Boxes in Downtown Saint Paul

There are boxes, which you may have never noticed, adjacent to any intersection that has traffic signals overhead. You know — the red, green, and yellow "stop and go" lights throughout our country. Modern traffic signals have to be powered and controlled by these fairly imposing metal boxes that sit not too far from every intersection where they're present. (Once you start noticing them, they're everywhere!)

In some cities, there are art programs to paint the boxes, or wrap them with artistically designed plastic, the same type of method used to wrap cars, trains, and buses. Wrapping the boxes not only makes them less ugly, but also prevents graffiti, since the boxes tend to be a preferred target for tagging.

Minneapolis has had a program to wrap or paint its boxes for quite some time, but Saint Paul has been resistant or at least hard to deal with, until now. Through Forecast Public Art, the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance has just sponsored four artists to wrap 16 boxes near Mears Park and along Kellogg Boulevard near the Mississippi River, more or less in the Lowertown part of Downtown.

The ones that feature animals and plants native to the Mississippi river biome are my favorites. There are 16 sides to the four boxes, but these photos I took came out the best, given the shadows on that sunny morning:

 

The boxes vary in size, but the proportionally taller ones are about 5.5 feet tall by 3.5 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep.

The artist is signed as rubylith.art.