Today, Mr. Peskin, who is chairman of the city’s Democratic Party, has seen his influence wane while Mr. Brown and Ms. Pak enjoy a renaissance.

Mr. Brown and Ms. Pak — close friends and political allies — helped install Mr. Lee as interim mayor in January, outmaneuvering progressives allied with Mr. Peskin. That shift at City Hall is translating into an increased pace for development.

Mr. Snellgrove, the developer of the 8 Washington project, has assembled a lobbying team that includes several people with close ties to Mr. Brown: H. Marcia Smolens, one of the city’s highest-paid lobbyists and a longtime Brown fund-raiser; Karin Carlson Johnston, a lobbyist at Ms. Smolens’s firm, HMS Associates; and her husband, Mr. Johnston, who served as Mr. Brown’s spokesman.

While the developers deny that Ms. Pak is working on the project, she has tried to help indirectly. In 2007, she organized a trip to China for friends and city officials that included Mr. Peskin, who was then president of the Board of Supervisors, and Mr. Snellgrove, a longtime friend of Mr. Brown and Ms. Pak.

“He was on the trip she organized and used it as a nonstop 10-day lobbying opportunity,” Mr. Peskin said of Mr. Snellgrove in an interview. “For 10 days we saw him for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We were taking this whole tour of Macau, and he was tagging along whining about his project for three hours. And we just wanted to see Portuguese architecture.”

Mr. Snellgrove declined to comment.

Mr. Snellgrove’s representatives told planning department officials several months ago that they had lined up the necessary six votes on the Board of Supervisors to win approval, according to a city official with knowledge of the project. But they suggested that the window might close after the November election because three supervisors were running for other offices and might have to be replaced.

“The message was, ‘We have to get this done with the current board,’ ” the official said.

The project’s progress has presented a political headache for David Chiu, the board president whose district includes 8 Washington Street. “I have heard there are attempts to move this faster through the process and have been surprised because I don’t think we have community support that we need,” Mr. Chiu said.