After Belfast celebrated its 250th birthday last year, community members buried a time capsule in front of City Hall on Tuesday as a way of celebrating the city’s history and looking ahead to its future.
The capsule is meant to be exhumed and opened up a century from now. A plaque marking its location will also be installed.
It contained 76 artifacts that were “anything I thought people in 2123 might find interesting, anything from the year 2023,” according to project organizer and former Belfast mayor Mike Hurley.
They included more serious items, such as newspaper clippings, a poem written by Belfast Poet Laureate Maya Stein, a flag given by the governor and copies of speeches from a festival that celebrated the 250th anniversary last year.
They also included more whimsical items, such as a jar of pennies, a sticker featuring the city’s unofficial nickname of “Moonbat Kingdom,” a signed photo of Mayor Eric Sanders when he was younger, and a version of the inflatable ducks inscribed with the word “Joy” that have periodically shown up in Belfast Harbor.
The city’s public works department helped bury the capsule on Tuesday morning.
“We started with all the obvious things. We started thinking of it as a historical time capsule of the city,” Hurley said. “Just things we thought would be cool for people a hundred years from now to open up and go, ‘Oh wow, look at this.’ Who knows what we’ll have a hundred years from now?
