Graffiti continues to mar Elgin’s streetscape
BY DAVE GATHMAN dgathman@stmedianetwork.com July 25, 2011 7:52PM
Public Works employee Katie Thrun sets up a power washer to remove graffiti from an apartment building on the west side of Elgin, Ill., on Monday, July 25, 2011. | Andrew A. Nelles~For Sun-Times Media |
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Updated: October 29, 2011 12:45AM
ELGIN — For decades, 75-year-old Warren Schultz has loved the quiet world behind his home along Stewart Avenue on Elgin’s far northeast side.
On a sunny, warm morning he can walk through the gate in the wooden privacy fence across the rear of his property and step into a large, farmlike community garden run by the Church of the Brethren. Surrounded by growing corn and broccoli and tomatoes, he can sit and shoot the breeze with friends who have come to tend their garden plots.
But now, as Schultz sits in that rustic hideaway, he looks back at his own fence and sees that all 60 feet of it is covered with graffiti. The spray-painted scrawlings range from a five-pointed street gang symbol to the words “White Sox” and “E.T.” to a dollar sign and a Satanic pentagram.
From homicides to thefts, almost every category of crime has dropped in Elgin over the past two years. But one offense that’s booming is graffiti — and most of that is being used to advertise street gangs.
Like the vandalism in Schultz’s residential neighborhood, other examples abound:
When customers go to pick up their repaired cars at Lee’s Auto on Elgin’s Dundee Avenue, they can’t avoid noticing that the concrete-block wall along one side of its parking lot is covered with “tagging” graffiti.
One reason city officials pressured the owners of the former Simpson Electric/Elgin Watch Case Co. plant to tear down that vacant piece of history is that even inside a fence topped with barbed wire, the building had become a magnet for spray-painted gang slogans.
At the last city council meeting, when Councilman John Prigge observed that there seems to be more and more of the stuff. City Manager Sean Stegall said the city has been getting 40 percent more graffiti complaints than one year ago.
Calling the sight of graffiti an “image killer” for a city, Prigge asked staffers to consider what could be done to get the writings cleaned up faster. He described a painfully visible bunch of graffiti that had been plastered on a retaining wall along “Car Dealers’ Row” on East Chicago Street and had taken more than a week to be cleaned up.
The graffiti queen
The 40 percent rise doesn’t surprise Katie Thrun, who works full-time cleaning graffiti off walls for the city public works department. Sometimes she works alone, sometimes with the help of teens sentenced to perform public service for committing minor crimes.
Under terms of a 2009 anti-graffiti ordinance, Thrun & Co. will even clean off graffiti left on private property, so long as the owner signs a waiver promising not to sue the city for doing so. Monday morning found Thrun using a spray-on solvent and a high-pressure hose to spray an unwanted message off the side of a two-story apartment building along Mark Avenue on the city’s northwest side.
Scrawled in black paint on brick, the graffiti had said, “Love Sucks” followed by a three-letter abbreviation for a street gang slogan declaring that the person who painted the message would kill anyone from a certain rival gang who came near.
“It has gone up a lot,” Thrun said. “And the damage tends to be more extensive. For example, that retaining wall on Chicago Street that the city council talked about is made of very porous material. So power-washing like this wouldn’t get it off. We had to use sandblasting, and it took a week just to do that one wall.”
Thrun said she sees two kinds of graffiti — gang propaganda and “tagging.” In the latter, the graffiti writer uses elaborate calligraphy and drawings to create what he or she considers a work of art.
“The tagging is usually even signed by the artist, but they use such fancy balloon letters and symbolism that you can’t really read the name,” Thrun said.
Lately, she said, the new graffiti seems to be mostly gang-related. “It’s a problem on both sides of town,” she said. “Right now I have more outstanding cases on the west side.”
Three arrests
Police spokeswoman Sue Olafson said three people — all of them juveniles — were arrested in recent weeks for allegedly painting graffiti.
Stegall and Police Chief Jeff Swoboda told the council that sometimes an increase can be caused by the work of just a handful of very active perpetrators.
Besides possibly qualifying the offender for a misdemeanor charge of criminal damage to property, graffiti writing is punishable by up to a $1,000 fine as a city violation. The ordinance also makes the offender and his parents, if he is a minor, liable for the cost of cleanup and damages.
Thrun said anyone with a graffiti problem can call a city hotline to ask for the free removal service. The hotline number is 847-931-5599. She said she gets an average of perhaps five complaints a day.
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