Former San Francisco Mayor, from 1996 to 2004, and the speaker of the California State Assembly from 1980 to 2005, Willie Brown set out his own record at the Mechanics Institute Library and Chess Center on a Saturday afternoon, before a packed audience at the end of July. Founded in 1854, the Mechanics was celebrating its 170 birthday; Born in Texas and a civil rights lawyer who had an affair with Vice President Kamala Harris, Brown was the City's first Black mayor.
At the Mechanics, Brown was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle's long-time design critic and columnist, John King, the author of Portal, San Francisco's Ferry Building, and the Reinvention of American Cities.
King asked easy questions that gave the City's best-known Black politician free reign to talk about his own role in the reinvention of San Francisco, and to extol the virtues of autocratic rule. "Willie helped to lay the physical groundwork for the city today," King said.. "He knew every square block of the city." Brown began by noting that corporate interests wanted to be "treated like shareholders and that's what I did." He clearly liked the taste of power and wanted to hold on to it.
By his own account, he fought tirelessly to upgrade Union Square as a shopping magnet, bring the Warriors to San Francisco, keep the Giants in town with a new ballpark, put real gold on the dome of City Hall, and secure permanent homes for museums like the de Young, and with plenty of parking. "The mayor needs to run the city and be subject to no one," Brown said. He also said that the door to his office was always open and that he was available to talk to citizens for ten minutes. He allowed that under his leadership the city should "not have built just office buildings." These days many of them are unoccupied. Bad planning.
No one in the audience challenged Brown about a word he spoke. One person in the crowd asked him about the race for the White House. "We should focus on the qualifications of Biden's opponent," he said. "If Trump is elected president I'm almost certain I'll be deported." Brown didn't come out for Biden, but he didn't come out against him, either. He was mostly diplomatic, though he insisted that "no politician wants to leave office" and that if had his druthers, he'd still be mayor today. "If I ran against Gavin Newsom, now California’s 40th governor, I would have beat him, but he might be president one day."
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