Pasquale's Tower

By Harrison Anderson

On the Southern slope of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill sits Pasqule's Tower, a largely forgotten landmark. Once a giant, the endless march of progress has long since made it a dwarf. Its most notable feature is the lonely aqua orb atop its roof, which leers down like an enormous unblinking eye on the foot fetish accessory shops and strip clubs that line the block of Broadway Street below. Behind it and further up the slope of the hill, taller buildings erected later on have rendered it invisible from most angles. So too has the passage of time obscured the building from view. There exists no record of its construction, and even more strangely, it lacks a physical address— it is listed as 6 Dunne Alley, which is actually an unconnected apartment building that sits beneath it.

Though it stands a modest 4 stories in height, when it was completed in 1930, Pasquale's Tower would have made for an impressive sight, as it was for a short time one of the tallest buildings in Telegraph Hill. Unfortunately for the ambitions of Pasquale Gogna, the builder of this strange structure, the prominence of his tower would fade rapidly as 1930 turned out to be a banner year for construction in San Francisco. Before year's end, a pair of art deco skyscrapers would rise to dominate the Northern City skyline— the 20 story Bellaire Tower atop Russian Hill, and the 22 story Clay-Jones building, which 91 years later remains the highest point of neighhboring Nob Hill. These are remarkable buildings in their own right, and have seen their own hilltop brilliance dimmed by that same endless march of progress, but theirs are stories for another time.

If seeing more majestic buildings looming over it from the surrounding hilltops weren't enough, larger blows to its individual brilliance soon followed, as in 1933 Coit Tower would be completed on the summit of Telegraph Hill itself, forever capturing the imagination and eye of both San Francisco natives and visitors. Also in 1933, construction would begin on the Bay Bridge, completed in 1936 and fully dominating the backdrop for the best viewing angles of the tower on the hills to the west. The long march of years since have further turned Pasquale's Tower from a proud monument into a footnote, the scarcely noticed vanity project of a man barely remembered.

This is probably for the best, as the only fully verifiable stories of Pasquale Gogna that have survived the intervening 9/10ths of a century paint him as something of a violent, drunken lunatic. In 1908, within a year of his arrival in the United States, he had occasion to strike a man with a wagon jack in a disupute over money (the sum of which is left undisclosed in the Oakland Tribune blurb recounting the altercation,) inflicting "a severe wound in the left cheek." In 1922, he was arrested in Healdsburg for public drunkenness, brandishing a revolver, "tanked up on jackass brandy" per the police report, "wandering around town in a hilarious mood." Aside from the gunplay, the scandalous part of this story is that it occured during prohibition. 99 years later, Healdsburg's economy is primarily fueled by legalized daytime public intoxication.

Beyond the scant surviving facts, even myths and legends pertaining to Pasquale Gogna and his tower are difficult to come by at this long remove of time. One tale posits that he built the tower as a way of enticing his Italian love to move to San Francisco. As the story goes, she arrived in The City, took one look at the tower Pasquale had built for her, and immediately boarded a boat to return to Italy.

It's a charming tale, but almost certainly apocryphal. Pasquale immigrated to the United States in 1907, and if he was a "man of letters," capable of sustaining a romance across the yawning distance of one ocean, one and a half continents, and 23 years, there remains no evidence. There is ample evidence, however, to suggest he was more of a fighter than a lover, making it perhaps ironic that his lasting contribution to the cityscape now looks down over Northern California's densest concentration of adult entertainment establishments.

On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, I set off to view Pasquale's strange legacy from the ground up. I first wandered up Taylor Street to Ina Coolbrith Park, a short, steep, overgrown collection of stairs and terraces on the side of Russian Hill that offers perhaps the only angle for viewing the tower which might hint at its brief prominence. From the top terrace, the tower is seen against the backdrop of the water, standing alone, as one might imagine that it did from most angles ever so briefly those many years ago.

Descending the shaded terraces and then winding in the tower's direction across Chinatown and into North Beach, it mostly fades from view, obscured by buildings both short and tall, but giving occasional glimpses of itself as you walk towards it up Vallejo Street. Ascending the Western slope of Telegraph Hill, it is entirely invisible, and it is not until you descend the Peter Macchiarini steps and turn left up tiny Dunne Alley that it suddenly lurches into view again, looming over you. This is the closest you can get to the tower, as an iron gate still bearing the name "Gogna" bars the way. I stood at the gate for a few minutes looking up at the tower from this angle, until a man emerged from an apartment to shoo me away from lurking around his car. The barbed wire atop the gate also serves to disincentivize the curious from further investigation.

I carried on down the rest of the steps to Broadway Street, past all those gentleman's clubs, seeing the tower over a small parking lot. Here the forgotten landmark could be seen looking over a billboard for Kars 4 Kids, the jingle for which could never be forgotten by anyone unfortunate enough to hear it. I spent a few more minutes slowly making a circle around the block, pausing for awhile across the street to admire the tower with the sun now sinking behind it.

And then, figuring I'd spent enough of my finite Sunday staring at this building I couldn't access, I let my feet carry me down Broadway, and up Columbus Street, through North Beach, eventually stopping to rest over a beer outside a bar near the now sadly shuttered Beach Blanket Babylon, quietly pondering the tension of the relationship between loss and permanence, how the line separating these two things is always blurry, but never more blurry than in an infinite city like San Francisco.

Blurry too were the loud and drunken young men that eventually interrupted my solemnitude as they stopped outside the bar to watch a pre-season football game through the window. One of them wore a Hustler branded hooded sweatshirt. Looking more fresh than it's bearer, I guessed it had just been purchased at the nearby establishment of the same name, one of those clubs that Pasquale's Tower now looks down upon. I wondered how many times the tower's own quiet solemnitude had been interrupted by groups of drunks just like this, and for the first time all day, 9 decades felt like a very small stretch of time.

August 24, 2021

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