A Multicultural City Hall Elopement Under the Golden Dome

Portraits Through the Multicultural City Hall Landmark

Family and couple portraits followed through the building. San Francisco City Hall is a 1915 Beaux-Arts landmark, and the North Gallery where they married carries tall windows on three sides, the most natural light in the building, over polished marble floors, with the golden dome overhead. The fourth-floor arches frame the grand staircase below, and the repeating stonework gives a photographer symmetry in nearly every direction. The couple moved through the arches and the light with their parents, then found stretches of the marble for just the two of them.

A City Hall elopement couple with a small family circle gets to use the building differently than a larger event would allow. With only a handful of people, Shireen and Kendall could pause at any landing without managing a crowd, and the Beaux-Arts corridors, built for civic grandeur, not intimate weddings, end up feeling almost private at that scale. The dome rises 307 feet above the rotunda, and from the fourth-floor North Gallery you can see the full arc of it above the grand staircase below.

Dinner Back at the House

Everyone drove back to the Lyon Street house for the reception. Shireen and Kendall changed and stopped for a few more photos around the place, the front door especially, which they had wanted from the start.

The family had picked up dinner from a restaurant, and before anyone ate, Shireen's father gave a blessing over the meal. Later they cut the cake together. It was the kind of ending that suits a wedding built around family, the ceremony downtown, the celebration at home, the same faces all the way through.