- [Joe Fama] Every community has streets that are dividers.

- [James Mayben] Basically, you turned the neighborhood into a highway.

Who does that?

- [Man] This is Hoosick street.

This is a main street.

- [James Mayben] Once that bridge came, we became known as Hillside North.

- [Woman] We think of the bridge as the dividing line between up north and south of Troy.

And so we came up with the name Uniting Line, just to be opposite of that.

- [Jade Warrick] When I'm doing public art, that is in a community that is not part of my own, I try really hard to connect with that community and to get their ideas so we can create a collaborative piece.

So it's mine and theirs.

- [Woman] Will this public art project suddenly reunite the two halves of the city?

What it will do well is focus people's attention in a place where they haven't really paid attention in a long time.

- [Narrator] Major funding for Bridging The Divide is made possible by, Chet and Karen Opalka, and The Troy Savings Bank Charitable Foundation.

(classical music) - [Announcer] This is the American dream of freedom on wheels.

- The project started with an announcement in 1950, 54.

It was in the newspaper.

They were gonna do this.

There were some iterations, earlier iterations, there were alternatives, but the big bang came in '69.

(classical music) The Hoosick Street Bridge had ballooned into this massive interchange between the proposed North South Arterial and the new Hoosick Street Bridge all of which was going to be funded with the money from the National Highway and Defense ct. And that act poured so much money into automobile infrastructure.

It made America a car nation and not in a good way.

And it changed everything about America.

It changed the nature of cities, it changed the nature of suburbs, where people lived, how things were done, how we got places.

And what happened in Troy was, the Hoosick Street Bridge.

(classical music) - The partners in the Uniting Line Project are the City of Troy, Collar Works, TAP, Inc, and The Art Center of the capital region.

We were provided an opportunity through Bloomberg Philanthropies, to apply to their Asphalt Art Project.

And with that we were looking for different locations in the City of Troy.

Deputy Mayor, Monica, came to us and started a little meeting to say how can we do this?

And she recommended the Hoosick Street Bridge.

- The Uniting Line and what the imagination ahead of it was the challenges associated with having this crazy bridge that divides part of the city from north to south.

- Hoosick Street has always been not something we've been terribly proud of in the city.

We're not gonna reverse the decisions that were made half a century ago.

So we need to learn how to live with them, how to use them to our benefit.

And the Uniting Line Painting Project was the perfect in terms of getting people to slow down, start to notice the area, and start to think about what else it could be.

(bouncy music) - The Hoosick Street Bridge underpass is huge.

It's a big area.

The groundwork there, the structure, the pillars all were in a real need for change.

(bouncy music continues) - This project jumps the scale in that so many partners were involved and it is in a very public space.

So it really warrants the public input and it will warrant scrutiny from the public as well.

The art center brought on staff that spent time on the site to approach people and ask them questions and show them examples of public art.

And people generally wanted to see something that was uplifting, something that was bright and colorful.

We received some 16 proposals and they were all wonderful from talented artists.

- Jade Warrick's proposal, really rose the top and resonated with the community in such strong, positive ways.

(bouncy music) - One of the big things was that everyone was telling me to do it.

I got emails, text, all my mentors and folks who I have worked with, they were just pushing me to do it.

I've always known since I was a kid that I wanted to paint big.

I've always kind of hated painting small 'cause I hate details.

I got offered for a muraling gig from Tony Iadicicco with the Albany Center Gallery ever since doing that mural on Broadway with the girl on the sunflowers, I knew that this was for me.

I think the best outcome would be just that the community feels seen and that they appreciate the art that was put on their block.

When you go out to neighborhoods in community that's not your space.

Unfortunately, it's just not.

It's not your space, it's not your wall, this isn't your neighborhood, unless it is.

That's why I think the community engagement piece with us was so important.

I do like a lot of advocacy work for the community, amplified voices.

It's an art and wellness program that I run with Eugene O'Neil and we work with neighboring youth organizations and our partners to try to uplift black and brown voices of the youth through art.

When I'm doing public art, that is in a community that is not part of my own, I try really hard to connect with that community and to get their ideas so we can create a collaborative piece.

So it's mine and theirs.

'Cause I'm very against art washing, which is just going into a neighborhood and throwing something up and not talking to them.

That's very weird to me.

What if people feel jarred because they're so used to their neighborhood being intruded on, by other folks whether it's police, city officials and then to see an artist come up and just throw something else that could be the straw that breaks the camel's back and the trust.

I hope that people will feel seen and validated in the images I pick since a lot of the images that I created are based off of conversations I've had in that neighborhood.

So I'm hoping it brings about validation, and beauty, and art equity to the community.

(soft instrumental music) - The community there growing up was excellent, family.

And when I mean family, I mean neighbors looked out for each other and you had a sense of pride.

We didn't call it Hillside North back then it was just ninth street.

You come down Hoosick Street, there were homes there, there was stores, there was a pizza place on the corner, there was cleaners, there was a laundry mat, there was the movie theater right down the street, there were diners.

I mean, we loved it.

After coming back from college, I went into the Marine Corps, after I came back from overseas, that's when I noticed a change.

