Page 3 of 6
"Goddamn it, Jeff, you're pissing me off again," one redevelopment manager said during a recent phone conversation Roth recorded.
And during a public meeting Roth packed with his allies, Perez told him, "I know you're here to mess with me, Jeff, but I'm not going to let you."
Across Mission and past the New 6th Street Market Liquors, a new visitor to the Sixth Street area arrives at the Baldwin House Hotel, an aged brick building that advertises clean rooms and reasonable rates -- daily, weekly, monthly.
After passing an ID card into the hotel watchman's iron cage, the visitor is let into a dark, musty hallway. He climbs the oily-carpeted stairway, turns right down a hall, and at the end, finds a door, painted bright yellow. In its center, affixed with a tack, is a golden crown, cut from a photograph.
The room behind the door is home to Antoinetta Stadlman, a woman who has come to deeply understand the courtly rivalries of Sixth Street. And while she professes few opinions about what the redevelopment agency ought, or ought not, do to the slums in her neighborhood, Antoinetta has used her political understanding to become a member of the area's ruling elite, its governing class. Someday, she dreams, she will become its queen. She will do so by becoming a San Francisco supervisor.
"We've got to start thinking about district elections coming up," she says.
The House of Baldwin
Antoinetta's designs weren't always so grand.
Until she came to the Baldwin House five years ago in a fit of desperation, she lived a life adrift.
Antoinetta entered the Baldwin House after two decades of aimless schooling at San Francisco State University and several failures in the workplace, all of which occurred while she lived with a sexual identity that she felt was not her own. By 1991, Antoinetta III was suffering what she describes as a complete financial collapse. She applied to the city's general assistance program and got herself a hotel room. At about the same time, she says, she changed her gender.
"I tried to look into it 20 years ago, but they couldn't do it because of my size," says Antoinetta, whose thick hands and broad shoulders still belie her change of sex. "Fifteen years later attitudes changed, and I was able to go right through."
Once ensconced in the Baldwin House, Antoinetta III signed up for a job as tenant building representative for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. The clinic has representatives in many of the hotels, hoping they will channel tenant complaints to clinic employees.
Antoinetta III saw potential for much more, she says.
"They didn't have any real, formal job description, so I saw the job as sort of a blank slate to do what I wanted," she says.
Before long, most of the Baldwin House's tenants began bringing complaints about their rooms to Antoinetta, and she took their trust seriously. She spent her days monitoring work crews to make sure repairs were done right and on time. She kept city health inspectors apprised of possible code violations, and did what she could to expel drug dealers from hotel hallways.
This last task proved the most challenging, as menacing crack dealers were difficult to confront, and the Baldwin's owner, Nick Patel, didn't seem to be doing anything about them.
It was in the struggle to rid her hotel of drug dealers that Antoinetta III saw her power increase tenfold. Gathering 14 tenants into a class-action lawsuit in small claims court, she charged that Patel had let his hotel become a drug-infested public nuisance. Antoinetta won $5,000 for each of the residents -- a $70,000 judgment.
Before the lawsuit, Antoinetta III made suggestions; now, she made demands. Once, she had lobbied for the eviction of troublemakers; now, she banished them by edict. Nick Patel, a middle-aged, soft spoken Indian who had treated her as a nuisance, now treated Antoinetta III with deference.
"You see that crown? I put that there after I won the lawsuit," she says. "After all, it's not everyone who wins $5,000."
As part of her self-described ombudslady duties, Antoinetta keeps a daily chronicle, which she files in rows of faded, royal-blue binders that occupy two bookshelves in her tiny, cluttered, second-story room. She adds to the chronicle every day. And particularly busy days can require five or more dated and timed entries.
Antoinetta says she keeps the logs in case she later needs to bring events up with Patel, the clinic, or the courts. But given that the Baldwin is Antoinetta's entire life -- she'll tell you as much -- the logs read like a diary of her aspirations to sovereignty.
She lovingly recalls the apex of her reign over the House of Baldwin in an entry into the daily chronicle, labeled 6:10 p.m., Feb. 20:
"I noticed that yesterday it was exactly one year since Nick finally came up to my office in the wake of the Small-Claims case, and pledged himself to co-operate with me in getting the Hotel back on track. As I have been getting the feeling lately that Nick has been slightly less attentive to my concerns, I felt that this was an excellent opportunity to reinforce the ties that bound him to me. Accordingly, I went to the Multi-National and bought two beers, Miller drafts, Nick's favorite. Nick was in the back office at the Baldwin, so I went back and asked him if he knew what day yesterday was. He didn't know, so I told him, giving him one of the beers, and saying that the progress we made with the hotel in the past year deserved a toast. We sipped in silence for a moment while I let Nick reflect on the situation a year ago ... I then said that we ought to toast the next year of working together, and Nick agreed, saying that we would work together 'for always' as we clicked our beer cans."
