City remains beautiful despite our decorating
Salesforce Tower is open. You can’t see it from the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior unless you get to that right angle, like the rock at the top of McLaren Park. But just about everywhere else in the city you can see it.
It’s not as tall as the Wilshire Grand Center in L.A., thus relegating it to the second-tallest building in California, but it’s our little skyscraper. That’s right. The thing on the top that looks like an unfinished crown? That’s actually a nine-story art project, designed by Jim Campbell, making it the world’s highest work of art.
I’m Irish, and so I’ve had years defending the small. At times like this I quote Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” I grew up in Ozone Park, on the edge of Queens in New York, when the 102 stories of the Empire State Building still made it the tallest building in the world. And as the World Trade Center got built, Nurse Vivian scoffed that there would always be something a little bit bigger, a little bit flashier.
No one in the neighborhood seems to have noticed Salesforce Tower, all 61 stories, 1.4 million square feet, 1070 feet high above 415 Mission St. But they do notice John’s cow. One of our neighbors placed a fullsize statue of a bovine on his roof. And each year on Halloween, Zane and Aidan and a hundred neighbors circle his house to see all the skeletons and pumpkins that gallivant as a gargoyle rides her. It wears turkey feathers in November and a red and white cap in December, when the skeleton gets repurposed into a candy cane. This month, Bessie has a glowing red heart on her buttocks in preparation for Valentine’s Day.
John talks to me, maybe because I leave up the blow-mold, electric nativity scene until the Feast of the Magi. He has, in fact, offered to buy me a disco ball to act as the Star of Bethlehem, so I asked him about his own decorations. “It’s not art,” he insisted, “It’s a cow.”
Salesforce Tower was designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli to be a modern obelisk, but that’s San Francisco shorthand for phallus, an architectural tradition dating back to when Lillie Hitchcock Coit financed her Art Deco tower on Telegraph Hill to resemble a fireman’s hose. Protesters against the Transamerica Pyramid yelled, “Stop the shaft.” Sutro Tower was called “a sword of Damocles hanging over the city.”
There is also a long history of snarky remarks made by Chronicle reporters about great works of architecture in San Francisco. Even though Herb Caen did say the Golden Gate was “the greatest bridge ever built,” he also called it “the car-strangled spanner.”
He dismissed Sutro Tower, saying that it would stalk down the hill and mate with the Central Freeway.
He said that the Transamerica Pyramid resembled a ketchup bottle, but eventually he made it bend to his will. Or at least his logo, long before The Chronicle depicted me in my purple tie. And Jon Carroll made no friends when he compared Nordstrom to a bordello.
My boys remain unimpressed by Salesforce Tower. Aidan calls it the big un-yellow banana, and Zane insisted that it looked better when it premiered in “Big Hero 6.”
My husband, Brian, calls it a missed opportunity. What makes an edifice unique is not its size, he insists, but its majesty. San Francisco doesn’t need another undone warehouse. Someday, he says, Salesforce Tower will become part of our history, but it will always be a hard sell.
I’m no expert on architecture. I truly couldn’t tell a Julia Morgan from a Maybeck. But I do love words, this column not withstanding. And Salesforce Tower is a name devoid of poetry, unlike the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the Flatiron or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Or in our case, the Sinking Tower of Millennium.
Maybe I’ll call the new building Pierre. That’s at least got a little rhythm to it.
But still, we live in Wonderland. We might not have fast-growing ivy, but we do have a fog bank that can cloud even the ugliest of buildings. And so we decorate as we please, either nine stories of perforated aluminum, or an effigy of a cow.
Frank Lloyd Wright, whose ghost bridge still haunts the bay, once said, “San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful.”
Salesforce Tower is a name devoid of poetry, unlike the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the Flatiron . ... Or in our case, the Sinking Tower of Millennium.