Thursday, January 21, 2010
Take Me Higher
It feels like I’ve been down for long enough. I’m not going to rush the pace of my recuperation, but I’m ready to move on now. And since, despite that readiness, I actually am destined to remain cooped up here for another week at least, maybe I can inspire myself with a few aspirations. Or whatever.
This is a city obsessed with self-image. Its architectural history and avant ethos both struggle against a status quo that is deeply entrenched and even more deeply fascinated with itself. New buildings look much like old buildings - in height, in cornice, in materials, in roofline. Exceptions occur, but they are exceptional. Mostly it’s pretty repetitive. The new plans to install a series of towers in connection with the Transbay Transit Center’s redevelopment project reflect more of the same - thirty to fifty unbroken stories, flat roofs, flat faces. For a city so interested in how it looks, it sure isn’t updating very effectively.
There is the proposed Transbay Tower itself, of course, which might top 1200 feet and would redefine the skyline as by far the tallest building in town. But if it does so I think it will just amplify the sameness and flatheadedness of most of the other buildings downtown. From a pedestrian perspective, it’s a pretty good town, but in terms of stimulating, variegated skyline architecture, we typically just don’t reach high enough.
Of course, when you ask people what’s the highest built thing in town, the clever ones, who have boned up on this blog posting, will know that it’s not the BofA Building, the TransAm pyramid, Coit Tower or even the 746-foot-tall Golden Gate Bridge Towers, didn’t you think you were sly for coming up with that one. But NO. It is none of these. It is the Sutro Tower, undisputed champion of San Francisco Height Records (the laurel for which is known as the height ashbury. tyvm.). Look, here’s a flickr stream with a relevant tag to show you what I mean, and you are now very welcome as well.
How much taller is it than anything else hereabouts? Darn good question, me. If you were to take a pier from the Golden Gate Bridge and put it up next to Sutro Tower, but please don’t, there might be traffic consequences, but if you were to do so, the tower would dwarf the pier by more than 200 feet of height. The tower’s base is 834 feet above sea level, and the tower itself is nine hundred and seventy-ever-lovin’-seven feet tall above that. It’s so much taller than anything else there is just no use discussing it. No, there isn’t. Stop arguing with the Chucklehut, you know it knows best.
Sutro Tower, the summit of our city, the muse that has inspired… well, basically nothing. A flickr photostream, and that’s about it. No popular songs, no burgeoning postal-card trade, no novelty snowglobes or anything. Okay, there’s a website, which, okay, is charming, but for gods sake they gave ME a website, it means nothing. This massive, city-mastering structure is so inexplicably under-the-radar that one of our favorite shirts for the boys when they were tiny (so, for Jesse, about 20 minutes) was the tower in white on a black background, over the word “local.” Only locals seem aware of it overhead, twice as high as anything else we’ve got.
And now there’s more!
With basically no fanfare, they actually went up and made the towers taller. The conversion from analog to digital caused the friendly folk who run Sutro Tower to put on an additional 58.5 feet of antenna. I can see the difference from anywhere in town. The towers went from 918.5 feet to 977, and that’s something. First, there’s the fact that our highest is higher, that the ceiling has been shattered again. It’s our ingrained nature to exceed our limitations, and this tower just proves once more that records are meant to be broken. And on the other hand, there’s the audacity of sending some enlightened being up with the responsibility of placing a higher piece of antenna on top of the highest antenna in the whole bay area, which, honestly, covers a lot of territory. Making the highest higher, right under our very noses. Anytime someone reaches such heights, we should sit back and take notice, I think.
But I don’t recall anyone paying much attention to this project when it was happening, or when they finished, or anytime really. They seem much more focused on getting a strong digital signal than on noticing the evolution of the apex of their landscape. I am okay with that, I suppose. Just so long as I keep noticing it myself.
and just because it was cool, is going down kitty-corner from my office, and is likely to make my hobble to work a lot easier within a few weeks, here’s a video on the temporary transbay terminal and their plans to make the area a park once the main center opens and takes over. so cool. of course, it means Mission Street will replace Market as the city’s most important street, which is an incredible historical shift in and of itself. well, we’ll see if it happens, right?
