A year of community painting sessions along Kensington Avenue reached its finish line this week, with 434 triangular murals now covering the steel supports of the Market-Frankford Line between SEPTA's Huntingdon and Tioga stations. The project, known as the Gusset Plate Project, stretches roughly 1.2 miles through Kensington and into neighboring Harrowgate, turning the shaded underpass into what amounts to an extended public gallery.
The finishing touch came on Tuesday, when District 7 Councilmember Quetcy Lozada placed the 434th piece — a Tree of Life design she created — onto a gusset plate directly across the street from Harrowgate Park, according to Metro Philadelphia. The project was a collaboration between Mural Arts Philadelphia, Lozada's office, and Impact Services.
Getting to that final plate took more than 500 neighborhood residents, who created the individual artworks during 30 free painting sessions held over the past year. The triangular format isn't arbitrary — it mirrors the actual gusset plates, the steel connection pieces that join the vertical columns and support beams holding up the elevated Market-Frankford Line tracks overhead.
A Framework Built for Hundreds of Voices
Pulling together contributions from hundreds of different painters required a system, and that fell to lead artist Mat Tomezsko, who has worked in Kensington for five years. Per FOX 29 Philadelphia, Tomezsko designed the project's modular artistic framework specifically to accommodate the range of subjects residents wanted to paint, from local staples like cheesesteaks and water ice to symbols of family and cultural resilience.
The painting sessions themselves doubled as a workforce and public-health effort. The station's report and other accounts tie the process to Color Me Back, a same-day work-and-pay initiative run through Mural Arts' Porch Light program alongside the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health, which pays housing-insecure residents $50 for a 3.5-hour shift spent working on public art.
Part of a Larger Corridor-Wide Push
The gusset plate murals are only one piece of a bigger initiative called Heart of Kensington Creates, according to Mural Arts Philadelphia. That broader effort along Kensington Avenue also includes six large-scale murals, six smaller installations, three gallery activations, and positive affirmation street signs, with the full campaign intended to culminate in August 2026.
Those affirmation signs got their own moment last month, when project co-founders Brittni Jennings and Kristin Kelly dedicated the August iteration of Afromation Avenue, installing the positive-message street signs near McPherson Square Library and Conwell Middle School.
SEPTA's Repainted Steel Set the Stage
None of the triangular canvases would have looked the same without work SEPTA began well before the first brush touched a gusset plate. SEPTA began sandblasting and painting elevated steel support structures on January 9, 2023, with completion anticipated by July 1, 2024, before the murals followed.
Mural Arts Philadelphia itself has deep roots in this kind of neighborhood-scale work. Founded in 1984 as an anti-graffiti program, the organization has grown into the nation's largest public art group, producing more than 4,000 murals across the city, per DiscoverPHL.
The Gusset Plate Project's completion lands amid a broader stretch of attention on Kensington Avenue, where Lozada's office has also been active on public safety and constituent issues, including a viral gun transfer case earlier this year. For now, though, the corridor's most visible change is overhead: 434 hand-painted triangles, running the length of the El, put there one free session at a time.
