Day 42: Civic Center and Rainbows
Day 42: February 11, 2014: Civic Center
City Hall wears many colors, but it sure looks good in rainbows.
Spend much time around Civic Center or on any of the surrounding hilltops at night, and you’ll quickly notice the ever-changing color scheme of City Hall. Some of those colors make sense: Orange for the Giants in the post-season, red and gold for the 49ers, blue and gold when trying to woo the Warriors to move over here, red and green during the holidays, etc. Some are less obvious: The colors of the Philippine flag in support of the nation after Typhoon Yolanda, a very pretty blue and green scheme that I still have no clue on, and other occasional colors in support of various charities. Some of the colors are just perplexing: That one time it was Twitter colors in honor of their holiday party, and the other time that it was blue as a smurfing promotional tie-in with the Smurfs Movie (seriously, that happened, I swear).
Considering City Hall’s cozy relationship with Twitter, perhaps it’s time for a Twitter account to let us know what the colors of the day mean?
This color scheme lasted a few weeks in February, seemingly for two reasons, based on the information I can find on the internets. Initially, this was to commemorate the 10th anniversary of “Winter of Love”, when the doors were opened for the first same sex marriages in San Francisco, kicking off many of the events that followed in the push for marriage equality that continues to make headway today. The lights were then left on through the end of the Sochi Olympics, presumably as a statement on Russia’s backwards anti-gay stance. Despite the setbacks that followed the first marriages in SF, I’m encouraged by the progress that has come in the past decade. As discriminatory laws in other states fall one by one, I have to say that I didn’t honestly expect to see this change come so quickly, if even in my lifetime. I couldn’t be happier to be wrong about that and to be here to see the tides changing. Equality is coming, let’s keep the progress coming.
(Kodak Portra 400 in the Canon 650, 1.5 stops overexposed)
