Venice, Brentwood, and the Pacific Palisades.
A woman drives into her three-story apartment complex parking lot after dark, her headlights illuminating a pale grey brick wall that separates the parking area from the first-story apartments.
The wall remains spotlighted momentarily until she turns off her car and gets out. She walks by the wall, lit only by dim overhanging lights, noticing its presence for the first time in months because of some newly spray painted lines that catches her eye as she makes her way towards her apartment.
Most days and nights the tenants in this West Los Angeles apartment complex off of Barrington Avenue come to and from, never taking notice of the grey brick wall. But about once every couple of months, this wall in the parking area that opens up to a back alley — no closing gate or hinge garage to close it from vandalizers — gets covered with spray painted taggings, mostly just select numbers and letters, no art.
The black graffiti stands out on a wall that usually never draws any attention.
“We call the owners of the [apartment] complex a lot to get graffiti removed,” said one tenant of the complex, who has been living there for four years now and declined to allow Westside Today to use her name or the location of the apartment complex for fear of retaliation. “A worker will come and paint over the graffiti so that the area begins to look like grey patch work.”
If one looks close enough, you can tell that the grey brick wall has in fact been painted over quite frequently, with different shades of grey emerging upon further inspection, pieces of a larger story.
With the grey wall visible from the alleyway, it also catches the attention of neighboring apartments.
“It has gotten to the point where our neighbors will call the city to have [the graffiti] removed,” the resident said. “I know because they’ll tell me that they called when I see them outside or something. If you don’t remove it, the whole alley will eventually have graffiti all over it.”
She goes on to talk about how last summer black graffiti suddenly materialized up and down the entire alley. Blue dumpsters had black graffiti, on telephone poles black letters could be made out against the brown wood — pretty much any space that could support black spray paint, which is a lot, had it.
“There’s now an LAPD car that will park at one of the ends of the alleyway, sitting there for a while,” she said. “I think it’s because of the graffiti that the cop car is patrolling this neighborhood.”
As a member of the Los Angeles City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, Councilmember Mike Bonin has fought to maintain and improve the resources the city spends to clean graffiti in neighborhoods, according to Bonin’s spokesperson. In the two budgets since he became a member of the committee, the city has allocated $7.1 million to graffiti abatement and cleanup.
In the last fiscal year, 647,898 square feet of graffiti was removed from 28,245 locations in Council District 11, which includes West Los Angeles, Venice, Brentwood, and the Pacific Palisades. This is compared with 30,283,227 square feet of graffiti removed from 596,506 locations citywide in the same period, with 80 percent of the graffiti being removed within 48 hours of the city receiving the request.
While District 11 accounts for only a small fraction of the total number of graffiti for the entire city of Los Angeles, in places it still remains noticeable.
Just down the street from her apartment is a reminder of just how brazen and defiant some graffiti artists and taggers have become.
Just off of Barrington Avenue, before the Ralphs on Olympic, is a billboard of John Oliver, the host of the HBO series “Last Week Tonight,” with his hands crossed, just starring past onlookers. The rest of the billboard is dedicated to the show’s advertising, now obscured by graffiti in street art lettering.
The billboard rises up above all the nearby apartments and commercial buildings, so that people stuck in after-work traffic can see the billboard down Barrington.
The vandalized billboard lasted about two or three days before it was painted over and then replaced by the same John Oliver advertisement.
The more difficult and noticeable the spot, the more recognition the clandestine graffiti artist or tagger receives within his community. The spots that seem the most unimaginable to have been done, as if only possible by some Spiderman graffiti artist or tagger, the longer they last as well. The hard-to-reach areas are more difficult for police to paint over.
With documentaries such as “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” a film about the beginning of street art, highlighting artists such as Shepard Fairey and Banksy, and the stardom of street artists turned painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat, upcoming street artists look to find their place within the constellation, often times resulting in the pursuit of bigger, more noticeable work.
However, that is not to say that all graffiti is street art. It turns out that most of the time it is just tagging: the marking of areas using various symbols often used to signify gang territory.
“It’s not pleasant. We don’t like it. And our neighbors don’t like the markings on our street,” said the West L.A. resident, gesturing towards the recently painted grey wall, “that’s why we always call the police to come and clean it up.”
Graffiti cleanups are most frequently reported to the city through the 3-1-1 hotline or the MY311 app.
