Tower sights in San Francisco
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A
Coit Tower
Up the Filbert Street steps at Coit Tower, you'll find 360-degree views of downtown and wrap-around 1930s murals glorifying SF workers - once denounced as Communist, but now a landmark.
reviewed
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B
Columbus Tower
Like most SF landmarks worthy of the title, this one has a seriously checkered career. Built by shady political boss Abe Ruef in 1905, the building was finished just in time to be reduced to its steel skeleton in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The new copper cladding was still shiny in 1907 when not-so-honest Abe was convicted of bribing city supervisors, and by the time he emerged bankrupt from San Quentin State Prison, the cupola was already oxidizing green. Towering artistic aspirations found a home here, too. The Grammy-winning folk group the Kingston Trio bought the tower in the 1960s, and the Grateful Dead recorded in the basement. Since the 1970s it has been owned b…
reviewed
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C
Palace of Fine Arts
Like a fossilized party favor, this romantic, fake Greco-Roman ruin is the memento San Francisco decided to keep from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The original was built in wood, burlap and plaster by celebrated Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck as a picturesque backdrop, and by the 1960s was beginning to crumble. The structure was recast in concrete, so that future generations could gaze up at the rotunda relief to glimpse ‘Art Under Attack by Materialists, with Idealists Leaping to her Rescue.’
reviewed
