The repainting is not a reinvention. The color scheme — that particular red, that particular white, chosen specifically so the 977-foot structure reads clearly against both fog and blue sky for aircraft — stays. What changes is the condition of the thing: the chalked, oxidized surface giving way to something closer to what it looked like when Gerald Ford was still president and the tower was already a landmark that residents were learning to either love or resent, depending on what it blocked from their view.

Sutro Tower has always occupied a specific category of San Francisco object: too large to ignore, too functional to be purely aesthetic, and present in the background of enough photographs that its deterioration becomes noticeable only in aggregate, only when you hold up something old against what you see now. The crews working on it are dealing with a structure that hasn't had this kind of attention in a generation.

The work is expected to take months, and the tower will remain operational throughout — meaning the transmission equipment serving dozens of radio and television stations keeps running while painters work around it.

Anyone looking west from the Castro or up from Irving Street in the coming weeks will notice the same tower in the same spot, but the color, slowly, coming back.