Taggers Rule : The Unfinished Century Freeway Is One Big Concrete Canvas for Graffiti Writers

If the ancient Greeks were creating the myth of futility today, they wouldn’t have poor Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill throughout eternity. They’d have him wiping out graffiti along the Century Freeway construction site.

The interchange where the $2.5-billion highway will one day join the Harbor Freeway south of Watts is not half-built, but the concrete walls artfully designed by architects in one of the state’s premier transportation projects are already scrawled with spray paint.

Boy, Pyke, Slick, Acid--if it’s all supposed to communicate something, the message is lost to thousands of commuters who crawl along the Harbor at rush hour. But the scribbled walls make one thing clear--graffiti are out of control in Los Angeles, and even Caltrans’ pride and joy is just a concrete easel for gangs and “taggers.”

“As the walls go up, the graffiti goes up. These kids are animals,” secretary Amber Martinez grumbled from the dusty site off Imperial Highway where MCM Construction is building the Century-Harbor interchange.

“They write on the rails, they write on the cranes, they write on the poles, they write on the trucks, they write on the palm trees. We tried to get the state to pay for some of this local ‘artwork.’ They refused.”

Engineers have designed the most innovative and expensive freeway ever built--one that will have a light-rail train running up its middle. Now if they can only figure out a way to keep it clean.

Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden has suggested calling out the National Guard to hunt down taggers from sundown to sunup. MCM construction hired a full-time security guard to watch the place but somebody stole his car.

At least nine bodies have been dumped at the site in the past four years, Caltrans officials said, so catching the hooligans who keep spray-painting $56,000 sound walls is not exactly a police priority.

A graffiti-proof coating sheds spray paint when washed with a high-powered hosing. But the hose costs almost as much as a sandblaster, about $150 an hour for a three-man crew--too expensive to maintain millions of square feet of freeway concrete, officials said.

There has been talk of taxing spray cans and using the money to clean up the damage done with them. State law already prohibits the sale of spray paint to anyone under 18, but shopkeepers say the vandals just steal it.

A recently passed city ordinance will require shopkeepers to store the cans under lock and key or in a cabinet accessible only to employees. Aerosol cans could be banned altogether by 1996 under a restriction imposed recently by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which some graffiti removal experts estimate could cut graffiti by 30% to 40%.

But none of that has made a dent in the problem, which Caltrans says would cost $2 million to clean up statewide next year. There aren’t enough workers or money to paint over all the graffiti. Most of it sits along the freeways until enough people complain. Inevitably, it’s only a matter of days before the freeway walls are tattooed again.

“We look at it every day. We’re disgusted. But what can we do?” said John Mehtlan, Caltrans senior bridge engineer on the Century Freeway project. “We don’t want our guys running around after the graffiti artists when they could have a spray can in one hand and a shooter in the other.”

Still, Caltrans is insisting that the walls be cleaned before it will pay for the $90-million interchange, and the builders are already squawking.

All that work will cost MCM tens of thousands of dollars, officials say, an expense the Sacramento-based firm did not anticipate when it submitted its bid.

“The state says it has to look pretty when we leave. But how long will it last? A night or two until they get some more paint,” groused MCM’s owner, Richard Myers. “I don’t want to waste the money taking it off. You can’t stop these people, so why not just leave it?”

If they have to remove it--and by every indication from the state, they will--project engineer Jerry Hamma is going to insist that the Caltrans inspector stand right behind the workers, “because when we come back from lunch, it will all be painted again.”

“They all say that,” Mehtlan said. “And there’s an element of truth to it. But if they expect to sell a job to the taxpayer, they have to clean it up.”

It’s 5 p.m., the sun is setting and the smell of cooking wafts up 117th Street in South Los Angeles. High above the neatly kept homes, silhouettes of little bodies begin to appear on the bridge of what will one day be California’s most modern and expensive freeway. Soon, the vandalism will begin.

“Something should be done about it. It’s our freeway. If the police were around more, people wouldn’t be spray-painting,” says 20-year-old Ken Parker, who lives across the street from the construction.

He thinks better of it and waves a hand in disgust. Graffiti, he decides, are just part of the Los Angeles landscape.

“It’s almost natural, that’s how I think of it,” he says. “There’s graffiti everywhere.”