Workers polished up the Portal in LOVE Park on Monday, October 21, 2024, ahead of its expected "opening" later in the week. (Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza/WHYY)

News that the Portal, a public art project that arrived in Philly last October, has been damaged by vandals and would be moved from its location at LOVE Park in the next few weeks seemed distressing and shocking — until we went back to our story announcing its arrival. Y’all tried to warn us.

“This is going to last 48 hours, tops,” another X user responded.

Maybe we should be impressed by ihow long it lasted before being broken.

What’s the Portal?

OK, so let’s take a step back. If you missed the news last fall, the Portal is an 11.5-foot-tall, 3.5-ton donut-like sculpture with a camera and an 8-foot live-stream video screen (no sound, sorry) in its center. It connects with Portals in cities in Lithuania, Poland, Ireland and Brazil. The brainchild of Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys, Portal’s website describes the installation series as a way to facilitate human connection across borders. 

It arrived Oct. 22, a glorious fall day, to great fanfare.

But Philly has a history of treating such things poorly.

Remembering Hitchbot

An inanimate, robot-like piece of art created in Canada, Hitchbot was developed in 2015 as a social experiment in trust. As Meir Rinde wrote in the story that anticipated the current state of affairs:

“It was benevolently passed from one person to another around the continent, until it arrived in Philly and was smashed to pieces.”

And it’s not like Hitchbot is an outlier. Philly is arguably the home office for mayhem.

While the Portal’s first days brought crowds, energy and fun hijinks, LOVE Park can be desolate late at night, and there can’t be eyes on it 24/7. Eventually, it was struck, probably with a rock (although some feared it was gunshots). Workers were repairing it Wednesday morning.

A spokesperson said it would be moved to one of three locations in a few weeks, and declared the Portal would be staying in Philly through the 2026 celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday.

That’s great, but it raises a question: Can the Portal be safe in any outdoor location in Philly? And if it can’t, and it’s placed indoors, say, at the Forum of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, doesn’t that defeat the idea of the Portal in the first place — as a tool to connect public spaces?

But maybe we’re thinking too big. It’s been here five months, and maybe the Portal has learned something about us in that time. It took a licking, but it’s not going anywhere. Sounds very Philadelphia. Maybe the Portal is one of us now.

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