Speaking in Tons

In 2007, a thousand-pound slab of paint, ten feet long, four feet high and three inches thick, peeled from Beta Bridge and slid onto the sidewalk along Rugby Road. It took five workers to haul away all the student sentiments that had accreted since 1994.

Words have weight, particularly when applied in layers to a concrete bridge.

For decades, students have painted Beta Bridge, UVA’s community bulletin board, on a near-daily basis. And periodically it must lighten its load. The technical term for this process is “delamination,” and it happens when the weight of the paint causes it to break away from the concrete of the bridge, according to Garth Anderson (Arch class of ’16), UVA’s facilities management historian.

It happened again in 2020, when about 500 pounds of speech had to be scooped up by a bucket loader. 

The bridge just seems to know when it’s time to clear its cache of messages, which for the past few decades has been in 13-year intervals.

“I don’t know if the peeling isn’t its own self-cleaning process,” Anderson wrote in an email. “It looks like most of the layers come off.”

Beta Bridge has carried traffic over the C&O Railroad tracks since 1924—and bits of art, club and community notices, birthday and sports team shout-outs, memorial tributes, inspirational and political messages, and other forms of expression since at least the 1970s. It’s an ever-changing canvas, a snapshot of what’s on the minds of students on any given day.

Sometimes one message has not dried completely before another is painted over it. The 2007 peel-off smelled of fresh paint, Rich Hopkins, UVA’s associate director of Grounds, said at the time.

The molting process does not damage the bridge, which is owned by the city of Charlottesville, Anderson wrote. Keeping the sidewalk clean and clear and dealing with the peeling paint is UVA’s way of being a good neighbor, according to Hopkins.

The bridge just seems to know when it’s time to clear its cache of messages, which for the past few decades has been in 13-year intervals.

When the paint will break away next is hard to predict. Anderson noted that since the bridge’s west wall has remained a memorial to the three football players killed in a shooting in November 2022, that side has been spared hundreds of coats.

“I’m not sure how you could monitor the coats of paint without making an angled cut through the paint at one end; then you need a microscope or a high-resolution photograph to count the coats of paint, but what would you do with the information?” Anderson wrote. “If you proactively attempted to remove the paint, you have a HAZMAT operation and you could damage the bridge.”

An unappealing outcome.