In this essay, Audrey Molloy dissects the stealth palm and the iconographies of the palm tree, telegraph pole, and cell phone tower as visual media that convey myths of Western expansion and technological innovation.
“Palms—as useful as telegraph poles.” —Grace Ellery Channing, The Land of Sunshine, July 1899
In the collective modern imagination, cellular connectivity is de-spatialized, interconnected, freedom to “roam,” and seemingly extends our corporeal capacities and experiences beyond constraint. With an excess of 300 million internet-connected devices in the United States has come a corresponding proliferation of cell phone towers,1 the structural, geographically fixed tether that enables our wireless mobility. Composed of fiberglass-reinforced plastic and steel, cell transmission towers typically appear as fifty- to 200-foot-tall cylindrical monopoles2—a stature necessary for operationalizing the transmitter(s), receiver(s), and antennae it hosts—albeit a material reality discordant with cellular technology’s conceived imperceptibility.
Laden with electronic armature, the imposing steel cell tower formally interrupts our shared illusion of unfettered, unseen mobility. Its offense in the landscape is both aesthetic and aestheticized; efforts to conceal this symbol of capital-driven infrastructure and oversight have resulted in the aptly named stealth tower, and more specifically the stealth palm, a cell tower aestheticized to resemble an ornamental palm tree.
An early emblem of conquest in Greco-Roman tradition, the palm tree was adopted by the Christian Church to symbolize victory over sin and death, and was first introduced by Spanish missionaries in the American Southwest and West to denote territorial triumph.3 Readily co-opted by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SPRR) in the 19th century to signify prevailing ideologies of exoticism, abundance, and progress in relation to Western reterritorialization, the ecologically disruptive and dissonant palm tree was rendered iconic.
From El Paso, across New Mexico, through Tucson, to Los Angeles, the SPRR substantiated westward tropical claims by planting palms at rail stations, offering newcomers an easily replicable, critical-visual affirmation of unimpeded promise. Extensively reproduced through photographs, illustrations, pamphlets, and a Semi-Tropic magazine circulated by SPRR, the palm tree came to symbolize settler fantasies of the West as a fertile, Eden-like oasis.4
Significantly, the site of the railway inextricably conflates the acceleration of the palm tree with the first telecommunications technology of the industrial age, the electronic telegraph. Positioned parallel to the railway, the proximity of telegraph wires to the railroad visually sutured these abrupt temporal, spatial, and ideological infrastructures in the landscape.5
Like the palm tree, the telegraph pole was foremost an imported tree recontextualized as a device to convey. That the cell phone tower should refigure in the contemporary landscape in the ersatz form of an ornamental palm tree is a sublime coalescence of communications network(s).
In the last decade, the leading fabricator and architect of stealth palms, Tucson-based Larson Camouflage, LLC,6 manufactured more than 10,000 concealed cellular transmission sites. Originally recognized within the “concealment industry” as a producer of artificial habitats for Disney World, the enterprise’s mimetic designs attempt to mitigate the visual impacts of communications and surveillance infrastructures through semi-tropical camouflage—an effort in public information systems to “make the visible invisible.”7
Yet, as an aesthetic disguise, the palm tree embodies a profound myth of Western expansion and technological innovation. Superimposed within the built environment, the palm tree and facsimile stealth palm—while materially distinct—are symbolically and functionally coextensive within a colonial imaginary that attempts to make the apparatus of its dominion discrete. Subjugated to classic Western European orders and values, the palm tree mediates “tropic” as an escapist referent for freedom, obscuring the panopticon
it supports.
