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Digging up the Foundation: Part 1

Sutro Tower 2

The Origin Story of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower

Adolph Sutro by Brady
Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro (1830–1898) was the 24th mayor of San Francisco, California, serving in that office from 1894 until 1896. (SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY.)

San Francisco’s Sutro Tower has stood on top of Mount Sutro so long that it is hard remembering a time when it wasn’t there. I was born two months before its birthday on July 4th, 1973. Though I feel a certain kinship with it, many San Franciscans have had mixed feelings about the orange pitchfork on the hill.

Herb Caen said he was “waiting for it to stalk down the hill and attack the Golden Gate Bridge” and saw it as a “giant erector set.”

Fritz Leiber, in the opening of his novel Our Lady of Darkness, said “The TV tower — San Francisco’s Eiffel, you could call it — was broad-shouldered, slender-waisted, and long-legged like a beautiful and stylish woman, or demigoddess.”

The legacy of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower is complex and intertwined with the city’s history—from Adolf Sutro’s philanthropy to the broadcasting imperium that is Sutro Tower Inc. Above all this history, both bizarre and mundane, dwells the Tower. Looming above the fog, casting shadows down the slopes of Mount Sutro and casting its visage over the entire city.

Crazy Sutro and Comstock Lode

There was a time before 1973 when Mount Sutro wasn’t crowned with the orange and white pitchfork pointed towards the heavens. The legacy of the location that occupies the tower is just as rich as the history of the tower itself.

Virginia City

Its origins recede back as far as the lifetime of its namesake, Adolf Sutro. The German-born immigrant had entered the United States in 1860 at age 20, making a fortune in the Comstock Lode. Still working as a merchant when he heard about the silver deposit, Sutro moved to Virginia City in Nevada with his education in engineering and designed the Sutro Tunnel, a four-mile-long tunnel used to remove water and heat in the bowels of Mount Davidson.

Virginia City

Sutro became rich and settled in San Francisco, emerging as one of the city’s most famous benefactors, buying the land around Mount Sutro and planting eucalyptus trees. The story continues decades later with Sutro’s grandson, Adolf Gilbert Sutro. Not as an industrious as his grandfather, Adolf Gilbert would have made his own contribution to San Francisco, while paving the way towards the origins of the tower that bear his family’s name.

Adolfo Gilbert attended Santa Clara College but would later work as a mechanic for the Wright Brothers. An early advocate for aeronautics and flying, he would receive the first ever pilot’s license for hydro-planes in the United States, which he would proudly carry with him—License No. 1. Eventually, his part in this story would begin when he decided to build a mansion in the center of his father’s mountain, which became San Francisco’s herald for an emerging technology in the later 20th century.

Read more next month about how this eventually led to the rising of a new icon in the city by the bay.

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