The long way to Coit Tower

Started: 2024-04-19 22:19:17

Submitted: 2024-04-19 23:58:44

Visibility: World-readable

Taking a train and a ferry to get to Coit Tower, then climbing all the way to the top

I found myself in the middle of April with one day of my weekend otherwise unencumbered and interested in finding some new adventure. I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that Coit Tower's elevator was broken and as a result everyone had to take the stairs to the top (and, as a side benefit, see more Great Depression-era murals in areas normally not accessible to the public), which seemed like a worthwhile expedition.

My plan was to drive to San Jose-Diridon Station in time to catch the 10:05 Capitol Corridor service northbound, but a collision or two on northbound highway 17 around Redwood Estates slowed traffic enough that I couldn't reach the station in time. (My heuristic is that traffic flows fine most of the time, but I'm still not sure how much I ought to pad my schedule to allow for the 5% of time when there's a collision or incident large enough that my whole trip takes 50% longer than normal.) Instead I rerouted to BART's Berryessa/North San Jose station to take the long ride up the East Bay to Oakland.

While I was riding BART north through Union City, at the point where the BART and Capitol Corridor tracks converge, I looked up and saw the other train heading north on its parallel tracks, traveling slightly faster at a point where both trains were able to travel at their maximum speeds.

I got off the train at 12th Street in Oakland and walked down Broadway to Jack London Square. I ate an early lunch of fried potato tacos at Mia, then caught the 12:15 ferry across the bay. I sat on the second deck on the port side of the open-air section at the stern, denying me a good view of the New Bay Bridge, but giving me a great view of the San Francisco skyline under the suspension section of the Bay Bridge.

I thought about catching an F-line streetcar north along the Embarcadero, but none were forthcoming. (I later learned that there was a parade on Market Street in honor of Nepal Day that may have interrupted streetcar service.) Instead I walked along the sidewalk, joining the crowds of people on the waterfront promenade on the bright (but chilly) spring afternoon.

To get to Coit Tower first I had to climb the Greenwich Steps to the top of Telegraph Hill, 285 feet above sea level. From there it was another 13 stories to the top of the tower, which I got to climb because the elevator was broken. This gave me a chance to see the murals painted on the stairs and on the second floor, which are normally out of view except on special tours.

From the elevator lobby I turned left to head up the spiral staircase, which climbed the entire height of the tower in a long helix climbing while turning to the right. (I guess if this were a screw, it'd be a left-hand thread, in the opposite direction from a conventional right-hand thread.) The first mural I saw was titled "Powell Street", which showed a city street wrapped around both sides of the stairway, climbing an entire flight of stairs. No single vantage point could take in the entire mural at once. Like the murals around the base of the tower, this was a triumph of Social Realism.

On the second floor landing there were more murals, including a large mural titled "Outdoor Life" that showed scenes of people eating and swimming and lounging about outdoors. Here too it was impossible to take in the entire mural from a single point (even with my wide-angle lens, which I brought with me for the specific purpose of photographing the murals). I found this a little frustrating when I tried to get pictures of the murals, but it gave a sense of immersiveness to the murals as they wrapped around me on both sides, stretching around the curved corridors in the tower. I felt as if I were immersed in the scene in a way that conflicted with the stylized Social Realism of the paintings themselves.

After the second floor the murals ended, replaced with the bare reinforced concrete staircase, still bearing the imprint of the wooden boards that formed the concrete when the tower was built 90 years ago, in a manner consistent with the Art Deco style of the tower while predicting the concrete Brutalism later in the century.

The stairs climbed around the elevator shaft in the middle of the tower. After every flight of stairs there was a small landing where the room opened out to the outer wall of the tower with small windows looking out. At floor 12 the staircase joined the top floor of the elevator, and the staircase climbed one more level to the 13th floor, the observation deck overlooking the city.

I lingered on the top floor, looking out every window to see the view on the bright sunny, nearly-cloudless day. The newest visible change to the view from the tower was the SkyStar Wheel relocated from Golden Gate Park to Fisherman's Wharf, to better serve the tourists there.

One obvious addition to the skyline since my first visit to the tower's observation deck (at least, my first visit as an adult, in the fall of 2015 when I interviewed at Google) was Salesforce Tower, now the city's tallest building, though it appears lower than the Transamerica Pyramid in this view.

After taking in the view from the observation deck I began the long descent back down to the ground level, down thirteen floors. I lingered one last time at the murals on the second floor and on the first flight of stairs, before exiting into the gift shop to buy a pair of stickers.

This selfie on the stairs fails to fully capture the experience of descending the spiral staircase in Coit Tower; though to be fair any single picture would not be up to the task of depicting the step-by-step descent, with each new step exposing one more step below, broken by landings every floor, even though "floor" in this context is probably meaningless because it's not like they're trying to use the inner space in the tower for anything so it's not like there are meaningful floors, until finally one emerges on the second floor into a riot of color in the mural depicting home life on the second floor.

I got a snack at the snack bar outside the tower, then descended the Greenwich Steps to the Embarcadero. The F-line streetcars were now running north, in the opposite direction I wanted to go, so I walked back to the Ferry Building. By the time I arrived it was the middle of the afternoon and I wanted a more substantial snack, so I ate a pair of Argentinian empanadas on a bench overlooking the bay. (I have been informed by a source whom I presume to be reliable that Argentinian empanadas are almost as good as Chilean empanadas, but it turns out the former are much easier to find than the later.)

I caught BART eastbound from Embarcadero to Berryessa, riding through the Transbay Tube and down the East Bay, then drove the rest of the way home across the mountain.