San Francisco

[Drunk Monk]

I've always wondered about these. I remember (and this might be a false memory) that ED pointed them out to DM when they were high...

The story behind the 'Grim Reaper' building that watches over downtown San Francisco
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Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

Andrew Chamings, SFGATE
March 30, 2023Updated: March 30, 2023 8:23 a.m.
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There’s been a lot of talk about downtown San Francisco becoming a ghost town of late. But even before the streets felt eerily abandoned, a dozen faceless ghosts in pale robes watched over the bustling streets from the black roof of 580 California.
The 12-foot-tall specters stand stark white in front of the dark glass 350 feet above the city. Their heads bowed, watching over the living below; an empty blackness where a face should be. The sculptures can be seen from over a mile away. If you stare up from Portsmouth Square, they watch your every move; from the backside of Coit Tower, the three north-facing ghouls hover at eye level, floating over Chinatown.
Since they were first lowered onto their lofty plinths by helicopter in 1984, the statues have been described as godly, deathly, ominous and cloudlike. But what exactly do they mean, and who put them there?
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The rooftop at 580 California St., San Francisco. 
Zac Rymland/Getty Images/500px

The construction of the 23-story office tower on the corner of California and Kearny was controversial from the start. It was set to replace a four-story historic insurance building and clock tower, but planners were met with pushback from those in City Hall dismayed by the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco. It would cast a shadow over Kearny Street — “the last broad sunlit street downtown,” attorney Sue Hestor complained when planning hearings commenced in 1982.
Outside of development concerns, something else in famed architect Philip Johnson’s plans was making City Hall anxious: 12 statues made by elusive New York artist Muriel Castanis that Johnson had chosen to crown his latest addition to the San Francisco skyline. (Johnson was also responsible for the Neiman Marcus building in Union Square and the skyscraper on stilts at 101 California.)
“What are they? What is their meaning, if they have meaning?” Planning Commissioner Susan Bierman remarked at a hearing in 1982. “Can’t you think of anything else? A ball? An orb?” Others joked that the strange statues represented the 11 city supervisors and Mayor Dianne Feinstein. An Examiner columnist called the statues a “monumental joke.”
Despite the one-liners and critiques, Johnson’s design was approved. And even before ground was broken on California Street, the building was creating a buzz. Businesses bought advertising space announcing they would be occupying the new skyscraper, next to page-length sketches of the tower topped with three distinct white figures.
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Advertisements for 580 California St. and architect Philip Johnson holding a model of the building in 1983. 
Archival
The New York Times compared Muriel Castanis’ fiberglass sculptures to the Invisible Man — bodiless, shaped only by their drapery, like the horror icon’s bandages.
While most agreed the statues were strange, it seems no one quite realized how ominous they would appear in real life. Maybe it's the way the light falls on the black-glass mansard roof and its gothic stylings, an aesthetic not obvious in the planning renderings. Or maybe it’s the way the white robes are now backlit at night. Or maybe it’s the body position of the middle female figure on each side — arms outstretched behind, as if ready to dive off her 350-foot-tall granite column to the street below or sail over the city like a Dementor.
On what must have been an eerie day, in 1983, the statues were placed onto the building one by one, via helicopter. A sky full of ghosts all heading to their new home in the Financial District. The sight reminded some of the iconic opening to Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” in which a helicopter swings a statue of Jesus Christ over Rome.
The building was opened with corporate tenants, mostly banks, filling every floor on Dec. 12, 1984. The reaction by architectural critics to the statues atop 580 California can best be described as vicious. An Examiner criticdespised the skyscraper so much that they stooped to using an ableist slur to describe it, calling it “a hodgepodge of unrelated styles that amounts to a case of retarded Victorian confusion.” Years later, the Sacramento Bee flat out called it the “Grim Reaper” building.
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A view of the "Corporate Goddesses" statues by artist Muriel Castanis, atop 580 California, in downtown San Francisco.
sswj via Flickr CC 2.0
After Castanis’ death in 2006, the Los Angeles Times looked back at what the publication referred to as a “Chilling existential riddle: Why no faces?” In that story, some looked up to the “Corporate Goddesses” — a name given to the art by their maker — as a warning against the sins of greed and unbridled capitalism. (Curiously, another lofty, chilling warning watches over the city just a block away, at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral: "Son, observe the time and fly from evil.")
“They’re creepiest after dark,” one investment banker who worked in an office across the street told the newspaper. “There are these black crows that fly around the building and nest inside the faces.”
A few liked the building’s audacious design. The Philadelphia Inquirer called the statues “subversive” and “provocative.” One blogger noted that if the finale of “Ghostbusters” had been set in San Francisco, not New York, surely the rooftop at 580 California would have been where Gozer tried to enter the earthly world.
One San Francisco resident told the Examiner that they were his favorite piece of art in the city. “They do not have faces or hands,” Kalman Muller said, adding somewhat spookily, “and yet they seem to have control over their surroundings.”
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A view of 580 California St. on Feb. 7, 1989.
Santi Visalli/Getty Images
Those who believed the statues had dark, mystical powers would have been shaken Nov. 28, 1989, when the figures watched over a very real tragedy. That morning, a 340-ton construction crane collapsed into the building, ripping through several floors and crushing a school bus at the intersection below. The disaster took five lives and injured 21.
Muriel Castanis rarely spoke about the meaning behind her creations and seemingly only once publicly commented on the statues at 580 California in her lifetime. “It arouses wonderful feelings. People stop and pause when they see them. It does make them think,” she said in a rare interview in 1983 after the design was finally approved by the Board of Supervisors, adding that the sculptures would “look like clouds going by.”
On a rainy March day, I strolled around Giannini Plaza, the park at the base of 555 California under the statues across the street.
“It’s a little scary,” San Francisco resident Antoine Levi tells me, looking up through the rain at the faceless beings. “Is it about death or something?”
“They’re interesting, one might say scary,” French tourist Jean-Baptiste Ferrian says, before taking in the surrounding nondescript glassy towers and looking back at the sculptures. “No faces! They’re different, unconventional. I enjoy them."
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The lobby of 580 California St., San Francisco, March 29, 2023.
Andrew Chamings / SFGATE
The lobby on the ground floor of 580 California was recently remodeled. The redesign included the installation of a smaller, orange version of Castanis' vision. The designers described the statue’s orange makeover as “both a continuity, a wit, and an extension of the most unique aspect of the building in a fresh new manner.” It stands unnoticed to most, by an empty gray chair in the corner of the lobby, as bankers and delivery people hurry to and fro. A more accessible, and far less chilling version of the 12 macabre icons 23 floors above.

Written By 
Andrew Chamings
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SFGATE's Editor-at-Large Andrew Chamings is a British writer in San Francisco. Andrew has written for The Atlantic, Vice, SF Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney's, The Bold Italic, Drowned in Sound and many other places. Andrew was formerly a Creative Executive at Westbrook Studios.