The San Francisco Chronicle starts its list of the city’s best stairways inside a building: the grand marble staircase in City Hall’s rotunda. The paper counts 44 steps and calls it the backdrop for countless weddings and political swearing-ins. Its writer says he has seen it in person a few hundred times and still gawks like a tourist when climbing it.
A building born from 1906
The earlier City Hall was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The Chronicle says the original was poorly built and over budget, and expectations for its replacement were low. Wikipedia says voters approved an $8.8 million bond in 1912 for a new Civic Center, and Arthur Brown Jr. of Bakewell & Brown won the design competition. Ground was broken on April 5, 1913, and Mayor James Rolph moved in on Dec. 28, 1915, the year of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The dome, modeled on Baroque domes in Paris, rises 307.5 feet.
History on the steps
Wikipedia lists people who have lain in state in the rotunda, including Gen. Frederick Funston in 1917 and President Warren G. Harding in 1923. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe married at City Hall in January 1954. In May 1960, students protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee were washed down the rotunda steps with fire hoses. Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in the building on Nov. 27, 1978. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake twisted the dome on its base, and a seismic retrofit that set the building on base isolators followed.
On screen
Both sources note the staircase’s film career. Wikipedia says the grand staircase stood in for an unnamed government building in Washington, D.C., in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and the Chronicle notes it also appears in Milk. Wikipedia says the upper levels of the rotunda are open to the public, and the mayor’s office is on the second floor, opposite the grand staircase.
For more on 1978, see our explainer on the Moscone and Milk assassinations.