Future towers imposingly over S.F.
It was time for the semiannual visit to the dentist at the medical building at 450 Sutter St. The dental assistant checks the gums, deals with the accumulated tartar, polishes the teeth so they glisten. The dentist comes in with a sharp pick, pokes around in the molars. “Hmm,” he says. “Hmm.”
The dentist is Dr. Jon Ornstil. I’ve known him for years. We’re connected, too, in a sort of city web. He’s the son-in-law of an old college pal. San Francisco is a small town. Or was.
But something was different out the window that fall day at 450 Sutter. A huge new building, the Salesforce Tower.
I hadn’t really noticed it the last time I was at the dentist. Now it filled the sky.
We’d all heard of the tower, how it would be big and important, all that. We’d seen the white construction fence at First and Mission streets, watched the welding sparks fly, seen the cranes go up. And up. Another big building. But now, suddenly, the Salesforce Tower is THERE. Sixty-one stories, more than a thousand feet tall, like an exclamation point on the city’s skyline.
The collection of towers in downtown San Francisco is a bit like the city’s visual brand, something that makes it distinctive. It’s a symbol, like a trademark. You see the skyline of Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and you immediately know that’s New York. When a collection of tall buildings with the Space Needle on the left flashes on the screen, you think Seattle.
That’s what a skyline does for a city, and that’s what’s happening in San Francisco. Cities are not naturally beautiful. They are artificial creations. Nature may have made San Francisco Bay, but San Franciscans made San Francisco.
So the skyline is important. It was a key element in the debate not many years ago over what was called the Manhattanization of San Francisco, not long after the days when the 32story Russ Building was considered a skyscraper. Then came the dark, glass Bank of America monolith and the unique Transamerica Pyramid.
And then others, bigger and taller, rising above the older city. One Rincon, the Millennium, and more tall buildings. And now the Salesforce Tower, the biggest of them all, the tallest in the forest, like a steel redwood, Manhattanization on steroids.
What makes it so important is that it is so important-looking. It can be seen from everywhere, maybe even from ships at sea.
Even in its uncompleted state, the Salesforce Tower is lit up at night. Two tall construction cranes — the tallest ever in San Francisco — hover on either side, their arms, outlined in light, thrust up above the tower like a football referee signaling a touchdown. We were driving over the Bay Bridge late last weekend and came out of the Yerba Buena tunnel, and suddenly, there it was.
“Wow,” said my companion. “Wow! It looks like a spaceship from Mars, like the War of the Worlds or something.”
It’s not the war of the worlds, but it is the future. It is the new San Francisco.
There are two ways to see the Salesforce Tower and how it fits into the skyline. One is to take the 25-Treasure Island Muni bus from Beale and Folsom streets to Treasure Island. It’s only eight minutes nonstop across the Bay Bridge. With a window seat, it’s the grandest $2.50 scenic ride in the world. Get off at the first island stop, and look back at the city skyline.
It’s not big and muscular like New York, not forgettable like the blocky skyline of San Diego, like the self-important skyline of downtown L.A. From just across the bay, San Francisco has grace. It’s backed by hills with blue water in the foreground, like a stage set. The tall buildings are in the center, and the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate frame them, like necklaces, especially at night.
And now the Salesforce Tower dominates the new skyline. The effect is striking.
A lot of San Franciscans, especially those who liked the city the way it was, see it differently.
My colleague John King went to the top of the Salesforce Tower this month and wrote about the view from on high. The headline noted the spectacular views. But the tower is disliked. One San Francisco woman wrote King to say the building is “A monstrosity ... nothing more than graffiti in the sky . ... It has ruined our beloved skyline.” Others denounced its “ugliness and hubris.”
I took the ferry to Oakland to see the city from afar, a second opinion, as it were. The ferry, Encinal, sailed under the Bay Bridge, and the passengers on the outside deck all looked back at San Francisco, the towers glistening in the soft March afternoon sun.
Tom Harbaugh from Sacramento, who said he was a third-generation Californian, was among the passengers. Asked what he thought, he glanced back at the skyline. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
I told him a lot of people don’t like the way the city looks now. “That’s San Francisco for sure,” he said, “Nobody here likes anything.”