Tall Buildings

The first time I ever heard that John Hartford song was at the Father’s Day Festival in Grass Valley. Laurie Lewis did a great job with it on that occasion and the song spoke to me on a couple of levels. Any great song done well by a great band speaks to you on a musical level. But there are other levels as well.

For me the subject itself meant a great deal just from the title because I have always been fascinated by tall buildings. Since I was a kid I have kept abreast of the latest developments. It fascinated me that the ancients built pyramids that were eclipsed only thousands of years later by the soaring spires of Christendom. When reinforced steel came onto the field as a building material, the sky was the limit and commercial centers of America vied with each other for who could build the tallest building just as they built impressive new bridges for the railroad and opened up the country to expansion.

By the time I was ten years old I was already a devoted reader of the World Almanac. My almanac gave me all the statistics any geeky kid like me just had to love. Baseball’s major league stats were all there. Who won all the elections in history and by how much? Where was the geographic center of the country? Where was the population center of the country and how had those nexuses migrated westward with the country over time? Tall building stats were super interesting. Where could the tallest building on the planet could be found? When were they built? How many stories did they have and how tall was the antenna was on top?

Ten years old was probably at the time of my peak interest in the World Almanac. That was the year my family made a summer vacation road trip to New York City. My Aunt Audrey lived just north of the city in Nyack and her husband commuted every day to Rockefeller Plaza in the big city. We attended the World’s Fair and we spent a day in Manhattan. I was awed by the scale of it all. Even at such a young age my neck was sore by the end of the day from looking upward at all the massive architecture. I remember going to the top of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building, looking down from the top and wondering what would happen if I dropped a penny (because my brother had told me that it would make a hole six feet deep in the concrete sidewalk).

Forty years later I found myself in Chicago, another great city for skyscrapers. I was there with my son and my nephew who had gone to school there. He proudly told us that Chicago was “New York done right”. Chicago really is a beautiful city. My son Ethan was as impressed as I was upon seeing the great city of Chicago for the first time. I wanted him to have that same experience I had had in New York when I was about the same age. We took the bus into the downtown and walked to the Willis Tower (still called the Sears Tower by Many). The tallest building in Chicago was open for tours that day but unfortunately the viewing was plagued by low clouds and the roof of the building was socked in with nothing too see. We walked instead the 100 story Hancock Tower, just under the edge of the cloud bank. i can still remember Ethan’s wonder peering down from the top so far to the streets below.

Last week we observed the terrible anniversary of an attack on tall buildings. Both World Trade Towers were taken down in 2001 by terrorists on Ethan’s first birthday. When I lived in Connecticut I would sometimes go down to the city and have a drink at the Windows on the World bar atop one on the towers. It’s hard to wrap my brain around the fact that it’s all gone now. I still have trouble watching the tapes of the devastation that day.

It’s hard to believe anybody would build another massive skyscraper after 9/11 or go up in one but they certainly have.  

Tall buildings are popping up all over the place. Dubai has the tallest now, the Burj Khalifa at 2717 feet. That’s almost twice the height of the Empire State Building counting the antenna. New York and Chicago are still building with a vengeance. The World Trade Towers have been replaced by a 1776 foot structure which is the sixth tallest in the world and the tallest outside Asia. Fifty one of the tallest 62 buildings are now in Asia.

Out here in California we are building tall too. If you define a skyscraper as a building over 400 feet, as might be expected New York and Chicago have the most skyscrapers in America. But who’s number five? Would you have have guessed San Francisco? I’ll wager not and I’ll wager you would also be surprised by #3 Miami. The new Salesforce Tower in San Francisco just made #13 tallest in the U.S. At 1070 feet it is a little taller than the first building to rise above 1000 feet, the Chrysler Building in New York City. Los Angeles’s Wilshire Grand is only 29 feet taller and it is the tallest building in America west of the Mississippi.  

Tall buildings can be dangerous. We have seen that they are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The skyscrapers of San Francisco and Los Angeles sit astride earthquake faults (the Los Angeles City Hall is the tallest base-isolated structure in the world but it still needed a seismic retrofit to bring it up to withstanding an 8.2 magnitude earthquake). The John Hancock Tower in Boston had to completely redesign their windows to withstand the fierce gales of Beantown. And San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is slowly sinking into the ground unevenly.

Despite the dangers I still want to go to the top of tall buildings. Some day soon I’d like to go to the top of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco and see if my son likes it as much as the John Hancock Tower on the magnificent mile in Chicago.

I looked for that song as I remembered it from Laurie and Tom but I couldn’t find it. I think they should record it.