Tony Irons
Tony Irons and his wife, Lee, raised their family of four boys in a house he had built deep in the woods of New Hampshire. He worked as a carpenter, then owner of a construction firm. In 1984, he went into partnership with an architect providing architectural and construction management services. In the early nineties, he accepted a position as an assistant in the Bureau of Architecture in San Francisco. The mayor, Frank Jordan, tapped him to be the project manager for the $300M renovation of City Hall, a National Historic Landmark and Beaux-Arts masterpiece involving base isolation as the seismic resistance system. In 1994, he qualified to stand for the architectural exam in California based on nine years of experience as a principal of architectural firms. He passed and became registered in California. The City Hall project won twelve local, state and national design awards. In 1999, he was appointed City Architect by mayor Willie Brown.
Tony was awarded a Loeb Fellowship the following year. While there, he focused on creative writing, studying with Anne Bernays through the Nieman Foundation. San Francisco asked him to return to the city as a Deputy Superintendent of Schools. Millions of dollars had been stolen from the District through construction bond measures. The City Attorney and Board of Education wanted him to find out who had done this, how they had done it and to restore the public trust in the school system. Three individuals were sent to prison and a new bond measure successfully passed. Tony retired from city employment and built a house in Baja, Mexico.
In 2004, the city asked him to return to oversee a $4B renovation of the water system that stretched from Yosemite to San Francisco and supplied water to central California agriculture and 18 Bay Area cities. It involved massive pipelines, dams, tunnels, pump stations and purification plants. The project received numerous engineering awards. In 2008, Tony retired again. He now splits his time between New Hampshire and Baja, writing novels. Three have been published, another is due out in 2019.