Do you want salt with that? Salesforce phallus 'shopped out' of Oracle Park calendar cover Salesforce's towering glass phallus in San Francisco has been omitted from the Oracle Park calendar on sale at the first SF Giants baseball game under the stadium's new Big Red moniker. Oracle signed a $200m, 20-year deal for the rights to the AT&T Park stadium last year and rather unimaginatively renamed it Oracle Park. But …
Given that Americans highrises are usually not nick-named with the same disparaging sense of humour as in the UK I'm surprised that the local nickname was not used in the story. Its known as The Dildo to locals..
A very suitable name for what is in reality a really ugly building.
The only other highrise in The City that has a name that stuck is The Pyramid, a.k.a The Transamerica Pyramid. Unlike The Dildo which is a real eyesore The Pyramid is a genuinely beautiful building and has been a real addition to the skyline for the last 40 plus years. And I suspect The Pyramid will sail through the next big earthquake just fine but The Dildo may not do so well. Floating foundations on a near shoreline site works, floating foundations on what was once a shallow inlet was never going to be a good idea. You can build something this big on the bedrock of Rincon Hill but not in what was the muddy shallows of the Bay back in the days of Yerba Buena..
Its unlikely to fall down, well bits might fall off, but I would not be very surprised if it ends up Red Tagged after the next 7.0M plus earthquake Not the 15 sec belch of 1989 but a proper 45 / 60 sec shaker. Or even a good 90 to 120 secs if the seismic geology is particularly unfavorable. A really big one, 180 sec plus of severe shaking, then all bets are off. Just like in Kobe in 1995, and Mexico City in 1985, a whole lot of big buildings will be coming down. And high mass buildings on floating foundations like The Dildo will be Red Tagged. But as the Bay Bridge will have collapsed, properly this time, this will not be the biggest news story after the next Big One hits.
You must not be from around here.
The TA pyramid was almost universally ridiculed by the natives (a cohort I confess membership in) at the time (which I confess I overlap enough to have been able to legally toast the completion thereof).
Today, of course, it is fully embraced as being an 'only in San Francisco' kind of thing.
Yes, the TA pyramid was universally laughed at. See Herb Caen's masthead. Yes, it has grown on the locals over the decades. The Dildo will not, it's really, really ugly.
As for the Giant's ballpark, it's known as "The Yard". Most folks I know will never use the "O" word. Kind of like how Candlestick Park was always called "The Stick", regardless of what idiot corporation had so-called "naming rights".
As for the Giant's ballpark, it's known as "The Yard". Most folks I know will never use the "O" word. Kind of like how Candlestick Park was always called "The Stick", regardless of what idiot corporation had so-called "naming rights".
Kind of like The Tappan-Zee Bridge in the lower end of NY State? Yeah, we aren't EVER going to use the name of that jackass former governor to refer to it.
> You must not be from around here.
>
>The TA pyramid was almost universally ridiculed by the natives (a cohort I confess membership in) at the >time (which I confess I overlap enough to have been able to legally toast the completion thereof).
>
>Today, of course, it is fully embraced as being an 'only in San Francisco' kind of thing.
Nope, a blow in. Only known The City since the early/ mid '80's. But I knew the story well and hesitated for a moment before I wrote. The odd thing about the whole TA Pyramid story was despite the whole media kerfuffle before, during and after it was built it struck me that the Pyramid was just the poster child for the whole anti highrise movement that started in the mid / late '60's. And ended with Prop M. It was the only building that was not some generic big box. Plus I understood it was displacing a whole bunch of well loved local businesses. Its footprint was outside the traditional mid-rise Financial District.
Admittedly my direct memory only goes back to 10 years after it was finished but I honestly never heard a single negative remarks about the Pyramid. And yes, by this stage the majority of my SF friends are natives. Although the majority of my SF native born friends live down the Peninsula and a few over in Marin. As you're from around here you know how that worked. The people pushed out in the 1970's and 1980's.
To me the Pyramid will always be special because I saw it so many times on my commute back from Marin every evening, driving across the GG Bridge, for the first time back in the 1980's. When the bridge was still painted with the deeper red paint, not the water based stuff they use now that peels off, The view as you came out of the Waldo tunnel heading south at sunset was one of the wonders of the world. On a good day it still works. But a bit more clutter downtown and the sad looking bridge now detracts from the perfection of the view as it once was.
I have heard quite a few negative comments about other high-rises over the years, including 101 California even before the massacre in '93. The stuff built since the end of the defacto moratorium, almost 20 years ago has been all pretty generic. Too generic to get a nickname it seems. Except for the Dildo. A name I first heard used while standing one night at an intersection near the top of Potrero Hill. I thought it was a suitably ugly name for a very ugly building.
Yes. In my case, my parents moved us down the Peninsula (Millbrae) from the Sunset District when I was 8. I have since relocated to the East Bay. Many 'natives' have chosen to move North, South or East to find (more) affordable housing.
Back in the day the rallying cry was something like "don't Manhatanize San Francisco".
Having been to Paris, and seen how they and London are structured, I don't understand why they don't allow multi-story (5-8) buildings along the street car lines into the Sunset, and add a line into the Richmond, and increase the capacity on the N and L lines... but that doesn't seem to fly these days.
You could pack a LOT of people into the Richmond and Sunset if you increased transit. That MAY take some pressure off the price of housing in The City.
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