Walking down the streets of New York City, it is not uncommon to see a bicycle that has been painted white and decorated with flowers, propped up against a stop sign next to a busy intersection. You might also see one of these bikes in a city like San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Albuquerque or occasionally even Minneapolis. If you don’t know what they stand for, they can be a source of confusion. If you do know what they stand for, you might take a moment of silence or give a prayer. These are called ghost bikes, and they are a way to commemorate cyclists killed after being struck by motorists.
Walking down Esther Street in Orlando, Florida, and seeing the Pulse memorial might have evoked similar feelings to those one might experience when seeing a ghost bike. A rainbow crosswalk likely won’t register as a memorial for someone who doesn’t know to be looking for it. However, for people who know about the Pulse Nightclub shooting of 2016, it might bring up feelings that any memorial would. 49 lives were taken in a targeted hate crime; in fact, it was the deadliest hate crime perpetrated against the LGBTQ+ community in modern history.
Like the ghost bike, the Pulse crosswalk marked not just a place, but an absence. It symbolized an interruption in everyday life caused by unimaginable loss. It was a signal, gentle yet enduring, that the street where the crosswalk sat had been forever changed. It asked nothing of passersby, only that they remember, even briefly, what happened there. Like all memorials, its core purpose was simple: remembrance.
That’s why it is so confounding that the crosswalk was painted over, in the middle of the night, with no public announcement, under order from the State Transportation Department, with the stated intention of removing so-called political messaging from intersections. It’s an appalling act: a state department painting over the memorial for 49 victims of a mass shooting. That is an absolutely terrifying thought.
Calling the Pulse memorial an act of political messaging doesn’t align whatsoever with its purpose. The rainbow crosswalk did not advocate for a candidate or a policy; it commemorated lives lost in an act of violence against a marginalized and often targeted community. To call that political is to confuse identity with agenda and grief with activism. At some point, this society has to stop calling these misinterpretations and start calling them silencing. The Pulse memorial was not a political message but a civic expression of collective mourning, one that was backed by the community and installed with city approval. In that way, it was no different from a ghost bike. Both live in the flow of everyday activity in a city. Both rely on public awareness to convey their meaning. Neither demands attention, but each invites reflection. Except only one was removed by the state.
Ghost bikes, while unofficial and unregulated, are most often left undisturbed. Their presence is quietly tolerated if not respected, because communities understand what they signify; they are public grief made visible.
They are permitted, perhaps, because they do not provoke thoughts of who is being remembered, but how they were killed. The Pulse crosswalk, on the other hand, was erased under the pretense of neutrality – the idea that having a public memorial for a shooting that happened in a “queer space” might mean something political. In doing so, officials revealed that the concept of neutrality, in this instance, is not neutral at all.
What made the Pulse memorial a target was not that it disrupted the peace, but that it represented the grief of a community that some in power would prefer not to acknowledge, or even speak about.
When we accept certain memorials and erase others, it sends a message about whose grief matters and whose can be pushed under the rug. It sends a message about whose lives are worth remembering. It is so important that our communities continue to serve the memories of ones we’ve lost that are facing erasure by spreading llove, not hatred.
The creation of the Pulse memorial was not a political act. Erasing it is.
