Glass Keeps Falling Off Skyscrapers in San Francisco
When I was five, I took a piece of rebar to the windows of an abandoned trailer in rural Kansas. I loved the tinkling chime of shattering glass. Each window held a song you could hear only once. The trailer park manager three lots down also heard, and when he found me, I knew I was done. He dragged me to my mother by the shirt and demanded $80 a window, and I’d broken six.
She couldn’t come up with the sum all at once, so I guess he tacked it onto our lot rent. The belt she whipped my ass with was braided.
I came to associate the sound of breaking glass with broken rules. It hasn’t proven wrong. When a fight is brewing, the signal that all hell’s about to break loose is a shattering pint or bottle. In an emergency, breaking a window to escape is the one situation where you face no consequences. They chip, crack, or explode during points of high tension in novels and films.
In reality, windows break when they’re improperly made, handled and/or maintained. They break because someone stopped paying attention.
A philosophy of glass
All glass exists in a state of tension. It’s why opera singers can shatter wine glasses. We subject it to tremendous heat and pressure, keeping it rigid when all it wants is to return to sand. Rigidity here means density, and density can’t tolerate stress. That is why osmium, the densest precious metal on Earth, cannot be forged. Time is unkind to rigidity. Eventually, all glass breaks.
In a sense, humankind’s devotion to glass despite its fragility is a statement on what we’ll risk for beauty. Seeing the landscape 35,000 feet below your airplane is worth weakening the fuselage. Beauty then is terror restrained; a lion in a cage, the magician and his saw, layers of engineered redundancy between your seat in Row 10 and the sapphire-blue, –60° skies. Some of the most beautiful things can kill us.
So many people are in charge of our safety. You better hope they know what they’re doing. The terror of doubting something’s integrity only increases with time.
What is wrong with San Francisco’s skyscrapers?
A window’s purpose, other than admitting air and light, is to let us gaze unimpeded at the world. It permits a feeling of awe that is more all the more pronounced the higher up you go. That’s the appeal of building to the sky. The trouble is, every building wants to come down, like how every window wants to return to sand. Keeping structures upright and windows intact is not entirely up to the steel and glass itself, it’s up to the people that design and maintain it.
These past few years have seen San Francisco’s skyscrapers pepper the streets with shards of broken glass. Trouble struck the ostentatious Salesforce Tower in 2019. Only one year after the 1,070-foot skyscraper’s grand opening, cracks were discovered on an interior window assembly. The window panes in question did not break, unlike in other problematic buildings.
Leave it to nature to expose the folly of Man. In March 2023, a severe storm broke records and, in downtown San Francisco, a lot of windows. Storms punched holes at 555 California (that big brown box), 350 Mission, 50 California, and the infamous Millennium Tower.
That so many highrise windows failed during March 2023’s windstorms has me wondering how dicey downtown will be during the next big quake.
A rain of terror at the Transamerica Pyramid
After a frighteningly close call at 350 Mission in September, falling glass and references to Final Destination made the news. Are faulty windows more of a problem in San Francisco than we’re led to believe? Supervisor Aaron Peskin asked the same question in 2023, after storms ravaged the Financial District. Peskin demanded an immediate inspection at those buildings, inspections that immediately became entangled in bureaucratic red tape.
“This is not the packed downtown of pre-COVID,” Peskin told the Chronicle. “but there’s no shortage of people on the streets, and (this incident) scared the living s— out of me. Needless to say, having glass rain on pedestrian-filled streets should be at the top of our list of safety concerns.”
Fast forward to September 2024 and it’s looking like Peskin was right. On the night of Thursday, September 26th, a 35th floor-window in the Transamerica Pyramid shattered while someone was cleaning it. Seconds later the pieces hit the ground, whistling “like meteor strikes” according to one witness. The San Francisco landmark has an unusual cleaning protocol for its slanted, swivelling windows; was their design to blame, or something else?
“These things were falling fast. It felt like they were coming from a higher floor,” the witness told the Standard. “These were significant chunks. I was a little scared to exit the lobby, because I didn’t want to get hit.”
Two people reportedly stood in the path of the falling glass. They dodged the shards just in time. “There could have been fatalities here,” wrote journalist Joe Kukura for SFist. The next person this happens to might not be so lucky.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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