Posted on Friday April 3rd by Jebediah Reed | 1,364
This phenomenon is global and many years old at this point. I, for one, still chuckle when I see them — awkward and ominous and hilariously wrong-looking among living trees. They’re a bit reminiscent of Ralph the Wolf (the Looney Tunes character who’s the timeclock punching adversary of Sam the Sheepdog) when he would try to dress up as a sheep and try to mingle with the flock. Just let us deal with seeing a cell tower, for God’s sake. Better yet: design a visually appealing tower that doesn’t require a leafy toupee. (Has anyone tried this?)
Lots more fakeness after the jump:
Photos: Flickr Shabib, Chantpleure, McKullen, Juan de Alcala, duncan nfe, jamesgalpin and probably a few others from this photo pool.
April 9th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Honestly, some of those evergreen ones blend in all right. What is that last one… a cactus???
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
[...] CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR *HILARIOUS* PICS OF CELL PHONE TOWERS BADLY DISGUISED AS TREES. [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
It reminds me of the (fake) christmas trees of my childhood!
May 12th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I actually think with a couple of exceptions, the fake trees look better than huge towers. Most of these are liekly near highways and people are traveling at 70 miles per hour. They only see a tree. They look stupid in a picture, but just fine traveling. Oh…I don’t work for a cell company.
May 19th, 2009 at 9:23 am
I like the redwood tree growing randomly in the subdivision
May 19th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
kristine…it isn’t even about them looking ridiculous and ugly (though they do)…it is simply that they should be designed and celebrated. Bell towers were functional man-made structures shooting into the sky…and they were made beautiful. So beautiful in fact that we now copy them and make fake bell towers. Same goes for chimneys.
Cell phone towers should be designed to look like cell phone towers…or a beautiful version thereof.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I work in the cell tower industry.
The reason these exist is that the “real” cellphone towers are suffering from severe NIMBY. The existing ones got placed in undeveloped areas, along highways, etc, etc. (b/c most people would willingly put something 200+ feet tall next to their home - although it actually would pay your mortgage, easily).
Two thing have happened: 1) cellphone use and coverage has increased, requiring more antennas and more towers in more places. 2) The population finally noticed these towers, especially as the population expanded and built new homes in the places that used to be empty (this happens especially in the west and south). They scream bloody murder if you try to put up a new one (which make the existing ones *very* valuable).
So you get a lot of these “stealth” towers. They also show up on (new) high school stadium lights (if the antennas aren’t obvious, look for an extra 5-10 feet cylinder above the lights), inside (new) church bell towers/steeples, just above billboards (usually out of the sightline), or inside the flashing on a new stripmall or the like.
Existing structures are also being used creatively. In cities, they are on the corners of buildings or on the rooftops - again, usually just behind the siteline. Watertanks and (newly) electric company infrastructure are being used.
Yeah, the trees look pretty stupid if you stop and look at them, but they are intended to work like Kristine said - keep them from standing out like a sore thumb. You have to jump through hoops to please the local town committees.
Although, as I found out once I started working in the business, once you know what you are looking for, they are *everywhere*.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Note: I obviously meant “most people *wouldn’t* willingly” in the first paragraph
May 19th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
[...] CELL PHONE TOWERS PRETENDING TO BE TREES [...]
May 20th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
There is one near my house that’s really funny. I live in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the cell tower installed near downtown Truckee, CA is designed to look like a blue spruce. The problem is there are no blue spruce in the area. So this slightly bluish “tree” stands out like a sore thumb from all of the green pine trees. It’s easy to spot anywhere within a couple miles.
Funny stuff,
Garrett
May 29th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Here are some more cell phone towers in New Jersey.
May 31st, 2009 at 4:39 am
Oh, come on! Some of those really aren´t that bad. But okay, *some* of them *are*
June 7th, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] in the Bag? 3-D Scanners for Airports // LIVE from the inside of a carry-on xray machine // Cell Phone Towers Pretending To Be Trees // Lights! Camera! Action! // Invisibility cloak edges [...]
June 15th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Cell Phone Industry People — What companies should I follow up with that have long-term projects across the nation. We do crew lodgin well nationally. Thanks for any insignt into your industry!! — J.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
They’re giant sticks. You could easily design a nice one. Case in point– the cell tower at Domino’s Farm in Ann Arbor, MI designed by Gunnar Birkerts.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/164/397066289_7a3206b77e.jpg?v=0
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Another way to disguise cell towers in semi-rural areas is to erect an old-style farm windmill tower with a platform near the top for the antennas. We have one here in a Southern California suberb that has the windmill unit on top; not sure if it’s connected to a generator or just spins for visual effect.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:13 am
I used to work for T-Mobile. We actually had birds nesting in some of our fake trees!!
