San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Committed life to public service
Anne Halsted’s 50 years in San Francisco civics started in spectacularly unglamorous fashion: organizing a drive to rezone a sewage plant in her neighborhood. It worked.
After that success, she aimed higher by founding the Telegraph Hill Historic District to preserve the 19th century housing stock. Before long, every conservation and citizenship commission in San Francisco, the Bay Area and all of California came calling.
Among her distinctions was being named the first woman on the San Francisco Port Commission and serving as vice chair of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission during the planning and staging of the America’s Cup in 2013, the largest event ever held on the bay.
“You won’t find many people more dedicated to public service than Anne Halsted,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif. “She served on so many nonprofit boards, planning groups and fundraising campaigns, it’s hard to know where she found the time and the energy.”
Halsted kept going even after lymphoma and incessant chemotherapy treatments sapped her tremendous energy. So many government and nonprofit meeting agendas, reports and legal documents arrived in packets at her home near Coit Tower that she had to add a second mailbox. She was making plans to call in to a committee meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission even as she learned that the chemo had stopped working and an experimental drug trial had failed. Halsted died March 13 at her weekend home in Glen Ellen. She was 78.
Everything she did was unpaid and often unnoticed, including her work for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association or SPUR, which she served continuously since 1982, including two terms as its president. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Commission, People for Open Space, the San Francisco Open Space Advisory Board, the Greenbelt Alliance, Friends of the Urban Forest — the list goes on for 20 organizations, many of which she served while also working a fulltime job with a leasing agency.
“Anne is an example for all of us of how to live a life dedicated to improving your community and the lives of those around you,” Feinstein said by email. Anne Watson Halsted was born Nov. 21, 1942, in Charleston, W.Va. Her father was in the coal equipment business. She graduated from Duke University in 1964 with a degree in political science and arrived in San Francisco in 1969, taking a job in human resources for United States Leasing International.
Living on her own for the first time in a Nob Hill apartment, Halsted had an epiphany that caused her to divest of her inheritance from the coal mining business and dedicate her life to public service in the causes of women, minorities, and the environment in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area.
“Anne was welltodo and had the option to pursue any lifestyle she wanted,” said her longtime friend Ken Maley, “and what she chose to do was to dedicate her life to civic duty.”
In 1978, Halsted bought a simple 1870s Italianate house on Montgomery Street just down the hill from the old Speedy’s Market on Union Street. Her home office had a view of Coit Tower and Alta Street, one of the original residential blocks in San Francisco. After witnessing the destruction of several of these charming small Victorians in the name of development, Halsted decided to do what she could to stop it.
“As she evolved, her interest in historic preservation expanded from just Telegraph Hill to the entire city,” said Maley, who lives around the corner. “Anne could be tough love, but the love prevailed.”
After 10 years of single life, Halsted met and married Wells Whitney, a scientist with Raychem Corp. and a trustee with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He moved into her house where they stayed ever after.
In 1990, Halsted retired after 20 years with U.S. Leasing, only to back fill her schedule with additional boards and committees. Her home office was thereafter piled high with reports and agendas hauled up the hill on foot by Ed, the neighborhood letter carrier.
“I’d ask Wells, where’s Anne?” said Maley, and he’s say, “she’s off on her appointments.” To get there she took public transportation, catching the tiny 39Coit bus to connect to the 30 Stockton or 45 Union trolley lines. If her appointment was in the East Bay, where the MTC is headquartered, she’d take BART.
When she wasn’t at appointments she was on the tennis court, as a member of the San Francisco Tennis Club South of Market. She’d ride the bus there, too. If there was no other exercise option available for her to burn energy, she’d walk up the hill to Pioneer Park, the plaza surrounding Coit Tower.
On one of her walks, she noticed that the stairway to the park on the west side was never finished when the tower was built in the early 1930s. So Halsted founded Friends of Pioneer Park to finish the job. It was completed in 2003, and now the Friends fund tree maintenance and other visitor improvements.
After many years of nonstop appointments and meetings, Halsted and Whitney bought a modest weekend compound in Glen Ellen so she could have a place to grow vegetables and roses. She did the hard work herself.
“She’d be out there pulling weeds,” Maley said. “She grew cherry tomatoes, squash, zucchini, beets. She hated things to go to waste so anybody who visited her went home with a bag of produce.”
In summer 2018, Halsted was sought out by the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to tell the story of her life in volunteerism for the Bancroft oral history project. It took her 13 hours to get through it all. The recording will soon be made available to the public.
“Anne Halsted was a force to be reckoned with,” said Shanna Farrell, who conducted the interviews at Halsted’s home in 2019, while she was undergoing treatment. “To boot, she was especially nice and always made me feel welcome.”
In addition to her husband, Halsted is survived by a niece, Katy Lonergan of San Francisco, and a nephew, Eric Lonergan of Seattle. Services are on hold because of the pandemic. Donations may be made to Friends of Pioneer Park, c/o San Francisco Parks Alliance, 1074 Folsom St., San Francisco, CA 94103.