From a Garage Wall Emerges a Window Into City’s Mood

Maybe one has to have lived in Los Angeles a lifetime, as I have, to begin to seek meaning in the side of a humble stucco garage.

When a place, however insignificant, has once been drawn to your attention, and then remains in your orbit year after year, its momentary moods and flickers of appearance can become your personal touchstones for the larger rhythms of decay and renewal that are too vast to comprehend.

I am only one of the hundreds of thousands of Angelenos who would know one such place if they have been watching carefully during their morning commute as they leave the S-curves of the Pasadena Freeway in Highland Park.

Most, I suppose, look left to the stately old houses, the train station and the church of Heritage Square to measure the infinitesimally slow pace of renewal of these wonderful reminders of a time before ours.

I look right to a garage at Avenue 39 and Carlota

Boulevard for my daily check on the blood pressure of Los Angeles.

For several years it has been telling me that things were OK, even though headlines screamed of recession and crime waves. But of late, with the news elsewhere seeming better, the message from my wall has been troubling.

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I have known this neighborhood since the 1950s when my friends and I pedaled the concrete Arroyo Seco channel on bicycles and ventured down most every street from San Fernando Road to York Boulevard.

Still, it wasn’t until the late 1980s, when I had been a working journalist many years, that a routine story made this wall stand out in my mind.

I did a stakeout there one night with two officers from the Northeast Division of the Los Angeles police. The garage had a fresh coat of paint that had been applied that very day by a young gang member who was caught spraying graffiti. His punishment, fitting the crime, was to cover over his work with the sickly beige that is the ubiquitous sign of unimaginative civic battle against lawless youthful pride.

Knowing that a newly blank wall would be an irresistible lure either to the youths own gang allies or their rivals, the police waited that night to make another collar.

I can no longer remember how well the trap worked, but I began to watch the wall from then on to see whether their strategy would be successful.

As all of us do, they soon moved on to new things. A short time later the first of those weirdly stylized, indecipherable letters appeared in one corner, then another, until they covered all the wall, one upon another so that even someone who could decipher them would have trouble doing so.

Then one day--I can’t say just how many months or years after the police episode--a kind of miracle happened.

The wall was painted a powder blue. In the center a pair of robed arms reached skyward in the act of releasing a white dove. A caption of large block letters read: “JESUS SET ME FREE.”

Whether it was the artist’s intent I never learned, but I was struck by the personification of the wall itself as a supplicant to Jesus, beseeching him for respite from the gang warfare of the avenue turf.

The young gangsters must have seen it the same way. From that day on the wall remained a testament to the power of an image.

Once several months passed without new graffiti, I naturally fell to speculation on how long the streak would last. For years, the only change was the gradual dulling of the paint.

On my Pasadena Freeway commute, no matter how troubled the city I was driving to, the wall breathed hope. As my children grew up and moved on to lives of their own, I imagined generations of gang veterans teaching their lore to younger ones, always with the admonition, “We don’t write our names on the Jesus wall.”

I came to think of the wall as immutable.

That lasted until about two years ago when the paint began to peel.

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At first it was a small flaw near the hands, if I recall. Then the deterioration spread. It was apparent that, like every painted stucco wall, this one needed maintenance.

Finally someone repainted the mural, reproducing the message of devotion but sadly lacking the skill of the original artist. It was plain to me, even while zipping by on my way to work, that the blotchy hands and textureless dove had lost most of their mystic power.

The obliteration has been incremental, proceeding from a scrawl in one corner to a patch of beige paint, to a longer gang message, to a wider swath of paint.

The word “Jesus” is gone now, and all but the wings of the dove are blotted out. A few days ago the coup de grace was delivered with a large satanic squiggle in red spray paint. The wall now cries “SET ME FREE” with the writhing pain of the condemned.

I have often wondered whether the sanctity that had protected the wall was truly a point of religious fervor or some oblique influence known only to those who responded to it.

A couple of times during my days of street reporting, I interviewed a young man named Peter Quezada who was on a crusade to paint the walls of Highland Park with images that would command the respect of the young graffiti writers. A charismatic ex-gang member who won the backing of the police, Quezada had a gift for art as an organizing tool. He’d use any image, from Aztec legend and Christian doctrine to LAPD blue, to keep his charges in line.

Could he have painted the Jesus wall? If so, it was his masterpiece, a note on Gabriel’s trumpet by a man who wielded art like a bullhorn.

Whoever it was, the artist, just like the police officers who staked out the wall more than a decade ago, has evidently moved on to something new. And my small corner of Los Angeles is less fortunate for it.

Every day now I think about what this means. I have found no tidy conclusion for my tale. I can only wonder if what we need is more art, more religion, more police, or just a tough guy who can conjure all three into the idea of peace.