The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches 5
and then moves on.
The formerly-controversial Sutro Tower, as seen from the northwest through the window of an Emirates Airbus A380 super jumbo jet.
See the entire Sutro Tower mise-en-scene here, courtesy of Telstar Logistics’ Todd Lappin.
Bike messenger Kirk Janes was killed yesterday morning in a collision with a truck at Fulton and Steiner in Alamo Square. San Francisco’s Ride of Silence, already planned for yesterday evening, was then hastily altered to start at this intersection.
The Ride of Silence occurs on the third Wednesday in May in almost 300 cities around the world. It’s a bicycle ride to commemorate cyclists killed or injured while riding on public roads. It helps to raise awareness among motorists of the dangers they pose to cyclists. Unlike a Critical Mass event, Ride of Silence rides are not designed to stall traffic or create conflict with motorists.
A KTVU channel 2 news crew spoke with riders as they assembled:
Friends of Kirk Janes were on hand with flowers:
It’s unusual to see a group this large not chatting and making noise. At the infamous intersection of Fell and Masonic:
Local writer Anne Herbert, famous for coining the phrase “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” recently announced on her blog:
The closer I live to Sutro Tower, the more I think it isn’t dangerous.
O.K. then. But who says Sutro Tower is dangerous? Well, for starters, the people who live around it in the Twin Peaks area, in small neighborhoods like Clarendon Heights and Midtown Terrace. Among other things, they worry about EMF radiation. They worry that the tower might fall down.
Sutro Tower at night under a shooting star. Looks safe enough:
But there’s not much they can do about it. The time to do something would have been back in the 1960’s when it was being planned.
So, let’s take a trip down Memory Lane and check out this 35-year-old piece from Stephen R. Barnett. 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.
As you can see, it’s white and orange to keep the FAA happy. Note the newish 125-foot-long, 10-ton auxiliary antenna mounted vertically
More recently, a movement was afoot to prevent the tower from going digital, but that didn’t work out.
There are updates for the digital future slated and there’s a lot of life left in this structure, so it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Yesterday’s Day of Action was well-attended.
Paul Chambers from KTVU, Channel 2 strikes a pose and gets down in order to warm up the kids before his live stand up. They were fired up
A United States Coast Guard Dolphin helicopter patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge last month.
Yesterday, Sector San Francisco invited a few folks over to get a closer look at what it takes to keep people from dying on the bay. Take a look the video from KTVU Channel 2.
Click on to see photos from the day. Don’t forget to hop over and take a gander at what Telstar Logistics saw.