Thoughts on Bridge Mix

“If there’s good weather, and there will be, there’s going to be a lot going on. There’s going to be live music, there will be capoeira dancers, some folks from the Natural History Museum are going to come out with telescopes. Apparently Jupiter will be visible that night. If not a full moon, we’ll be close to one.

And then the artists are going to transform the bridge itself. The bridge is a little bit scary, but it’s an important piece of connective infrastructure in the city. The northern part of Tremont where Lincoln Park, and the galleries, and the restaurants are has really experienced a lot of investment and energy. The southern part has a dog park, it has Clark Fields, and it’s a place where there is burgeoning energy. So the bridge is just this important link, and if people are scared to go across it, it harms the neighborhood.

For the night, the bridge isn’t going to be scary. For the night, the bridge is going to be welcoming, comfortable, exciting, beautiful.

So the bridge will be lit (by Gauri Torgalkar). Alex Tapie and Wes Johansen are going to install a living room on the bridge itself to kind of promote this idea that this is a community space. It may be kind of an odd, scary sort of community space over a freeway, but for that night, it will be beautiful and comfortable and fun.

And then at the northern end, Patsy Kline is going to set up a mobile art gallery out of a U-Haul, where she’s doing a work about being present and not being present in your life. So she will have interviews and video installations and connections to the other side of the bridge, that you can experience from the north side.

Also on the north side we’ve got Gypsy Bean, my very favorite café. Nicky is coming out for the night with coffee and sweats. So there will be food for sale from them.

On the southern side of the bridge is a stage, and that’s where there’ll be the dancers from the capoeira school in Tremont, and they’ll be doing a performance. The band is Miss Melvis and the Buford Pusser Experience and they’ll be really good. I’ve heard them perform and they’re really good. They’re loud and they’re fun and it’s a really good band.

Eric Hooper wants to do a greenhouse raising that night. He has a farm at the southern end. Kind of like a farm raising, but a greenhouse raising, to celebrate the fact that agriculture is flourishing in the city. Eric’s been there since, I think 1999, so he has an established farm in the city.

Other than that, it’s just people and fun, and on a nice night, it’s a beautiful place to be."
- CUDC Senior Planner Terry Schwarz

And the weather forecast says that it will be a gorgeous night, so go experience it for yourself!