It’s unclear if the SAGE system would have actually been effective in detecting incoming bombers, which presumably would have employed radar jammers. Fortunately, we never found out.

The antenna was removed shortly after the site’s decommissioning in 1980, but the building, a prominent local landmark visible from downtown San Jose, has been preserved.

This was an opportunistic capture from a hotel balcony, made with a small camera and 90mm lens. I made several exposures, waiting for good light, which came out briefly for this one.

The wrong gear is definitely better than nothing, but still not as good as the right gear. This is a perfectly acceptable image, but I can’t look at it without wishing I had used a view camera, a higher resolution sensor, and a slightly longer lens. But if I had insisted on that, I’d have no image at all.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. The concrete brutalist design appears not to have been replicated anywhere else; it seems to have been site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

Captured with a DSLR and a 24mm shifting lens.

During the 20th century, AT&T operated a shortwave “radiotelephone” service for vessels on the high seas. Ships could contact an operator, who could connect them with any landline telephone number they wished.

The North Atlantic station, callsign WOO, occupied expansive transmit and receive “antenna farms” in marshlands near the shore in central New Jersey.

Rendered obsolete by satellites, the service ceased operation on November 9, 1999.

Until 1984, the Santa Fe Railroad moved freight cars across the San Francisco Bay by barge. Railroad cars were decoupled from trains and loaded onto special “carfloat” barges, which were pulled across the bay by a small fleet of tug boats, to be re-attached to trains at the other end. The service ended when a fire destroyed the Point Richmond pier (the East Bay terminal for the operation), and that was that.

A handful of rail carfloat operations continue in the US, most notably in NY Harbor.

With a few exceptions (a few towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. I wonder if we’ll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as a visual blight, the same way decades after they’re (inevitably) also gone.

Captured with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 Digaron lens and a bit of vertical shift. The afternoon light highlights the basic arched form of the bridge structure against the background and foreground foliage. A polarizer darkened the clear winter sky.

The Taft Bridge, named for the notably hefty former president and SCOTUS chief justice, is the largest unreinforced concrete bridge in the world. Comprising seven major arches over Rock Creek Park, it links the Kalorama and Woodly Park neighborhoods.

Rail carfloat services make economic sense only under a narrow set of circumstances, where there’s no natural place for a direct overland rail link, the alternative route is very long, and the volume of traffic is too low to justify building a bridge but too high to make it practical to unload and truck the freight by road. San Francisco Bay and NY Harbor are two examples. Crossing NY Harbor from the mainland by freight rail, for example, involves a 250 mile detour upstate and back.

From 1958 through 1980, this incongruous four story monolith was the centerpiece of the “Alameda Air Force Station”, a long-range radar site that was part of NORAD’s SAGE early warning system. The blast-hardened concrete building served as the platform for an FPS-24 radar system, a massive 120 foot wide reflector that emitted a 5 megawatt VHF pulse, continuously rotating at 5 RPM.

Notoriously, the signal disrupted TV and radio reception throughout the San Jose area.

I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they’re artifacts of what was perhaps humanity’s most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn’t seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.

On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.