Light in the Tunnel
August 31, 2026
On the last Saturday of Hanukkah in December 2021, swastikas appeared in several Greenbelt tunnels, including the one beside the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. Boise responded the way a decent city does. Maintenance crews painted over them. Police opened an investigation. Officials condemned the vandalism publicly.
The graffiti said something specific: that Jews in this city are not welcome, and everyone else should take note of where they stand. Removing an image like that is not the same as replying to it. What was left was blank concrete — the same blank concrete that drew vandals in the first place.
So the city took up a harder question. What should go here instead? A committee of community partners put out a call and chose muralist Addie Boswell. The following October, she went into the Eighth Street tunnel with high school students, people from faith communities, folks from the unhoused community, and neighbors who showed up. They painted it together in about a week.
Boswell and the volunteers filled a dark tunnel with people working to create a better world: a teenager holding a climate justice sign, a teacher with a book, the woman whose lawsuit shut down the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho. They added the symbols of different groups in the community: a crescent moon, a sunflower, a transgender emblem. Around every figure they painted a ring of light, set at eye level, so that whoever walks through meets them face to face. At the center of it all is a chestnut tree like the one Anne Frank could see from her window. The mural is called E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One.
One night, a can of spray paint, and a whole city spent a month talking about it. Art cannot compete on speed. It competes on staying. At the dedication for the mural, Boswell said, “Breaking glass is easy. Tearing things down is easy . . . This kind of work will never be broken by the work of moments.”
A committee, a hired artist, sixty people with paintbrushes working through a week in October. This was a remarkable amount of effort to respond to a dozen marks made in the dark. But nearly four years after it went up, the mural is what people still walk by every day.
Anyone can walk into the Eighth Street Tunnel. There is no ticket and no gallery hours. The mural never mentions the graffiti. It doesn’t scold or argue. It is simply a picture of our community, offered to everyone who passes through. The graffiti made a claim about who belongs. So does the mural. The difference is that one of them is still here.