SAN FRANCISCO — Even as a senator, Dianne Feinstein didn’t hesitate to share her gripes about San Francisco’s uneven sidewalks and dirty streets with the mayors who succeeded her.

She was traveling in a car several years ago past the Sutter-Stockton Garage, a downtown parking structure, and was frustrated to see a ratty mattress propped up against a fire hydrant.

“Ed!” she hollered over the phone to Ed Lee, who was mayor at the time. “There’s a mattress!”

Days later, she returned to the neighborhood, and the mattress was gone, Sean Elsbernd, a former state director for Feinstein, recalled Friday. “She was very pleased with herself.”

To Feinstein, San Francisco was still a city that took pride in attention to detail and tried to keep expectations high.

She was born in San Francisco in 1933, the year construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge. She was central to some of the city’s greatest triumphs and its transformation into a financial and cultural capital of the West Coast.

And she steered the city through some of its worst modern moments: the assassinations of City Hall colleagues; the aftermath of the Jonestown massacre of hundreds of San Francisco-based cult followers in Guyana; and the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the city’s gay community.

The journey of San Francisco is inextricable from the 90-year life of Feinstein, who attended Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in the same Pacific Heights neighborhood where she kept her stately city residence until her death Thursday night.

As mayor, Feinstein led Monday morning meetings during which every city department head had to answer her specific questions, such as how many more people were living on the streets compared with the week before, recalled Rudy Nothenberg, who served as her deputy mayor.

“The main takeaway for me was that the city needs to have competent, involved and energetic bureaucratic management at the top level,” said Nothenberg, who retired in the 1990s as the city’s chief administrator.

San Francisco would look very different if Feinstein had not been its mayor: No more cable cars. No colorful street cars rumbling down Market Street. Perhaps no Pier 39, the kitschy spot on the northern waterfront.

Launched in 1873, the entire cable car system was on the verge of collapse when she took office. She secured $60 million in federal funds and business donations and then led the rebuilding of the system in less than two years.

While the cable cars were shuttered for repairs, Feinstein launched the colorful streetcars that rumble down Market Street in their place. That move eventually led to the creation of the city’s popular F-car line from the Castro district to Pier 39.

Perhaps Feinstein’s biggest contribution to San Francisco was guiding the shellshocked city out of the 1970s, a decade marked with horrors that included several serial killers; the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst; the Jonestown massacre; and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

Soon after, Feinstein was named mayor and led the city as it tried to find its bearings.

Feinstein, a staunch moderate, was not always a perfect fit for San Francisco, a city that sometimes pushed the boundaries further to the left than she was comfortable with. Over the years, her middle-of-the-road positions fell out of step with the city’s dominant politics.

In a city that has been essential to the LGBTQ movement, Feinstein vetoed domestic partner legislation in 1982 and pushed for the closure of gay bathhouses as the AIDS epidemic grew, both of which were unpopular among many gay residents. She later supported same-sex marriage.