Cafe’s Art Takes Bite at Pasadena

Business is booming at the newly opened Rite Spot cafe, thanks to Pasadena City Manager Philip Hawkey.

It’s not just the food that’s packing them in at the 1930s-styled restaurant at the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Fair Oaks Avenue. It’s the furor over a 40-foot mural by artist Kenton Nelson.

Inspired by Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” and by tussles with Pasadena’s bureaucracy over colors in the cafe’s neon sign, Nelson turned out a satirical work in the heroic style of Depression-era federal Works Progress Administration murals.

In the mural, Pasadena city workers lounge under trees and shovel money into a truck. A motorcycle police officer eats a doughnut and ignores a mugging. Pasadena’s Beaux-Arts City Hall is labeled “City Hell.” Even cafe co-owner Roger Kislingbury is on the wall, walking into City Hall with bags of money.

Since an article Jan. 8 in the Pasadena Star-News in which Hawkey criticized the mural, at least 40 people have entered the restaurant daily to peer and point, said co-owner Victor Ciulla. About half stay to eat, he said.

“The day the article came out, I got at least a dozen phone calls,” Ciulla said. “People saying, ‘I love your mural. It’s a beautiful work of art.’ ”

Hawkey said he telephoned Kislingbury to protest the mural as “inaccurate and unfair” after city workers complained. “I believe that city employees do a good job and care about the community,” Hawkey said. “To ridicule them is not a service.”

He also said he wants to know whether any facts underlie the satire. If the Rite Spot owners know of any city employees taking money, Hawkey said, he would investigate.

But the mural was not aimed solely at Pasadena, Nelson said. “It’s an attack on our government in its entirety, our bureaucracy and what it’s become.”

On Thursday, that message sailed right over the heads of one group of lunchtime patrons, who said they saw only a painted paean to Pasadena.

“I love it,” said Paula O’Sullivan, who works for the Pasadena Convention and Visitors Bureau. “It’s got the train station, City Hall, the trees and the feeling of what Pasadena really is.”

Laura Pleasant said she was “drawn to the colors.” But if one wanted to criticize, Pleasant said, pointing to a figure of a woman with her arm raised, “you could say she’s soliciting with her arm over there.”

Attorneys Michael Mayock and Leonard Plotkin said they came to the restaurant to try out the food and look at the mural. They pronounced the art “entertainment” and “all in good fun.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Mayock said of the City Hall protest. “No one would have noticed it if they hadn’t called it to everyone’s attention.”