San Francisco City Hall

City Hall is the building the rest of the city's record is written in. The Municipal Record, published every Thursday by the Board of Supervisors from the building itself, existed — its masthead says so — to preserve in condensed form all that pertained to the government of the city, and it printed the switchboard for the whole place: City Hall, Park 8500. A century later the same address still carries the Assessment Appeals Board in Room 405, the Taxicab Commission in Room 400, the Finance Committee in Room 263, and the Airports Commission when it meets downtown rather than at SFO. It has also been where uncomfortable testimony was heard: the 1996 report of the Task Force on Prostitution records a forum held at City Hall expressly for sex workers, who testified about police misconduct and neglect, and about their fear of reprisal if they came forward. The building's own fabric was documented in a 1993 historic structure report prepared for the Bureau of Architecture — the Polk Street elevation, the rotunda at the top of the Grand Stair, the telamons at the Van Ness portico, the supervisors' chamber — bound together with a summary of the earthquake damage and repair study that preceded its retrofit. A later regional survey counted San Francisco a leader in seismic strengthening, with roughly seventy public buildings retrofitted, City Hall among them. Vendors have been paid $14.7 million on contracts recorded against the building.