Tech Pranksters Turn SF Alley Into Crowd-Sourced Mural
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- Hultquist, Bleier, and Walz paid JJ Hollingsworth $26,000 for the 82-foot alley after she accidentally won it at auction for $25,000, then spent another $10,000 to pave it into usable ground.
- Paint a Street, the trio's new website, lets users submit low-resolution digital drawings that will be arranged into a 1,280-tile collage across an 80-foot sidewalk decal on the alley, with submissions and the street-naming auction both closing April 7 at 1 pm PT.
- The street-naming auction crossed $100,000 in bids within less than an hour of launch, turning the prank into a self-funding art commission.
- Walz is a recent OpenAI employee who co-created Jmail, a Gmail-styled archive of the Jeffrey Epstein emails, and has co-run San Francisco's Pursuit scavenger hunt for two years alongside Bleier and Hultquist.
- Submissions are filtered through an AI content moderation tool plus manual review, though Hultquist concedes that coordinated placements could still form crude shapes — including, theoretically, a giant one.
- Hollingsworth, who hired a lawyer to confirm the trio wasn't trolling her, called the project the best-case outcome for her expensive mistake and said she's celebrating with a concert by her songwriter real estate lawyer.
Why it matters: The auction crossed $100,000 in under an hour, meaning the pranksters' $36,000 outlay is already dwarfed by naming-rights revenue, turning a joke land purchase into a funded public art piece. For Hollingsworth, the deal converts a $25,000 mistake into both cash and a community installation. For San Francisco, it shows how internet-native collaborative projects — modeled on Reddit's r/place — can now claim real physical territory.
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