City Hall continues to fete its centennial this year with “The People’s Palace,” a new half-hour documentary by Jim Yager. The somewhat hagiographical pic documents the world's fifth-largest dome, built in 1915 and hailed as a symbol of the city's resurgence from disaster, and premieres Wednesday with a free screening in the building itself (where else?). For those at home, that's to be followed by a broadcast on KQED Channel 9 on November 24th.

“We had a great cast of people throughout the City that really wanted this to happen,” the filmmaker told the Examiner, citing participants like city archivist Susan Goldstein, writer Gary Kamiya, and scholars like Jeffrey Tilman and Robert Cherny.

The People's Palace: San Francisco City Hall 100 Years from James Yager on Vimeo.

A lot's gone on in a hundred years, and the picture is a sort of an "if these walls could talk" examination. For example: Mayor Dianne Feinstein describes the day she found Supervisor Harvey Milk who had been shot. She reportedly found him and held him in her arms — “I was very moved that she spoke as candidly as she did,” Yager says. Then there's Willie Brown's cleaning up the place and gilding the dome, which, if you ever see Willie Brown, he'll be sure to tell you all about it. And, more recently, there's some discussion of the significance of Gavin Newsom same sex-marrying couples there.

It really is a marvelous building, and the film promises some perspective you won't get on a tour bus driving by. I believe it was Starship that once said of San Francisco, " We built this city / We built this city on rock and roll, built this city / We built this city on rock and roll, oh." But the documentarian, citing city hall mastermind Mayor James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, might argue that we built it on a strong democracy as symbolized by our city's centralc civic structure.

City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, S.F., 7 p.m. Wednesday, Free, but registration required