In the past few years, Americans have been forced to come to grips with our latest landscape monstrosity: the cell phone tower. A silver cylinder bigger than a light pole but smaller than a radio antenna, the cell-phone tower is an ugly but necessary blight on the urban horizon. In the interest of city beautification, some of these sticks have been disguised to better blend into the background. Take the one behind Big Joe’s auto repair shop just off the corner of Dale Mabry and Henderson: Someone threw on a coat of brown paint, added sparse artificial “branches” at the top, and voilà, now it’s a tree! The disguise is utterly unconvincing, and, if anything, the paint job makes the tower even more of an eyesore — which makes it all the more endearing, don’t you think?
This article appears in Sep 12-18, 2007.