City officials have a suburban-parent approach to graffiti artists, so you’d expect them to move quickly to clean the graffiti off a playground. You know, to protect the young, impressionable kids from having to see what the nasty teenage hooligans do with spraypaint. But I sent in a complaint about graffiti on the nice new Common playground on April 24, and as of today, May 25, the place is still a tagged-up mess.
Here’s my report to the city: “The kids’ playground on the Common, between Bell Road and Cogswell. Much of the equipment has been tagged or otherwise hit by graffiti. The large yellow tunnel has a lot of black spraypaint on it, for example, and there is an interesting blue slide — the slide itself is divided into three, so multiple kids can go down at once — with graffiti on both the slide and the blue plastic ‘crown’ above the slide. I believe a picture of the same slide can be found on the city’s ‘Taking Action Against Graffiti’ web page.” (That dig about the pic on the city’s website was too perfect to resist. See the page here.)
Maybe city hall’s suburban parents are too busy dealing with commuting issues, like fucking over Chebucto Road residents, to care about the children.
(Here’s some history of this situation.)
This article appears in May 24-30, 2007.
