New Insect on San Francisco's Skyline - Salesforce Tower with Cranes (Cranes 01)

I don't post photographs as a rule because I'm not much of a photographer. But I'm posting this one, fuzzy though it is -- it was the best I got -- because I like the image of the insect-skyscraper. It's the new Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, a few weeks after it was topped off.

I took this picture out a car window. Don't worry, I was the passenger. I happen to love how cranes look against the sky and this sky was particularly beautiful. My lousy reflexes would have done better in a traffic jam but alas traffic was moving. I hope you can still make out the big bug's antennae. There's even a second set of feelers barely visible above the next-tallest building angled away from the viewer.

As locals may guess, I was on the ramp from 101 into the city. Or rather what folks in the Bay Area call "the city". We former New Yorkers know that in fact "the city" is 3000 miles away.

As to my love of cranes: I am now motivated to post two other crane photos, one taken during a walk on the High Line in New York City in 2015, one taken a couple of weeks ago from the roof of the Kennedy Center.

I loved cranes even before I read David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes (1986). Probably that's why the book popped off the shelf at me back in the late 1980s at the Berkeley Heights, NJ library. Or was it the old Carnegie Branch on Amsterdam at about 69th? Anyway, the jacket cover told me that Leavitt meant construction cranes, not the whooping kind, so I read it. It's good so I kept reading Leavitt's books over the years, including the one I think is my all-time favorite, The Indian Clerk (2007).

I like the whooping variety of cranes too, ever since a high school classmate, an ardent supporter of saving those cranes from extinction, told me about their endangerment. I wonder if she'll be at our upcoming 50th next month. Hope so.

I also like apartment building water towers. I could see a few from my family's second apartment in Lincoln Towers. The first faced New Jersey but we didn't have a river view because the West Side Highway was in the way. Nowadays that view has been replaced by other Towers.

I suppose I just have a fascination with rooftops. Which brings to mind the wonderful and beautifully illustrated book Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold, published in 1991, a year after I moved away from the [real] city.

Free association, thy name is MINE. If you mind, or don't mind, please let me know.

May 9, 2017 rev 0