And downtown, there's the Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission Street; 415-655-7800; www.thentryorg; $10 entry), housed in a 1907 brick building converted by Daniel Libeskind into a glittering blue steel monument.
A query for "Taj Mahal" might produce ranked results for the Indian monument, the blues musician or Donald Trump's casino.
Orbison had struggled to get Monument to release Blue Bayou in 1963, as label boss Fred Foster reckoned the charts already had too many songs with "blue" in the title.
In the welcoming ceremony Monday morning, Obama placed a wreath of red, white and blue roses at an imposing monument honoring Cuban independence hero Jose Marti, who is revered throughout the hemisphere.
Take a look at the guy: all crags and rasps, grizzled and gravelly; white hair, cold, sky-blue eyes, a face like Monument Valley, that Mitchum-esque barrel chest; that pinch of Ward Bond's ferocity, always trailing a Pigpen-dustcloud of waywardness and notoriety, alcoholic and narcotic excess, rehab and recidivism.
At the time of Fellows' discovery of the monument, the remains of blue paint were found in the backgrounds of the reliefs.
Behind the cloud-studded blue are the facades of fragile monuments under restoration; those structures are also the beneficiaries of the advertising revenue.
There was an impressive variety of offerings, including some elaborate designs mimicking ziggurats and Al Shaheed monument in Baghdad, two giant blue half-shells.
But there was no socialist plot: The Blue Room tree's theme last year was monuments, and the ornaments were put together by civic groups all over the country.
In ancient Egypt, ointment jars were made of deep blue cobalt and white glass, and public monuments in ancient Greece were painted in vivid hues.
