A Long Goodbye for the Olympic Murals

In Los Angeles, the good things often slip away in the night. One morning you head for your favorite breakfast spot only to discover it’s been turned into a used-clothing store. No one seems to know why. It’s just got switched.

When I first came to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, I remember walking past the old Sunkist building in downtown and thinking how perfect it seemed. Inside its pure white walls you could picture the citrus kings sitting behind their desks, fighting their citrus wars with Florida and Arizona.

A few weeks later, I walked down the same street and the building had disappeared. Vanished. I stood there stupidly, staring at the empty lot, wondering where the citrus kings had gone.

It turned out they had moved to a modern, geometric building in Sherman Oaks that causes no one to stop and linger. And these days I can’t even remember exactly where the old Sunkist building stood. It’s just gone.

All of which gets me to today’s tale. You remember the freeway murals that were painted for the 1984 Olympics? Ten of them, splashed along the concrete walls of downtown, picturing gigantic kids skipping or 1950s cars parading or starmen floating in space.

Today, we pretty much accept Los Angeles as a city where mural art pops up everywhere. We are famous for it. But it was the Olympics project that gave credibility to the mural artists, setting the tone for all that followed.

And guess what? Those very murals are now slipping away in the night. As usual in Los Angeles, the slipping-away has been accomplished with barely a whimper. Neither the mayor nor any City Council member nor anyone else--except for the artists and a few supporters--has tried to stop the destruction.

The mechanism of loss is confounding and maddening. First came graffiti kids who, over recent months, reversed a long-standing tradition of leaving the murals free of besmirchment and began tagging them mercilessly along a stretch of the Santa Ana Freeway.

That was bad enough, of course. A number of freeway drivers who watched the defilement began writing letters to Caltrans, demanding that something be done. I cannot speak for the letter writers, but I suspect they were driven by the agony of the loss and the desire to see the murals protected.

Caltrans engineers, however, extracted a different meaning from the protests. The letter writers, they decided, simply did not want to see the graffiti. And they had a way to get rid of it.

Caltrans sent out crews to paint stripes over the graffiti. Long, gray stripes. Of course, the gray stripes also covered the murals, or those parts that contained the graffiti.

To paraphrase an old saying, Caltrans decided it was necessary to destroy the murals in order to save them. And that’s what they did.

I’m exaggerating a bit here. Of the four murals that have been graffitied and over-painted, the gray stripes now cover the bottom third or so of the images. You can still see that a mural exists, you just can’t tell what it’s all about.

Of the four, the most famous was painted by Latino artist Frank Romero and showed a color-splashed procession of 1950s cars rolling through a perfect L.A. afternoon. The lower parts of the autos have now been painted out, leaving their upper parts looking like odd spaceships floating over the gray paint.

Romero works out of a studio in Atwater. Last week he prowled around its high-ceilinged rooms, sipping a Coke, trying to explain his feelings about the destruction.

“All of the murals on that stretch of the 101 went for 13 years without being hit by the taggers,” he said. “The first time I noticed a tag on my painting was a couple years ago. Some kid had artfully drawn it inside the curve of a car fender.

“After that, a few more timid marks appeared. Then, suddenly this year, they went wild. Tags appeared everywhere. It felt like part of me was dying.”

Even before the Olympics, Romero had become one of L.A.’s best-known artists. A member of the group of East Los Angeles artists known as “Los Four,” Romero has created paintings that have sold for more than $50,000 in galleries. Many others hang in museums.

So he does not need the mural to solidify his reputation. Still, Romero began his career as a street artist, and the slow death of this work began to hurt. Even as the graffiti marks piled up, he began organizing a restoration effort.

“We decided to hold a benefit where we would sell signed prints of the mural and use the proceeds for the restoration,” he said. “Of course, at that point, we didn’t know that Caltrans was going to paint over the entire bottom.”

Romero says Caltrans never warned him directly that the over-painting was about to take place. Caltrans, in fact, concedes it did not. But the agency says it did send letters to the Los Angeles Mural Conservancy describing the graffiti problem and instructing the conservancy to correct it or else.

You may think it odd that Caltrans, with a multibillion-dollar budget, would demand that a tiny conservancy correct a graffiti problem on the state’s freeways. But the law appears to be on Caltrans’ side.

“Any artist who paints a mural on Caltrans property must sign a contract that makes the artist responsible for maintaining the mural. If they don’t, Caltrans has the right to correct the problem in its own way,” said William Koval, head of the Caltrans office that oversees the murals.

Actually, the people at the Mural Conservancy agree with Koval’s legal assessment. Even though the murals were commissioned by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, even though the murals were celebrated widely by the city after their completion, and even though the artworks sit on state land and are, in fact, owned by the state of California, none of these entities have any responsibility whatsoever to protect the murals.

That responsibility lies entirely with the artist. If the artist leaves town, if he dies or goes broke, that’s too bad. Either he cleans the graffiti off his mural or Caltrans will paint it over.

In effect, the legal situation is insane. But it’s legal just the same.

Bill Lazaro, head of the conservancy, says his group spends about $10,000 a year to protect a dozen or so murals in the downtown area on behalf of the artists. Some of the murals have been covered with what are known as “sacrificial coatings” that allow graffiti to be washed off.

But, he says, the conservancy does not have the money to protect all the murals. “We were organizing a fund-raiser for the Olympic murals, and we thought Caltrans was going to wait. It turned out they didn’t.”

Lazaro and Romero still believe that all four of the murals painted over by Caltrans can be saved. For his part, Romero says he is willing to re-create the entire mural at its present location if the fund-raiser provides enough money to pay for the materials. Perhaps, he says, the other artists will be willing to do the same.

In Los Angeles, of course, loss comes quickly and restoration comes slowly, if at all. In this city, you learn to enjoy it while you can.

So perhaps we should enjoy the top parts of the Olympic murals, which hover over the gray paint. You can see a human figure here, a palm tree there. There’s enough to give you a glimpse of the artists’ intent, enough to remind you of those fine days in 1984.

At least for now.