Booth Plaza has long functioned as a designated point of arrival—a curated space of intentional pause. Yet, within its landscaped sightlines and sculptural sightlines exists a counter-phenomenon: Bypass Images. These are not the sanctioned murals or commissioned statues, but the fleeting, accidental, and often overlooked visual events generated by the very infrastructure designed to move people past the plaza.
Booth Plaza, historically the commercial heartbeat of the district, has spent the last eighteen months undergoing a massive revitalization project. Designed to update aging sewer infrastructure, widen pedestrian walkways, and install smart-city lighting, the project was necessary but visually intrusive.
"Construction is the price of progress," notes City Planner Elena Vance. "But for a long time, the price was the aesthetic soul of the Plaza. We had plywood walls up for months. It felt claustrophobic. It drove foot traffic away from local businesses because people didn't want to walk through a tunnel of grey barriers." Bypass Images in Booth Plaza
The city council, facing pressure from local merchants, commissioned a public art strategy. They didn't just want graffiti prevention; they wanted something that felt integral to the Plaza’s identity. Thus, the "Bypass Images" program was born.
// Remove all images from the DOM document.querySelectorAll('img').forEach(img => img.remove());
// Or replace src with empty string document.querySelectorAll('img').forEach(img => img.src = "");Booth Plaza has long functioned as a designated
Cause: Booth Plaza requires an MD5 hash even for bypassed images to prevent duplicate uploads.
Fix: Generate a dummy hash.
"image_hash": "00000000000000000000000000000000" Cause: Booth Plaza requires an MD5 hash even
| Without Bypass | With Bypass | |----------------|--------------| | ~3.2 MB images | 0 KB images | | 2.5s load time | 0.4s load time | | 50+ HTTP requests | ~5 requests |
For a busy plaza kiosk on metered Wi-Fi, bypassing images can be the difference between a fast transaction and an abandoned session.
