YAY!!!
By Rachel Swan, Lucy Hodgman, Staff Writer March 20, 2026
Stand on a terrace near San Francisco’s waterfront, and you’ll see them: Thousands of tiny lights twinkling from the Bay Bridge’s suspender cables, draping the western span like a sequined gown.
“Bay Lights 360” went live Friday night following celebrations with bands, speeches from Mayor Daniel Lurie and other local leaders, as well as people cavorting in blinking costumes.
“San Francisco is the greatest city in the world,” Lurie told the crowd gathered at the Embarcadero as the Friday night dusk darkened. “One of the big reasons why is because our creative class, our arts, our culture, has always led the way. We are doing so again, and this illustration tonight, the Bay Lights is just one more illustration of why.”
Bay Bridge lights returned Friday after three years of darkness
Greg
Quick and Dirty
Stand on a terrace near San Francisco’s waterfront, and you’ll see them: Thousands of tiny lights twinkling from the Bay Bridge’s suspender cables, draping the western span like a sequined gown.
“Bay Lights 360” went live Friday night following celebrations with bands, speeches from Mayor Daniel Lurie and other local leaders, as well as people cavorting in blinking costumes.
“San Francisco is the greatest city in the world,” Lurie told the crowd gathered at the Embarcadero as the Friday night dusk darkened. “One of the big reasons why is because our creative class, our arts, our culture, has always led the way. We are doing so again, and this illustration tonight, the Bay Lights is just one more illustration of why.”
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After an exuberant countdown just before 8 p.m, the crowd cheered, then quieted. Spectators watched as the lights blinked on and began to undulate across the bridge, making its 1.8 miles of steel suspender cables almost appear to breathe.
Bay Bridge lights to return Friday after three years of darkness
Bay lights presented an art installation by artist Leo Villareal, comprising of 25,000 individually controllable LEDs along 1.8 miles of the Bay Bridge, during an activation ceremony at The Embarcadero in San Francisco, March 20, 2026.
Manuel Orbegozo For the S F Chronicle
The revelry capped off three years of darkness and a “burn-in” period to ensure the lights could withstand winter storms. Generated from computers in a Caltrans electrical room on Yerba Buena Island — soon to be transferred to a bunker beneath the bridge — the dancing lights turned a piece of workhorse infrastructure into an Instagram-worthy tableau.
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Artist Leo Villareal is the wizard who created them, sitting on balconies along the Embarcadero and tinkering on a laptop. He’d connected the machine remotely to the control center at Yerba Buena, programming light patterns that would run every night.
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“It’s all inspired by the kinetic activity around the bridge,” Villareal said, standing at a waterside pier as dusk gathered on a recent weeknight. He was hunched over a MacBook Pro that he’d positioned, somewhat precariously, on a cement rail, its screen filled with rows of code and real-time simulations of the span.
Overhead stood the canvas itself, a massive steel structure with car headlights winking from its road bed, and gulls flying through its sinewy cables. Villareal wanted to evoke all of these sights and sensations, tweaking the software script to capture light and shadow that he calls “negative space.” To the untrained eye, his improvisations look like pictures that flash across the Bay Bridge cables and towers: champagne bubbles, birds, silhouettes of sharks.
Leo Villarreal, the artist behind the art installation by Bay Lights on the Bay Bridge, speaks during an activation ceremony at The Embarcadero in San Francisco, March 20, 2026.
Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle
Villareal created the first iterations of “Bay Lights” in 2013 by stringing 25,000 LED nodes along the bridge cables. Years of brute weather and corrosion forced Villareal to retire the lights in 2023, always with the intent of resurrecting them. But getting to this point wasn’t easy. A civic art nonprofit called Illuminate rallied $11 million in donations to rebuild and enhance the project. The team hired crews of engineers to string the LEDs up at night, usually closing a lane of traffic and hoisting themselves up in baskets as cars whooshed by at 50 miles per hour.
For the final stage, Villareal flew from his home in New to San Francisco, where he worked, night after night, from borrowed apartments and hotel rooms that provided a birds-eye view of the bridge. During his final week of programming, the artist and his software expert, Raphael Palefsky-Smith, set their workstation in a vacant luxury condo unit, on the eighteenth floor of a complex on Steuart Lane. They peered down at the bridge towers through untinted window glass, which allowed them to work inside.
Illuminate founder Ben Davis said Villareal’s work had taken the light installation from the “awesome” to the “sublime.” He acknowledged that San Francisco wasn’t the only city to cast light on its bridges, but said no other bridges rivaled the Bay Bridge's nightly light show under Villareal’s direction.
Illuminate Founder and CEO Ben Davis speaks during a Bay Lights activation ceremony at The Embarcadero in San Francisco, March 20, 2026.
Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle
“There’s no other function than beauty,” Davis said. “But I’m such a great believer, now, in the power of beauty to unite us.”
Their new version of “Bay Lights” ultimately features 50,000 LEDs, only half of which were activated on Friday. These bulbs, placed on the exterior or “water” side of the cables, will shimmer over the Ferry Building, Fisherman’s Wharf, China Basin, and the decks of commuter ferry boats. The 25,000 bulbs that line the interior or “road” side of the cables will continue to undergo safety testing. Ultimately, crews hope to turn them on as well so that the whole illuminated spectacle is visible from Oakland.
Crowds lingered along the Embarcadero after the festivities concluded Friday night, marveling at the lights or trying to capture them on camera. “The pattern looks different every time,” noticed Rhoda Terry, who came with her daughter, Khayla Bullock. The pair would drive through the tunnel of lights that night on their way home to the East Bay.
Robert Wallace, 69, imagined the infinite possibilities for projection on the tens of thousands of bulbs now that they’re in place — he wouldn’t want them to be used for advertisements, but he'd like to see them animated with fireworks or other designs.
Passersby take a moment to look at Bay Lights’s 25,000 individually controllable LEDs art installation on the Bay Bridge during the activation ceremony at The Embarcadero in San Francisco, March 20, 2026.
Manuel Orbegozo/For the S.F. Chronicle
“A world class city should have world class bridges,” Wallace said. “You could have it be anything you could think of.”
Remo Reyes, 27, brought a portable chair and his French bulldog, Opie, to the water’s edge for a view of the lights turning on. A San Francisco native, Reyes liked the idea of people getting “a really good view” as they come into the city.
“A lot of time we get a bad rap in the city,” Reyes said. “People are always talking bad about the city, especially in politics. And feel like this is something that just enlightens it.”