Carlsbad Grapples With Its Wall of Shame

The great seawall of Carlsbad, a half-mile-long concrete promenade that’s considered a beachfront jewel in this tony town, has turned into a wall of shame that has upset the community’s sensibilities.

Over the past 18 months, the smooth and graceful $3.5-million wall has become a vast exhibit of raunchy urban-style graffiti, everything from racial slurs to sexual expressions and surfer slogans.

Instead of lending Carlsbad’s seashore a touch of linear majesty and eye-pleasing precision, the wall now offers thousands of tourists and local residents’ crude letters spelling “rampage,” “the Pope smokes dope,” and “oingo boingo.” The ripest graffiti can’t be quoted.

Graffiti problems are hardly unusual, but this is graffiti on a grand scale. About 70,000 square feet must be cleaned, and city workers spend 20 hours a week toiling at the wall. Yet they still can’t stay ahead of the spray paint, chalk and stubborn markings made with surfboard wax.

“It’s available, and it’s one of the few places where they have a big canvas to paint on,” said Larry Willey, the city’s assistant director for utilities and maintenance. “It wasn’t a problem at first, it just seems to have escalated.”

The wall, ranging in height from 12 to 17 feet, is only 2 years old. It was built with city funds as a retaining wall to secure the erosion-prone bluffs between Tamarack and Walnut avenues. But now it is the cause of complaint and controversy.

“We’ve gotten complaints from residents who have taken friends down there to see this jewel, then become totally embarrassed,” said Lee Bohlmann, executive vice president of the city Chamber of Commerce. Some markings are drippy statements of adolescent love, “but it seems they’re mostly gutter terms.”

Downtown merchants who have labored to nurture Carlsbad’s reputation as a breezy, quaint seaside village that’s perfect for tourism have had gnawing concerns over the wall.

“It presents a very poor image for our city,” said Hope Wrisley, co-chair of the Carlsbad Village Merchants Assn., bemoaning that the graffiti problem has gotten “overwhelming.”

She often walks along the beach past the wall and discovered not long ago that graffiti isn’t the exclusive lexicon of beer-chugging youths. She spotted a man “maybe 40 years old, spray painting. A nearly middle-aged man. How tacky.”

“The wall is just too big a target,” Wrisley said.

Still, it’s obvious that most of the wall markings are left by young people. The heavy jumble of words and phrases includes “team crack,” “surf or die,” and “heavy metal rules.” There are explicit drawings of nudity and characters having sex. Somebody took 30 feet of wall space to paint “I do not know--where do you want to eat?”

Chris Brady, a 39-year-old Carlsbad man, savors strolling along the beach during mornings and sunsets. The sprawling array of graffiti anger him. “It shows a lack of respect for other people’s property. They’re rebellious and they don’t care about anybody but themselves,” he said. “It shows how the society has gone.”

City official Willey isn’t immediately as concerned about society as he is with the graffiti. Erasing it isn’t an easy task, especially the markings made by surfboard wax that are covered with sand and left to melt into the concrete’s pores.

In frustration, the city had hired a contractor to help eradicate the graffiti, but the use of high-pressure water was eroding the wall’s finished surface. That process left a more porous surface that is even harder to clean of new graffiti.

Finally, the City Council agreed this week to spend nearly $48,000 on another contractor who will rid the wall of all graffiti, then apply a protective clear wax coating to make cleaning easier. The coating will be replaced with each new cleaning.

Willey hopes the new approach and prompt removal will discourage most people who yearn for public expression.

Bohlmann suspects that the only way to eliminate the problem is to cover its surface with an artistic mural, although that has not been proposed. “When there is a mural or design painted on a blank surface, graffiti is not a problem,” she said.