{"id":11457,"date":"2019-04-26T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=11457"},"modified":"2019-04-26T08:00:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T12:00:50","slug":"ante-swain-crosswalk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/04\/26\/ante-swain-crosswalk\/","title":{"rendered":"This New Crosswalk Is An Optical Illusion To (Hopefully) Slow Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"

The question was how to slow traffic around Medford\u2019s Brooks Elementary School to make it safer for students.<\/p>\n

Last year, fourth-grader Eric Dobson and his third-grade partner Isa were in the school district\u2019s Center of Citizenship and Social Responsibility, an afterschool leadership training program devoted to fixing social problems. They came up with the idea of painting a crosswalk with an optical illusion that would make it look, if you viewed it from the right direction, like a three-dimensional row of blocks was floating in the road.<\/p>\n

They were inspired by a concept that seems to have spread from China<\/a> and India<\/a> and Iran to Iceland and France and North America: Montreal and Kansas City. The theory is that drivers seeing the illusion will slow down to figure out what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

Last October, the Cambridge City Council tasked city staff to look into \u201cutilizing the Icelandic crosswalk design in an intersection in East Cambridge.\u201d<\/a> But city transportation and planning workers researched the idea and recommended against it<\/a>: \u201cIn one formal study, between 10 to 14 percent of drivers swerved upon seeing the markings, perhaps believing them to be real raised objects in the roadway. Swerving would not be a safe maneuver \u2026 In another study, the addition of the three-dimensional markings did not produce significantly more yielding to pedestrians compared with regular crosswalk markings. In various studies, there was also no clear evidence that vehicle speeds were reduced.\u201d<\/p>\n

But earlier in the year, Medford Mayor Stephanie Burke \u201cloved\u201d the students\u2019 idea for a three-dimensional crosswalk and had them present it to the city\u2019s Traffic Commission in February 2018. \u201cThe commission gave them their support. It took a whole year, but this April vacation the student\u2019s vision was realized,\u201d Brooks Elementary School reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain installing “Log Off” along Boston’s Greenway. (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Which is where Boston artist Nate Swain<\/a> comes into the picture.<\/p>\n

Well, first the school contacted Somerville mural painter Liz LaManche, but she was busy, so she referred them to Swain. They contacted him two weeks ago to paint the school crosswalk.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thrilled to do it because I was wanting to do one of these for a year or so,\u201d Swain says. He\u2019d lived in Boston\u2019s North End for a number of years before moving to Sullivan Square in August 2016. \u201cWhere I live near Sullivan Square, I have to cross Mystic Ave. to get to the T station. So I was going to do one guerrilla \u2026 right on Mystic Ave. That\u2019s super high speed, also a super wide street.\u201d He acknowledges, \u201cIt was kind of a pipe dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swain says,\u00a0\u201cI always liked the idea of calming traffic.”<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to school for landscape architecture, got my bachelors degree for that, then worked for eight years as an AutoCAD monkey,\u201d Swain explains. \u201cI was designing roadways and parking lots and all sorts of car-oriented stuff. I know when you draw a landscape the car comes first. That was kind of an eye-opening experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Swain says, \u201cTen years ago I quit that to be an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>
In 2009, Nate Swain got permission to cover the bricked up windows of the NStar substation at the corner of Prince and Salem streets in the North End with photo-murals that create the illusion of looking through curtained windows. Nov. 10, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2009, he got permission to cover the bricked up windows of the NStar substation at the corner of Prince and Salem streets in the North End with photo-murals that create the illusion of looking through curtained windows, with cats perched on sills and rooms decorated with vases and potted plants.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain’s photo mural at St. Leonard\u2019s Peace Garden on Hanover Street in Boston’s North End. (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The following year, Swain covered the wall of the Assaggio restaurant facing St. Leonard\u2019s Peace Garden on Hanover Street in the North End with a photo-mural depicting a leafy, vine-covered wall that he had photographed at the Arnold Arboretum.<\/p>\n

Swain has also painted murals of forests, rivers and flowers at the old Bartlett Yard bus maintenance facility in Boston\u2019s Roxbury neighborhood, at the Arsenal Mall in Watertown, on a building on Boston\u2019s Beacon Hill.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain’s “Sequoiarama” on Boston\u2019s Government Center Garage along Merrimack Street, Oct. 5, 2016. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He painted a 94-foot-tall sequoia that hung on Boston\u2019s Government Center Garage along Merrimac Street. \u201cWe think it adds a nice element to the garage\u2014one of the ugliest buildings in Boston,\u201d Thomas O\u2019Brien, the owner of the place, told Boston Business Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain “Barnacle City.” (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the edge of the Charles River, near the North Washington Street Bridge, on the east end of Boston\u2019s Paul Revere Park, Swain has been assembling bricks to create a \u201cLow Tide City\u201d or \u201cBarnacle City.\u201d<\/p>\n

