COLUMN ONE : Engulfed in a Sea of Spray Paint : Los Angeles’ anti-graffiti programs have made some breakthroughs, but many residents see the battle as a hopeless one. The visual blight is taking a toll on the city’s psyche.

In Boyle Heights, just out of the shadow of Bunker Hill’s whistle-clean high-rises, children frolic against a wall so covered with spray-paint scribble that its original color is hard to discern. FLACO2, the wall proclaims. CESAR1. FM-CX3. Inside the B&G; Liquor Market, manager Jin Sup Paeng throws his hands up in disgust. “This town!” he exclaims.

Along the Harbor Freeway, newly erected sound walls provide miles of sand-colored stone--a vast canvas for graffiti vandals. The top Caltrans official in Los Angeles was appalled during a recent drive on Interstate 110 and immediately ordered a cleanup. It didn’t last.

Trees are no longer spared. On almost every major thoroughfare in the city--downtown, the Westside, the San Fernando Valley--curbside trees, particularly the ficus with its pale bark, bear graffiti scars. There is nothing city officials can do about it; the chemicals that remove spray paint also kill trees.

Even Mayor Tom Bradley’s house is not immune. A recent drive past the mayoral mansion in Hancock Park revealed this cryptic message, scrawled in red letters on a cinder-block wall: “Don’t Screw Us Tom Please HPL’S ERK 69.”

Long a serious problem in Los Angeles’ poorer neighborhoods, graffiti have become a citywide eyesore, marring the urban complexion like a runaway bout of acne. The toll on the population is high--in the millions of dollars spent to eradicate it, in decreased property values, in the crime experts say it spawns and in the more intangible psychic costs of living in a city that looks as though it is under siege.

With the ocean at its side and the mountains at its back, Los Angeles is a place of striking natural beauty. But this mecca of sunshine and palm trees--a city that has staked its reputation in large part on its looks--increasingly is showing signs of urban decay. The most visible are graffiti.

“I think we’ve gone to hell in a basket,” said Sylvia Gross, the 78-year-old president of the San Fernando Valley Federation, a group that represents 19 Valley homeowner organizations. “The places that are closed up for business and the trash that is left all over the place and the streets that are torn up and the graffiti that is on every building and the lack of landscaping is pitiful. . . . What has happened to our town?”

Tourist officials, usually reluctant to criticize the city they are paid to boost, admit that they are worried. The Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, for example, is quietly pressing city officials to get rid of graffiti before it opens a $485-million addition to its downtown Convention Center in 1993.

“People still come to Los Angeles for the same reasons they always have--for the sun, the beaches, and the glamour,” said Gary Sherwin, spokesman for the visitors’ bureau. “We still deliver on our promise in those areas. But there are some areas, like graffiti, that are very troubling to us.”

This year alone, various government agencies in Los Angeles will spend more than $15 million on graffiti eradication. That is not counting the myriad volunteer cleanup efforts, or the millions spent by private businesses. The problem has become so widespread that it has spawned its own cottage industry: graffiti removal services.

But it is a losing battle, made more complicated by the fractured nature of Los Angeles, where overlapping city and county jurisdictions have no coordinated plan of attack. As these private and public efforts fail, residents are growing frustrated.

At 3rd Street and Rampart Boulevard, a bustling, low-income neighborhood just west of downtown, Juan Estrada loads soda cans into the back of his big white panel truck. Only the truck is not so white anymore--it is, rather, a colorful rolling advertisement for gangs and taggers. One message after another is crossed out. The 40-year-old Estrada has no clue what they mean.

Estrada, who recycles cans for a living, bought the used truck for $3,000, saving his money little by little. At night, he parks it outside his apartment, and that’s when the graffiti vandals hit. He used to try to remove it, but each time he cleaned the truck, the graffiti came back. Eventually, he gave up.

“There’s nothing you can really do,” he said, adding that he is not the only one. He points down the block, to another white truck. It is as marred as his.

Farther west, in the city’s Miracle Mile district, the people who live at Whitworth Drive and Genesee Avenue are worried. Graffiti are beginning to hit their quiet neighborhood of Spanish-style duplexes. They see it as a harbinger of the community’s decline.

“To me,” Robert Louis said, “it means that a whole bunch of other problems will follow. It means gangs. . . . This is a nice, middle-class, integrated neighborhood. You don’t want the neighborhood to start going downhill because of something like graffiti.”

Next door, Deborah Rosenthal can barely contain her contempt for the people who marked their turf on her garage. “It feels,” she said, “like little dirty rats coming out at nighttime.”

