For the first time in three decades, Jaguars fans heading down Bay Street to the stadium for a home game won’t see a trail of yellow paw prints painted on the street.
Instead, they’ll find black-shaped boxes where the state Department of Transportation painted over the paws down blocks of Bay Street.
The state previously had no problem with the paw prints that have been around since the Jaguars played their first season in 1995. But the paws got caught up in a statewide purge of decorative art on streets.
Who painted the paw prints?
The Downtown Council of JAX Chamber had taken the lead in organizing the annual Painting of the Paw Prints. The group bought the supplies and volunteers did the painting. The event doubled as a fundraiser benefiting charitable organizations.
The Downtown Council had been planning this year’s painting to coincide with 904 Day that falls on Sept. 4. But after the state Department of Transportation launched a review of pavement art across Florida, the Downtown Council decided against doing the painting amidst the uncertainty.
While that meant no new prints, it left open the question of what would happen to the existing prints already on Bay Street.
Why did the state paint over the paws?
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in July that a “back to basics” approach to improving traffic safety requires ending the use of any pavement markings whose purpose isn’t traffic control.
“Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks,” Duffy said in a post on X. Duffy said any recipient of federal transportation funding can only have markings on streets “advancing safety, and nothing else. It’s that simple.”
The state Department of Transportation put out a June 30 memo that said the state’s traffic control manual “explicitly prohibits the application of pavement or surface art on travel lanes, paved shoulders, intersections, crosswalks or sidewalks.”
The state hadn’t raised any objections in the past about the paw prints hurting traffic safety, but they fell under the new scrutiny of art on Florida streets.
What happened to other pavement art in Jacksonville?
The state also ordered the city of Jacksonville to remove art from several crosswalks and intesections on city-maintained streets.
The city complied by painting over rainbow Pride colors on three crosswalks celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in a one-block section of Lomax Street in the Riverside neighborhood.
The city also painted over a large mural across the intersection of San Marco Boulevard at Children’s Way in the San Marco neighborhood and multicolored crosswalks at a North Pearl Street intersection in Springfield and a Milner Street crosswalk next to R.L. Brown Elementary School.
The mural and the crosswalks on North Pearl Street and on Milner Street used colored geometric shapes but not the Pride colors.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: State crackdown on pavement art erases tradition of Jaguar paw prints on Bay Street
Reporting by David Bauerlein, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
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