In San Francisco, All Roads Lead to Sutro – Remembering a Time When San Francisco NIMBYs Were Quite Tame

Take a look sometime. You’ll see that All Roads Lead to Mount Sutro and its Sutro Tower.

Now, let’s take a trip down Memory Lane and check out this 38-year-old piece from Stephen R. Barnett about our Sutro Tower. He alleged:

“…the project was cloaked from public view by a media blackout, a conspiracy of silence hatched by the TV stations that own the tower and joined by the Chronicle and Examiner.”

Them’s fighting words, don’t you think? You might not agree with his conspiratorial tone, but we all can appreciate little nuggets such as:

“It is ridiculous to assume the FCC will require the entire tower to be painted with alternate stripes of white and orange.” Wheat declared. It “will doubtless be painted a neutral color consistent with the surroundings,” he assured the Supervisors.”

Click to expand

Oh well.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 at 7:02 am and is filed under architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “In San Francisco, All Roads Lead to Sutro – Remembering a Time When San Francisco NIMBYs Were Quite Tame”

  1. Harry says:
    May 16, 2011 at 6:52 pm

    It probably was covered up. And I am sure a lobbyist was retained to shepherd it through…..

  2. Harry says:
    May 16, 2011 at 6:55 pm

    Also, I do not think that NIMBY applies here. There are good reasons why this would have been opposed!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY

  3. sfcitizen says:
    May 16, 2011 at 7:35 pm

    I don’t know, the NIMBY’s don’t really mind TV antennas someplace else, they just don’t want a really big one close to where they live…

    Anyway, they were promised beige but they got FAA Red and White, the old bait-and switch…