Hundreds of people gather in Chicago to push The Bean, then they explain the bizarre reason for the campaign: ‘Give the man inside the bean resources’
‘In the back of everyone’s minds, we knew it wasn’t really gonna move.’
The Bean stayed exactly where it was on Sunday, even after hundreds of people leaned on it in Millennium Park. According to Block Club Chicago, an anonymous flyer had asked people to nudge the sculpture seven inches leftward at 12:47 p.m. The flyer spread across social media the day before.
A student who took part says as many as 250 people joined in. The crowd gathered around the time printed on the flyer. Footage of the push shows a large group pressing against the steel together. The sculpture weighs 110 tons, and it did not shift. The event follows other viral meetups. Those include celebrity lookalike contests, pageants for performative men and a mock protest over a man supposedly living inside the sculpture.
The unnamed organizer built the invite around that meme. On the Partiful page, the post reads, “There is a man trapped inside the bean.” It continues, “New research shows that there might be latch door under the right side of The Bean.” Moving the sculpture about seven inches might let them “give the man inside The Bean a pickle and other resources.”
A call for the alderman’s office
The downtown alderman says there is no man inside the sculpture. His office has received a flood of calls about the claim. A local promoter filmed himself with the crowd and jokingly declared, “we’re gonna call that at least one inch.” He adds, “I don’t know if we got it the full seven inches,” and says it “looks like it was moved slightly.” His caption clarified that the sculpture did not actually move.
The student says she saw the flyer on Instagram the night before and figured it would make for a good Sunday outing. She says the push let her connect with strangers. “It gave me something to do today,” she says. She adds, “In the back of everyone’s minds, we knew it wasn’t really gonna move.” In her view, “these events are just for people to build stronger connections in community.”
According to the City of Chicago, the 110-ton sculpture, officially named Cloud Gate, measures 66 feet long by 33 feet high. The city’s page describes it as “forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates.” Online calls to gather do not always fill a field, and the gap between sign-ups and attendance can be wide. According to Good Morning America, more than two million people responded on Facebook that they would attend the Storm Area 51 event in Nevada. About 75 had shown up by that Friday morning.
Some in-person events do deliver, as a Gojo lookalike contest in New York drew more than 400 spectators and 25 cosplayers to Washington Square Park.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
Follow The Mary Sue:
