Cleanup Caper

Perhaps only in Venice Beach--home to off-the-wall artists, boardwalk bassoon players and alternative-minded denizens--could an act of graffiti cleanup be investigated as a case of vandalism.

In a whodunit that has also miffed many in the Venice arts community, workers in unmarked vans recently descended upon the colorful wall creations at the Venice Graffiti Pit, silently slathering a coat of plain beige paint over the balloon-character graffiti that has become an unofficial landmark and tourist attraction.

No one has claimed responsibility for the whitewash: The city says it didn’t do it. The Recreation and Parks Department professes ignorance. The local city councilwoman is mystified.

But not everyone claims to be a fan of the lost drawings. Several officials, including a spokeswoman for Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter and the president of the local Chamber of Commerce, said there are those in the community who don’t appreciate the graffiti.

Even so, this quirky beach community has long protected the Pit as public art. And now the blatant erasure of the graffiti is being investigated by police.

On Tuesday, Galanter called in police to crack a case that in other vandalism-plagued areas of Los Angeles would be considered an act of community service.

But not in Venice, where even police aren’t sure what’s art and what’s junk for the eyes.

“Well, apparently it wasn’t graffiti,” Lt. Ann Young of the LAPD’s Pacific Division said of the Pit, which sits behind a grassy area where Windward Avenue meets the boardwalk. “It was the artistic type, the good type, if there are any types of good graffiti.”

One city graffiti buster is aghast that police are probing the situation.

“That’s amazing,” said Tom Ernst, who does educational outreach for Operation Cleansweep, a graffiti abatement program in the Public Works Department. “I don’t think it should be investigated as any type of criminal activity. That’s overkill.”

But even hard-nosed graffiti cops such as Ernst do a bit of soft-pedaling when it comes to the Venice Beach brand of public graffiti. He said the Pit was one of the only places in the city where his cleaners have been instructed to leave the stylized drawing and writing alone.

“You want to applaud someone who will go ahead and paint out graffiti, but you need permission,” Ernst said. “I don’t like graffiti, but if we condone this [painting out], it’s like saying it’s OK to trespass and go onto property that’s not yours and poke your nose into other people’s business.”

Meanwhile, Los Angeles police are going ahead with their probe, saying that if members of the public launched the cleanup without city permission, it would constitute vandalism.

“It’s kind of a surprise,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Brent Honore, senior lead officer for Venice Beach. “It’s just [that] no one knows who did what and who had permission, if they had permission at all.”

The Pit, a sunken public area of 40 concrete tables, benches, walls and trees beside the Venice Pavilion, has been the scene of hand-painted drawings since the early 1970s. As the years went by, both professional and amateur artists added their own touches, a scene the Venice community came to embrace as a product of its artsy culture.

Recently, the jagged street-smart renderings have served as the backdrop for countless movies and TV shows, including the film “White Men Can’t Jump.”

But on Tuesday, the wall had become a huge ocean of beige, covered now by the herky-jerky, spray-painted scrawl of local taggers. And even some more legitimate artists had returned to re-create their work.

All along wind-whipped Venice Beach, the accusations are flying.

“It smacks of city works since it’s city beige,” Carol Tantau-Smith, president of the Venice Chamber of Commerce, said of the graffiti cover job. “They occupy [the adjacent] building, so you’d think they’d notice if somebody painted it.”

But city officials have no record of any such work. “It was evidently community vigilantes,” said Niki Tennant, a spokeswoman for Galanter.

Such a prospect doesn’t sit well with local park officials: “This is what’s difficult to understand--who these ‘benevolent’ community vigilantes are. Probably in their own minds they were doing something good,” said Kathleen Chan, project manager with the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.

But not in the minds of the youth-oriented beach culture. Indeed, for tie-dyed-in-the-wool Venice Beach skaters and boardwalk denizens, the cover-up is an unthinkable crime tantamount to filling in the community’s historic Venice canals with mortar and concrete.

“It might not have all been beautiful, but it was an expression of how someone might have been feeling on a particular day,” said skateboarder Mike Macisco, who rolled through the Pit on Tuesday afternoon. “Anyway, there’s an unwritten rule that says you never cover up another artist’s work. That’s just unthinkable.”

Longtime Venice resident Joan Klotz summed up what she thinks the community reaction will be, describing how she faced the bare and blank walls.

“I almost cried,” said Klotz, a board member of the Venice Arts Mecca, a nonprofit youth arts organization that is planning to turn the area into an arts center. “It was such a dead, institutional brown color and all the tables were painted a gun-metal gray. It was like a prison yard, a dead souls kind of place.”

City officials agree that the Pit’s decorations were different from graffiti in the rest of the city.

“It was a combination of art and a lot of other things like free speech statements, and a lot of ideals that typify Venice,” Tennant said. “It was not tagging. It was certainly more in the realm of what you would call public art.”

So far, there are few clues in the case.

On Friday, a recreation department maintenance employee noticed the workers readying to paint in the graffiti pit but didn’t think anything about it, his supervisors said. Right next door, the filming of the television show “Pacific Blue” distracted the usual crowd of boardwalk strollers, who paid little attention to the painters, the supervisors added.

Thinking about the fate of the Pit, resident Klotz feels her own hue of Pacific blues.

“It was like a kaleidoscope, colorful and witty,” she said.