Looking Up

A lot of the older blocks around me are made up of two or three story houses and stores. But here and there you’ll see a building that rises above the surroundings, at least by a little bit.

This is an office building that’s now a century old, and I guess in order to impress people it has a big bell tower for ringing out the hours.

Meanwhile this much newer local shopping plaza has its own cheap version of a landmark tower, but without a bell or clock. As far as I know nothing is up there, and below you can just see the Dunkin Donuts that fills its first floor.

And off in the distance, huge broadcast towers loom.

But most are much shorter. Some, like this church a block from the big bell tower (which you can just see in this photo) has a tower even shorter than its roof. Maybe it was there in case the funding came in some day to add a steeple.

And these churches never added steeples, managing just a gesture to the above.

Others, however, made a bigger point of pointing up.

And the steeple which rises behind this house shows how a higher elevation made more than a visual impact for some churches. Putting a bell up above the surrounding houses made sure people in the area could hear the call to services.

None of these churches have parking lots, and everyone in the congregation would be in walking distance. They couldn’t pretend they didn’t know when it was time on Sunday.

There’s another type of tower in the area. You can see a couple of views of one of them here.

Towers like this were common for fire stations. In the days before fires were called in by telephone and people would just pull an alarm on a street corner, firemen could get a fix on the location from their tower. They were also used for hanging hoses to dry in the days before compressed air could be used to clear water from hoses.