Staff columnist
Blank building walls, drab utility boxes, faded and rusty fire hydrants. Practically everything in the urban landscape that can’t run, fly or slither away is a sitting duck for artists these days as cities haul out their revitalization handbooks in attempts to make downtown areas as important and vibrant as they once were.
The latest blank canvas to be discovered by artists, and now urban planners, is the literally downtrodden crosswalk.
The crosswalk’s job used to be simple: Two parallel lines painted across a thoroughfare, giving pedestrians a better than even chance to make it across the street unscathed.
The strictly utilitarian safety role has been broadened in recent years to include a more aesthetic element, with artists bringing beauty and/or whimsy to the space between the lines.
The latest gussying up of crosswalks in Long Beach is on downtown’s Pine Avenue, where by the end of the week, five midway crosswalks between First and Seventh streets will have been turned into vibrant and highly stylized works of art, which you might find attractive.
“What is it?” was a question we heard a few times while we gawked at the first of the five crosswalks, between Seventh and Sixth streets.
One of those who didn’t know what to make of the cross-art had emerged from the Mabel’s Gourmet Pralines shop. It took us a while, too, to figure out what we ultimately decided was Metro trains interspersed with bat rays and sand sharks. A block to the south we had no (or very little) problem discerning the Grand Prix cars but couldn’t quite tell that they were intermingled with leopard sharks. Like we said, “stylized.”
Because a lot of people are going to be grouchy about this and ask the tiresome question, “Doesn’t Long Beach have better things to spend money on than painting motorized vehicles paired with fish in crosswalks?” we asked Downtown Long Beach Alliance’s placemaking manager Sean Warner that question, though we loaded it with a lot of apologia.
Warner’s answer was a two-parter: “The money we used is from a dedicated fund to making public space improvements and is in keeping with our goals to increase pedestrian activity. And, the second part is that public spaces and streetscape would be boring with just sidewalks, crosswalks and lights.”
The response to the civic griper’s follow-up question is: $40,000.
“That includes the artist fees, making the stencils for the five designs and the installation’s paint crew,” explained Warner.
The artist was Hataya Tubman, who designed similar crosswalk patterns for Pasadena’s Playhouse District.
Besides making things less boring (we will just die from ennui if we see one more unpainted crosswalk), Warner expects the tarted-up crosswalks to increase pedestrian traffic downtown, which presupposes that people will cross the street to see them.
The downtown crosswalks joins the roster of other mashups of art/safety in the city, which includes crosswalks on the Broadway Corridor in Alamitos Beach that are painted with Pride flag colors (which, frankly, is most of them), and the piano-keys crosswalks in Bixby Knolls and Long Beach Boulevard and Bixby Road.
Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, tgrobaty@scng.com, @grobaty on Twitter.
