The warmth of a new spring signals Bob Zaragoza to take up his patrol in search of graffiti along the streets and alleyways of southwest Denver’s Athmar Park neighborhood.
The past six years, Zaragoza, 65, has risen at 5 a.m. to walk the block around his house and scour the walls of Rishell Middle School for the telltale attack of taggers. If he finds the paint before it fully dries, he can wipe it clean in minutes.
Once, a group of teens confronted Zaragoza when they saw him removing their tag from a heavily bombed trash bin.
“They told me it was none of my business,” says Zaragoza, a neighborhood activist of sorts, who has made graffiti elimination his personal mission.
“As long as I live in this neighborhood, I will do everything I can to fight back.”
This summer Zaragoza may be in for the fight of his life. Graffiti is making its biggest mark on Denver, changing the daily urban routine, sparking debate over its meaning and challenging the community to respond.
Growing painfully
In truth, the amount of graffiti in Denver has been increasing the past two years. But it seems to have spiked. In the first three months of this year alone, crews repainted 790,000 square feet of graffiti-clogged walls, bridges and buildings – nearly 50 percent more than the same period last year.
Calls from concerned and angry residents are at an all-time high as abatement crews frantically respond. The public works department used to pride itself on removing graffiti within 48 hours of a report. Now it takes three to seven days.
The state Department of Transportation, the city of Denver, Xcel Energy, Denver Public Schools and other private and public entities spent $1.8 million last year on the problem, according to Gary Price, Denver’s director of solid-waste management.
And the taggers are spreading out.
Three years ago, public works crews knew from their diligently plotted maps where the majority of their calls would come from: concentrated areas in the southwest, northwest, northeast and central Denver, including downtown and the Colfax corridor. Now their map is a sea of dots drowning every neighborhood in the city.
Some say it’s a sign – albeit a negative one – that Denver has grown up as an urban place.
“I think we are a major cosmopolitan area now that is experiencing the same problems as any major city,” says Price.
The depth of those problems remains a question, however. City Council leaders Michael Hancock, Rosemary Rodriguez and Judy Montero say the graffiti in their neighborhoods is gang-related. Tensions are rising between rival ethnic gangs who are becoming increasingly more virulent in marking their territory.
But youth leaders say a good portion of the tagging is just wayward teenagers engaging in an age-old form of protest, using the streets and private property as a canvas to express unheard voices.
And they are offering at least one solution. The Colorado Hip Hop Coalition is working with underground graffiti artists and well-known muralists, petitioning the city to designate a popular tagging and mural painting spot at the abandoned city water-treatment facility at East 52nd Avenue and Emerson Street as a legal graffiti park.
“Youth culture and the dominant culture keep butting heads,” says Jeff Campbell, executive director of the coalition.
Still, everyone acknowledges something should be done. The proliferation of graffiti has changed the way some people carry out their day-to-day lives in west Denver.
“People start their day walking around their homes and businesses to see if they’ve been tagged again,” Rodriguez says. “My own house has been tagged four times in the last year. I pick up trash, and I look for graffiti. It’s a way of life for us now.”
Taking it personally
For the past 25 years, Tony Ibarra’s company, Digatron, has developed surveillance camera technology primarily used by the government for security efforts, including border patrol and homeland safety.
These days, he’s getting more walk-in traffic as residents and business owners along Federal Boulevard try to protect their property.
Ibarra’s cameras offer a 24-hour, anti-graffiti surveillance service that trips an alarm as someone steps onto a property. Security guards back in a monitoring station use a live chat-back feature to tell taggers police are being notified. Some systems come with a flashing blue light and siren.
Buying the camera system was Mike Moore’s last-ditch effort to stop the tagging of his Littleton Capital office on the 600 block of South Federal Boulevard. Moore says his stucco building was hit scores of times over the past decade.
“When people came up here to do a mortg age loan, they would take one look at my building and think this was a bad neighborhood and decide to do business somewhere else.”
His place hasn’t been tagged for the past month – since a camera was installed on the building, as well as on a neighboring dental office that shares the monthly monitoring costs. Last week, the mortgage office had its first set of walk-ins in nearly four years.
“But I can’t really believe it yet,” says Moore. “I still drive to work every day expecting to see the graffiti.”
