Under the Tracks

The overpass on Ninth carries the elevated line across the old rail yards, and for forty years the space underneath it was the kind of place you walked through quickly. Pigeons. Puddles that never dried. A single bulb on the north pillar that had been out since anyone could remember.

Then, over one summer, six artists painted the six pillars, and the underpass became somewhere people go on purpose. Couples take photographs there. A food truck parks there on Saturdays. Somebody fixed the bulb.

Pillar by pillar

The project started with a permit nobody expected to be granted and a budget that would not have covered the paint for one pillar. The artists sourced the rest themselves — leftover stock from a hardware store that was closing, scaffolding borrowed from a contractor who liked the idea, and a lot of late nights when the trains were few enough to work under.

Each pillar belongs to one artist, and each artist was given a single rule: the work has to be legible from a moving train. That constraint shaped everything — the big flat fields of colour, the letterforms tall enough to read at forty miles an hour, the absence of the fine detail that would turn to noise from a window.

“You get about a second and a half. Whatever you paint has to say what it says in that time.”

The fourth pillar, the one with the bulb, is the one people talk about. It shows the neighbourhood as it was before the yards closed — a street of houses that are gone now — painted from photographs the artist collected from residents who still had them.

None of the murals is signed. The artists decided early on that the work belonged to the overpass, not to them, and so far that has held. Ask who painted the fourth pillar and the regulars will tell you: the neighbourhood did.