A very Philly ‘marriage selfie mural’ is going up at the Wedding License Bureau in City Hall

Love can strike anywhere in Philly — over a Citywide Special at Bob & Barbara’s, while waiting in line at the PPA impound lot, or when eyes lock across the glass case housing the giant megacolon at The Mütter Museum — but love can only be certified under the law in one spot, the Wedding License Bureau at City Hall, which, until now, has offered no sense of place at all.

That’s about to change with a new “marriage selfie mural” from Mural Arts Philadelphia set to be installed in the bureau next week. Created by Mural Arts staff artist Nathaniel Lee, the installation features favorite Philly photo spots for newlyweds across the city, from the LOVE sculpture to City Hall.

In just four weeks, Lee designed, produced, painted, and will install the mural at the Register of Wills’ Wedding License Bureau in Room 415 of City Hall so it’s up in time for Valentine’s Day next week.

“This is a legacy project for me; it’s the type of thing I’ll be able to tell my grandkids about,” Lee said. “Plus, it’s in City Hall so it won’t get developed into a Starbucks or anything.”

Register of Wills Tracey Gordon, who first considered bringing a photo booth into the Wedding License Bureau before reaching out to Mural Arts to see if they’d be interested in a collaboration, said this will be the first cosmetic upgrade to the office in decades.

“It has not been upgraded in a very, very long time,” said Gordon. “My predecessor was there for 40 years and the furniture was here before he came.”

Gordon, who took office in January 2020, said before COVID-19 hit, she’d often see couples who came in for marriage licenses take selfies in the bureau to celebrate the occasion. But the outdated décor and bare walls offered little sense of place in the photos, beyond a cold government office.

What if, she thought, those photos could scream: “We’re in Philadelphia and we’re in love!”

“I’m a hopeful romantic, although divorced,” Gordon said. “Even though this is a business and it’s serious business, it should be fun. You should leave with something warm.”

When Gordon’s staff reached out to Mural Arts Philadelphia, they were immediately on board, she said. Mural Arts, which had some money left over from a project that was sidelined because of COVID-19, was able to re-allocate the funds and do the mural at no cost to the Register of Wills Office, which oversees the Wedding License Bureau, according to a Mural Arts spokesperson.

“At Mural Arts, we think a lot about human connection and how that has been missing in our world lately,” executive director Jane Golden said in a statement. “When we heard from the Register of Wills that people were getting married in front of a blank wall, we thought that art could combat this emptiness.”

In a typical year, about 10,000 marriage licenses are issued at the Wedding License Bureau and 850 weddings are performed across the hall in a small judge’s chamber. Among the more notable wedding licenses issued by the bureau, whose records predate the American Revolution, was the 1951 license for the marriage between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, who later wed at the Germantown home of a local dress manufacturer.

A total of 107 weddings were performed at the bureau last year before COVID-19 restrictions shuttered the office in the second week of March. On April 1, the bureau reopened for emergency marriage licenses only and issued about 550 such licenses — many of which were granted to people who needed to get on their significant other’s health insurance — before it reopened to the general public on an appointment-only basis in July.

On a normal Valentine’s Day, 50 weddings are performed by five different judges across from the bureau, but weddings on site are still on hold due to the virus, and there is no scheduled date when they might resume.

While newlyweds can’t yet get photographs with the mural, the 150 people who are applying for a marriage license each week now can.

Lee included City Hall’s iconic clock tower in his mural and positioned its William Penn topper so Penn will appear to be blessing couples below. He put in the Liberty Bell to symbolize the freedom people have in marriage today, and he included the Philadelphia Museum of Art stairs (aka the Rocky steps) to illustrate that sometimes, marriage can be a struggle.

Lee created the painting, which is 10 by 10 feet with large golden rays of a dawning sun emanating out well beyond that, on a mural cloth canvas at the Mural Arts studio at Sweetbriar Mansion in Fairmount Park.

He plans to transport the mural to the Wedding License Bureau on Monday and fuse it to the wall like permanent wallpaper using a mural cloth method, he said.

“When this was just a blank, white wall, it could be a wall anywhere,” he said. “I wanted it to be very much here, and very much Philly.”