Roman Mars's Guide to San Francisco

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Now, let's get out on the street and tell some stories.

This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars in San Francisco.

Since Get Your Guide offers adventures and tours all around the world, we decided we would release a bonus episode with our own guide to my favorite stories about San Francisco, the city in my backyard.

But you don't have to be walking around with me to experience it.

You can join me just by listening.

I'd like to start with the most famous building in the city of San Francisco, even though it's no longer the lone tower dominating the skyline.

And that is the Trans-America Pyramid, designed by LA architect William Pereira.

It's about 850 feet tall.

It's a skinny four-sided pyramid with two like wings poking out.

They look like ears to me.

And those wings accommodate the elevator shaft on one side and a stairwell on the other.

The best view of it is where I'm standing, looking down Columbus Avenue.

The building was commissioned by the Trans-America Company.

Construction started in 1969 and it was to serve as their headquarters as well as their logo, which strikes me as quite novel and forward-thinking.

The funny thing is, it's no longer Transamerica's headquarters.

They moved to Baltimore some time ago, but it is still their logo.

They did a brand refresh in 2025, and the building is depicted in red right next to the word Transamerica.

The logo looks great, but they do not own the building anymore.

So, the idea of making a building a headquarters and a company logo at the same time turned out to be kind of genius, but it was also at the root of why people hated this building so much when it was proposed and first constructed.

Many local architects considered it a silly advertising symbol more than a rational modern building.

They were offended that a company would erect an 850-foot logo in the rather diminutive San Francisco skyline.

Also, it went up at a time when modernism was at its most influential, when buildings were supposed to be free of unnecessary adornment and just be good functional buildings.

Well, to make a pyramid come to a point at the top, it has to have a bunch of empty non-functional space.

The top 200 feet are just air.

There are no offices up there.

Modernism declared that unethical and even immoral.

Non-architects hated it too.

The design took up a whole city block in a part of the city without any other tall buildings.

So here are some of the most vicious quotes from the people at the time that I've collected.

Okay, here we go.

Putting it in San Francisco would be no less reprehensible than destroying the Grand Canyon.

An inhuman creation, a second-class World's Fair space needle.

Then Assemblyman John Burton said that the pyramid would rape the skyline, which, like, yows.

I mean, this was before Twitter.

Like, he had to say that as a human to another human.

To critics and community members, it seemed to violate the whole purpose of zoning and urban planning.

The surrounding buildings were no more than three stories tall.

But over the course of 50 years, something happened.

Some people have never lost their hatred for the pyramid, but I would classify them as a very small minority at this point.

The San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects opposed its construction in 1969, but a couple decades later, they hailed it as one of the city's best buildings.

I interviewed the late San Francisco architect Henrik Bull about it about 15 years ago, and he was an early vociferous hater, but he grew to love the pyramid.

He was the one who made me appreciate it even more.

He told me that the true beauty of the Trans-America Pyramid reveals itself depending on where you're standing.

And that is why I'm talking to you on the median, in the middle of the street, looking at the pyramid down Columbus Avenue, which is a long, broad, diagonal street that cuts through North Beach.

The Transamerica building is right at the end of the street.

It's at the terminus, and it creates this awesome vanishing point perspective where everything goes in diagonals to a point.

And in a way, if you tilt that vanishing point up vertically, there's the Trans-America Building.

It is this delightful triangular surprise.

It perfectly completes the scene.

Had that been a conventional modern rectangular building that was popular at the time, it would have been a tragedy, according to Henrik Bull and to me.

It also looks great from the bay as a silhouette when the sun's going down.

It's really quite graceful.

The taller buildings that have gone up since then are really pretty dull.

I don't think of San Francisco as a good skyscraper city.

You could say a lot of things about the pyramid, but it is not dull.

So I have to thank Henrik Bull for teaching me how to love this weird building that epitomizes San Francisco and looks like a dunce cap.

If we go south of here towards the financial district, you will experience one of my favorite things about San Francisco.

The Popos.

