Career
"Firebelle Lil" Coit was considered eccentric, smoking cigars and wearing trousers long before it was socially acceptable for women to do southern She was an avid gambler and often dressed like a man in order to gamble in the male-only establishments that dotted North Beach. As a young woman, she traveled to Europe with her mother.
They separated in 1880, and he died in 1885 at age 47.
Coit was fascinated by firefighters from a young age. At age 15, in 1858, she reportedly witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Company
Number. 5 respond to a fire call on Telegraph Hill when they were shorthanded, and helped them get up the hill ahead of other competing engine companies.
Sources differ on whether this happened while she was coming home from school or coming from a rehearsal for a wedding. She then rode along with the firefighters when they went to a fire or were in parades, and attended their annual banquets.
She continued this relationship with firefighting throughout her life, and after her death her ashes were placed into a mausoleum with a variety of firefighting-related memorials. Coit left one-third of her estate to the City of San Francisco "to be expended in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved".
The city used this bequest to build Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.
The remainder of her bequest also sponsored another neighborhood landmark, a statue of three firefighters at the northwest corner of Washington Square Park.