'Cause the bridge was there and that was the way to get home from the airport.

(soft music) Once that bridge came, that's where they separated Troy.

They actually separated Troy.

And that's when it became Hillside North, we became known as Hillside North instead of just our own Troy just part of being Troy.

(soft music continues) - [Neighbor] Good morning to you, sir.

- Good morning, ladies.

There's good change and then there's bad change.

And that bridge has been a bad change at least for Hillside North residents.

Basically, you turn the neighborhood into a highway.

Who does that?

You don't put a highway in a community.

- It was 26 years between the big article in the paper that announced it to everyone's shock and awe, and the ribbon cutting on the bridge.

This was not a good thing.

It really didn't help with traffic.

It really didn't.

It made traffic worse because it took all of this interstate infrastructure and dumped it on Hoosick Street.

- I was intuitively opposed to the bridge project.

The base of proposition these roads was okay, we're gonna take out strips of urban development, neighborhoods, tax base, in order to concentrate auto traffic in the midst of the most dense populations.

That's kind of what I reacted to.

I mean, I was going door to door with little flyers and talk to people and try to motivate some opposition to this.

- Later on in the process we brought suit.

(instrumental music) - As time went on my idealism kind of waned and I realized they wanted to do something by imminent domain.

The courts were not gonna stop them.

- [Joe Fama] The Green Island Bridge fell down and they said, "Well, now we gotta build it."

- That occurred just before the litigation.

So, State DOT was using that in one sense to say, "Well, the Green Island Bridge is gone.

So that's obviously not a viable return.

So we must proceed with the Hoosick Street Bridge."

Which was just a false argument because what they should have done and in fact did very rapidly, was rebuild the Green Island Bridge to a much larger specification.

- And we were crushed after the lawsuit failed.

- In a sense it was inevitable what happened and what was inevitable was a further deterioration destruction of Troy.

And that's what we're fighting.

We believed that should not happen.

- [Joe Fama] So, what did it accomplish?

All that disruption and it made things worse.

It made Hoosick Street a nightmare.

- With the amount of traffic that comes up and down that hill, it's terrible.

We started having accidents and I don't mean just car accidents, people were getting hit.

And once that young girl got hit by a car, is where they figured out, "Oh let's put a button, where we can stop the traffic for at least 30 seconds where everybody has to stop."

But for almost two, three years we were asking for that and it was nothing.

My future is to strengthen our neighborhood, just to bring a more positive light and how to figure out how to slow some of that traffic down.

(cars moving on the highway) (instrumental music) - Oh, ye-yeah.

- I've always painted my own murals, even the super large one.

So this is just a new process for me.

But I'm kind of excited 'cause I get to sit back and watch it happen.

I'll definitely be out there to help paint up on the lifts and doing some spray painting of the outlines and doing things like that.

- If there were about 20 artists on the payroll we tried to bring in apprentices, master painters, supervisors, all of whom could use this experience as a way to get more skills, more contacts, learn from each other.

(upbeat music) - I started mural painting about 15 years ago and mostly with residential work and I've moved into commercial over the years.

Our role is simply to manage the production of the art.

So, we have to make sure that the design reflects Jade's design.

I like art.

I see it as a transformative linguistic mechanism.

Not everybody reads the same language, not everybody reads letters, not everybody speaks the same language, but everybody can view art.

So I think this is a really powerful tool for people in this neighborhood especially children to be able to literally look up to these giant role models that are now part of the conversation of Hoosick Street.

- So the challenges that we had there was a six-week delay in the actual start date.

So that put us back quite a bit.

We're hoping to have this done before the weather gets too cold.

- [Kendra Farstad] And there's a lot of safety things.

We have some really big heavy duty equipment that is very dangerous if not operated properly.

There's some power lines that we have to navigate.

There's definitely high heights that we have to navigate.

- Yeah, this is an interesting place here.

Under the Hoosick Street Bridge basketball court and this is a safe haven.

This is where kids come, play basketball, and their parents know that they're safe.

There's a lot of gang violence, a lot of gun violence in the city of Troy.

And if they come here, they have another chance to live.

And that's how serious it is.

If you let the media tell it, it's a bad area of Troy, any place besides downtown is a bad area of Troy and they don't understand.

Troy is Troy.

It's still one Troy.

But this area now is calm.

It's calm, there's no action.

You see they're tryna beautify it with the murals and all that.

So, it came a long way.

There's a couple more things that we need to do like put some lights up in here because you just think about it, if you have lights in there, then you can play until at least 11 o'clock.

Think about the crime rate, it would go down.

(instrumental music) - First thing that came to mind when I was viewing the underpass pillars, was, "Oh my God, this is huge."

I was like, how am I gonna create characters that go across every single one?

Because it's not easy to create characters and items like that.

It's like you have to sit and think of faces and poses.

And I do use references sometimes, but it's like, how do you create something that's completely new and something that's completely just your own.

The mural is basically showcasing BIPOC people in nature, surrounded by nature, which is calming and meditative for a lot of folks in the black and brown indigenous communities, just reveling in nature, enjoying and meditating in nature, while also just enjoying their passions.