Popos are privately owned public spaces, publicly accessible plazas, terraces, atriums, little parks, and even rooftop parks that are provided and maintained by private developers but available for the public to use.

They're marked by a handsome sign with the public open space logo, which displays the hours that people can access the area.

The 1985 downtown plan requires all projects involving new building or the addition of 25,000 square feet or more in the downtown and nearby neighborhoods provide public accessible art equal to at least 1% of the total construction cost.

And I...

love this idea.

I think it represents the best of San Francisco.

It also exemplifies the city's deeply held but conflicting convictions.

Popos are sincerely meant for the public good.

I know that and I believe that.

But because it is not actually public, no one's quite sure what's allowed inside of a popo, who's in charge, what the codes of behavior should be.

There are security guards, there's hours of operations, there's constant surveillance.

Some popos contain priceless works of art.

And just because they're publicly accessible, that doesn't mean they're easy to find.

The signs do help, but online guides are crucial if you want to find them all.

And this is why they'll never supplant the need for truly public spaces.

And there's nothing like a well-designed outdoor space.

In downtown San Francisco, different plazas will be right across the street from one another and one will be teeming with people and the other one will be completely empty.

It's a stunning thing to witness and it doesn't have to do with just the beauty of the place.

San Francisco has many beautiful underused parks.

It all comes down to functional design.

This was a big part of the Get Your Guide tour that my wife Joy and my stepdaughter Maya and I took in San Francisco, which was fantastic, by the way.

With architecture tours, I'm always a little worried that they're going to devolve into a list of famous names and architectural movements, but our tour guide, Jamie Lasher, had great observations about the architecture, fun stories to tell, and he offered crucial insights into why some public spaces work and some don't.

So I was into Jamie's vibe from the get-go, but he truly won my heart when we hung out in the Popo at 525 Market Street, which is one of the most successful Popos in the area.

And to explain to me why it was so successful, Jamie referenced urban sociologist William White.

Maybe you haven't done an episode on him, but I'm sure you're familiar with William White.

After photographing and filming people using public spaces in New York for many, many years, he concluded there were four things that made them most successful.

Sunlight, seating, and particularly seating you can move around.

Proximity to food, and being able to people watch.

And this has all four.

We've got some bench seating in the back, you've got stadium seating up to this little plaza.

If you don't like sitting here close to the street, you can climb up a set of stairs to that kind of mezzanine plaza a little bit above the street with a little different view.

And it is oriented to give a lot of sunshine and it's big enough that there's a nice gap here between the buildings.

So terrific place.

Sure enough, if you walk around San Francisco or really any city, you will see over and over that a good functional public space probably contains those four things.

Movable seating, food, sunlight, and fascinating people to watch.

So the current tallest building in San Francisco is Salesforce Tower, and I don't really think all that highly of it.

It's this big, heavy-looking building that I think gets quite a lot better when you get really close to it, but it is not a great addition to the skyline, despite its sweaty efforts to stand out.

Like the crown of it is lit up at night with 11,000 LED lights.

It usually displays a kind of low-res, kaleidoscopic swirl of colors that is generated from cameras placed around San Francisco that, to quote the building's website, monitors the rhythms of the tide and wind, the patterns of the weather, the migration of birds, and the daily ebbs and flows of activity to sort of create its collage.

Me explaining that is more interesting than it actually looks, unfortunately.

What Salesforce Tower does have going for it is a pretty phenomenal rooftop park located four stories off of street level.

If there's a spectrum of Popos where on one end is a true public park and the other end is like a museum, the Salesforce Park is very much on the museum side of the scale.

if you're lucky enough the gondola is working and you can like ascend into the park on a gondola ride it often is not and you have to take an elevator but as soon as you get into the park you're confronted with a list of activities that you cannot do like it doesn't scream fun it's like entering a like your grandma's house like don't touch anything but the botanical gardens and the plant collections are just out of this world they're so beautiful and it's really nice to be there and it's a great place to take in all the other tall buildings in the neighborhood, including what is probably the most infamous San Francisco skyscraper, the Millennium Tower.

