I got invited to a media reception for the relighting of the Bay Bridge Lights on Friday. Prime waterfront views, small bites, city leaders counting down to the big moment like it's New Year's Eve. The invitation described the return of the lights as "a meaningful moment for San Francisco's waterfront."
It is a meaningful moment for San Francisco's waterfront, which is a sentence I apparently mean without irony.
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They are lights on a bridge. I need to be clear about this. They are 48,000 LEDs strung along suspension cables, programmed to shimmer in patterns inspired by the water and weather below them, patterns that technically never repeat. They do not feed anyone. They are not housing. The whole project exists because a PR guy working for Caltrans in 2010 thought the Bay Bridge deserved more attention than the Golden Gate, which is maybe the most second-child energy a piece of infrastructure has ever displayed.
But when they went dark in March 2023, exactly ten years after they first lit up, people lost it. People I know who can't name their supervisor suddenly had opinions about LED failure rates in marine environments. Leo Villareal, the artist, said people told him they wanted the lights back because it had become part of their therapy. The western span at night just looked wrong, like a smile with a tooth knocked out. You'd be driving across the upper deck at midnight and the absence would register in your chest.
The original installation was only supposed to last two years. It ran for a decade. Then the wind and salt and fog did what wind and salt and fog do to everything in this city, and the whole system had to come down. To bring it back, the nonprofit Illuminate raised $11 million from more than 1,300 private donors, no public funding. They were delayed from spring 2025, then fall 2025, and finally landed on this Friday. The relighting happens to fall on Willie Brown's 92nd birthday, which feels right, since the western span is formally named for him.
That is very San Francisco. We will let entire city agencies fall apart, but we will privately fund the hell out of a public art installation because it made us feel something on the drive home.
Bay bridge lights
by u/Fixed-gear in sanfrancisco
And it did. The Bay Lights were corny and sincere and kind of magical, and the fact that they existed at all suggested a city that still believed in gestures with no practical purpose other than being beautiful. They didn't solve anything. They just made the bridge shimmer. And for a decade, every time you caught them from the Embarcadero or a rooftop or an Uber crossing the span at 1 a.m., you thought: I live here. Good.
I've not been around the Bay Bridge this week but my friends say they've been back already. They're just making it official in a couple days.
Friday at 7:30, they flip the switch. The new system is engineered to actually survive this time. Eventually a second phase will light the south side too, so the East Bay finally gets the view.
They're just lights on a bridge. But a city that will privately raise $11 million to put them back is a city that still believes in things it can't justify. I don't know what to call that. I think I'd call it home.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
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About the cover photo
It was taken by Thomas Hawk, and I riffed it to look something like SF Standard — as they have shamelessly and repeatedly pushed the Bay Bridge lights in their subscriber campaigns. It's like they've turned the LEDs on themselves.
