘this will work’ and you just try it.”

The store has none of the aspects of the chain bookstores that customers tend to find unfavorable. Quaintly, the store holds together in and of its own. There are no paper coffee cups or Wi-Fi internet abusers and the staff aren’t just absentminded employees. The store is a comforting throwback to bookstores of old, where kids finds the first book they will remember reading.

The style of this Noe Valley neighborhood bookstore reflects the values of its owner. Waters is not your typical entrepreneur. Currently, she is excited about an arrangement she has with a company that plants a tree in Lebanon for every bookmark they sell to customers at her store. She measures success not by the bottom line, but by the connections she makes in the community. The staff at each one of her stores vouches for that.

Alvin Orloff, 48, has known Waters for over 10 years. He explains how Waters’ best trait as a person, and as a business owner, is that she is a good listener. It is this skill that enables her to let the employees of her bookstores reveal their own talents and each neighborhood bring to life the stores as their own.

Waters thought of the idea for Mission neighborhood bookstore in 1982 at a tea party at Radio Valencia, once a small restaurant with an attached art gallery and performance space. Dog Eared Bookstore’s originial location was on Valencia Street between 23rd and 24th Streets in the space that the Scarlet Sage now occupies. Waters picked the space because a large red heart had been painted on the window for years. In 1986, Dog Eared moved to the larger space it currently calls home.

Although Waters moved back to Berkeley after the birth of her daughter, she had been a Bernal Hill resident for 15 years and thinks of herself as part of the blue-collar generation before the area became gentrified. When the building located at the corner of Cortland and Bennington went up for sale, Waters seized the opportunity. What was once a possible relocation spot for Phoenix became the current Red Hill when the store’s lease was in jeopardy around 2003. However, since then, Red Hill has grown into a community hub of it’s own.

Currently, Waters is expanding the inventory at Phoenix to include vinyl records. Since the closing of Noe Valley’s only music store, she has come together with a record shop in Lower Haight to make available a couple of shelves, or 800 records, in her store. The store’s audiobook rental program will continue as well, although she says it has become less popular lately with the majority of people downloading MP3s instead.

“The nature of the used book business is that you have to keep paying attention to changes in society and culture and change with the times,” says Waters adjusting her knitted sweater. “But of course, we are back to selling vinyl again.”

photo courtesy of www.dogearedbooks.com