Sally Stanford's Valhalla

The Valhalla, the old restaurant building at 201 Bridgeway on the Sausalito waterfront, was for thirty years the establishment of Sally Stanford, the most famous madam in San Francisco and later the mayor of Sausalito. She was born Mabel Janice Busby in Oregon in 1903, ran a series of houses in San Francisco from the 1920s, and by 1941 kept the best known of them on Nob Hill at 1144 Pine Street, where the columnist Herb Caen liked to say the United Nations had been founded, since so many of the delegates of 1945 passed through. She bought the old Walhalla saloon in Sausalito in the late 1940s and opened it as a restaurant on 24 March 1950. The building dated from 1893 and had already been raided during Prohibition after a report of a trap door. Stanford ran for the Sausalito city council six times before she won a seat in 1972, and in 1976 the council made her mayor. She retired in 1980 with the title of vice mayor for life and died in 1982. Her autobiography, The Lady of the House, was filmed in 1978 with Dyan Cannon in the part. In 1985 the city put up a drinking fountain in her memory at the ferry landing, with a knee-high basin for dogs inscribed in memory of her own dog, Leland. The restaurant later traded for a time as a Chart House. In 2012 the building was bought by owners who planned a hotel, met the neighbours' objections, and converted it instead into a private residence, which they put on the market in 2025 for 28 million dollars. A story from her first months there survives in the Sausalito Historical Society's records: a heavy safe full of renovation money fell through the floor into the bay and came back up with barnacles and two starfish attached.