Mission Mission

Finally, a miniaturized version of our favorite local landmark for your household! And it doubles as a shelf and coat rack, just in time for scarf weather. It’s called the Sutro Tower Rack, it’s currently raising funds via Kickstarter, and designer Timothy Seward wrote in to tell us all about it:

While living in the edge of the mission (20th+Potrero) I looked up and saw Sutro Tower everyday. I decided to take my street art skills and put them to the design test. I wanted to blend the beautiful mid-century designs of the past and incorporate my street art flavor. It may be hard to identify the street in this furniture piece, but the playfulness of the soft lines and pop colors are definitely inspired by my murals and my good friend Ian Ross‘ murals around SF.

Here’s a gif of the Sutro Tower Rack in action:

And here’s one of all of the delightful colors it’ll come in:

Enticed? Head on over to the Sutro Tower Rack Kickstarter page and pledge. Want to see it in person first? Timothy will be showing the rack at the Urban Epicurean Festival at Fort Mason this weekend, where you can also snag yourself an on-trend Sutro Tower lapel pin.

P.S. Here are a bunch of our posts on Sutro Tower over the years…

Maybe they’d be rubber or something. Just a thought. Could call the set Sutro Bath Toys.

Click the bottom right to make it big.

[By Mission Sunsets, via Jonathan Foote]

I mean, come on. That was goin’ off.

These are just two that I grabbed, not even counting the rainbows, I can’t keep up with all the others people are posting. Add yours in the comments!

If we were an early Pagan society with some kind of shell-based monetary system, we’d all worship Sutro tower. Like the sun, it’s huge and can be seen everywhere. Also like the sun, it constantly blasts us with helpful radiation (assuming you find TV helpful).

These days, we don’t turn towards it twice a day and pray for protection against the club-wielding apes, but we do take a shit-ton of pictures of it. Here are a couple more tributes from this week:

Local indie-music heartthrob Ryan Browne posted this soothing video montage he shot over the course of a few months. Check it:

WBTC points out that Therapy on Valencia, in addition to being a brick magnet, carries those dreamy laser-cut plywood 1/1000 scale models, if you don’t mind supporting a dude who allegedly likes to threaten other would-be-sutro-model-makers with legal action:

That’s it. Sutro bless you all.

It’s a good thing that antenna operators are equipped with portable video recording devices (in the form of smartphones) these days:

And here’s another tower tour from 2009:

[via Monkeybrains]

Well I sure know what I would do if I had a kick ass view of Sutro, make a bunch of timelapse videos of it. Thats what Jonathan did.

Check out this stunner. Kinda makes me feel like I’m soaring towards the Ivory Castle on Falkor, my trusty luck dragon:

The instructions for making your own are simple, just fire up that Linux machine you have lying around and dig through heaps of ffmpeg forums:

I used gphoto2 running on an Ubuntu machine to grab photos, basically as quickly as I could get them off the camera (roughly one every 5 seconds). I’m getting them at fairly large resolution (2048 x 1536), though I crop and downsample them for the video. To create a 20fps video from the still photos, I use ffmpeg, which is amazingly powerful provided you get the command line options right.

He adds:

So as the unrepentant perfectionist, I still see some areas of improvement. Despite a fairly decent camera mount, I still see more camera motion than I would like: I am going to try bolting the camera directly to the building, but I suspect the building itself moves.

God damn plate tectonics. Maybe he could bolt the camera to Sutro?

[via rotormind]

[via Satellite Tourist]

This is what our great protector sees as it endlessly scans the horizon for threats to our fair City.  Shouldn’t it be facing the Pacific Coast, though?  Perhaps Chief Gascon has succeeded in enlisting Sutro to help fight crime in the city.

Previously:

Sutro Comes ALIVE

Sutro Tower Lightning Strike

Troy Holden, photographer from the supergroup Caliber and formerly Plug 1 (I can stop saying that now, right?) has really been tearing it up lately and before Brittney can . . . okay, never mind, she already posted this, but I still wanted to put it up. It’s a view of our neighborhood, and I get to do that. Just look at it for a moment, please. It’s amazing.

I usually only put up my own pics, but even my ego’s not large enough to hold this one back.