“Would you want to go up in the pan?” Julio Perez, a tower team member, asked me on a recent Thursday morning. “That would be the coolest.”
We were walking the grounds under Sutro Tower and had just seen a couple of painters whisked aloft in the roughly 6-by-6-foot metal platform strung up by a steel cable less than an inch thick. For the first time in 30 years, the tower is being completely repainted to restore its vibrant candy cane colors. Throughout the summer, anyone in San Francisco looking up may notice projecting black boxes for the painters and, if they’re lucky, the pan that hoists them up to the job. It looks similar to shark cages divers use, except with the top half lopped off. Shrunken to miniature size, it wouldn’t seem out of place next to other contraptions in the board game Mousetrap.
We arrived at the base of the tower midmorning in early June on a mild and sunny day. This was intentional. Our ability to go up and observe the ongoing paint job hinged on good weather conditions. Winds here can blast over 90 miles per hour and anything surpassing 20 mph would cancel the ascent. The pan, however, seemed eons beyond the realm of possibility, regardless of gusty conditions. The small group of visitors who scaled one of the city’s highest human-made landmarks some years ago had arrived via elevator.
I tipped my head back and took in the monolithic structure. My gaze lingered on the antennas, which sometimes float atop the fog, 1,811 feet above sea level…