One Against the Wall : Volunteer Uses Paint and Roller to Keep Freeway Beat Graffiti-Free

Tom Carney’s recently adopted charge gets beaten up by vandals at least once a week. Single but devoted, Carney spends almost every Sunday morning and some Wednesday afternoons patching up the damage.

What Carney adopted last spring was not a child; it was a wall--a half-mile stretch of the Los Angeles freeway network that has been assaulted by vandals with spray cans for almost as long as anyone can remember.

Carney, a 32-year-old car stereo installer from Long Beach, is helping to win a war the state has been unable to. After spending $1 million in a futile effort to clean up graffiti, the California Department of Transportation this year put up miles of walls for adoption by churches, fraternities, businesses and people such as Carney, who polices his hunk of concrete like an overprotective father on prom night.

“I’m obsessed with this,” Carney said, climbing out of his dirty white sedan on the shoulder of the southbound Long Beach Freeway near Willow Street where, just that morning, he had spotted a graffiti tagger’s black scrawl.

The roar of the traffic is dizzying and the smell of exhaust nauseating. He does his painting on his days off and, unlike the various organizations whose members share the chore, Carney does it alone. Sometimes he leaves with a headache. But when drivers cross the boundary into Long Beach, they can be sure that the wall with the blue sign proclaiming “Adopted by Tom Carney” will be the beige the state of California intended it to be.

“At first I did this for selfish reasons, because the stuff really bugged me,” Carney yelled over the roar of trucks, their tail winds whipping his brown hair. “But when I got into it I realized this is the first part of Long Beach that people see on the way to the Queen Mary and it looked pretty bad.”

It costs nothing to adopt a freeway wall; the only commitment is time. The adopting party agrees to keep the wall clean for two years and to wipe out any graffiti within five days. Caltrans supplies an orange vest, a white hard hat, beige paint and a roller. For safety purposes, only walls with at least 10 feet of shoulder are eligible for adoption, “or we’d have people ending up at the Queen Mary on somebody’s hood,” said Joel Fonseca, coordinator of the Caltrans Adopt-a-Wall program.

Since Carney took charge of his wall, he has gone through 80 gallons of paint. Some taggers grew so tired of watching Carney wipe out their work that they moved on down the freeway. (So did Carney; he recently signed up for an adjacent half-mile, southbound.) So zealous was Carney that he once saw a vandal in action at noon and was out there before the paint had dried. The organization that adopted a nearby stretch of wall complained that Carney was cleaning up their territory before they got a chance.

“My good friend Tom Carney, he loves it! He’s out there all the time,” Fonseca beamed. “This is a diligent commitment and in Tom’s spot you don’t see any graffiti. Everybody around here knows Tom Carney’s name.”

Next year Caltrans expects to spend $2 million painting over freeway graffiti statewide and when the work is done, the vandals inevitably will strike again. For Caltrans workers, it’s as much a matter of pride as money. They hate graffiti more than potholes.

“One little tag makes us look ridiculous,” said Fonseca, who dismisses the array of graffiti sprayers as “everything from your A-student to your average murderer.”

“There could be a million Tom Carneys out there, but there are 10 million graffiti artists,” Fonseca said, scowling. “But we can beat them. We’re getting a handle on it.”

Since the Adopt-a-Wall program began in Los Angeles last February, Caltrans has issued 21 graffiti-removal permits in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Considering that it costs $2 a square foot to clean up graffiti, officials estimate that the volunteer labor has already saved the state thousands of dollars.

The idea was declared a success locally and spread throughout the rest of the state, where 831,000 hours of manpower have been donated so far. In some areas where citizens have participated, freeway graffiti has decreased as much as 95%, Caltrans officials report.

Carney checks his wall when driving to and from work. He has invested hundreds of hours and what he has to show for it is a patchwork of browns that don’t match. It is a quiet act of volunteerism that most drivers don’t even notice.

“Some of my friends think I’m pretty crazy. But I like to think it helps,” Carney said, rolling over the last streak of black paint and stepping back to scrutinize his work.

When Caltrans offered to put up another plaque to commemorate Carney’s latest adoption, he declined. “That would be self-promotion,” he said, staring shyly at his white tennis shoes, freckled with beige.