GROWING UP IN SAN FRANCISCO
MAYOR ROLPH'S SECRET STAIRCASE
(1 of 1)
by Bill Roddy
Mayor James Rolph, Jr. was a San Francisco
institution. No one was mayor for a longer period of time... 1912 to 1931.
As a boy in the 1930s I explored City Hall and the adjacent Exposition
Auditorium. (That's its real name for me as it was built by the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition of 1915 and given to the City afterwards.)
The words Exposition Auditorium were chiseled into the
top of the building, but I don't know if they are still there.
Anyway as a kid I never dreamed I would
ever work at City Hall, but I did for eleven happy years working there
for Mayor's Shelly, Alioto and briefly for Moscone. The years were 1965
to 1976. I still did a lot of exploring there and made an unusual discovery.
The secret staircase.
If workers during the recent reconstruction of the San
Francisco City Hall happened to go to Room 100, just off the main entrance,
they would have been surprised to see a staircase that went nowhere.
I used to wonder what was behind
the door to Room 100, which the Mayor's Office used for storage. I got
the key from Dottie Merrill, who was our chief clerk, and a great friend
and opened the door.
It was a small room, musty with age,
and filled with old filing cabinets stacked two deep. They contained old
correspondence from Mayors of years gone by, and not very interesting...
complaints and the like. I had my fill of the current ones I was working
on and had no desire to read ancient ones. But to get to the rear of the
room I had to jostle the front cabinets aside.
When I did I saw a small iron staircase
wrapped around the walls. The steps were littered with paper. I'll get
to that shortly. I climbed the stairs and saw to my amazement that they
stopped at the cement ceiling about twelve feet up. Where did they go?
I went back outside, paced off the
distance from the outside wall to Room 100 and went back upstairs to Room
200, the Mayor's Office, directly above. I stepped off the same distance
and found myself in the office of the Press Secretary, who was Peter Trimble.
Then I went into Pete's bathroom and
knew that's where the staircase would have started.
Why would Rolph had wanted one?
Room 200 is the Mayor's main reception
room and is always filled with hangers-on; people waiting for an appointment,
or hoping to get one, or wanting a job or some favor from the Mayor. (when
I checked my dictionary for the spelling of hanger-on, I found the word
had been in use since the year 1542, so you can see how long they've been
a problem to rulers.)
The Mayor didn't have to leave through
Room 200. He had other doors that led directly to the outside corridor,
but the corridors were always filled with more people trying to get into
Room 200, so that was no good to the Mayor.
But Rolph had his secret staircase
and could leave his offices without encountering his supplicants; down
the stairs, out Room 100 to Polk Street and no one the wiser.
Years later someone on the staff of
Mayor Rossi decided they needed a toilet more than Rossi needed a stairway
and that was the end of the secret stairs.
What about the hundreds of pieces of
paper I found littering the stairs?
They were old canceled checks for small
amounts, $5 to $20, and were dated from 1911, when Rolph took office. All
of them were made out to women and had the imprint of the Widow's Fund.
They were signed by Ed Rainey, who was Rolph's executive secretary. Rainey
stayed with Rolph for the twelve years he was in office and later went
with him to Sacramento when Rolph became governor.