But our get-your-guide tour guide, Jamie, had another name for it.

We've got to talk about the Leaning Tower of San Francisco, which is the other tall building we can see here.

This was, it's really unfortunate for the developer, Millennium Partners, who has done a ton of really amazing high-end, high-rise residential in different places around the country.

A lot of it in conjunction with high-end hotel brands like Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons.

They put their name on this one, and they just chose the wrong one.

So it's across the street from the Salesforce Tower, and when it was built, it was the tallest residential tower ever built in San Francisco.

And the condos were the most expensive ever sold up to that point.

And it hasn't worked out so well for the buyers.

So the foundation here is a little different than many of the others in the neighborhood.

As you know, much of downtown here is landfill.

Where we're standing was originally bay

and the gold rush completely re-engineered the waterfront of San Francisco.

There's very, very little of the original shoreline of San Francisco along the bay.

So we've got sand and bay mud under our feet.

There were sand dunes all over that was used as film material and below that mud that came from sedimentation in the bay.

And it goes down a long way.

Actually the Salesforce Tower has the deepest foundation ever constructed in San Francisco.

It goes down almost 300 feet.

Not every building around here goes that deep though.

Not everyone goes all the way down to bedrock.

There are a number of buildings that have been built that have a big concrete platform that's well underground.

You know, it's like a huge big square of concrete and all the piers that go up and attach to the building are anchored on that plate.

If you make the plate big enough and you put it deep enough, you might get a little bit of compaction.

You might have the building settle and sink a little bit, but not too much.

There are many buildings around here that have used that.

My audio got a little inaudible for a second here, but what you missed was Jamie saying that the Millennium Tower had one of these concrete matte foundations.

Their structural engineers estimated that worst case, it would sink about two inches.

Right now we're at 18 and climbing.

But that's not really the problem.

The big problem is it's not, the building's not settling evenly.

So the corner of it is two feet over the street now.

I've been told that if you drop a marble on the floor of one of the condos, it'll roll.

It is still safe to live in.

There have been any number of structural engineers who've crawled all over the thing, hired by the developer,

by the owners of the condominiums, by the city.

And it's safe.

And as long as they continue to say that, I think people will still live there because they paid an awful lot for those condos, probably can't sell them for a whole lot.

And the lawsuits are just flying all over the place.

One explanation they came up with is the whole problem is because of the foundation that was dug across the street from them for the Salesforce Tower.

It caused some movement of the subsurface soil that created the problem.

Who knows?

It's not all figured out yet.

All I do know is that they've spent $130 million trying to fix the problem, putting in additional piers at the corner that is leaning the wrong way.

And I guess their hope was that the building's going to settle a little bit more and maybe it'll settle away from the corner and kind of even out over time.

And you know, so far, it seems to be working.

The corner away from the intersection has settled more.

The only problem is, and they've got all kinds of sensors in the building now.

I mean, they're monitoring what's happening to the nearest millimeter, I'm sure.

But apparently, it appears that the core of the building is sinking a little faster than the exterior.

That might be hard to fix.

Yes.

So we're going to leave Jamie and the downtown area and travel west to what is really my favorite spot in the city.

And we can't leave San Francisco without mentioning the greatest piece of human-made infrastructure ever created.

That's after this.

So let's take a break to talk about the sponsor of today's episode, Get Your Guide.

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So I am already a Get Your Guide fan.

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But for this partnership, as I mentioned in the episode, I decided to take the San Francisco Architecture and Public Art tour with a couple members of my family.

And we had a blast.

It's like a walking 99% visible tour with a great point of view and focus.

I was personally familiar with a fair amount of the material because of what I do for a living, but I learned a ton more.

It was so much fun.

Even if you are from the Bay Area, you should go on this tour.

Wear like a 99 PI t-shirt and make a friend.

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So, on my way to our next stop on the tour, I came across one of my favorite San Francisco stories about this gas station on Vaness Avenue.

In almost every respect, it's a normal Chevron station.

