Venice Whitewasher Scandal Turns Out to Be a Mistake

The mystery of the whitewashed Venice Beach Graffiti Pit has been solved.

The culprits--a group of painters in unmarked vans who covered the popular tourist attraction with a coat of beige--were workers cleaning graffiti as part of their sentences for committing misdemeanors.

Project Heavy West, a nonprofit Westside community agency that coordinates graffiti removal, was contracted by the city to remove graffiti from the Venice Beach Pavilion, next to a sunken amphitheater called the Pit. But last Friday, the graffiti-busters covered up the cacophony of bright images and words on walls, tables and benches in the Pit, which had been hailed by many residents as art and which the city has pointedly left alone.

“This was a tragic error,” Lorenzo Merritt, executive director of Project Heavy West, acknowledged Wednesday. “The unfortunate thing is we’re getting slammed for doing a good job. The crew misinterpreted [their directions] and didn’t recognize this was a very special situation. I’m fully cognizant of how sensitive that community is about that Pavilion. All I can do is apologize.”

Merritt said Project Heavy West received only a street address on a request from the city to clean graffiti on the outside walls of the Pavilion. That’s why he didn’t notice that the workers were going to be near the Pit, he said. “Otherwise I would have said ‘Don’t touch,’ ” he added.

City officials dubbed the cover-up a well-intentioned mistake, and a spokeswoman for Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter said police have called off their investigation into the once-mysterious erasure.

At least one of the workers who painted the Pit said he alerted his supervisors that painting the area seemed irregular. “They made me do it,” said Dennis Juehring, 26, adding that two supervisors unfamiliar with the Venice area instructed the workers to start on the side of a wall facing the Pit. “I said, ‘Are you sure? I don’t think we’re supposed to be painting that.’ People kept walking by and asking what we were doing.

“We can’t get blamed for it--we were just doing community service work,” said Juehring, who is doing several weeks of graffiti clean-up after being charged with a misdemeanor assault. “We’re told to do what they say, otherwise we don’t get credit.

“I was amazed. I went home and told my friend, ‘I can’t believe I painted [the Pit],’ ” Juehring said. “I think [Venice residents] have a right to be upset.”

Sure enough, the graffiti clean-up sparked a furor in the community. Venice residents said they were heartbroken to see a colorful symbol of their artsy community transformed into blank beige walls.

While the Venice community has debated furiously over the proper use of the area wedged between the beach and the boardwalk, residents say few people wanted to see the Pit’s colorful drawings disappear.

“Even the most conservative people in Venice have nothing against the graffiti in the Graffiti Pit,” said Rick Feibusch, director of the Venice North Beach Homeowners Assn. “If you didn’t like graffiti art and the funkiness of Venice, you wouldn’t live here in the first place.”

Now, to soothe feelings, Galanter has asked a local arts center to coordinate an effort to repaint the Pit with murals. The Social and Public Arts Resources Center will hold community meetings in the next few weeks and contact local artists to begin planning what to paint. Merritt said his group will help out in any way possible.

A Galanter spokeswoman said a Parks and Recreation Department employee learned Project Heavy West was responsible for the job late Tuesday. A supervisor acknowledged the agency’s role, the spokeswoman said.

By Wednesday afternoon , almost every surface in the Pit was already scrawled with new drawings and words. A rainbow of colors peeked through the places that the painters failed to cover. The furor, for the moment, had died down.

“Hey, it was a mistake,” Feibusch said. “It’s all going to go back up again and its going to be better than ever. Venice overcomes all adversity.”