The new owners of Dirt Alley are asking San Francisco to help give it a long-overdue glow-up.
The Standard has closely covered the story of the thin, relatively useless strip of property in the Outer Sunset, first purchased in error by hapless neighbors. In February, tech prankster Riley Walz and his partners, Patrick Hultquist and Theo Bleier, bought the alley from composer JJ Hollingsworth for $26,000, then spent $10,000 to have it paved.
The trio were previously behind Pursuit, last summer’s 12-clue scavenger hunt that drew 12,000 participants across the city.
For their latest endeavor, they promised a collaborative public art project — consisting of individual square images laid out like tiles — to determine the alley’s future. Now it has been unveiled. Starting Thursday at 10 a.m., anyone can visit paintastreet.com (opens in new tab) to submit a 48-by-48-pixel drawing and vote on submissions from others. The idea is to let the public decide what gets printed as a sidewalk decal (opens in new tab) on the street.
“Part of the fun is we’re not very good artists,” Hultquist said. “So we’re asking people to go and submit a drawing, submit a painting, and get their friends together to try and take over an area of the board.”
The property was auctioned off to unwitting buyers last year for $25,000. | Source: Jungho Kim for The Standard
Example tiles submitted to paint a street for the redesign of Dirt Alley. | Source: Courtesy
It’s easy to foresee a problem: What about the dicks? Hultquist gamely said that every submitted drawing would be subject to approval.
The interface works like a leaderboard where users can upvote or downvote any tile online. The most upvoted submissions float to the top of the page, while the downvoted sink. At the end of the voting period, the winning design will be printed onto sidewalk decals on the alley.
The owners hope the competitive dynamic will encourage friends to coordinate submissions and battle for territory on the board to create larger drawings. It’s an effect they say was inspired by Reddit’s r/place (opens in new tab) — the particularly internet-addled may remember the viral collaborative pixel-art experiment launched in 2017 by programmer Josh Wardle (who also created Wordle).
“Seeing all these people sort of fighting over areas on the board was really awesome,” Hultquist said. “We wanted to replicate that effect.”
The difference, Hultquist said, is that the team plans to print and attach the winning design on the paved alley to create a public art display that can function as a tourist attraction, akin to the murals at Clarion Alley in the Mission.
Dirt Alley otherwise sits empty, awaiting the installation of a new design in a public ceremony later this spring. All told, the project — including the purchase price, paving, printing, and legal fees — will run the owners roughly $50,000.
Submissions opened Thursday at paintastreet.com (opens in new tab). Voting closes April 7 at noon.