Growing memorial for Lee
The memorial to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee outside City Hall grows daily after his death from a heart attack early Tuesday. Lee’s body will lie in state in the rotunda Friday, and mourners will be invited to sign a book of remembrance. City officials and dignitaries are preparing for Lee’s memorial Sunday afternoon, featuring tributes from his predecessors.
Flowers sprouted from the gray front steps of City Hall on Thursday while the sad-eyed people inside the great gray building prepared to welcome home their former boss.
A group of planners was standing at the base of the grand staircase, deciding just how things should go for the lying in state of Mayor Ed Lee on Friday and the memorial service Sunday.
The advice to the public, who are welcome to attend both events, is to be patient and to be prompt.
The body of Lee, who died Tuesday of a heart attack, will be brought up the Polk Street steps and into the City Hall rotunda at 7 a.m. Friday. Mourners will come in on the Polk Street side and file past the closed casket from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. An honor guard will try to keep the line of people moving. Mourners will be invited to sign a book of remembrance.
On Sunday, the building will open at 2 p.m., an hour before the memorial service is scheduled to begin. The mayor’s office, which is planning the event, has released little information about it. Lee’s predecessors in the mayor’s office are being invited to speak for up to two minutes each, and former Mayor Willie Brown is expected to be among them.
“We’re working all that out now,” city protocol director Charlotte Mailliard Shultz said as she entered City Hall on Thursday.
Through the day, the collection of bouquets left on the front steps grew. They were accompanied by photographs and front pages depicting Lee. “God bless you” and “Thank you,” the mourners wrote on cards and signs and on notes attached to candles.
By midmorning, the number of flowers had grown so large that City Hall workers laid out 14 large blue cones to mark off a path for the public to walk into the building without trampling the memorial.
Inside, City Hall tried its best to keep going.
City Hall historian Ellen Schumer led a group of thirdgraders up the grand stone staircase and into the Board of Supervisors chambers, where the usual talk she has given for decades was now filled with explanations of the difference between a mayor, an acting mayor and an interim mayor.
“We have a rule book, called the City Charter,” Schumer said to a class from Sherman Elementary School in San Francisco, after she led them into the resplendent oak-paneled room.
“When something happens to the mayor, the president of the Board of Supervisors becomes the acting mayor — it’s like if one of your teachers had to leave, and you had a substitute,” Schumer said.
She delicately told the students the tragic story of what happened at City Hall in 1978, just a few steps from where they were sitting. Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk died, she said, and when a student asked how they died, Schumer said that “the term we use is assassination” and she left it at that.
After the tour, Alyssa Belogorsky, 8, said she had never met Lee but that he “seemed nice and didn’t make any bad laws.”
Jack Tollas, 8, said that he was sad “because when a good leader passes away it’s sad if people liked him.”