Thursday's Da Mayors of San Francisco: Part I

All cities have a mayor. Some became famous, like Dianne Feinstein, who was catapulted to prominence after the political assassinations of mayor George Moscone, and supervisor Harvey Milk. Some become infamous, like disgraced New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani. But there is something about Room 200 in city hall which has served as a laboratory for higher political aspirations.

In its 175-year history, San Francisco has had 46 mayors, some of them became footnotes in history, still others achieved great success. But in the last 50 years, for some reason the mayor of San Francisco is often a name which resonates beyond our 49 square miles and even California's boarders.

Historians may quibble over this, but I would say the city's first mayor who left his mark was Adolph Sutro. The namesake for the Sutro Tower, sitting atop of Mount Sutro, only a few miles from the world famous Sutro Baths.

Ever wonder why Twin Peaks is barren and wind-swept, while right next to it Mount Sutro is lush and green?

San Francisco’s Mount Sutro has a rich history tied to Adolph Sutro, who launched California's first Arbor Day in 1886. A city-wide campaign signed up local school children who planted thousands of eucalyptus trees and other types of flora on a barren hill then called Mt. Parnassus and created one of the great urban forests. Because of the student tree-planting campaign, Mount Sutro is an urban green space with its own eco system. A self-made millionaire from the Comstock Load, Adolph Sutro ran for mayor in 1894 on an anti-corruption platform, which was all the rage during the Progressive Era.

At the turn of the 20th century, like a lot of big cities, San Francisco was rife with corruption. Boss Abe Ruef, San Francisco's own Boss Tweed, held court in a private booth in his favorite restaurant. With a phalanx of bootlickers attempting to curry favor with the predominant political machine, it was common to see these hopefuls line up for a man who was never elected to office. Ruef and his cronies hand-picked the mayoral candidate for whom they thought was the most pliable and easy to control.

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Eugene Edward "Handsome Gene" Schmitz was a good looking, but perceived as the-not-to-bright president of the musician's union. He was a handsome enough lug to not offend anyone, and with Boss Ruef's tutelage, was elected mayor in 1901. But then five years later, a little incident kind of tossed a challenge to his administration.

On April 18th, 1906, The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire devastated the city. And after 72 hours, a whole third of the city was burnt rubble. To the surprise of everyone, Mayor Schmitz oversaw the aftermath of the disaster and provided the necessary leadership that the city needed. It turned out he was the right man for the crisis and came into his own. Some historians say that if it wasn't for his steady-handed stewardship of the crisis, many more people could have died.

Before 1912, no San Francisco mayor served more than two terms. That was until James "Sunny Jim" Rolf took office that year, and there he stayed until 1931. Noted for never being without his beloved boutonniere affixed to his lapel, for almost 20 years Sunny Jim oversaw the rebuilding of San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, the success of the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition World's Fair, Coit Tower, and the development and planning of the first iterations for the Golden Gate and the San Francisco -Oakland Bay Bridges.

Oh, and of course World War One, the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like many San Francisco mayors to follow, he moved on to higher office and was elected governor of California in 1931.

San Francisco in the 1960s was a tumultuous time. Joe Alioto, the son of a prominent family of fishermen, served as mayor from 1968 to 1976. For a hundred years, Alioto’s Restaurant was a prominent fixture in Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Alioto name was a fixture in San Francisco politics.

It was during these years San Francisco morphed from a conservative mid-sized port city, which hosted the Republican Convention just four years before he took the oath of office, to the center of the counterculture.

After the Summer of Love in 1967, tens of thousands of hippies (and their poser counterparts) descended upon our city by-the-bay, mostly in the Haight-Ashbury District. At the same time, and only a mile from there, tens of thousands of gay and lesbians from around the world headed to the sleepy Irish working class neighborhood of Eureka Valley. Today it is known as the Castro District.

A mile from there, the La Raza/Chicano movement in the Mission District was fighting for the rights of the original settlers of San Francisco when it was Spain and later Mexico. This is the milieu where a young Carlos Santana found his voice and music.

Although the Black Panthers (not the MCU lind) originated across the bay in Oakland, black activism found just cause in the Western Addition during Mayor Alioto’s tenure.

A short trip on the 22 MUNI bus line from the Mission District brings you to the Fillmore District, once called the Harlem-of-the-West. A brutal, and ultimately racist campaign of urban renewal displaced thousands of black San Franciscans in the name of removing “blight.”

It took lawsuits and relentless campaigning to finally stop the clueless policies of an equally clueless planning commissioner named Justin Herman. Homes (many of them classic designs that survived the 1906 earthquake) and businesses were destroyed. Right next to city hall, there were dozens of blocks which consisted of nothing but streets and vacant lots where a community one stood. Some said it was reminiscent of Hiroshima.

With the success of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, Hollywood began to shoot more films in the city. Over time they began to ingratiate the city’s mayors into their productions, if just a little bit.

Character actor John Vernon played the fictional mayor of San Francisco, and faced off against Dirty Harry, in the first of the film’s series. In the Enforcer, the fictional mayor is kidnapped, and naturally Dirty Harry is the only one who can rescue him.

Victor Garber played the real-life mayor George Moscone, in the Oscar-winning 2008 production Milk starring Sean Penn. In the 1994 thriller Nick of Time Marsha Mason plays the fictional governor of California, but her hair and style sure looked a lot like then-senator (and former San Francisco mayor) Dianne Feinstein.

Dianne Feinstein came in third place in the mayor’s race of 1975, but became the president of the board of supervisors, which is the second most powerful office in the city. History and timing found her catapulting to the mayor’s office when mayor George Moscone was assassinated by supervisor Dan White.

She was decidedly more conservative (by San Francisco standards) than her predecessor. She was often regarded as a “Goody-Two-Shoes,” and as supervisor would often show up to raucous meetings with tie-died clad hippies and activists dressed in a proper skirt and shiny patent leather shoes. One gay activist at the time said she didn’t care what you did in your bedroom, as long as you were in bed by 9:00pm. Once she became mayor, she inherited the past ten years of left-leading politics, and the incoming challenges of President Ronald Reagan, and AIDS.

In the early days of a pandemic which also struck the nation, and is largely forgotten about, the AIDS crisis festered first in San Francisco but was then euphemistically referred to as the “Gay Cancer.”

She managed to snag the 1984 Democratic Convention while AIDS activists protested outside, and there was buzz of her getting a VP nod. But history tells us another woman got it instead. After 11 years at the helm, she soon found herself heading to Washington D.C. in the historic “Year of the Woman” of 1992, when more women were elected to the US Senate than any time in history. And there she represented California for the next three decades until she passed away (while still in office, by the way) in 2023.

Dianne Feinstein's City Hall Funeral

It is a high honor for a deceased senator to lay-in-state in the rotunda of the US capitol building. “Di Fi,” as she was known colloquially, insisted she be honored by the people she served, and laid-in-state under a different dome; that of the city hall where her career began.

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