As graffiti tighten their hold on the city, neighborhood activists are striking back. Adolfo Nodal, who waged a highly publicized anti-graffiti campaign in MacArthur Park during the mid-1980s and heads the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, said Los Angeles is for the first time experiencing “a grass-roots movement to cut down on visual blight.”

In the San Fernando Valley, for instance, 4,000 people participated in a November graffiti paint-out spearheaded by the Los Angeles Police Department. In one morning, the volunteers used 1,700 gallons of paint, eradicated 62,000 feet of graffiti and picked up 127 tons of trash to boot.

In Hollywood, Laura Dodson took a different tack. The Neighborhood Watch leader founded “Boulevart,” a program in which 200 young people pledged not to deface Hollywood Boulevard in exchange for having their graffiti displayed as art. While construction of a new theater complex was under way, Dodson obtained permission for the youths to put up dramatic spray-paint murals on the temporary wooden walls surrounding the site. Dodson also supervised a 40- by 1,000-foot mural on the side of a Hollywood disco.

Dodson believes that making these graffiti murals legal is the cure for “tagging”--the work of non-gang members who have created the graffiti explosion by scrawling their names on trucks, buses, walls and buildings all over the city. (The most infamous of all taggers, Chaka, left his moniker in more than 10,000 places before his arrest in November, 1990. In July of last year, Chaka--a.k.a. Daniel Bernardo Ramos--was sentenced to 90 days in a boot camp program and 900 hours of graffiti cleanup after admitting that he had violated his probation.)

“The artists have a lot of control on these taggers,” she said, “and if they had more places to be creative they could encourage the taggers to come over to their side, to do art instead of the vandalism. These kids need respect like everybody else.”

Many disagree. Hannah Dyke, a Sylmar anti-graffiti activist who is a vocal opponent of graffiti art, says graffiti in any form lead to more graffiti and vandalism. “If the so-called artists want to do artwork,” she said tersely, “for years and years canvas has been a successful medium.”

In fact, the graffiti-as-art debate is so intense that when Los Angeles sponsored a “graffiti summit” in September, federal mediators were brought in to supervise the discussion. Wounds were still raw from the last gathering several years ago when, Dodson said, some anti-graffiti activists became so enraged at the art proponents that they threw fruit at the head table.

Experts who study graffiti say they do not occur in a vacuum but are linked to other forms of blight--litter, run-down housing, a proliferation of billboards and even ugly buildings, such as mini-malls or storage warehouses. These features come to define the character of a neighborhood, they say, spinning a cycle of graffiti and vandalism.

Graffiti also can lead to more serious crime, according to UCLA criminologist James Q. Wilson, author of the so-called “broken windows” theory.

Wilson reasons that signs of disorder in society--graffiti, broken windows, abandoned cars, trash--frighten law-abiding people into avoiding public places. Those places are then left to criminals, who further deface them, creating a downward spiral in which the fear of crime leads to an increase in crime.

“I regard Los Angeles as kind of on the cusp,” Wilson said. “It wouldn’t be difficult for it to slip down because this process starts like an urban cancer.”

Robert Rome, an Encino psychologist who is a former vice president of Homeowners of Encino, said: “Graffiti tends to make people feel that they cannot trust anyone, that they have to be protective of their own property and be on guard. It tends to take away the neighborhood feel, which used to exist throughout Los Angeles and is now a shrinking commodity.”

Some cities have had limited success in cleaning up graffiti. New York has largely eradicated graffiti from its 5,000-car subway fleet, a feat that most residents once thought impossible.

The Transit Authority began its program in 1984, cleaning its subway cars one by one and employing its own police to deter vandals. If graffiti reappeared, the car would be withheld from service until it was clean again. As the program expanded, the authority helped develop new car-cleaning products, including graffiti removers, stainless-steel cleaners and graffiti-resistant paint, that it says are safer and cheaper than what was previously available.

But the $6-billion subway cleanup campaign, which drew nationwide praise, did not end New York’s graffiti problem, said Penny Brackett, an official with the Transit Authority. When spray-painting subway cars was no longer an option, Brackett said, vandals began carving up windows. So the transit authority installed scratch-resistant glass in the cars and the vandals, she said, “were driven from underground into other areas,” such as sanitation trucks and buildings.

And some subway graffiti persist; Brackett said workers still spend an average of 110 hours a week cleaning spray-paint off subway cars.

