Robert Houser

Warren Hellman

No patch of ground in San Francisco could have been more fittingly christened.

The recent renaming of Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park as Hellman Hollow paid sweet and poignant tribute to the late philanthropist and patron Warren Hellman, the creator and sponsor of the glorious Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. This was the place he had transformed every fall since 2001, filling it with the music he adored and loved to play himself on the banjo.

But there was also an unintended irony in the city’s affectionate parting gesture to one of its most cherished citizens. “Hollow” is about the last word anyone would attach to the name of a man whose personality and impact on Bay Area culture could hardly have been fuller, richer, more wide-reaching or more enduring.

By any measure, Hellman was a singular figure in shaping the region’s artistic and cultural life. He was wealthy and generous enough to make his contributions matter, and he spread them across a spectrum of causes and institutions in a way that few major donors do.

But it was Hellman’s wisdom and insight, his particular flair for problem solving and his expansive spirit that counted for as much and probably more than the way he used his money. Hellman was an igniter. He made things happen that wouldn’t have happened without him.

In addition to Hardly Strictly, his legacy includes such tangible assets as the sleek and essential parking garage that serves the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and a safe harbor for the Judah L. Magnes Museum on the University of California, Berkeley, campus.

Both projects were in peril when he stepped in.

Hellman led the 1998 initiative drive for the garage and rescued the Magnes, now known as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library, after a merger with the Jewish Museum San Francisco (now the Contemporary Jewish Museum) fractured.

As a deep-pocketed donor to organizations of all kinds, from the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera to Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage music coffeehouse and the Mission District’s ODC dance company, Hellman could deliver the Midas touch, often in moments of pressing need.

His sense of timing, invaluable to him as a musician as well as a patron, was one of his great strengths.

When the San Francisco Ballet was forced out of its War Memorial Opera House home during that facility’s seismic retrofit in 1996-97, Hellman and his wife, the former ballerina Chris Hellman, supplied a major influx of cash as half of the company’s subscribers defected.

In four decades of giving, according to the Ballet's executive director, Glenn McCoy, the Hellmans became “the largest cumulative donors in our history and among the most generous supporters of dance in the United States.” They funded important new productions of “Giselle,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Petrushka.”

Without the Hellman largesse, the San Francisco Ballet would simply not be what it is today — one of the great dance companies in the world.

Hellman’s beneficence fell across a dazzlingly wide range of interests, from education to public policy, medicine to poverty, athletics to Jewish organizations.

He carried the flag, well ahead of others, for online journalism in the region, first with the respected website Voice of Dance and then as founder and chairman of The Bay Citizen.

In one of his alchemical inventions, Hellman dreamed up a meeting of sports and dance in Toe to Toe, a fundraiser that matched UC Berkeley athletes and ODC dancers in an inspired mock competition. That was vintage Hellman, drawing a crowd to entertain, raise money for two causes (ODC and UC athletics) and tweak the collective consciousness all at once.

“It brought in guys so they could see how strong dancers are,” said Brenda Way, the founder and artistic director of ODC, who brainstormed with Hellman on Toe to Toe. “Whatever was a normal way of doing things, Warren would want to think of another way of coming at it.”

“He was our Renaissance man in a cowboy shirt,” said Kary Schulman, director of San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts. “Warren was always looking for something that would not only be good to do but fun to do as well.”

Hellman attracted a lot of notice for his bluegrass outfits; his love of outdoor sports — the riskier the better; and his blunt, convention-be-damned manner in the nominally cultivated realms of high finance and foundation boardrooms.

He was, in many senses, a one-man show, but none of it was affectation or plotted eccentricity. He was no craggy California Donald Trump, leaping from one self-aggrandizement to the next. Much of his work went on quietly and unnoticed, behind the scenes.

Hellman’s style was of a piece with his substance, sprung from the conviction that joy and progress went hand in hand, often wandering off in unforeseen directions.

“For him there was no distinction between bluegrass and ballet and symphonic music,” said Brent Assink, executive director of the San Francisco Symphony. “He didn’t care about the different definitions people apply to art. It was all about the sheer joy of participating, of being an active part of whatever it was. So of course it made sense he played an instrument himself.”

That experience-first, boundary-leaping quality is what allowed him to move so freely and fluidly from one issue to another without losing focus or freshness of outlook. Hellman loved to meet people for breakfast and bounce around ideas. He did it with artistic intuition and a businessman’s blend of rigor and pragmatism.

When the San Francisco Ballet was under financial pressure in the 1990s, Hellman argued for and helped build a substantial endowment for long-term stability and growth. With ODC, he recommended just the opposite, seeding an artistic venture fund that would be spent more quickly to get that contemporary troupe’s new work onstage when it was hot.

Every dilemma was an opportunity for its own smartly tailored solution.

Hellman, who relished writing songs for family members, friends and almost any occasion, believed that creativity was a primary good, accessible to all. “He wanted to have a good time,” said Schulman, remembering a colleague and friend who turned the pleasure principle into a sweeping philosophy and practice of civic improvement. “He wanted everybody to have a good time.”

To a remarkable degree, not only with the people he knew but with the many lives he touched in the Bay Area and beyond, that’s exactly what Hellman achieved.

Steven Winn is a San Francisco arts critic and regular interviewer for City Arts & Lectures.