No one’s home

Leland Stanford had to take a rowboat the two blocks from the Capitol to his mansion in flooded Sacramento, and step in through a second-story window, on the day he was inaugurated as governor of California, Jan. 10, 1862. That was probably the highlight of a two-year tenure that ended when his new

Republican Party refused to renominate him.

Stanford was better known as a builder of the western half of the transcontinental railroad and the founder of Stanford University. There was that nice mansion too, which he bought as the family home in 1861. Two other governors lived there before Jane Stanford gave it to the Roman Catholic Church to be an orphanage.

Bought by the state in the 1950s, the tattered mansion is gorgeous again, thanks to $20 million in privately funded renovations. Those who haven’t closely followed the mansion’s story would probably think that it’s a place for governors to live. But no, it’s intended for official entertaining and public tours only. It doesn’t have so much as a spare bedroom for the governor.

Public tours will show how governors in California once lived, not how they live now. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger makes do with a hotel suite, paying the hefty bill himself.

The last official California governor’s residence, a creaky Victorian northeast of the Capitol, was abandoned by the Ronald Reagan family in early 1967. Nancy Reagan complained that it was a noisy firetrap, on the main truck route through town. Reagan friends built a pseudo-early California residence on a bluff overlooking the American River, but Reagan’s bachelor successor, Jerry Brown, called it a “Taj Mahal” (others offered even more architectural derision) and refused to live there. It was later sold.

Efforts to build or buy another official mansion foundered in controversy -- too far from the Capitol, too much traffic, inadequate security, too expensive.

The Stanford Mansion may relieve pressure for an official governor’s residence. That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Future governors might spurn an official residence, as Brown did and as the last three mayors of L.A. have done to the city’s Getty Mansion in Hancock Park. There’s no accounting for tastes in California real estate.