He created a secret, guerrilla Zen rock garden in the shadow of the Zakim Bridge in 2013 and maintained it with the help of friends for a handful of years.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain’s guerrilla murals under the Zakim Bridge, Boston. (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI have the biggest guerrilla mural under the Zakim Bridge. It\u2019s like 150 feet. I didn\u2019t ask MassDOT [Department of Transportation] to do it. I just did it,\u201d Swain says. At Artists for Humanity, where he\u2019s the facilities manager, he paints the scenes on vinyl banners recycled from advertising billboards and then installs them at the site. \u201cThere\u2019s sort of this attitude: If you want to do something colorful and nice, they\u2019re kind of like just do it, as long as it\u2019s not offensive or tagging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swain says he snuck the first one up in 2014 and keeps adding. \u201cI want to keep going. The wall keeps going. I\u2019ve gotten into the idea of [painting] holes in the wall, holes just punched into the wall. Through this jagged concrete there\u2019s this idyllic world that you want to crawl into.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain’s “Lego Fill” on Congress Street near Boston’s Children’s Museum. (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Around the summer of 2015, Swain patched a broken wall of a building along Congress Street by the Children’s Museum with Lego bricks. The Lego construction was broken and he repaired it a couple times. “Right before I was going to repair it for the third time, someone else repaired it for me. Which was really amazing.” When the wall was going to be torn down in 2016, contractors emailed him in advance, returning the Legos to him and allowing him to document the change.<\/p>\n

“Log off” was a guerrilla project around Thanksgiving 2016. He wrapped a Boston Greenway building across from Rowes Wharf with a mural that made it look like a pile of logs. Greenway folks removed it after two days, he says, because they felt the magnets he’d used to hang the painting weren’t secure enough, and then returned the art to him.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain’s guerrilla mural of sunflowers on supports under Route 93 in Sullivan Square, Boston. (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He\u2019s painted guerrilla murals of sunflowers and daffodils on supports under Route 93 in Sullivan Square, near the MBTA stop. He was commissioned to paint murals for Deano’s Pasta Shop in Somerville that suggest you’re seeing through the walls into the manufacturing, packing area and shop inside.<\/p>\n

\"Nate<\/a>
Nate Swain “Painted Dead Trees.” (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2016 and ’17, he was noticing dead trees and shrubs around Boston and began painting the bare trunks and branches red, white, blue. When he painted bushes at Paul Revere Park on the Charlestown side of the Charles River, a man complained and police arrived. “They were up for a day and a half. Later they got cut down and thrown in the wood chipper. They were really beautiful. I wanted to seem them last longer than a day and a half. It’s still barren land.”<\/p>\n

Another time, he noticed the resemblance of some 1960s metal sculptures near Harvard Towers and the New England Aquarium to giant laptops. So in the summer of 2016, “I stuck on these decals of broken windows and a rotten apple and a power button.” The satirical tech logos were quickly removed.<\/p>\n

\"Optical<\/a>
Optical illusion crosswalk painted by Nate Swain at Medford\u2019s Brooks Elementary School, April 20, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And last week, Swain painted the 3D crosswalk at Medford\u2019s Brooks Elementary School, across a newly paved driveway exiting from a parking lot in back of the school to Allston Street.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really cool. It\u2019s really simple,\u201d Swain says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t able to quite finish the illusion because there\u2019s supposed to be these shadows that make it really float up, but the pavement is so dark.\u201d<\/p>\n

Medford plans to paint similar crosswalks at the city\u2019s other elementary schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was designed for 35 feet away as the perspective point,\u201d Swain says. \u201cThe further away you are the more you get this crazy illusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Optical<\/a>
Optical illusion crosswalk painted by Nate Swain at Medford\u2019s Brooks Elementary School, April 20, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI\u2019m currently going to be doing the biggest project I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d Swain says. He\u2019s got his eye on a concrete wall that he aims to paint with waves. \u201cIt\u2019s a quarter-mile long.\u201d Swain continues, \u201cI sort of have all these visions of applying paint onto concrete walls as quickly as possible, gallons and gallons, colors, just splashes. Boston kind of needs something daring.”<\/p>\n

Another mural he’d like to paint is a scene on TD Garden that would look like a cutaway view through the wall into the stadium inside.<\/p>\n

At times, Swain has been frustrated by limited opportunities to make public art around Boston, the bureaucratic hurdles that stymie ideas. Which is why his projects are guerrilla endeavors as often as not. These days, he says, “I just keep on keeping on, just keep picking away at it. I’m only one man. I have so many distractions. I have so many ideas that I want to do. … This year if I could get anything done, there’s a huge wall next to Artists For Humanity that Gillette owns on A Street.” It’s about 140 feet long and 70 feet tall. “I’d love to just wrap the whole wall in a forest or something. … There’s all these giant walls that I could totally transform.”<\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Optical<\/a>
Optical illusion crosswalk painted by Nate Swain at Medford\u2019s Brooks Elementary School, April 20, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The question was how to slow traffic around Medford\u2019s Brooks Elementary School to make it safer for students. Last year, fourth-grader Eric Dobson and his third-grade partner Isa were in the school district\u2019s Center of Citizenship and Social Responsibility, an afterschool leadership training program devoted to fixing social problems. They came up with the idea […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,115,105,112],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11457"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11508,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11457\/revisions\/11508"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}