San Antonio is set to roll out its new rainbow sidewalks in the Pride Cultural Heritage District this weekend, turning a political dust-up into a public celebration. A ribbon-cutting is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Sunday at North Main Avenue and East Evergreen Street, where the painted sidewalks are meant to take the place of the rainbow crosswalks the city removed earlier this year under state pressure. City officials and local advocates say the new sidewalk art keeps Pride visible in the heart of the "Gay Strip."
According to the San Antonio Express-News, the city's LGBTQ+ Advisory Board and community members will lead the ceremony, which the city has billed in a social media post as "a powerful celebration of unity." Crews were spotted in February painting the rainbow stripes along North Main as part of the project. Organizers have said the sidewalks are intended as a stand-in for the crosswalks that had marked the intersection since 2018.
Why the crosswalks came down
The rainbow crosswalks came up only after the Texas Department of Transportation rejected San Antonio's request for an exemption and told cities to scrub "political ideologies" from active travel lanes, according to the city's explanation of the removal. In response, the city shifted to rainbow stripes on sidewalks one block north and south of the intersection and worked out the design with the LGBTQ+ Advisory Board, San Antonio Report noted. City officials had argued the painted crosswalk improved safety at the intersection, but TxDOT said the markings did not comply with federal pavement standards.
Gov. Greg Abbott followed up in October with a directive threatening to withhold state transportation funding from cities that did not remove markings he labeled political, and local reporting has tied that move to a broader federal push. Axios reported that U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy urged governors to join a national roadway-safety initiative that called for removing artwork and political messaging from roads. That mix of state and federal pressure has triggered similar changes in Austin, Houston and Dallas in recent months.
Legal and funding questions
The new rainbow sidewalk project, budgeted at $170,000, has been anything but quiet. Critics have argued the plan misuses public-works money, and two groups went to court earlier this year to try to halt the work. A lawsuit filed by Pride San Antonio and the Texas Conservative Liberty Forum claimed the city failed to properly allocate or vote on the funds tied to the sidewalk and crosswalk work, prompting a temporary pause in the project, the Express-News reported. City leaders maintain that most of the cost is tied to removing and re-striping the intersection to satisfy state standards and that parts of the original crosswalk will be preserved for a future archive or art installation.
City Hall and the community are still not entirely on the same page. District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur and Councilman Jalen McKee‑Rodriguez backed the sidewalk design as a way to preserve visibility for the LGBTQ+ district, while other council members objected to spending public dollars on the project, according to local coverage. The city also drilled out pavement cores from the crosswalk before removal so the remnants can be saved for the city archive or future exhibits, Texas Public Radio reported. Supporters argue the sidewalks will create a longer corridor of Pride visibility than a single crosswalk ever did, while opponents say the state should not be accommodated with taxpayer money.
Organizers describe Sunday’s ribbon-cutting as both a street party and a pointed response to the state directive, with local activists and business owners expected to turn out. For now, the installation is the city's chosen middle ground between state enforcement and local visibility and is part of a broader wave of similar responses across Texas, KSAT reported. Drivers can expect traffic controls in the immediate area during the ceremony, and the city has not announced any plans beyond the current sidewalk art.
