A locally viral Facebook post this week declares that the Bay Bridge’s beloved Bay Lights display is coming back on March 7. But the Bay Lights organizers tell us this is completely false, saying “It ain't happening March 7."
Your Facebook scrolling this week may have lifted your spirits with an exciting announcement that the Bay Bridge’s famed Bay Lights LED display, which has been off for nearly two full years, were coming back on Friday, March 7. This claim seems plausible, after all, the project’s organizers Illuminate have raised the $11 million they needed, and the lights are currently being reinstalled.
The Facebook event is entitled “JUST ANNOUNCED: SF Turns on $11M, 50,000 LED’s display. Join it!” The invite declares the Bay Lights will be lighting up again the night of March 7, and asks you to join their gathering to “Watch the magic of the Bay Bridge Lights re-imagined.”
This seems like exciting news! So we reached out to Illuminate founder Ben Davis, who was caught completely off guard by this announcement, and informed us that the invite's announcement was all complete bullshit.
"I'm not sure where this March 7 date came from,” Davis tells SFist. “It ain't happening March 7."
Illuminate organizers have made multiple requests on the invite’s discussion page to take the misinformation post down, but those pleas have gone ignored.
The event has been up on Facebook since shortly after 12 noon on Tuesday. As of press time for this post, the invite has nearly 450 people marked Interested or Going, and is acquiring about 100 new marked potential attendees every day.
So who are these jokers hyping up this completely false event? The event host is listed as Club Urban Diversion Adventures, a name which might ring a bell.
This is the same outfit that tried to sell registrations to the annual, free flash mob Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight as if it were a paid event requiring a membership, in the tradition of previous hucksters who’ve tried to sell tickets to free public events like SantaCon and 4/20 on Hippie Hill. And in a very odd twist, Club Urban Diversions’ founder is alleged to have been the person who dressed in a masked vigilante Batman-style costume to scare off would-be Fisherman’s Wharf thieves in the summer of 2023.
So where did Club Urban Diversion Adventures get this March 7 Bay Lights relighting date? They simply pulled it out of their ass.
Club Urban Diversion is a paid membership group ($19-$59 per month), and they seem fond of using Facebook to promote events that are sometimes free, though presented as if they require a paid Club Urban Diversion membership. Their Bay Lights Facebook invite contains a link to their own event page, which curiously lists the Cost Range of this event as being “$0.00 - $10.00.”
But after a long scroll through 500 words of marketing and promotional nonsense, the bottom of that invite has a disclaimer saying. “Please note that the date of this event is subject to change based on the date the lights will be switched back on. As of the date we created this event, the official date has not been announced when the light [sic] will be turned on.”
Yet the Facebook invite contains no such disclaimer, and is marketing the event as if the March 7 date was a certainty. And that Facebook invite is reaching a much broader audience.
Club Urban Diversion does promote some events that would not be free, like Tahoe ski weekends and such. And I suppose there could be an argument that some people might gladly pay money to attend free events like this along with a group. But in this case, the event is being marketed with a patently false date, and misleading a ton of people in a public online forum.
The Bay Lights are definitely coming back. The lights are being installed now, and testing will start soon. But do not be dazzled by social media claims that the Bay Lights will be back on by March 7.
Image: Illuminate
