The frame of Pepperdine's theme tower was assembled over the weekend, beginning as soon as the LA County Board of Supervisors approved the permit Friday night. Sections of the steel frame had been trucked to campus from Riverside, and the night of the board's vote, they were bolted together under floodlights, on top of a foundation that had been poured days before it was officially permitted.¹

President William Banowsky describes the rushed construction in his memoir: "Monday's sun rose over the Santa Monica Mountains at 6:47 a.m., illuminating the prefabricated steel. Standing in stark 125-foot-tall nakedness, as [architect] Pereira had predicted, it did roughly resemble a poor man's Eiffel Tower."¹

Although the tower's superstructure was raised in May, completion of the project was delayed until September 1973.²