Bay Lights display returns to San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in grand lighting ceremony. Here’s how to watch.

By Jose Fabian

The Bay Lights are officially returning to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Friday after being shut off in 2023 due to environmental wear.

A grand lighting ceremony is being held at San Francisco’s Embarcadero, where a countdown will happen ahead of the relighting.

How to watch “The Bay Lights” relighting

Beginning at 7:00 p.m., CBS News Bay Area will live stream coverage of the relighting ceremony.

You can watch in the video player above and on all streaming devices via the CBS News app.

Illuminate, the nonprofit hosting the event, said founder Ben Davis and the artist behind The Bay Lights, Leo Villareal, will be in attendance and speak ahead of the grand relighting.

There will then be a countdown around 7:30 p.m. leading up to the relighting of the northern cable plane on the bridge’s western span.

Illuminate said the event will also double as a celebration for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s 92nd birthday. The span of the bridge where The Bay Lights are installed is named after Brown.

The Bay Lights history

Illuminate said Davis originally began the project and brought in Villareal, a NYC-based artist, to design an artwork for the Bay Bridge, and while the relighting is for the northern cable plane, a second phase of the project is underway, which will bring expanded visibility to other parts of the Bay Area. 

The original Bay Lights project went up in 2013 and was turned off in 2020 due to environmental wear, a decision that was made by Villareal. 

The new light system is made up of 48,000 individual LED lights and is designed to withstand “the wind loads, the salt air, the vibration, and the need for long-term reliability,” according to Adam DeJong, Musco Lighting project manager.

The privately-funded project cost $11 million to replace the original installation.

Artist’s 2nd version of Bay Lights 

Villareal, who illuminated the River Thames, transformed Times Square, and put his stamp on the National Gallery of Art, is taking another swing at the Bay Bridge. For the last few months, Villareal has been showing up at Pier 14 in San Francisco just before dusk, waiting for the sun to go down, working on his 1.8-mile-long canvas.

“I’m improvising, I’m trying things with my code and figuring it out on the fly, which is really exciting,” he said.

The lights will be dancing across a bridge that has spent nearly a century living in the shadow of its more glamorous Golden Gate sibling just across the water.

“It’s almost like I’m playing an instrument, the visual instrument, trying things, and when I make discoveries, I’m able to record that and those become the building blocks for the final installation,” Villareal said.

It was a rare chance for the artist to revisit an old work, new code, new lights, same bridge.

“What I’m interested in is creating community, I’ve often described my pieces as digital campfires,” he said.

Across the city, residents like Greg Kerr see this as a turning point.

“San Francisco feels like it’s kind of on the up right now, and so seeing this creative landscape come alive is really cool,” Kerr said.

And while 50,000 dancing lights won’t do much to speed up rush hour, this bridge might just stop traffic…. And that is by design.