Ahead of Houston hosting the 2017 Super Bowl, the Montrose Management District spent around $3 million installing lights on six bridges that span a portion of US 59 on the southern edge of Montrose. Designed to change colors to reflect different celebrations, from Astros wins to St. Patrick’s Day and Pride celebrations, the lights quickly turned that once drab section of the highway into a social media sensation.

If you walked the bridges during the early days of the installation, you’d often come across people (including some current Houstonia editors) snapping selfies beneath the multi-hued glow. The lights were a hit with drivers too, as they provided a welcome visual break from Houston traffic, time usually spent staring at barren concrete medians or shriveled, highway-adjacent foliage.

Unfortunately, the heyday of the installation was short lived. Within a year, large portions of the lights began to flicker out, giving the bridges an unsightly patchwork effect. In 2019, management of the problem-plagued lighting system was taken over by the Houston First Corporation after the Montrose Management District shut down (a story for another time). By then, the bridge lights, which had originally been conceived as a beautification project that would forever change the national narrative about Houston being, well, ugly, had turned into one of the city’s biggest eyesores.

By the time Houston First took over, many of the lights, which were difficult to maintain and already past their warranty date, started failing entirely. They’ve had the most wishy-washy of dispositions ever since and have often been entirely out for long stretches of time.

But help is on the way. In September 2023, the city voted to approve funding to repair the iconic yet long tapped out lights, a repair job that will cost a cool $4 million. While the city is providing $2.6 million for the project, Houston First will pay the rest and will also be on the hook for maintaining the lights for the next decade. Key to the project: the lights will use new technology that is both easy and cheap to maintain.

Since it’s been a few months, we reached out to Houston First for an update—we’re curious about when our evening walks across the bridge from Black Hole Coffee House to Grand Prize Bar for drinks… er… dinner, will be picturesque again.

“A design team was selected last fall through a formal proposal process and work began late last year. The design work, permitting and bid solicitation are not yet complete,” Houston First Corporation told us in a statement. “This is a complex project that will include due diligence and approvals from several agencies; at this point we do not have a timeline for construction.”

It looks like we’ll be walking in the dark for now.

While we wait, we’ll light a candle for the restoration of the formerly kinetic Wings Over Water sculpture in front of the George R. Brown Convention Center, another Super Bowl beautification project (this one priced at $1.34 million) that also no longer works.