It has a blue awning, it has a red and blue Chevron logo on the sign, but the sign and the awning don't say Chevron, they say standard, as in Standard Oil, the massive oil monopoly broken up in the early 20th century by the Sherman Antitrust Act.

One of the independent companies created from that breakup was Chevron.

And for some reason, even though this gas station is a modern Chevron station in every way, it is called Standard.

If you call the station, they will answer the phone saying, Chevron, and the attendant cannot say why it says standard on the sign.

I have actually tried that.

But I talked with a trademark lawyer named Amanda Lewandowski, and she helped me uncover the mystery of the seemingly anachronistic gas station.

So a trademark can be any word, name, symbol, or device used by someone who has bona fide intent to use the mark in commerce and that they're using that word symbol or device to identify the source of their goods and services.

The phrase bona fide intent means that if you want to keep the trademark, you have to legitimately use it.

So in this particular case, when Standard Oil was busted up, the Standard Oil trademark retained a lot of goodwill and value.

And if whatever reason down the line, Chevron wants to take advantage of that value, they have to use the name standard somewhere.

You can't just put it on some pamphlet or something disingenuous.

Like you have to really use it.

So they have to prominently use the standard name in conjunction with oil and gas services if they want to keep it.

So that's why there's a standard gas station that, for all intents and purposes, operates as a Chevron station in San Francisco and in 15 other locations in the U.S.

So about three miles southwest of this gas station is legitimately like my favorite spot inside of San Francisco.

When people visit, I always send them there, even though there's nothing actually there or a big part of what was there is missing.

So let's head to Mount Olympus.

So we are at the very top of Upper Terrace Road on a hill that was once thought to be the geographic center of the city.

It is very windy, but the view is just amazing.

It's a 360 degree panorama of the best views of the city.

At the top of the stairs here, there's a tiny hilltop park and a raised plinth and a massive stone pedestal that rises to nothing.

It was once the base of a 12-foot bronze statue.

The statue was called Triumph of Light.

It was a robed woman that looked a little like the Statue of Liberty, and she was holding aloft a giant torch in one hand, and in her other hand, she had a piece of parchment.

And below her, at her feet, was a crouched figure sort of reaching up to these two objects as if symbolizing mankind reaching for light and knowledge.

It was erected in 1887 by then-developer and future mayor, Adolf Sutro, as a symbol of liberty and progressivism.

When Sutro dedicated the statue in 1887 on Thanksgiving Day, he told the crowd, May the light shine from the torch of the goddess of liberty to inspire our citizens to good and noble deeds for the benefit of mankind.

At that moment, it must have seemed like it would stand forever, to be a timeless reminder of the importance of liberty and civilization and philanthropy.

But it didn't last.

In the late 1930s, people were already referring to it as the Mystery Monument, which strikes me as a shockingly brief period of time to have forgotten about Sutro's statue and its lofty ideals.

By the 1940s, there was discussion about removing it because pieces had fallen off.

And after decades of neglect, sometime in the 1950s, it just disappears.

No one knows who ordered its removal or what happened to the statue.

All that is left is the stone base, a lovely landscaped knoll, and a view that sends hikers and dog walkers walkers up here regularly, even though there is no statue to admire.

There's not even a plaque.

I know I don't want them to replace the statue.

The location of the story is kind of perfect as it is, but it would be cool to have a picture and description of what was once here for people to read.

Or maybe not.

I don't know.

Maybe it's better as a mystery.

But I truly love this place.

It's the greatest.

So I would be remiss if I didn't take you to the greatest piece of infrastructure ever created, and that is the Golden Gate Bridge.

So I'm looking up at the bridge from Cavallo Point, which is not actually in the city.

It's on the north side of the bridge, but it's a great place to take in the majesty of this beautiful thing.

Earlier, I mentioned that the Trans-American Pyramid works better the farther you are away from it and that the Salesforce Tower is better up close.

Well, the Golden Gate Bridge is perfect from every angle and vantage point.

Its slender silhouette is elegant as seen from the East Bay.

It is a joy to drive over it.

It is a joy to walk over it.

