Artist Restores Famed Mural Covered Up in Graffiti Sweep

Willie Herron hoped the mural would grow old with his Eastside neighborhood, absorbing the scars of graffiti as venerable signs of aging on the tough, oil-stained alley behind his mother’s bakery.

Instead, it was coated with layer upon layer of “bureaucratic” beige.

That’s Herron’s name for the paint that county work crews slather all over certain neighborhoods in their efforts to cover up graffiti.

When Herron found his historic 1972 mural--depicting the gang stabbing of his younger brother--almost completely obscured by the dull color, he complained to the county Board of Supervisors and was soon commissioned to restore it.

On Sunday, “The Wall That Cracked Open” was unveiled again, as neighbors, and even old gang rivals, gathered to listen to bands and celebrate one of the city’s early Chicano murals.

“I think it signifies the roots in our neighborhood,” said Frederico Tellez, a friend who grew up with Herron. “It gives us a sense of pride to have our culture displayed in a mural like this.”

To Tellez, the message is intimate and powerful. As he was leaning against an iron fence across the alley Sunday, he chatted with a friend and former gang rival whom decades ago he would have tried to kill, he said. But the two men had gotten educations and had risen above their narrow hatreds, they said.

That’s the transcendent theme of the piece.

Herron, an artist who lives in Laguna Beach, will forever remember the night he painted it. He was coming home when one of his brothers ran to the car, putting his hands on the window and screaming that their brother John had been stabbed in a gang attack. They found the 15-year-old unconscious on the asphalt behind the bakery, with numerous wounds from a knife and ice pick in his back.

They called an ambulance and rode with him to the hospital, where the boy would later recover.

But on the walk home, an image came to Herron, he said. It was of a face--the face of a plague--rising from two fighting men, surrounded by his pious grandparents and an Aztec symbol of his ancestry. The plague was gang violence.

When he arrived, he grabbed some paint and set to work to re-create the image. He worked around the existing graffiti and hoped any new gang tagging would complement the mural through time. “I didn’t want it to be a freeze-frame,” he said.

By daylight, he was done with the 18-by-25-foot depiction. It was one of his first public works, forever the closest to his heart, and became renowned among scholars, historians and art critics.

He watched it grow through the years, as expected, with gang graffiti, and did nothing to keep the tagging at bay. But last July, when he found it and another of his murals--”The Plumed Serpent”--in their new beige coats, apparently applied by county contractors, he had to draw the line.

He began covering “The Wall That Cracked Open” with plywood, before the abatement crews could implement another county anti-graffiti program and paint vines over it. Then he won the $47,000 commission to restore his work, he said.

The alley in City Terrace might seem an unlikely place for a major art restoration project. The mural sits behind the bakery and the Mi Casa Discount 98-cent store, flanked by two rusted rain gutters and wood electrical box and strafed by a tangle of power lines overhead.

Fortunately, his original piece was done in a hearty oil-based paint that remained while he stripped the beige away with a mixture of acetone, paint thinner and denatured alcohol. He didn’t have to paint much back in.

But the years of graffiti were lost. “We wanted that,” he said. “Now it’s kind of a time capsule.”

So next Herron will actually repaint some of that early graffiti.

He hopes that other artists who have lost their murals to abatement crews will stand up and demand restoration.

“We have our history to protect,” he said. “The city has its history to protect.”