There's a lot of love for boxing and basketball where the two that stuck out to me the most.

DO images that you actually see repeated throughout this design is a couple of basketball players and a couple of boxers is an awe to the folks who came out of Albany and became big basketball players or MMA or boxers.

- Again, North Central, the people who grew up there, and we have Kevin Pompey who was a professional boxer, Welterweight Champ.

He comes down and he trains the kids.

We've had some great basketball players come out of there.

Even my nephew, Emanuel Mayben, they called him Tiki, and he was a step away from going into the NBA.

There was Luther Rackley who actually played in the NBA, played for the New York Nicks, Rosie Phillips one of the best high school basketball players ever.

And he grew up on ninth street.

- And when I spoke to KP and a couple of other people, they said that the neighborhood has a lot of soul to it.

And my interpretation of soul which a lot of people kind of interpret is, could be music.

(soulful music) We have the parents, I think it's really important to show black fathers out there enjoying time with their kids because it's something that happens.

But unfortunately there's a stereotype that black fathers aren't present.

We gotta showcase more art that has people of different tones of browns because it not only showing light skin people and art really does affect the black community because you're kind of only seeing one tone as pretty and desirable.

And so I want it to be very intentional about showing different shades of brown in this project.

We need to amplify the voices of people, my people, who feel like they aren't being seen.

- I'm a painter, illustrator and sculptor.

Jade, the artist, is my sister.

The part I've been working on the most is the characters.

I think it's important that people of color can see themselves in these characters too.

Each character in the mural, they each show a lot of diversity but they're all connected.

And so, I hope that when people see the mural, they get that sense that, "Oh, we're all different but we can all be connected and all have this community that we all live in and wanna help grow."

- It's kind of insane that the smallest city that I've lived in has some of the most diversity of people and cultures.

And I feel like that's not even reflected much in the public art here.

So, I just wanted to have that out there to give a shout out to folks of color to see like, "Hey you're seen, you're validated, here you are, 40 feet high, (laughs) can't be missed."

(instrumental music) So it's interesting because I'm taking a step back and kind of just watching others do my work.

- Having been in Troy and watching this thing being transformed, the underpass transformed, I took this opportunity to just...

It was just a moment of why not.

- First picture I took when I seen it, I seen her working over there and then I come here to catch the bus and I seen the girls, I think she was boxing and I took a picture of it and put it on Facebook and it really made me feel better.

Really could see people doing something positive for Troy.

(soothing music) - Dragonfly, we gotta add some open leaves and then correct some petals to make them a little more tulipy.

And the bottom and it's done.

We're so close, we're close.

(upbeat instrumental music) (drum music) - This is a great day as we celebrate the completion of the Gems of Troy, the first phase of the Uniting Line Public Art Project.

(audience applauding) - After these murals have been painted and my goodness it's changed.

Not only made it colorful and happy, and people smile but it seems to have changed the energy a bit and much more positive.

How can all that fun and color not impact people?

It did us.

We'd loved it, enjoyed it as soon as we were painting it, the transformation.

(soul music) - It's like when you put nice art somewhere, people are like I wanna go there, I wanna invest in this place, this place feels like home or this place feels comfortable for me.

So therefore that art, putting nice big murals up actually has a domino effect of having people start paying attention a little bit more to I don't know some neighborhoods that may be neglected.

- We know that the mural is only the beginning of this project.

And I think that the public could say, it's just paint.

How do you think paint is going to change anything?

And we've known that since the beginning.

Our very first grant application I called the mural a clarion call to the community, to that area.

None of us have any one vision of what should happen under the Hoosick Bridge, because we wanna wait for the community to tell us what it would be.

We are actually surveying there right now to get some very early impressions around what would people wanna do under the bridge.

And then there's the hope for how that physical space can be improved.

Roadways, the sidewalks, seating areas, lighting.

I think what we'll end up doing is lighting it first to create more public safety down there.

- We're still gathering input, but we do know that we wanna extend the riverfront walkway that starts in the downtown area by the old city hall site.

We've got plans drawn to extend that up to the Hoosick Street Bridge in the next phase.

And what that'll do is that that'll be nice because it'll create a walkway between North Central and downtown.

Hoosick Street is a very automobile centric piece of infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians, bikes.

So they're coming off the bridge sometimes at speeds in excess to 50 miles an hour.

So we're talking with DOT on ways we might bring that speed down sooner before people get into the city.

- [Gary Nelson] I think people appreciate what was there.

We can correct what was bad about it by reinvestment in various ways.

And I'm glad we can take advantage of what's still left.

- So there's only a few of us in the Hillside North residents who's been there for quite a few years.

We have a lot of new renters and a couple of homeowners.

It's not the same pride, it's not the family type, but it's getting better.

As far as a mural coming up on all those stands from the bridge, that is super.

It makes you really start to feel part of a community.

Somebody else cares about how we are coming up or raising our children down here.

So, we take a sense of pride in that.

People need to come see it and then they'll see that North Central is striving and strong.

(soothing music) - [Narrator] Major funding for Bridging The Divide is made possible by, Chet and Karen Opalka, and The Troy Savings Bank Charitable Foundation.