Yeah, we know what you mean. Intense. Projected onto the east and west sides of the building between 5 p.m. and midnight, with extended hours set for New Year's Eve and Day, the City Hall light show has turned the citizens of Philadelphia into a bunch of people gazing up at all the colors. It's freaking a few of us out, annoying others, and allowing some, like Bakshas, to transcend the mundane with an encounter with art that, much like the Gates project in New York's Central Park last winter, has dramatically remade a familiar public space.
"The pillars are much more yellow sometimes," Bakshas is saying. "The cornices at the top are orange, sometimes yellow. The statuary is white, sometimes purple."
It's taking him back to an earlier time, a sacred place. "It reminds me of the crucifixes I got when I was a kid that were glow-in-the-dark," he says.
People who come to see it often don't know what to make of it. Is it art deco or Victorian? Did the Mummers have something to do with it? (It does look in a way like something a fancy brigade could be pulling down Broad Street.) Something out of Disney? Scooby-Doo? A fairy tale?
Some people look at the building and are convinced it's been painted. "I was hoping," said Nahid Ibrahim, 19, a Temple theater arts major. "I thought, 'Wow, this is so colorful and welcoming and fun.' But it was obvious they're not going to do that since it's historic."
Ibrahim's obsessed with the top tier of columns on the west side. "I like watching how the third pillars go from yellow to orange," he says. "It's really cool."
For others, the shock of the building's look has rocked their world. A woman passing by around 11 p.m. Saturday said: "Oh my God, all this time I've lived here, I never noticed this."
