For about a decade, two enormous murals adorned the Mulberry Street Bridge in Harrisburg.
You may remember them: 86 panels, 43 panels per mural, spanning 640 feet in total, showing colorful scenes of life in Harrisburg.
In April 2014, PennDOT removed the murals to rehabilitate the bridge, with no plans to reinstall them. So, for the past two years, they’ve been in storage in Harrisburg’s old central post office on Market Street, in space donated by Blue Bell-based Equilibrium Equities, which now owns the building.
But a volunteer group—the Mulberry Street Bridge Mural Preservation and Relocation Committee—has formed to free them from storage and put them back before the public.
“We’re five volunteers with a monumental task,” said member Tara Leo Auchey, who also runs the online publication today’s the day Harrisburg.
The committee has engaged Navarro & Wright Consulting Engineers and has a preliminary arrangement with the YWCA of Greater Harrisburg to display one of the murals, the one that faced north on the bridge, at the corner of Cameron and Market streets.
Despite the all-volunteer effort, the expense to relocate and mount the murals is monumental. Besides their size, the unique makeup of the murals makes their re-display a costly effort.
“They were created on ‘parachute fabric’—polytab mural fabric,” said Lauren Nye, the exhibitions manager at the Susquehanna Art Museum and a committee member. “And that fused to the surface of the bridge, so there was no peeling it off.”
When the committee talks about preserving and relocating these murals, Auchey said, they are not just 86 panels of art. They are enormous sheets of metal, each one 7-feet tall and 7-feet wide.
The north mural depicts a single scene across 43 panels, a history of Harrisburg from its early days through the City Beautiful movement of the early 1900s. The committee is dedicated not only to keeping all of the north mural’s panels together in sequence, but to keeping it at the intersection of downtown and Allison Hill, the two neighborhoods the Mulberry Street Bridge connects.
The south mural is a series of individual scenes across two and three panels each, featuring people affiliated with the arts group, Danzante, and from around Allison Hill.
“We were at the South Allison Hill Multicultural Festival,” said Nye, “So many people—at every event that we go to—walk by and say, ‘Oh my God, I remember these! Do they still exist?’ They’re like, ‘My cousin is on there!’ ‘My daughter is on there!’ ‘A portrait of my friend is on there!’”
These interactions illustrate the committee’s other important mission, besides raising money: outreach to the community.
“That’s the biggest thing we want people to know, that they are still safe and there is still a group of people who are invested in bringing them back to the public,” said Nye.
A Gift
These works of art need to be displayed again not just because they’re beautiful, but to demonstrate Harrisburg’s identity as a unified city and to contribute to its economic development as a source of tourism, say committee members.
“For the 10 years they were up on the Mulberry Street Bridge, there was no graffiti on them,” said Harrisburg artist Nancy Mendes, a committee member. “That shows that people loved and respected it. Why not give it back to them as a gift?”
During its campaign, the committee has formed relationships with people and companies that have helped with various aspects of the project. In addition, they say they have the support of the city, which has promised flood clearances to mount the murals on the Y’s property at Cameron and Market. However, when they applied for tourism funding, Dauphin County rejected their application. So, to raise money, the committee has begun throwing events.
“But it’s not $1,000” they need, said Auchey, referring to the average amount an event pulls in.
In fact, the installation for the north murals alone will require a budget of $250,000.
Auchey said the goal now is to have a small fundraiser every two to three months. Fortunately, both of the artists who worked on the murals are dedicated to preserving and restoring them.
Elody Gyekis, who painted the north murals, donated a piece of art to the committee’s last auction. The committee also wants to launch a Kickstarter campaign featuring photo prints by south mural artist Cesar Viveros of his work on the north Philadelphia mural “The Sacred Now,” which was painted for Pope Francis’ 2015 visit to Philadelphia (the pope signed it).
Indeed, if the Mulberry Street Bridge murals are ever going to be a part of the community again, the effort is going to need to be bigger than just a five-person committee. When committee members attended the Multicultural Festival, Nye said, they saw a man walk by.
“He totally didn’t care about anything,” she said. “He’s walking down the street. He sees our picture and stops. He’s like, ‘Oh my God. I remember those murals! You guys have them?”
Nye told him that, yes, they did. He then pulled out his wallet.
“He said, ‘My wife gave me $2 today to spend however I want. I want you to have it. This is important.’”
To learn more about the effort to save and re-mount the murals, please visit the Facebook page: Mulberry Street Bridge Murals Preservation and Relocation.
