If you've lived in San Francisco for more than fifteen minutes, you've developed a relationship with Sutro Tower — that giant red-and-white trident stabbing the fog above Twin Peaks. It's on your coffee mug. It's tattooed on someone you dated. It's the unofficial mascot of a city that already has too many unofficial mascots.

But here's a question we genuinely didn't expect to be asking in 2025: is Sutro Tower propagating?

Reports and chatter have been bubbling up about smaller antenna structures and telecom installations popping up across San Francisco's hilltops and ridgelines — and some residents have started joking that the city's beloved 977-foot tower is spawning offspring. It's a fun bit of urban mythology, but it points to something real: the quiet, steady expansion of communications infrastructure across the city, often with minimal public input or environmental review.

San Francisco's urban ecology is a genuinely fascinating thing. The microclimates, the fog patterns, the way red-tailed hawks circle the tower like it's some ancient monolith — Sutro Tower sits at a strange intersection of technology and nature. The area around it supports surprisingly diverse plant and animal life, and any expansion of infrastructure in that corridor deserves scrutiny, not rubber stamps.

Here's where the liberty-minded among us should pay attention: when cities green-light new telecom buildouts — often pushed by carriers flush with federal broadband subsidies — the permitting process tends to move fast and quiet. Public land gets used. Aesthetic and environmental concerns get hand-waved. And residents find out about it when a new steel structure appears on their skyline like a baby Sutro crawling out of the fog.

We're not anti-infrastructure. Better connectivity is a genuine public good. But San Franciscans deserve transparency about what's going up, where, and who's profiting. Sutro Tower is a landmark precisely because there's only one of her. Let's make sure the city isn't quietly cluttering the skyline without so much as a public hearing.

Mama Sutro deserves better. So do we.