About 250 people showed up at Chicago’s Millennium Park on Sunday, November 8, with one goal: shove Cloud Gate, the 110-short-ton steel sculpture everyone calls the Bean, seven inches to the north. They pushed at 12:17 p.m. The Bean did not budge.
A Reddit post claiming “100s of people” had gathered to move the landmark reached Reddit’s r/popular feed this week. Chicago rapper Taylor Bennett, who joined the push, jokingly declared victory and claimed the sculpture had moved one inch. It had not.
The math of pushing a bean
Cloud Gate weighs 110 short tons, which is 220,000 pounds (about 100 metric tons). Split that evenly across 250 people and each one is responsible for 880 pounds of polished steel, roughly the weight of a grand piano and a half.
Weight was never the only problem. The sculpture is not resting loose on the plaza. It sits on the roof of Millennium Hall, a restaurant below the plaza, and it is braced by structural members under the plaza that are tied into its interior with rods. Engineers had to reinforce a retaining wall and a garage foundation underneath before it could be installed. In other words, the crowd was not pushing a heavy object; it was pushing a building component.
Why seven inches, and why north
Organizers of the stunt have not published an explanation on any page we could read, and the choice of seven inches appears to be part of the joke. What is on record is that the Bean was never meant to sit where it does. Artist Anish Kapoor’s piece was first planned as the centerpiece of the Lurie Garden in the park’s southeast corner, but park officials judged it too large and moved it to what is now Grainger Plaza, over Kapoor’s objections.
A short history of Chicago joking about its Bean
The push is the latest in a run of tongue-in-cheek campaigns aimed at the sculpture:
- 2004 to 2006: Chicagoans nickname the half-built sculpture “The Bean.” Kapoor calls the name “completely stupid,” then later accepts it.
- 2017: a Facebook event urging people to “Windex the Bean” gets more than 2,000 people marked as going.
- 2025: during Lollapalooza, a group satirically claims a man has been trapped inside since 2004 and urges people to contact their alderman; the claim was widely labeled a hoax.
- November 8, 2026: about 250 people try to push it seven inches north.
The Bean by the numbers
The sculpture measures 33 by 66 by 42 feet and is built from 168 stainless steel plates, each 3/8 inch thick and weighing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds. Crews welded them together on site into 2,442 linear feet of seams, then ground and polished every one through five stages until the joins disappeared. It was originally estimated at 60 short tons; the finished piece came in at almost twice that.
It is also built to last. Kapoor’s contract says the sculpture should survive for 1,000 years, and the lower 6 feet are wiped by hand twice a day. The final cost was $23 million, paid entirely by private donors.
The Bean reopened to the public on June 23, 2024, after nearly a year behind fencing for plaza renovation. On Sunday it stayed exactly where the 2006 dedication left it, seven inches south of where 250 people wanted it to be.
Further reading
Image: Roman Boed from The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
