Residents get lessons in cleaning up graffiti

Kris Wise
Daily Mail staff

Monday August 25, 2003; 10:30 AM

Cleaning up other people's messes isn't exactly the way most people prefer to whittle away a weekend.

But about a dozen frustrated city workers and residents decided to don rubber gloves and surgical masks Saturday to help rid at least one of Charleston's streets of graffiti and learn how to clean the unwanted artworks off their own property.

I tagged along as they attempted to tackle a graffiti-stained brick building on the East End where vandals have used a former Department of Motor Vehicles office building as their own personal canvas. Black paint covered the bricks, white paint scarred the stone foundation and purple marker-like streaks dribbled down the building's heavy metal doors.

It took about two hours with everybody wielding water hoses and spray bottles full of stinky, potentially harmful cleaning agents to get rid of most of the graffiti.

It didn't take that long, though, for us to realize that more talent and hard work is required to clean up the darn stuff than it takes to put it up in the first place.

What left us most bewildered is why anyone would waste time to wreck a building like that anyway.

Ten-year-old Alyssa Ferguson probably put it best, questioning why any self-described artist would take pride in the unrecognizable smears of paint.

"It's just a scribble here, a scribble there," I heard her say. "A 2-year-old could do it."

Nobody wasted much more time than that analyzing either the motivation or the work of the vandals.

Instead, we listened to a lecture by Mike Gioulis, a consultant for the state's Main Street program, about the trial-and-error process of cleaning up graffiti. A lot of the chemicals used to remove paint also can remove the surface features of buildings, and some of them probably could take off your skin.

"You don't want to throw it around and take the paint off somebody's car, and you don't want to end up causing more damage to some of the historic buildings taking graffiti down than the graffiti itself caused," Gioulis warned. "So it's going to take a lot of afternoons and weekends learning what works best to get this stuff down."

For the city's new Graffiti Task Force, still trying to recruit members from neighborhoods on the West Side and Kanawha City, a shortage of time is not the problem. Mayor Danny Jones told us he soon plans to spend an afternoon a week with his own work gloves on.

What's less available is money to buy graffiti-removing chemicals -- some of them only come in multi-gallon drums and cost upwards of hundreds of dollars -- and more people willing to devote elbow grease to the project.

Dan Ferguson, owner of Chef Dan's restaurant, got in on the cleaning action Saturday, looking like he derived a special sort of pleasure from washing away the work. His restaurant, located right across the street from the Clay Center, once was a favorite haunt among graffiti artists.

"I put the word out on the street that if it happens again, I'll find the person who did it," Ferguson said.

I was less familiar than Ferguson and some of the other business owners who repeatedly have been hit by vandals with the lingo that's apparently used "on the street."

Graffiti vandals call many of their works "tags," "pieces" and "throw-ups." At least one of those titles seems appropriate.

"There's apparently a code (among vandals) that they don't tag churches and they don't tag homes," said Mary Russell, co-owner of Contemporary Galleries. "But it's just as hard for anybody else."

Russell's Kanawha City gallery was struck with graffiti three times in a two-year period. It costs almost $4,000 each time to repaint her building.

East End resident Kristi Abdalla said she's seen vandals become more and more brazen on the city's streets.

"My brother-in-law's truck was recently tagged," Abdalla told me. "It was parked right in front of his house. It's getting a little bit ridiculous when you can't even park your car on your own street."

Elizabeth Street, at least for now, was a little cleaner when we left it Saturday. We learned that the most effective means of getting rid of graffiti is to get it down quickly, before the work is viewed by crowds and the vandals are given any credit at all.

We also discovered the orange scent of those cleaning chemicals really doesn't hide their odor and that nail polish remover is probably your best bet when trying to get magic marker out of aluminum.

The only disappointing part of the experience came after a layer of black paint was lathered with three different soaps, scrubbed, hosed down, lathered and scrubbed some more before it finally started to disappear. The cheers quickly ended as another equally ugly layer of red graffiti emerged.

The uncovering prompted one participant to refer to us all as "graffiti archeologists."

"You get rid of one and churn up another one," he said.

To join the Graffiti Task Force, call 348-8014

Writer Kris Wise can be reached at 348-1244.