The Gainesville Sun reports:

Gainesville city officials and residents gathered at City Hall Plaza on May 8 to celebrate the ribbon-cutting of the newly renovated space. The redesigned plaza, city officials said, will provide a more functional community hub and can accommodate more than 2,000 people. The space also incorporates the rainbow bricks salvaged from the downtown crosswalks removed last year.

Their removal came after state officials ordered communities across Florida to take down or paint over rainbow crosswalks, including the crossing in Orlando that memorialized the 49 victims of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre.

Gainesville officials pulled roughly 1,900 bricks from three downtown crosswalks after the Florida Department of Transportation threatened to cut the city’s transportation funding in August 2025. In a memo, the department warned that non-standard markings “can lead to distractions or misunderstandings can jeopardize safety.” Instead of discarding the bricks, the city commission chose to honor the LGBTQ community by incorporating them into the plaza.

Read the full article. In a similar move, last month Miami Beach reinstalled its rainbow bricks as a broad path in an oceanfront city park across from the gay beach. Also last month, the city of Boise reacted to a ban on Pride flags by wrapping its flagpoles in rainbow stripes.