My favorite snapshot view of the bridge is when you're driving south on 101 and you see it framed in the arch of the Robin Williams Tunnel.

I never tire of it.

It is just a gorgeous thing.

So I'm down at the shoreline of Cavallo Point, this other perfect view of the bridge, so I can stand and talk talk about it for a little bit.

The chief engineer in the construction of the bridge was Joseph Strauss, but a lot of the structural design was by a fellow named Charles Alden Ellis.

They fought a lot while the bridge was being built, with Strauss accusing Ellis of wasting time and money.

But Strauss was the boss and he fired Ellis and ended up getting most of the credit for the bridge himself.

Ellis only got recognition for his contribution decades later.

And you might think, this Joseph Strauss seems like a credit-hogging, nasty piece of work.

And that may be true, but there is much more to him than that.

Chief Engineer Joseph Strauss was maniacally devoted to worker safety.

The job of bridgeman was very dangerous.

60 mile-an-hour gusts of wind could come out of nowhere and sweep men into the water.

So we made a rule that all workers had to wear clip-on safety lines.

And a lot of the macho tough guys wouldn't wear them and complained.

But on the Golden Gate Bridge build, if you didn't wear one, you were fired.

And eventually everyone fell in line.

He was also one of the first chief engineers to insist on hard hats on the job.

But the ultimate expression of his commitment to worker safety was when he spent over $130,000 on a safety net to be installed as work began on the bridge's roadbed.

It was the most expensive, elaborate safety device ever conceived for a major construction site.

The net ended up saving saving 19 lives.

19 men fell off the bridge during construction and fell safely into the net.

It spanned across the entire length of the bridge and stuck out about 10 feet wider than the roadbed on each side because with those winds, people didn't just fall straight down.

They flew some distance and the net caught them all.

The 19 men who accidentally fell into the net called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club, which is pretty badass.

The net became this real morale booster.

Workers were kind of excited by the notion that people actually cared, and the net turned out to be kind of fun, so much so that they had to be ordered not to jump into the net on purpose.

There was a major accident during construction where 10 men died and a platform broke free and crushed the bridgemen below.

But even with that one-off event, the safety record of the Golden Gate Bridge construction was far better than that of the Oakland Bay Bridge, where 28 workers died.

The Golden Gate Bridge was a real leap forward in valuing the lives of bridgmen and ironworkers.

And that's what I think of when I see it now.

That the greatest human-made structure was made humanely.

After the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge, Joseph Strauss returned to his first passion, which was poetry.

His most famous poem being, The Mighty Task is Done.

And it goes,

At last, the mighty task is done, resplendent in the western sun.

The bridge looms mountain high.

Its titan piers grip ocean floor.

Its great steel arms link shore to shore.

Its towers pierce the sky.

It goes on from there.

I think he was a better bridge builder than a poet, but I really love that he was both.

Strauss died in Los Angeles at the age of 68, one year after the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge.

If you ever come here, don't miss it.

Walk across it, drive across it.

Look at it from every angle you can.

This bonus bonus episode of 99% Invisible was produced by me, Roman Mars.

Mix by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real.

Special thanks to Jamie Lasher, Dara Mahaley, and Sean Mahale of Ignite Tours.

You can do the exact same tour that I did with Jamie by going to getyourguide.com and searching for the San Francisco Downtown Architecture and Public Art Tour.

Jamie was so great.

It was so much fun to spend time with him.

My family had a fantastic time.

You should do it.

Our executive producer is Kathy Tu.

Our senior editor is Delaney Hall.

Our digital director is Kurt Kolsted.

The resident team includes Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Kelly Prime, Chris Barube, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashma Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, and Joe Rosenberg.

The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown.

Oakland, California.

You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server.

There's a link to those as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

Thank you again to the sponsor of today's episode, Get Your Guide.

No matter where you're headed, Get Your Guide is the perfect planning tool for your next trip.

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From must-see iconic attractions to unexpected under-the-radar gems, Get Your Guide has something for everyone to uncover the invisible details that shape our world.

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