California Tower

This guide to California Tower in San Diego starts with the bells chiming overhead on schedule, and the reveal that there is no real bronze bell up in that tiled dome at all, only an electronic system triggered from a keyboard. It follows architect Bertram Goodhue's ornate 1915 design for the Panama-California Exposition, paid for by the state at a cost of about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and how a second exposition in 1935 left inspectors worried enough about the tower's height and masonry to lock its doors. Look up at the colored tile climbing nearly two hundred feet toward a dome that was never built to hold an actual bell.