Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Let there be light atop McCann

Those cool colored lights atop the new McCann-Erickson building have been on-again, off-again, and they're currently off again at the request of city officials, who received complaints from two members of the Historic District & Design Review Commission. The HDDRC, which contains a few of the last remaining vestiges of the Antis in members Jeff Sadowski and Marsha Rowbottom and chairman Keith Deyer (their time to come), is to take up the issue Wednesday night, when the building's owner, Ted Fuller, and its architect, Buzz editor Chris Longe, are to appear before the board requesting official sanction for the lights.

According to city officials, no ordinance governs or restricts the lighting that is used on the McCann building. We hear the Antis are calling it the "red-light district," apparently oblivious to the rest of the spectrum projected from the high-tech LEDs atop the roof. Each quadrant of the roof sculpture is lit by 34 watts of lighting, little more than one-tenth of each of the 300-watt ghetto lights installed by the city itself on Maple and Bates.

Fuller gratiously turned off the lights as a courtesy to city officials. Really, the city would have been powerless to do anything had he refused.

We happen to like the way the top of the building is lit (about as much as we hate the way the street is lit), and hope that the HDDRC has the good sense to let there be (colored) light, though we also hope that if they refuse, Fuller simply ignore their mindless behavior.

We understand Buzz editor Shelli Weisberg, that flaming liberal staffer for the Michigan ACLU, will show up to defend Fuller's right to bring diversity to the city's narrow spectrum, and defend our right to have a building of color in downtown Birmingham.