In Los Angeles, the new Metro Blue Line has remained graffiti-free since it began operating more than a year ago. Transportation authorities--conscious that they must project an image of safety to attract riders--have gone to extraordinary lengths to police the system and keep it clean.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission is paying sheriff’s deputies about $13 million a year to police the line--even while it operates at a deficit. As is the case with the New York subways, if a Blue Line car is defaced, it is taken out of service and immediately cleaned.

Providing that same level of attention to buildings is a far more difficult task, especially in a city with an estimated 1 million structures. A recent citywide survey, conducted by meter readers for the Department of Water and Power, found that 2,300 single-family homes, 2,200 apartments and 2,400 commercial buildings had been marred. The agency, however, acknowledges that its count is low; the DWP employees who gathered the information examined only the sides of buildings that faced the meters they were checking.

Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess the full extent to which graffiti have become woven into the visual fabric of Los Angeles, one thing is certain: as the phenomenon exploded during the last few years, so has the cost to taxpayers.

The Southern California Rapid Transit District expects to spend $12 million this year on graffiti removal--twice what it spent three years ago--and officials say that is not nearly enough to keep the fleet of 2,500 buses clean. Caltrans, meanwhile, has upped its Los Angeles graffiti removal budget tenfold since 1985.

Jerry Baxter, Caltrans’ regional director in Los Angeles, says that his jurisdiction accounts for 85% of the freeway graffiti in the state. Caltrans is forgoing other maintenance--such as tree trimming and fixing potholes--to devote more funds to graffiti cleanup. Recently, after Baxter gave it agonizing thought, the agency resorted to putting razor wire around overhead freeway signs.

“The only measure of success that we have seen so far is with our razor wire,” Baxter said, “and unfortunately we can’t put razor wire on everything.”

The city of Los Angeles budgets $3 million a year for graffiti removal, most of it to pay for crews that respond to the complaints by homeowners and businesses. Elsewhere--on light standards, utility boxes, stop signs and trees--it simply remains.

The signs of graffiti cleanup campaigns--public and private--are evident across the city, in patchwork squares of unmatched paint on walls and buildings.

But one expert says these piecemeal paint-outs may be backfiring. Ernest Garrett, the founder of Graffiti Prevention Systems, a graffiti removal company, says his statistics show that when graffiti are covered in patches, they are three times as likely to reappear than if the wall were all one color. Garrett says the paint squares serve as invitations to graffiti vandals.

“It’s like a dog urinating on a hydrant,” he said. “Somebody has already been there.”

Over the years, there have been various efforts to control graffiti by clamping down on the ubiquitous spray can. Under California law, retailers are prohibited from selling spray paint to minors. But the law is not heavily enforced and some graffiti vandals simply steal their supplies.

By the estimate of one manufacturer, more than 8,000 spray cans are used daily to deface property nationwide.

In Los Angeles, city officials and bureaucrats say they have little hope of winning the war against graffiti. The only way the problem will be cured, they say, is for residents and businesses to shoulder part of the burden.

To that end, the private nonprofit group Los Angeles Beautiful recently kicked off a “cleanup, fix-up, paint-up civic pride” campaign that encourages schools, residents and businesses to join what it is billed as the first citywide beautification effort. Since October, community groups and schools have initiated more than 400 cleanup projects, according to Ronald Cox, the organization’s chairman.

“If we are in a neighborhood where we have trees and flowers and the walls around our homes are clean, then the aura of beauty is heightened for all of us, and there is less likelihood that graffiti will occur,” Cox said. “The long-term solution is for everyone in the city to take on that civic pride.”

Others, however, suggest that graffiti have proliferated precisely because Los Angeles has lost its sense of civic pride.

Kevin Starr, a USC historian who has written three books about Southern California, complains that today’s Los Angeles residents feel little kinship with the city. They have come here, he says, to take what Los Angeles has to offer--a better job, a chance at fame, an escape from poverty.

The result is that the city has turned inward, creating beautiful private interiors--shopping malls, restaurants, homes--while paying little attention to outdoor public places like parks and streets. Simply stated, he says, people don’t care enough about Los Angeles to clean it up.

“They care about their homes, their television sets, their family lives,” Starr said. “The goal of private fulfillment is built into the core of this society. . . . But a city that turns its back on the public life, the public dimension of things, shouldn’t be surprised if the public sector is defaced.”

The City’s Graffiti Count

Here is a look at the concentration of graffiti in the city of Los Angeles, as measured by Department of Water and Power meter readers during the summer of 1991. (One visit per ZIP code was made during a two-month period.) Some toned areas represent more than one ZIP code.

Incidents of graffiti found per ZIP code area. No record 1-60 51-100 101-150 151-200 201-250 251-300 301+