A Tale Of Two Bridges

Barley, a dog, looks down the length of a bridge with orange lights.

Barley, a dog, looks back over her shoulder on a bridge with blue lights.

Over 20 years ago, the white globes covering a bridge’s light fixtures were replaced with blue globes as part of a weekend celebration. The community loved those blue lights so much that, when the white globes were restored, there was a general outcry. There was no going back, it was near-universally felt: The bridge must now be blue. So the powers that be swapped the party globes back in and the bridge has remained blue to this day. When, much later, a second bridge over the same body of water was built, symmetry demanded that the new bridge have a distinctive chromatic identity. I’m sure orange was an easy sell (it being a pretty typical color for lights to have), but it can’t have hurt that it sat directly opposite on the color wheel.