Signs of bad times?
Councilman Hancock insists he knows what spray-painted graffiti art looks like. But art isn’t what he’s seeing in District 11, which encompasses North Park Hill and extends all the way out to Denver International Airport.
“This is a criminal act,” Hancock says.
Like many residents in the neighborhoods of Montbello, Stapleton, Gateway Park, Parkfield and Green Valley Ranch, he sees the graffiti as evidence of something worse: gangs. The concern was expressed frequently during a recent community meeting held at the District 5 police station in Montbello.
“This is indicative of a larger problem we are about to have with gangs in this area,” says Burnie Baker, a Montbello resident and member of the Northern Corridor Coalition. “(Graffiti) seems to be the first step.”
If that’s true, there’s plenty of evidence that trouble is brewing. A fence across the street from Falcon Park in the heart of Montbello is littered with the hidden language of known gangs vying for territory none owns.
Strings of letters and numbers are tied together with geometric symbols, scrawled in thick, decisive strokes made by markers or spray paint. Some of the letters appear to be taken from the Greek alphabet like those used to denote college fraternities or sororities. It’s mysterious, but words stand out: “block,” “southside,” “Playoo” and “52 Crip.”
This is a guerrilla war in which spray cans are the weapons of choice. One gang leaves its symbol in signature shades of red or blue. Another gang comes by and covers it over with a large, black rebuttal “X.”
Residents try to keep up. But their efforts add to the mess. New wooden planks and discoloration caused by cleaning solutions leave their own unsightly mark on fences – and the psyches of residents.
“We are so used to seeing it that we feel uncomfortable if there’s a white wall that hasn’t been covered up,” says Frank Duran, 14.
Duran and several of his buddies sat on park tables heavily marked by tagging last week while they decoded the messages on the fence across the street.
This belongs to the BKs.
No, it’s the East Side Oldies.
Hold up, this neighborhood is now home to the Sureños.
“It’s competition,” Duran says.
Hancock has a different spin. “We have an unhealthy community right now where people don’t feel safe in their own neighborhoods, where people are changing the way they walk to and from school to avoid the threat and intimidation of some kids who have gone astray.”
A place to paint
Graffiti artist Travis Burns, 29, has suffered the consequences of the city’s recently stepped-up enforcement efforts, including stings, jail time and hefty fines.
Burns was arrested on suspicion of criminal mischief two weeks ago after he was caught tagging one of the free-standing walls that remain from the water-treatment plant. The walls are a usually a free zone for graffiti artists, but this time, someone called the cops. Now Burns must appear in court May 1 and faces up to $15,000 in fines.
“I wasn’t hurting anybody,” says Burns. “The cops were treating me like a criminal when all I’m trying to do is make artwork that people can see.”
Burns is among a group of underground graffiti arts who believe a new solution to curbing taggers is to have the city designate those same walls as a legal graffiti park.
Proponents say the park would take taggers off the street the way skate parks have redirected many skaters off the 16th Street Mall. Art educational programs could be created and funded in which graphic artists team up with youth taggers, teaching them how to creatively channel their angst and rebellion. Crews of taggers could compete in monthly mural contests.
“A lot of other cities have this, including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles,” Burns says. “Why doesn’t my city?”
The proposal is still in its embryonic stages, says the Hip Hop Coalition’s Campbell. He has been gathering data and budget numbers but has not approached the city formally yet.
“Anytime you have such a strong presence of opposition to voices of resistance, you are going to have an even stronger reaction to it,” Campbell warns. “Until it comes from the graffiti artists themselves that things need to change, nothing will change. Look around the city. The graffiti cats are burning it down.”
As Hancock drove through the graffiti-marred streets of his district last week, he doubted the idea of a legalized graffiti park would fly now.
“They picked the worst time to even bring that question up,” says Hancock. “This is such a destructive, expensive act that I’ve lost my patience. I’m not trying to put the idea down, because I think everything is worthy of being looked at. I’ll look at it, but I also am interested in the best practices of combating this that have been put in place throughout the country.”
Staff writer Sheba R. Wheeler can be reached at 303-820-1283 or swheeler@denverpost.com.
More online: Metro State professor Carlos Fresquez talks about tagging in an audio slideshow. http://extras.
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