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It wasn't to last. At about the same time she shared draft beers with Nick, Antoinetta began feuding with Henry Perez.
This next epoch in her reign is one of war, and it continues to this day. The epoch finds its roots at a neighborhood meeting last fall, when Antoinetta III refused to endorse Henry's effort to gain neighborhood backing for the management standards scheme, which the redevelopment agency supports, and which would funnel some $100,000 of agency renovation funding to the hotel owners who are the bane of the Housing Clinic that employs Antoinetta.
After the meeting, Antoinetta wrote in her diary, "Henry said that he would not allow me to block four years of work, and if I could block the Problem Solving Council, that he would rally in the neighborhood at large to support his plan. If looks could have killed, Henry would be up for my murder a number of times over."
And so it came to pass that Henry Perez, with the help of members of his Merchants and Residents Association, set up tenant committees in several hotels, including the Baldwin House.
At the Baldwin House, recruiting alternate tenant advocates wasn't difficult. Janet Norman, a 200-pound transsexual who lives one door down from Antoinetta III, had bristled at Antoinetta III's heavy-handed rule, and jumped at the chance to form a tenants' association that would challenge the Queen of Baldwin House.
"We've gone to Toni and said, 'Let's solve the problems, lets work together,' " Janet says. "But she says, 'You're not legitimate, and I'm going to put you down.' That's the attitude we get out of Toni. Toni's approach has been the standard legalistic, political-machine kind of approach that hasn't solved the problems in the past, and it's not going to now."
Antoinetta III considered this encroachment a grave threat to her reign. If tenants went to Perez's organization with their problems, Antoinetta's reason to exist might be eliminated.
After much contemplation, Antoinetta III decided that her power would have to reach beyond the Baldwin House Hotel, if her reign were to prevail. She would have to cement alliances, plan crusades, plot against enemies, and wage bitter battle. She would need to expose her most dangerous enemy, Henry Perez, for what she believed he was: a vile, bankrupt pawnbroker, a Republican carpetbagger from San Jose, a taker of money from the hand of the state, a befriender of slumlords, a developers' ally.
And so it also came to pass that Antoinetta Stadlman found Jeff Roth, the Natoma Street property owner, Jerry Clark, a part-time bartender at the M&M Bar on Fifth Street, Eric McDougall, a Natoma Street public relations consultant, and a half-dozen residents of Sixth Street hotels. Together, they formed the Positive Futures Coalition campaign slate, and together they ran for the redevelopment agency's project area committee for Sixth Street.
From there, they hoped, they would banish Henry Perez from his building on Sixth and Mission to his home in San Jose.
Meanwhile, allies of Perez, including John Elberling and Janet Norman, organized a slate of their own, named Allies For A Better Community.
Antoinetta III recalled her slate's first strategy meeting at a tony live-work loft that is the home of Eric McDougall. "We all sat around what appeared to be a most expensive dining table set, and Eric served us all up glasses of wine," Antoinetta III wrote. "On an impulse, I caught one up and hoisted it, calling for a toast. This got everyone's attention, so raising my glass high, I proclaimed, 'Here is to the demise of the SSMRA!' "
The Crusade
If Sixth Street's politicos hated each other in the past, that hatred turned to loathing during the campaign for election to the neighborhood's project area committee. The organizations of both Perez and Antoinetta printed bales of flyers and counter-flyers, canvassed door-to-door, and called in favors and friendships.
Antoinetta III handed out flyers calling Henry Perez an interloper. Henry's organization distributed flyers that labeled Antoinetta III a cynical dissembler.
A week before the April 17 elections, Antoinetta III brusquely scans a sheaf of papers she has just brought back from the registrar of voters. The papers list the names of every Democrat in the neighborhood.
She's scouting the neighborhood, figuring out which voters fall within the boundaries of the redevelopment agency's Sixth Street project area.
Antoinetta III will post Positive Futures Coalition flyers on the door of every registered Democrat in the area, accompanied by letters denouncing Henry Perez as a carpetbagging San Jose Republican. To do this, she will enlist the election-day aid of Jeremy Graham, an articulate, shaggy-haired employee of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic whose rapport with San Francisco's skid row indigents is legendary. She will visit the squalid hotels in the area, calling on Housing Clinic tenant representatives, alerting them to the urgency of her cause.
"Hello? It's Antoinetta, from the Baldwin ... Jackie? Hi Jackie, how's it going," Antoinetta says, leaning toward the doorway of Jacqueline Benjamin, who lives on the second floor of the Sharon Hotel on Sixth Street. Antoinetta has recruited Jacqueline to run on her slate as a tenant candidate, but Jacqueline has had an allergic reaction to mosquito bites, and hasn't been able to attend Antoinetta's organizing meetings.
"This is a packet of stuff for you, for this hotel, and this is a packet of stuff for the Raymond Hotel right around the corner," Antoinetta says. "And, you know, any time you get a chance over the weekend, if you're feeling bad, take it easy for a day, but every room needs to get one."
Come election morning, Antoinetta is agitated. Wearing a light sun dress and a pair of cross-country ski boots, the large transsexual tromps between the Delta Hotel, where the election's first phase will be held from 9 a.m. until noon, to the Sunnyside, where the Housing Clinic is giving free donuts and coffee to area residents who vote.
