A bridge collapsed in Topeka in 1965. Sixty-one years later, the city painted that collapse onto the underside of the bridge that replaced it.
The mural is called "Reflections of NOTO." It runs along the underside of the Kansas Avenue Memorial Bridge near Veterans Park in North Topeka, in the neighborhood now branded as the NOTO Arts and Entertainment District. The city unveiled it at a ceremony on Thursday, July 2, according to WIBW. The ceremony ran at 4 p.m. under the bridge, steps from Veterans Park at 131 N. Laurent St., the same stretch of riverbank the mural spends several panels remembering.
The mural does not skip the bad years
The panels move through the moments that built the neighborhood, in order. Pappan's Landing opens the sequence, an 1842 ferry crossing on the Kansas River that predates the city of Topeka itself. The Union Pacific Railroad arrives next, in 1866. Then the mural turns to disaster: the flood of 1903, the flood of 1951, and the collapse of the Melan Bridge in 1965, all painted on the same wall as the neighborhood's modern turn into an arts district, according to WIBW's report on the unveiling. The sequence also traces the area's roots with the Kaw Nation and the original townsite of Eugene, the settlement that grew into North Topeka.
Most public murals skip the disasters. Cities paint the founders, the parades, the home team. This one paints a bridge collapse, on a bridge, in a river town that has flooded twice badly enough to make the historical record. That is the point of a mural meant to work as a record, not a backdrop for photos.
It took more than one artist and more than a few weekends
Lead artist Zandra Sneed-Dawkins ran the piece with supporting artists DeAna Morrison, Jordan E. Brooks, and Pradeep K. Bangalore, under project manager and NOTO Arts Administrator Staci Schnacker. WIBW covered the project in May, when residents, students, and volunteers were still under the bridge with rollers and brushes, months ahead of the ribbon cutting.
The project ran on public and philanthropic money. The National Endowment for the Arts, ArtsConnect Topeka, the City of Topeka, and Shawnee County Parks and Recreation all funded it, alongside local businesses and volunteers who showed up to paint, according to WIBW's preview of the unveiling.
NOTO already bet its identity on murals
North Topeka spent decades as a flood-scarred stretch of the city before rebuilding around the NOTO Arts and Entertainment District. A bridge mural that puts the floods and the collapse in the same frame as the comeback is a neighborhood putting its own record in public, at the one spot every driver crossing the Kansas River has to look at.
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