Pride Tower

Introduction and Background:

Seeing as how San Francisco is considered to be the city with a reputation of being friendly to all people of different backgrounds; from race, ethnicity, sex, religion, or skin color to name a few. The city is especially known for being a tolerant city in terms of it's urban gay population.

A quick view of the tower:

My proposal is to put the install the current six representative colors of the pride flag onto the outer shaft of the Coit Tower. The tower would be a commemoration to the creation of the pride flag, created by Gilbert Baker, who in June 25, 1978 debuted the pride flag, although the flag originally included eight colors. Lines 1[Hot Pink] and 6[Turquoise] were taken off as time passed on due to the lack of availability of the two colors as the flag started to become a popular symbol of gay pride, as Baker calls the current pride flag, "The commercial flag."

Original LGBT pride flag with 8 colors:

Something interesting to note is that Coit Tower is named after a wealthy socialite woman named Lillie Hitchcock Coit, which her fortunes funded the monument four years following her death in 1929 and took five years to construct. She also fancied the city's firefighters, from their clothing to their helmets, it was almost as if she too wanted to become a firefighter, trousers, and disguised herself as a man to gamble in the gambling halls in North Beach even before they were sociably acceptable for women to do so. She eventually married Howard Coit, who worked as a caller at the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange. She later divorced to Howard Coit and never remarried. Unfortunately, she suffered a stroke in 1929 and the Park Commission proposed to build a tower with the funds from her estate, which is today the Coit Tower. Although the tower resembles a fire hose nozzle, the architect of the tower, Arthur Brown Jr., denied the claim that it resembles a nozzle, although the context brings up a good point of Lillie's love of firemen and firefighting.

Monument:

The monument will basically consist of the 6 colors from the pride flag plastered only onto the outer shaft of the tower, which the colors will wrap around the tower. A visual is provided as to how the described monument will be [although the image may not give a realistic interpretation of the envision of the proposal, it gives the viewer a sense of what the proposed tower would look contextually]:

Benefits:

-Awareness of gay identity among international audience on a landmark, where tourists would usually visit, for example.

-To encourage a safe environment where equality among the LGBT community is a standing symbol for a safe environment, however it may be in a limited space.

-Another benefit to this monument would be good to establish the monument onto a certain time and month. Since 2000, former President Bill Clinton declared Gay and Lesbian Pride Month on June, which the month was also chosen to commemorate the Stonewall riots in the same month.

Improbable?:

What makes the monument almost improbable is that the intention of the monument is that the colors are suppose to be permanently fixated onto the shaft of the tower, which is unlikely that the city would ever commission a project to change a monument's meaning or aesthetic per se. It challenges the notion of changing a monument's physical features and it's reputation for being homogeneous among its surroundings, changing the aesthetics of the monument.

Estimated Costs/Tools/Instruments:

-Paint: $35,000

-Labor/Manual Labor: $5000

-Paint Rollers: $1000

-Commission: $25,000

Estimated expenses: $66,000

I have also found a Sketchup model of the Coit Tower, which you can also download a kmz file of the retooled tower:

Retooled Coit Tower [Viewable on Google Earth]

Viewable Presentation on Youtube: