The Road to Bureaucrat’s Hell

Sometimes a bureaucrat at City Hall does something so stupid and offensive that you want to blow the place off the map.

I heard of such a case last month from Gary L. Blasi, a UCLA law professor who lives in Echo Park. Echo Park, north of downtown Los Angeles, is a neighborhood hospitable to the arts and artists, a cosmopolitan community of many ethnic groups.

But Gary’s 17-year-old son, Michael, an artist, found it anything but hospitable.

Here’s Blasi’s story:

Several months ago, Michael, a student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts whose work has been exhibited in many shows, including one in City Hall, received a flyer asking him to participate in a mural painting project in city parks.

“He volunteered,” Gary Blasi said. “His assignment was to help paint a storage building in Echo Park that has always been a graffiti-spattered eyesore. Michael conceived a mural that paid homage to the intersection of cultures in Echo Park. He chose an image he recalled as a little boy, when the lake had been drained.”

Michael painted an old Asian woman digging for lotus roots, a delicacy, while other people looked for old guns and scraps of metal.

“Over the next several weeks, Michael and his friends spent several hundred hours bringing this beautiful image into being,” Blasi said. “Another set of young people painted a very different but equally beautiful image on the other walls of the building . . . the ugly ‘tagging’ of the building stopped. It was a joy to drive by the building on my way to work every morning.”

“This morning at sunrise, with no notice or warning, the city bureaucracy officially vandalized the building, painting over the murals with what can only be described as a bureaucrat’s beige. I am informed that this was the decision of (Parks and Recreation Department) Assistant General Manager Manuel Mollinedo, who apparently did not like the artistic merits of the mural. I arrived at the site at about 8 a.m., after Mollinedo’s vandalism was done, but in time to talk to several neighbors of the park who were as angry as I was.

“Mollinedo had neither the courtesy, the courage, nor the common sense to give any warning of this action to any of those who had contributed hundreds of hours of labor to beautifying the park. He apparently reached this decision yesterday and saw that it was begun at 6 a.m., specifically to prevent anyone from seeking another view within the city that might be different than his. . . .”

*

I checked the damage the other morning. Working in unaccustomed haste, Mollinedo’s minions had done a lousy job. In the spaces between the bricks, I could see the blue, green, yellow and orange traces of the mural.

I called Mollinedo to ask his side of the story. His secretary said he’d get back to me. He never did. Instead, he assigned the dirty job of covering his rear end to an assistant, Kathleen Polston, a Parks and Recreation analyst.

She told me that Barbara Benish, an artist, had been chosen by the Department of Cultural Affairs to paint a mural on the Echo Park building. Her design was approved by two city agencies, Cultural Affairs and Parks and Recreation.

Polston said Benish used her design on part of the building but enlisted the young artists, including Michael, to render their vision on one of the walls.

Polston said Mollinedo had “received complaints” about the teen-agers’ work. She inspected the mural and told Benish, “Barbara, this is not the theme you showed us.”

There were a number of ways this could have been handled, according to Al Nodal, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department. “I never would have had it painted over. There were a lot of ways to solve this, “ Nodal told me. But for reasons known only to him, Mollinedo ordered the mural painted over.

Happily, I can report that Mollinedo’s grief over this episode has just begun.

Michael Blasi’s father, Gary Blasi, wasn’t always a quiet-spoken law professor. In his years as an attorney for Legal Aid, he was a fierce fighter for the poor. Blasi beat expensive private attorneys hired by the county to defend its reduction of relief payments and helped force the powerful Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to spend more for low-cost housing.

In the relief fight, he used all the weapons--legal maneuvers, lobbying public officials, demonstrations and publicity. He showed no mercy. He never quit.

The fallout from this mural, which took Mollinedo only half a day to destroy, will no doubt now occupy much of his time. Blasi will pursue him as he pursued other stubborn bureaucrats. Mollinedo will curse the day he heard the name Blasi.

Welcome to Bureaucrat’s Hell, Mr. Mollinedo.