Originally Posted by
jimmuller
On my morning commute yesterday a longer section was blocked off. The westbound detour continues past Bow St. It is good to see maintenance taking place. Some of those root heaves were becoming new life forms.
I have ridden from Lexington west past 128 and back many times, not lately though, and I don't think I've ever seen those signs.
The detour is between Hurd Field/TJs/Drake Street/Drake Village, in Arlington, and Fottler Avenue, Lexington; Bow Street, Lexington, gets swept up in it. The picture was shot looking back at the Fottler Avenue intersection, where the work was particularly active just at the moment I crossed it, outbound.
The crabs, interestingly, have been there well over a decade, installed by graffiti artist Sonik (a.k.a. Caleb Neelon) as part of his Bolted Sign Project; the idea was to create graffiti that was compatible with the road-sign format; pretty clever, since it neutralizes the destructive/defacement component of grafitti art. For giant space crabs, they're pretty unobtrusive, easy to miss, I guess; I often don't notice them on a ride, but sometimes, like yesterday, they pop into the foreground. The old web site for the Bolted Sign Project seems to have succumbed to web rot, but a
2009 Phoenix article on Sonik, and
Caleb Neelon's current home page suggest what was going on here. Once upon a time, there were more of these signs along the Minuteman, but some officious person(s) removed most of them, leaving these two only. With luck, they'll survive the pending round of
improvements.
rod