A Crime Against Art : Theft of three sculptures from subway site has officials baffled. Did vandals like the work, or just the materials?

Somebody must have really liked Larry Gruda’s artwork.

At some point in the last few days, thieves hauled off three of his eight-foot-tall, 50-pound sculptures from a subway construction site in Hollywood.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials can’t figure out why--or how-- anyone pried off the colorful glass-tile columns from a fence and walked away with them from the busycorner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.

“It’s unbelievable to me that somebody would take them,” Gruda said Tuesday.

The artist noticed two columns missing when he drove by Monday. On Tuesday, he returned to find a third gone.

While the sometimes unpopular transit agency has encountered vandalism, this is the first time that artwork has been stolen. And it comes as the sad-sack agency has had one problem after another with the subway project.

“I’m amazed,” said Maya Emsden, director of the MTA art program. Once subway construction was finished, the artwork was to have been given to community groups that helped with the design.

“I can’t imagine that it would mean as much to whoever who took it as it would mean to the people who made it,” Emsden said.

The columns were among 23 that feature small pieces of glass with images of people and other subjects etched by the artist, based on drawings made by community groups.

The artwork adorns a fence around a Metro Rail construction site and is one of the few pleasantries at a gritty corner.

“There was a homeless guy who came by when I was setting it up and said this was too pretty for the neighborhood,” the 44-year-old San Fernando Valley artist said. “But I thought it was worth it.”

Gruda speculated that thieves may have been wanted the glass. Each column is worth about $1,800, he said.

“We will learn a lesson--make sure things are secure,” said Emsden.

But she noted that the art program has saved the MTA money. Before the program began, transit workers were repeatedly being sent to construction sites to remove graffiti from undecorated fences.

“If there weren’t these sorts of projects, we’d have even more vandalism,” she said.

Transit police are investigating the theft.