The new Graffiti Management Plan is pathetic for a bunch of reasons. I go into some of those reasons in today’s UpFront column; I’m going to test another one of them right here. I think the city’s stated response times to graffiti complaints, slow as they may be, are still too fast for the city to handle. So let’s see how long it takes city hall to clean up City Hall.
Although City Hall should be the jewel in the crown of municipal property, it could use a little help. There is garbage collecting in the moat out front: I saw a McDonald’s cup with its bright red stripe and a shiny Cold Shot can on a sunny morning this week, distinct among the generic background of paper scraps. And along the Barrington Street side, two metal doors are marked with several bits of graffiti. One tag is a jaunty silver crown that is half faded, as if someone started to scrub it off, but then decided they couldn’t be bothered. A piece on the other door is a stencilled hand holding a gun.
This is glaring evidence the city can’t keep its own house in order, which drives me crazy when the Graffiti Plan tells citizens to take care of theirs. So I just reported the City Hall graffiti at the official reporting website. City Hall is in a Graffiti Plan “priority area,” and the city promises to remove graffiti from said priority area municipal property within three days. My request went in just before noon Thursday. I’ll be checking back to see how the city’s plan works in action.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 6, 2006.