We’re almost at the finish line for 2020, but there’s still time for at least one more monolith—and, apropos of the season, this one’s made out of gingerbread.
Dotted with frosting and gumdrops, a confectionery tower was discovered Christmas Day by visitors to San Francisco’s Corona Heights Park.
No one has taken credit for the sweet structure, but locals have called it a ‘Christmas miracle,’ bringing joy during a turbulent time.
The city’s parks department says it’s not in any rush to take the monolith down: ‘We all deserve a little bit of magic right now,’ an agency spokesperson told KQED.
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Visitors to a hilltop in San Francisco’s Corona Heights Park on Christmas Day were greeting by yet another monolith, this one made of gingerbread.
App developer Ananda Sharma spotted the tower during his morning run and snapped a photo.
‘It smelled very good,’ he tweeted.
Sharma told KQED he smelled the tower before he saw it.
‘It made me smile. I wonder who did it, and when they put it there?’
The sweet structure is supported by plywood and decorated with icing and gumdrops
One witness said it smelled ‘very good,’ while another licked the tower to make sure it was real
Visitors to the park, which overlooks the Castro, have had difficulty assessing the monolith’s size: Some guessed it was 10 feet tall, others 7 feet, and some hazarded just 5 feet.
In photos, the structure dwarfs a woman standing next to it.
At least one passerby needed proof the candy column wasn’t a fake.
‘The gingerbread monolith is real. So real that i even watched someone lick it,’ Product manager Josh Ackerman tweeted. ‘And then I proceeded to say a prayer for them. On that note, merry monolith!
At one point, the gingerbread tower was even framed by a rainbow.
‘In the perfect act of SF 2020 defiance, there is an expertly-iced gingerbread monolith atop Corona Heights. Miracle?’ tweeted Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, called the gingerbread tower ‘the perfect act of SF defiance.’
More than a dozen monoliths have popped up all over the world, starting with a shiny metal one spotted in the Utah desert on November 18 by officials with the Division of Wildlife Resources.
Since then others have cropped up, including ones in Warsaw, The Netherlands, the Isle Of Wight, central California, Vermont, and at a mountain-bike theme park in Canterbury, New Zealand.
The three-sided metal pillars are reminiscent of the science fiction Space Odyssey series by author Arthur C. Clarke in which three such monoliths, built by extraterrestrials to foster intelligent life, are discovered across the solar system.
The original monolith appeared in the remote desert in southeastern Utah in November
On December 10, a monolith appeared overnight in Adelaide, Australia, with three different coordinates engraved into it.
The top coordinates were for Trump Tower in Manhattan, while the second location was the uninhabited island of Managaha in the Northern Mariana Islands, and the bottom set marked the Sphinx in Egypt’s Al Giza Desert.
A three-sided structure was found at Seaford Train Bridge in Adelaide’s southern suburbs earlier this month. Etched into it were coordinates for three different locations around the world
Most of the structures have disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as they appeared, with little information on their creators.
The fate of San Francisco’s gingerbread monolith is unknown, as Sharma noted it began raining in the city around 11:30am.
‘…Not sure what happens to gingerbread in the rain,’ he wrote, ‘but it probably isn’t good.’