Sutro, the icon

This piece was featured first on Apr 23 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

The truth is that I never meant to be a radio person. Even when I took the Forum job (five years ago!), I fully expected that our program, beaming out on 88.5, would soon be in terminal decline. It would be replaced, I figured, by our podcast and other digital offerings. But as it turned out, that’s not what happened. KQED’s and Forum’s listenership has remained as strong as ever.

The room where I host Forum shows—Studio B at KQED—looks out across the OpenAI headquarters, over the Mission and up to Sutro Tower. I love Sutro from the studio’s angle. But I also love Sutro from afar, like on an East Bay ridgeline, when you look over and see Sutro and only Sutro poking up out of the fog. Sutro feels like a guardian, keeper-outer of bad vibes. Other cities’ icons might be a statute or a skyscraper or an opera house. We have this piece of infrastructure.

Sutro is a real place, somehow. You can go up there like I did for emergency training here at KQED. There’s a building at the base that’s surprisingly huge, with Cold War-era thick walls and a water supply. If something big ever really goes down in San Francisco and we need to go to full emergency mode, your loyal KQED on-air people will be kayaking, biking, or sprinting for that place to provide you coverage of whatever has befallen us.

In a little room, we’ll talk into a microphone and the signal will go out not just across the city but across the whole region. In a place that’s predicated on the hyperlocal, the neighborhood, the town, Sutro is one of those rare things that unites us, like the Valkyries, and lumpia. From that particular spot, a message can reach anywhere in the Bay Area, and the tower itself is a message… Atop this city’s highest hill, we placed a means of human connection.

I visited another little room today—Hercules Records on Alcatraz in Berkeley. I was there to pay homage to our new comrade-in-public-media KEXP, which was broadcasting live from the shop. The place was packed, the mood jovial, the music great. Somehow, the public radio ecosystem in the Bay—KPFA, KALW, KWMR, and now KEXP—has gotten stronger.

Maybe there’s a reason. Our Forum show today was about the ways that digital media (music, in particular) can be manipulated by clever/unethical marketing. The more we put our trust in the platforms to deliver us what we want, the less control we have over the information and entertainment that we’re feeding to our brains.

And many people—myself included—have started to turn away from the algorithmic. Everything these public radio stations deliver is handcrafted by people, your friends and neighbors, who are working on your behalf to find you interesting things, whether that’s a new band or an important civic phenomenon.

Perhaps I even imagine that Saint Sutro smiles down upon us, as the signals propagate out, building community as they go, one “From KQED in San Francisco” at a time.

(P.S. You should know that our main radio transmitter is on San Bruno Mountain, but Sutro is our backup transmitter in an emergency, as described above.)

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum

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