The Bay Bridge will soon be relit, according to the nonprofit behind the iconic light installation that spanned the San Francisco skyline for a decade.
Illuminate announced Monday that crews have begun installing 50,000 new LED bulbs across the western span of the bridge and that the renewed installation could be up and running within months.
Ben Davis, the founder of Illuminate, told KQED that he is eyeing late March for the grand relighting.
“We anticipate celebrating the return of The Bay Lights to our skyline later this winter. … We hope you will join us on the waterfront,” the company said in a post on social media platform X.
The Bay Lights — then thought to be the world’s largest LED sculpture — debuted in March 2013, and on its 10th anniversary, it was shut down amid uncertainty over a fundraising effort for repairs. Artist Leo Villareal designed the project, which Illuminate said was Davis’s “brainchild.”
The installation became a sensation throughout the Bay Area, attracting locals and visitors to the bridge that has long served as an essential commuter channel but not nearly the most famed way to cross the water.
The original Bay Lights was comprised of 25,000 bulbs fastened to the sturdy cables that extend down from the Bay Bridge’s arches. At night, lights danced through the sky, creating waves rippling between Oakland to San Francisco and beams falling like rain from the tallest points of the bridge to its road.
The optical illusions were the product of a program called Particle Universe, which Villareal could use to change how the lights’ mass, velocity and gravity appeared to act from a remote desktop computer, he told KQED before the first official lighting.
“He’s spent a significant amount of time on and around the bridge looking at the patterns of nature and sort of the built environment,” Davis said. “[Villareal] has abstracted those and then cultivated them a way for beauty while they’re still randomized.”
The installation went dark in March 2023 after a decade of wear and tear from fog, wind, salt and exhaust over the bay, creating maintenance challenges with some of the bulbs.
Illuminate had launched a fundraising campaign to renew the installation with stronger lights, but it did not reach its goal by the time Bay Lights was shut off — leaving the project’s future in doubt.
In May, the company announced that it had privately fundraised all $11 million needed to revitalize Bay Lights, with custom bulbs designed to withstand harsh weather for years to come. In addition to improving bulb quality with custom LEDs, the nonprofit is attempting to double the number of bulbs, wrapping them around both sides of the western span’s cables to create a wider field of view.
“One of the criticisms of Bay Lights was that it points at the penthouses of San Francisco and the North Bay, but it didn’t really shine on Oakland or some of the other communities on the east side of the bay,” Davis said.
This was largely for safety, he said — it wasn’t clear whether it would be unsafe or distracting for drivers to see lights on the inside of the cables as they drove across the bridge. But if the expanded version, Bay Lights 360, passes a safety inspection Davis expects will take place in January, the lights on the inside of the cables will be visible from the East Bay and even to commuters.
Davis said that in this installation, they are going to “see if we can actually, as a matter of aesthetic equity, address that concern by making it available to everyone really in an excited way.”
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