Burlington voters allocated a good chunk of change to fixing city streets and sidewalks on Town Meeting Day earlier this month. That money, part of a $20 million bond, isn’t available yet, but an anonymous artist from Buffalo, N.Y., has already started the work — for free and with some flair.
The Buffalo Pothole Bandit rolled into town and has filled 10 fissures, pits and hollows over the past several days, leaving them level and adorned with whimsical and poignant mosaics that are documented in the artist’s posts on Reddit.
A ghost stands behind a microphone in a one-foot-square College Street sidewalk installation titled “The Comic.” Steps away are two tiny works: a sun shooting rainbow-colored rays over the horizon and a quote from the advice Warren Zevon gave talk-show host David Letterman shortly after the singer-songwriter learned he had terminal cancer: “Enjoy every sandwich.”
Another piece memorializes “Mickey and Jordan,” two prominent leaders of Buffalo’s LGBTQ community who were murdered earlier this month.
Comments rolled in on Reddit: “Beautiful little works with a function. Thank you!” one user wrote. “I’m a grouchy jerky and I like this,” another said. “Bro is singlehandedly restoring our city,” a third wrote.
City Hardware sales clerk Asa Fulton hadn’t spied the Bandit while the rogue repair work was conducted on the store’s block. Fulton did, however, notice the gems embedded in the concrete. “I think they’re supercool,” he said. “It’s like vigilante city beautification.”
The masked master, who began working in and around Buffalo about two years ago, told Seven Days in an email interview that they had no prior connection to Burlington. They came to buy a new vehicle “and stayed to fill a few holes. “
“It’s lovely here,” they wrote.
Most of the Bandit’s artwork is embedded in Buffalo, where the artist lives. The Bandit told Step Out Buffalo last year that they had no artistic background. “I started filling holes by putting toys and Scrabble letters in the ground, then I tried making mosaics and it went from there.”
“I’m not trying to shame the city or Department of Public Works by doing this,” the artist continued, speaking about Buffalo. “I just like being helpful and spreading joy.”
The works garnered “Best Public Art” honors in Buffalo Spree magazine’s 2024 Best of Western New York contest.
The Bandit has yet to reveal their true identity and is seen wearing a raccoon head in Instagram videos on their account.
Burlington Department of Public Works spokesperson Robert Goulding had heard about the installations and said he admired the “civic spirit” behind the work. At the same time, he told Seven Days, city officials “strongly discourage” people from taking it upon themselves to fill potholes.
“It is simply not safe for people to fill potholes in the middle of the road,” he said.
Besides putting their safety at risk, amateurs who repair holes prevent city workers from assessing them to see if a larger problem lurks below, Goulding said. There could be a water main break or sinkhole.
“These are rare, thankfully, but certainly it’s good to have trained eyes on them,” Goulding said.
He wouldn’t commit to keeping the guerrilla art. Street maintenance workers need to assess it first, he said.
“I want to reiterate the civic spirit behind this — beautifying our city,” Goulding said. “These are things we can all get behind. But given that there’s larger safety issues potentially at stake, I don’t know that we would be able to leave them.”
Most of the artwork viewed by Seven Days was on sidewalks. One piece, on Pine Street at Home Avenue, is near the side of the roadway. In a previous Reddit thread late last year, the Bandit told fans that they like to work in the morning, when there are fewer people around and less traffic. Each project takes “anywhere from 90 seconds to 5 hours, depending on what I’m putting in,” the Bandit wrote.
“Often whenever I’m at a store I look at everything and think ‘would that go in a hole?'” they wrote.
The Bandit plans to stay in Burlington about a week, working and training a local artist to continue. “This is turning into an art residency of sorts,” the Bandit posted to Instagram on Sunday. “The holes are plentiful but not as deep as ours.”
They were deep enough in 1986 to support baby trees. That’s when Burlington had its own Pothole Bandit, who planted three evergreen saplings on city streets one June night to protest the ruts.
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City officials took a lighthearted approach with their response. Radio disc jockeys Louie Manno and Jim Condon broadcast a high-noon summit between the Bandit and then-police chief Kevin Scully, at which the bandit agreed to stop filling the holes. Mayor Bernie Sanders later issued a “pardon” and pledged $1 million to fix the streets.
The masked Pothole Bandit turned out to be 28-year-old Bruce K. Ploof, a city cab driver, and his stunt got national attention. “It was like the 1986 version of viral,” Manno told reporter Erik Esckilsen for a Seven Days story and video in 2015.
Ploof could not be reached on Monday. Esckilsen reported that he quit driving a cab and, after living out of state for a time, moved back to Burlington and got a new job: working for the Department of Public Works.
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