July 15th, 2009 at 11:36 am
We’ve got one here in El Paso, TX. Its supposed to be a palm tree but it looks very awkward on the edge of the city, right in the middle of the dessert! Its a good landmark if I get lost though.
August 4th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
[...] check out our HILARIOUS photo gallery of cell phone towers badly disguised as [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Tower guy is right. Another part of the problem is that communiteis REQUIRE wireless companies to design them this way. This puts a lot of added cost to the design and construction of the tower. This us ultmately passed on to you and me. So we get to pay for perseving the ‘view’.
Tony- if they designed them all like the one in A2, can you imagine how much our cell bills would go up?
People think these are just thrown up there for giggles. There is a scientific approach to placing them in the areas where coverage and capacity is needed. People want coverage in their house (an area the phones aren’t really designed to get a signal). Communities treat them like trailer parks.
Double edged sword- everyone wants coverage and nobody want to see the infrastructure that provides it. Last time I checked, I pass about 1,000 telephone poles, high tension wires, and street lights everyday. Why aren’t those ’stealth’?
September 22nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I think they look really good. I would not having one in the back of my house.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
AICP_Planner: more and more communities are demanding that power lines be “stealth” as well — by burying them underground. Underground lines do have some distinct advantages, particularly during storms, but they also have major disadvantages: they’re much more expensive to install and maintain. They don’t need as much maintenance, because they’re not exposed to the elements, but they’re also not accessible. And then the various utilities have to put some kind of an access box at the junctions so they don’t have to bring in a backhoe every time they need to work on them, and *that* box is often a source of grief (and creative landscaping) in people’s yards. You can always tell whose got the electrical junction box on their property, because of the huge and otherwise inexplicable collection of low-maintenance shrubs plunked in an odd part of the yard, usually trimmed back in one area by order of the utility. (And yes, they can order you to trim it. Penalty for ignoring them is that *they* trim it, and probably not with an eye to aesthetics.)
The city of Bloomington, MN is heavily averse to new cell phone towers, requiring they be placed on existing structures. As most of the city is residential (with laws forbidding building taller than your neighbors without special dispensation), this presents significant challenges for cell phone providers. Almost every high-rise is festooned with antennas, and still there are substantial coverage gaps. One provider decided to fix this by making an arrangement with a local church: the cell phone company would foot the bill for them to install a new bell tower, which would belong to the church and which the cell company would rent, providing them with a much-needed source of reliable revenue. It went in, it looks great — but the city council called shenanigans, because this was clearly installed to be a cell tower, not a bell tower. The giveaways are the fact that the bells are purely cosmetic and it is a freestanding structure next to the church rather than physically attached. After much grumbling, it was proven to them that this did not actually violate the code, as written, and that furthermore, the city council had approved the building permit. (They just hadn’t paid attention to the details.) The city reluctantly allowed it,but promptly changed the law to make it even more restrictive.
Thus, due to NIMBYs, Bloomington will never have any of these fake tree towers. They are against city code, because no matter how well disguised, the fact is that they are primarily intended as cell towers.
Stupid.
Google maps has a picture of the bell/cell tower under construction. The part at the top has been covered with a brown metal with the church’s stylized cross logo. It actually fits in pretty well, really. I’ve linked it under my name.
October 4th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I take offense to people who are suggesting that the view out of my house is a small price to pay so that cell phone users can pay less for their airtime. Especially since I do NOT own a cell phone, nor use one. I value the “view” or vista from my yard and take exception to those who think their cellphone is more important. I don’t interrupt your phone calls. Don’t think you should be able to interrupt my pleasure of NOT seeing a cellphone tower in any disguise outside my house.
November 9th, 2009 at 3:07 am
[...] of a ride. Midway up we crossed over and headed through the Redwood Forest. (You know all those ridiculous cell towers dressed up like insanely tall pine trees but that really resemble cheesy plastic bottle brushes? Imagine a whole forest of them, but bigger [...]
November 18th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Here’s a cell phone tower. Do you believe it really exists?
November 27th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
The tree towers are at least more attractive that some options. I am a municipal planner and have been dealing with a NIMBY furor over a massive 100 foot flag pole which is a not-so-stealthy “stealth” tower.
December 7th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
these towers arent really for cell phones there to listen in (big brother) and also for mind control!!do you research