A Fall City Hall Micro Wedding Under the Dome

Portraits Through the Autumn City Hall Halls

Family photos came first, then Bianca and Erick on their own through the building. The staircase sits beneath a gold-leafed dome that rises higher than the one over the U.S. Capitol, and the afternoon light fell through it in long, wide columns while they moved from the balconies to the arches below. An autumn City Hall wedding hands a couple one of the more extraordinary portrait rooms in the city — stone and gold and the long sweep of the marble, the upper balconies looking down into the light.

The small group had all of it to themselves on a weekday afternoon, every archway and landing theirs to move through. The family gathered in for photographs, one of Erick's people in a cream cowboy hat, everyone posed along the low stone rails while the arched windows glowed behind them.

Cake on the City Hall Terrace, and the Close of the Day

They cut the cake from Sweet C's Bake Shoppe out on the terrace, the autumn foliage gone gold and red behind them, feeding each other a bite in the last of the November sun. The cake was white and clean, a bright fruit filling showing at the cut.

The day stayed within those walls and the steps just outside them, from the moment they arrived to the moment they left, and the dome was overhead for all of it. Keeping the whole day at City Hall — ceremony, portraits, cake — means the story of the day is also the story of one building. Bianca and Erick's November wedding at SF City Hall was exactly that: one place, their closest people, and the strings playing under a great gold dome.