David Prowler Blog

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1.Head on.

This morning I was in a meeting in a conference room on the 30^th floor of a high rise office building downtown, looking out at the Bank of America building, the tallest building in San Francisco. It looked different.

In fact, it looked pretty good, tall and slender and elegant. It was as if I’d never seen it. I realized it looked so good because I was seeing it, for the first time, head on.

But when do you get to see a building head on? You have to be up in the air yourself or way far away.

2.From above.

Why is this view so popular? I don’t get it. Hardly anybody ever sees buildings like this.

3.How we really see them.

4. On a table.

Everybody likes to look at building models. But they make a high rise look like a Brancusi sculpture.

Here are some other fans (identities listed at the end):

Donald Trump

Adolph Hitler

Charles de Gaulle

Le Corbusier

Johnny Depp

A couple of times a week I walk from my house to my office at Second and Market Streets and of course there’s only one way to go: down Market Street.

You could write a little essay about the hidden erotic aspects of Market Street, but why be coy? There’s nothing hidden about it. It’s right out there.

That’s what Market Street is about. From the Castro to the spike of the Ferry Building filling the canyon between the highrises, with the neon of mid-Market and the hustle of the financial district in between, Market Street is sexy.

All it needs is barkers like the strip clubs on Broadway yelling “Check it out!”

Sometimes it’s the advertising signs, or the statues, or the names, or even elements of the architecture. Today it’s gaudy and commercial, but topless men and women were at one time heroes – stuck on or holding up buildings.

Whatever you’re into, come find it on Market Street.

And on Market Street there is the loyal opposition, too:

“It might be more romantic to say “I love you” in French than it is in Cantonese; nevertheless, it is still possible to say it. It might be more touching to say it in song than in design, but saying it in design should be achievable, too.

And it is possible to say “I love you” even in architecture, as the Taj Mahal proves.”

Stefan Sagmeister, “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far”

Some buildings have something to say. It might be a bank building saying “your money is safe in here” or a highrise saying ‘we mean business”. A house could telegraph modest comfort or shout out wealth.

Here are two buildings that tell you about different kinds of power.

Here’s the Federal office building in San Francisco.

I think it says “I’m in charge here. You are nothing.”

This is the power plant at Kennedy Airport. It glows at night and usually there’s steam coming out of the pipes.

These are buildings with clear messages. They’re like words. String buildings together on a block and you might get a sentence, in a neighborhood maybe a paragraph. And when they click it’s poetry.

Everyone knows there are invisible cities. Sure, there are the obvious one with street corners and steps and shopfronts. But then there are the spots and the patterns only some people know.

Somehow drug people know that the corner of Church St. and Market St. works well for them.

Johns know where to find hookers to their particular tastes.

Gang members know where they can safely go and where they can’t.

Cops know where they can pick off speeders.

And there are the cities that live only in memory. When I go to neighborhoods I lived in I can feel the ghosts, remember the parties.

Out my office window now I overlook where I flew off a motorcycle and broke my collarbone, about 25 years ago. Nobody would know but me.

In front of my old apartment in North Beach an old man, Peter Macchiarini, once showed me where he was standing when he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and he told me the curse he’d said. To this day when I walk by that spot I too remember Pearl Harbor and I remember Peter.

Here’s a spot with a past: A banal parking lot for a banal apartment complex in Berlin.

Underneath: the site of the bunker where Adolph Hitler hid for the last two weeks of the war before marrying Eva Braun and killing himself.

Under our feet, a world of wonders.

“Is it possible, after all, that in spite of bricks and shaven faces this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the seraphim, cannot resolve?”

Herman Melville, Pierre, 1852

Here at Market and Montgomery Streets the docents meet their groups by the Spirit of the West statue and troop them around Downtown. Here’s what they probably don’t know: it’s a terrific place to clean yourself. Not in any fountain. Not in the sense we usually think of as cleaning. It’s something else.

The Bay Citizen ran a piece recently about a Ponzi schemer in North Beach. He uses the name Giuseppi Viola sometimes and his bank knows him as Ralph Napolitano. (Ralph himself has disappeared.) His real name is Joseph Viola, he was a fugitive, and he preyed on people who wanted 20% returns on their investments.

Anyway, a private investigator named Tim Schmolder was hired to tail Viola to learn where he lives. According to his client, “Good surveillance men are rarer than diamonds. I’ve only known three or four in 40 years.” Schmolder fits the bill.

Schmolder: “This guy was pretty clever making sure that whenever he does head home, no one is trailing him: ‘Cleaning himself’, that’s what we call it. That’s what you have to do, the life you have to live, if you are on the run.”

Schmolder thinks it was no accident that Viola chose that particular spot. “There’s no better intersection in San Francisco to clean yourself than that intersection,” Schmolder says. You can take BART, go underground, go down long corridors in hotels into alleyways, catch a taxicab. Everything is spontaneous.”

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it’s such a great intersection: the sheer number of places to duck into.

And maybe half the people I see there, under my office window, are tailing the other halve, who are trying to get clean. I’m pretty sure that the swells at the three shoe shine stands are neither following nor evading tails. Everyone else, who knows?

Woodblock print by David Prowler