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Night lights
By JANEL STEPHENS TAMPA -- Late last month, Victor Simmer and his building maintenance and window cleaning crew made the familiar trip up 37 floors, and then a series of ladders, to the top of the SunTrust Financial Centre. There, they set to work on one of the most eye-catching features of downtown Tampa's skyline. The crew went at it for hours, changing the pyramid of red, white and blue lights that had beamed from atop the building since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks into lights to reflect the holiday season. By dusk, a seven-tier pyramid of green and red set the 525-foot-high building apart from the others on the city's somber skyline. Today, it's the largest Christmas tree in town, and probably the only one circled by vultures. The distinctive lights that top the SunTrust building are something light designers, engineers and property managers would love to see more of. "Have you seen a picture of Miami at night?" said Brian Justo, owner of Bay Stage Lighting Co. in Drew Park, which provides the sheets of color film used to light the building. "You see all the buildings lit up in blues and reds and all different colors ... it's just spectacular." "Anything that creates interest downtown is a very positive thing," said Barry Hanerfeld, managing director of commercial services for Wilson Co., one of three donors assisting in the reproduction of a 90-foot mural on the nearby Franklin Exchange Building. "We're trying to create interest in the downtown." Completed in May of 1992, the SunTrust building, then called the Landmark Centre, stood as a beacon on Tampa's urban skyline. Art Bookin, SunTrust building operations manager, said architects attached the light pyramid to the building to symbolize "a lighthouse" and a "beacon to Tampa" as a port city. "Now, you automatically know it's Tampa by seeing the building," Bookin said. Simmer and his crew from VicArt Building Maintenance and Window Cleaning Inc. have had the job of changing the colors for three years. The pyramid has been red, white and blue for the Fourth of July, green for St. Patrick's Day and purple during Alzheimer's month. It was changed to "SunTrust blue" during Super Bowl XXXV, Simmer said. (And in a bit of patriotism that didn't involve the lights, a 360-pound, 20-foot-high gold medal hung from the Landmark Centre building in 1992 as U.S. Olympic athletes stopped in Tampa on their way to Barcelona, Spain.) The process of changing the lights works like this: A maintainance elevator carries Simmer and his crew to the top of the building and the base of the pyramid -- called a ziggurat, an architectural structure based on the temple tower of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians. The ziggurat stands about 75 feet tall from its base on the 37th floor. From there, the men climb a series of narrow outdoor ladders to gain access to the lights. Each of the seven levels contains rectangular blocks with fluorescent lights in the floor of the tier. A strip of color film called a gel is attached to a lens on the lights, which shine up against a metal wall to create a block of color. It takes crew members 41/2 hours to change the 166 fluorescent lights that illuminate the tiers. A sheet of colored gel, 20 by 24 inches, costs $6.50. The gels are often reused to save on costs. It costs about $900 to light the tiers, according to the building's property manager, Patty DelVillar. DelVillar said the decision to change the ziggurat is an in-house building management decision. For now, it will remain green and red through Jan. 1. DelVillar said the management staff hasn't decided what's next. They have considered making the ziggurat pink in October to commemorate National Breast Cancer Awareness month. But a color change could be in the works sooner if things go well for the hometown football team. "If we go to the Super Bowl," DelVillar said, "we'll be changing the colors to Bucs colors."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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