Atop ‘finest building’ in S.F.
The Ferry Building stands at the foot of Market Street like an exclamation point, like the candle on a birthday cake, as Herb Caen said more than once.
I’ve always admired it myself, ever since the day my grandfather took me for a ferryboat ride, a seagoing adventure to Oakland and back again. He was both old, and old school. He thought that red bridge had disfigured the Golden Gate.
“You see that, boy?” he says of the Ferry Building. “That’s the finest building in San Francisco.”
Friend in high places
So when the chance to get an inside look at the Ferry Building came up the other morning, I jumped at it. We were on an inspection tour with historian Donna Ewald Huggins to look into the building’s role in the centennial of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. To really see the tower, you need a friend in high places. That was Jim Phelan, a steeplejack who climbs flagpoles and tall buildings, like Spider-Man.
Phelan is 62, skinny as a snake and supple as a mongoose. “Are you afraid of heights?” he asks. “We’re going all the way to the top.”
First, you get a groundfloor history lesson. The Ferry Building dates from 1898, and for generations it was the symbol of San Francisco. But in time, the old-time ferry steamers faded away, and the Ferry Building languished behind the hideous Embarcadero Freeway, a gray ghost of its former glory. The freeway was damaged in the 1989 earthquake and torn down. The Ferry Building was reborn.
It is crowded day and night now, but the magnificent tower is closed to the public. Deborah Garofalo of Equity Office, which manages the building, leads the way.
There are 10 flights of wide steel steps leading up 240 feet to the top. There are landings with wooden floors, like big rooms, thick with the dust of the years. People have written their names on the walls. The earliest mark was from July 1907, but it was hard to see the name. JJD wrote his initials inside the tower in 1921, WBD in 2001 and Big Al in 1967.
The machinery that runs the Ferry Building clock enclosed inside the tower in its own wooden house is on level six. You can peer in the dusty windows and see the clockwork gears slowly turning. The clock stopped twice in its history — on April 18, 1906, and Oct. 17, 1989. It took earthquakes to stop time at the Ferry Building, which otherwise seems timeless.
The stairs lead up again. One level houses the speakers for the caril- lon, a recording of bells pealing the hour and half hour. It is said to be a recording of Big Ben in London. On level 10 is the siren, which wails a test warning every Tuesday at the stroke of noon.
On the way up, Phelan talks about his life “working in the air,” as he calls it. He is a third-generation steeplejack who learned the trade from his father, who learned it from his father. It’s Jim Phelan’s livelihood and his passion. He proposed to his wife atop the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Tight space
It’s all in the family. Phelan’s sister, Dody Mancuso, has her own business. “She’s a steeple-jill,” Phelan says.
After 10 flights of stairs, the easy part ends. There are now three steel ladders. You have to climb hand over hand, twist around poles and through narrow trap door openings. You have to wear a safety harness.
“You ever climb inside City Hall?” Phelan asks. “That’s really something. They have cardiac corner and heart attack ledge. This is nothing.”
At the very top, just under the flagpole, is a tiny space under a cupola with four oval windows. They say 47 million people a year went through the Ferry Building in its heyday, but there is only room for three at the top.
You can look out one of the oval windows right down Market Street, the cars and buses and streetcars looking like toys. Out the other windows: the bay, the tall buildings of the city, the southern waterfront. The top of the Ferry Building building moves, just a bit. “You ought to be up here in a windstorm,” Phelan says.
There is a narrow ledge just under the windows. He crawled through one window, stood up outside.
“You want to come out?” he asks. Not me. But Huggins is game and climbs out the window, clipped on the safety line. Once out there, with the city at her feet, she lets out a little squeal. I can’t tell whether she’s delighted or terrified. They came back inside. “Don’t worry,” Phelan says. “Coming back down is the easy part.” That’s true. It’s getting to the top that’s hard.