San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Advocate was a defining preservationist
With her genteel roots and refined personal style, G. Bland Platt wasn’t an obvious force to be reckoned with in San Francisco’s development battles of decades past.
But there she was again and again, filing lawsuits one moment and conducting historical research the next. Exerting what influence she could have as leader of a city board with limited powers and, more than once, showing up to protest the demolition of an aged building.
In the process, the woman known to friends and fans as “Gee Gee” emerged as one of San Francisco’s earliest and defining preservation advocates — a calling she embraced in her 20s and pursued for more than 40 years before her death from pulmonary disease on Dec. 13, 2023. She was 84.
“She really set a very high bar,” said Katherine Petrin, one of many people now involved in preservation who saw Platt as a mentor. “Her work habits, her standards and strategic sense. … She was such a model.”
The strategic sense was evident as late as 2004, when Platt saw a photo in the Chronicle showing the historic dome of the Emporium department store perched 60 feet in the air, high above a construction zone. She and other preservationists promptly threatened to sue the developer for violating its earlier pledge to restore much of the former structure.
By the time the vertical mall known as Westfield San Francisco Centre opened in 2006, the developers had agreed to pay $2.5
million to the city. That financial settlement led to the creation of a public “conservation fund” that continues to support historic studies and other efforts.
Not all such campaigns were successful — including the highprofile but futile effort to save the City of Paris department store by Union Square, a battle waged when Platt was the president of the San Francisco Landmarks Advisory Board.
Or the demolition of a warehouse at the base of Telegraph
Hill, done even as Platt arrived on the scene “with a handful of supporters and several turn-of-thecentury maps to prove that part of the hapless building dated from pre-Civil War days,” the Chronicle reported at the time.
But it’s a measure of her effectiveness that 110 buildings were given landmark status in the 13 years between her appointment to the then-new landmarks board and 1980, when she and four other members were abruptly dismissed by then-Mayor Dianne
Feinstein.
“She was practically the inventor of preservation in S.F.,” said Woody LaBounty, president of San Francisco Heritage, an advocacy organization. “She had a matrician’s air, but her interests were all over the board.”
Platt’s dedication to the preservation cause began much earlier, before such a cause even existed in any sort of formal way.
Born in Kentucky in 1939 and raised on a grassy estate lined with wooden fences painted
black, the woman born Gertrude Bland went to the Connecticut College for Women and then married Peter Platt, a Yale law student. The young couple moved west when he was hired by a San Francisco firm, and Gee Gee joined the genteel Junior League to meet other women. As a member of the league, she volunteered in 1963 to help research local buildings that might be worthy of saving.
The city’s planning department wanted to compile a list, but it had nobody on staff to oversee such an effort. Hundreds of league members stepped in, literally; Platt often pushed her two young sons in a stroller while gathering information on Victorian homes and the like — many of which were in neighborhoods like the Western Addition, where entire blocks were being razed in the quest for what then was dubbed “urban renewal.”
“We hope to arrest the destruc
tion of San Francisco’s architectural heritage,” Platt told a reporter in 1966. “A city which has no past has no present.”
The research led to the book “Here Today: San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage,” which Platt helped edit. It was published in 1968, around the time Mayor Jack Shelley signed the advisory board into existence and made Platt one of its initial members.
The book’s influence didn’t end there: Platt and the board made a priority of saving at least some of the Western Addition’s imperiled Victorians. Eventually, a dozen were moved during November of 1974 to new locations in the neighborhood, in the dead of morning so as not to snag traffic.
The moves were facilitated by a new preservation group now known as San Francisco Heritage. In its archives is a photo of one move; Platt can be seen watching the procession, wearing a fur coat to fend off the pre-dawn chill.
This courtly determination, more than specific wins or losses, is what Platt’s admirers recall most vividly.
“Gee Gee wasn’t a grandstander by any means, but she had such a presence,” recalled Donald Andreini, a former Heritage staff member. “She was a wiry little bird of a lady, and she stood her ground more than once.”
Much of this took place while Platt was a single mother, divorced from her husband and raising two boys.
“For a while, frankly, it felt like something that took her away from us,” said Peter Platt Jr., her oldest son. “A rival enterprise.”
Then Peter and his younger brother, Geoffrey, watched their mother during the struggle over City of Paris, which was replaced by a Neiman Marcus that, at least, includes the florid rotunda salvaged from its predecessor in a partial win for preservationists.
“I’d see her on the scene, in front of these reporters and cameras. It was intense and she was amazing,” Peter recalled. “That’s when I got it — this matters.”
After Platt’s dismissal from the board by Feinstein, Platt started her own historic research consulting firm. There were long stints on the board of Heritage and also the California Preservation Foundation. As time passed, she received the equivalent of lifetime achievement awards from the foundation and San Francisco Tomorrow, another watchdog group.
All this could make younger preservationists feel daunted — even though Platt also was the type of person who up until the pandemic would stop by the planning department each December to drop off a holiday turkey with all the fixings for staff members.
“She was this icon by reputation, and (early on) I had a lot of friends in the preservation world who were scared of her,” said LaBounty. “But we got along great from the start. As long as you were respectful of her, she was respectful of you.”