Rainbow Lights Are Headed To All 4 Castro Station Escalators

Rainbow Lights Are Headed To All 4 Castro Station EscalatorsPhoto: Shane Downing/Hoodline
Shane Downing
Published on November 10, 2016

Now that the election is behind us, we can turn our attention back to Castro neighborhood news—and no, we’re not talking about Les Natali’s most recent Hamburger Mary’s job posting on Craigslist. Even in the darkest of election times, we all knew what was shining at the end of the tunnel: a rainbow light.

That’s right, Gay Disneyland season ticket holders, it’s been confirmed that each and every one of our four Castro Station escalators will be fitted with rainbow-colored LEDs.

Of course, as we previously reported, work on the remaining two platform escalators will take at least five months each. However, because there is no price increase or added outage time to upgrade the escalators from standard white LEDs to rainbow lights, SFMTA is saying that the community is in support of the decision.

“The current plan is to provide rainbow lights at all Castro Station escalators based on requests from the community,” wrote SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose in an email. According to him, the necessary components to provide the lights at the station’s north street escalator have already been ordered, and “it will be retrofitted with rainbow lights as soon as the components arrive.”

Back in October, neighbors were encouraged to email an SFMTA public relations officer to share their thoughts regarding the escalator lights; however, the transit authority ultimately took the matter to a local merchants’ meeting.

“MTA didn’t want to deal with a formal survey,” president Daniel Bergerac jokingly told the Castro Merchants at last week’s meeting. In a straw-poll vote on whether or not local business owners wanted the other three Castro Station escalators fitted with rainbow lighting, members unanimously voted “yes.”

Rose wrote that SFMTA had received additional support for the rainbow escalators beyond the merchants’ informal “yes” vote; but he wasn’t able to quantify that support, nor was he able to respond to whether or not any neighbors came out against the multicolored installation.

The coolest escalator in SF ❤️💛💚💙💜 #castro #rainbowescalator

A photo posted by C l a r a L e e ⭐️ (@clara.yj) on

With the news, we can now turn our attention away from Castro Station’s escalators, and shine our light (just a simple white metaphorical, journalistic spotlight) onto the forthcoming elevator improvements headed to Harvey Milk Plaza.

Is a rainbow-lit shaft in our future, neighbors? We’re going to poke around and see what plans are in the pipeline before we get back to you.

Until then, tell us what you think about the rainbow-ification of the Castro Station escalators in the comments below.