A deadline this week for Florida’s local leaders to remove all street art has come and gone, but in some cities the rainbows and colored roads haven’t disappeared. It’s unclear what state leaders will do in cities where elected officials have blown past their time limit.

Some cities, including Orlando, Tampa, St. Petersburg and Gainesville, reluctantly agreed to have their streets paved when faced with a decision between art and state funding. Others, however, are using whatever leverage they can to keep their street art.

Elected officials in Miami Beach, Key West, Delray Beach and Fort Lauderdale have all missed their deadline Thursday this week to remove street art. All have started the process of an appeal. Some say they are in limbo waiting to see how the Florida Department of Transportation responds.

“I’m sure that the state will find every way they can to associate their actions and to make it look like they’re trying to enforce traffic control,” said Fort Lauderdale’s Mayor, Dean Trantalis, a Democrat, at a special meeting last week to discuss the state’s order. “But as has been said time and time again, it’s simply a camouflage for their true intent — which is to erase or eliminate as many LGBTQ references in the state as possible.”

The transportation department sent elected leaders in every Florida city with painted roads a letter over the summer, offering two options: remove street art, or lose millions in state funding for road projects. State leaders say the order is necessary for safety reasons.

State officials offered the chance to appeal the order but appeared to stand firm on their decision, writing that “the department has already reviewed the pavement markings,” and they “determined that the pavement markings will not be allowed.”

“So, they’re giving us the opportunity to ask for a review of the situation,” Trantalis said,  ”but they’re telling us in advance that they’re not going to change their mind.”

Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale leaders announced their intentions to appeal. In Delray Beach and Key West, city leaders were given until Wednesday this week to remove their street art; both cities have until Friday to make arguments in favor of keeping the art, with no real timeline given for when the state would make its final decision.

Across the state, stretches of roads that were once rainbow colored, had murals supporting both Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements, and even school art projects, have been paved jet black to comply with the new transportation department rule.

Along some of these roads, the fight to retain street art is carried out by protesters. A snapshot of that happened here in Orlando.

For weeks, foldable chairs, cardboard signs and packs of street chalk have been scattered around the lawn outside the former Pulse Nightclub. For nearly a decade, the city-purchased building has served to honor the memory of 49 lives lost in one of America’s deadliest mass shootings. In August, it became one of the many battlegrounds in what some say is Florida’s newest culture war.

In what Orlando’s Democratic Mayor, Buddy Dyer, called a “cruel political act,” one rainbow crosswalk serving as a memorial outside Pulse was paved over in the dead of night on Aug. 20. Protesters, who have been standing along the crosswalk ever since, call it a blatant attempt by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to remove the LGBTQ community from the public eye.

Orlando’s leaders weren’t given much room to push back against the Florida Department of Transportation order. Officials said Orange Avenue, where the crosswalk is located, is a state road, meaning the state has jurisdiction. Still, protesters hope the state changes its mind.

The paving of the Pulse memorial crosswalk has generated pushback, with protesters saying state leaders are only adding salt to the wounds from the 2016 mass shooting.

“The community’s resilience is what created that public crosswalk,” said Patience Murray, 29, who was at the nightclub during the shooting. “It just seems like there is a larger agenda going on, of a display of power.”

Murray was 20, visiting Orlando with friends the night of the shooting. Her friend’s cousin, Akyra Monet Murray, who was not related, was with her that night. She was the youngest person shot and killed at Pulse.

Nine years after the shooting, Murray said she hopes the Orlando community continues to band together and fight the state’s order. She said it feels like state leaders are trying to erase history.

“It feels like a soft launch of some larger initiative,” Murray said. She explained that the state’s insistence on removing the memorial felt like an attempt to “homogenize us all into a lack of individuality and expression and culture.”

Since Pulse’s rainbow crosswalk was paved overnight, Orlando residents have spent time outside the memorial filling in the road with street chalk. Efforts to protest the state order were met with arrests.

Four people have been arrested outside of the Pulse crosswalk, and all are represented by the same Orlando attorney, Blake Simons. He said that he doesn’t think the state has any case to bring against his clients.

“This is a First Amendment free speech violation,” Simons said. “The crosswalk is an extension of the sidewalk, which has been traditionally held as a public forum.”

State transportation officials sponsored an art contest that let students at an elementary school in Lake Nona, near Orlando, design art for bike lanes outside the school. Just months after the contest ended and the road painted, they ordered it to be removed.

The Governor has frequently cited safety as a reason for paving over street art, which critics dispute.

“I think that’s easy, low-hanging fruit,” said Trantalis, Fort Lauderdale’s Mayor. “It just brings me back to that question of urgency — why now, and why is it happening so fast without any conversation. And that’s ultimately where I continue to be confused and extremely perplexed.”

Florida is one of the deadliest states for pedestrians, according to nonprofit Smart Growth America. A report from 2022 shows that Florida cities rank in the Top 20 for pedestrian deaths, with Orlando coming in at No. 18.

A 2022 study for Bloomberg Philanthropies by a traffic engineering firm compared traffic data from intersections, including some in Florida, before and after streets were painted. Except for two examples in Georgia, every intersection had a lower or unchanged crash rate. One site in Pinecrest — which averaged nearly six crashes per year — dropped to an average of one crash per year after the street art was installed.

Key West and Delray Beach were some of the first cities to push back against the state’s order — Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale followed shortly after. Street art still stands in these cities.

In Delray Beach, city leaders have fought to keep a large intersection painted to honor victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. On Tuesday, they presented their case at a hearing in Orlando to keep the art. They did not get a clear timeline on when they would hear from transportation officials their appeal. The city manager said they would “stand by for their decision.”

In Miami Beach, after submitting an appeal to the transportation department, commissioners voted in favor of finding ways of honoring the city’s LGBTQ community if the rainbow crosswalk was removed. They also voted to line the road with rainbow flags.

In Fort Lauderdale, city leaders voted to find a lawyer to represent them in their appeal to the state. They also held an hourslong special meeting dedicated to finding an appropriate response to the state’s order.

State transportation officials wrote in a memo that cities that don’t appeal, or lose their appeal, will have to pay the department’s cost to paint over crosswalk art.

“If we allow it to happen without any fight, without any protest at all, these things will continue to happen at a massive scale,” Murray said. “It’s really unfortunate that this is happening right now, but I think it’s an opportunity for us to speak up and advocate for our ability to exist and express ourselves within our communities.”

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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at [email protected]. You can donate to support our students here.

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