AND NOW…THE LEANING TOWER OF ‘FRISCO…
(…a grandiose model of excessive wealth display…with feet of clay)

Back in the days of the Italian Renaissance, the civic leaders of Pisa decided to commission the construction of a “campanile” of grandest style that would outshine any other in the rest of Italy, as a symbol of Pisa’s pre-eminence in those times.

So it was built and was, indeed, a remarkable achievement in elegant design and fine engineering for those times. To the city leaders’ delight it soon became a widely admired landmark in all Italy, attracting a host of visitors to see it. Yet, almost as soon as they celebrated the completion of its construction, their wonderfully elegant edifice began to sink and lean away from the perpendicular. Soon that leaning reached an odd angle giving their elegant tower a quirky silhouette against the Pisa sky line, drawing even more visitors to see this quirky silhouette and thus generating heftier visitor money flows because of it.

While this was not quite what the civic leaders had had in mind when they built it, being practical realists they simply swallowed their civic pride, and happily milked those visitor money flows for the nest six centuries until that weird leaning angle had nearly reached to the point of collapsing. They finally closed their tower to public access, but with the advent of modern engineering technology however, they more or less fixed the problem so that the tower was stabilized but still retained its quirky tilt for which it had become so famous.

If this sounds like a parable and cautionary tale about how pride go-eth before a fall, perhaps it is, but it’s a lesson which doesn’t seem to have reached San Francisco…a city which has developed an exquisite expertise at creating FUBAR situations. Such a situation has now emerged in the midst of the current orgy of constructing bigger and more grandiose edifices than ever, with the grandest of these being the Millennium Tower, a 58 story edifice offering luxury digs for those who’ve achieved the extreme affluence to afford a million dollars plus, and up, for these, as a status symbol of their socio-economic progress.

But just as in Pisa, Italy, this grandiose monument to excessive wealth display appears to have developed…feet of clay. In their haste to erect it the developers and engineering geniuses who built it somehow “missed” anchoring it to…bed rock…so it too is now ever so slowly sinking and beginning to become…the Leaning Tower of ‘Frisco. While it may take a few centuries before the Millennium Tower reaches the same quirky angle to its silhouette as Pisa’s, we doubt anyone might notice if it did because it is surrounded by a crowd of similar skyscrapers.

All of that could change, of course, if another “big one” came along, seismically forcing everyone back to their drawing boards to come up with newer and grander towering claims for bragging rights to replace those they had built there before.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s landmark cable cars keep modestly clanging along as fun rides for visitors…at $7 a ride…to generate steady and gratifying money flows into the city’s coffers. Apparently plowing some $16 million dollars to stabilize and rejuvenate that antiquated and quaint system some twenty years ago turned out to have produced a better ROI than any of those towering efforts.

As we said, San Francisco does have the most exquisite expertise when it comes to achieving FUBAR results.

CENTURION