The answer, simply, was that the tower was going to be visible from the hills above Oakland and Berkeley: a spendy part of the world where lots of rich people were accustomed to looking out the windows of their nice houses and seeing the landscape. And only the landscape. They didn’t want their views marred by a twenty-kilometer-high “monstrosity” whose “stark, ugly, industrial profile” was going to be “cluttered” with “ungainly industrial encrustations” and “gaudy” with a “Las Vegas-style light show” that would “sully the purity of the skies night and day.”
