Street Art was having one of it’s little moments in the Art World at large and San Diego was absolutely in on it. Banksy had just started painting his now celebrated murals across the pond and Shepard Fairey had either relocated to San Diego or had a hell of a local street team. I started collecting the “Andre the Giant” vinyl stickers in a notebook that meticulously catalogued the date and location of each newly discovered variation.
This enthusiasm briefly led to imitation: I found a high contrast black and white photo of Vladimir Lenin in the San Diego Central Library’s Image Archive; several file cabinets full of Manila envelopes stuffed with pictures cut from books and magazines to form a kind of low tech Google Image Search. I cut a stencil and made a few T-shirts and a surface carved Halloween pumpkin.
For me and my compatriots Graffiti offered everything that excited us about art: it was obscure, unscripted and illegal. It was inevitable that we would pick up spray cans and get in on the action. My best friend Francois had been living at my house for his final year of high school. We collected all the old paint we could find in my parent’s garage and dressed ourselves in the head to toe black of cartoon burglars. In retrospect we were only making ourselves more conspicuous but we also needn’t have bothered. Our destination was a set of sewer tunnels invisible from every possible street angle.
We graduated to actually planning pieces, buying colors and picking spots with higher risk and visibility. We also began attempting to connect with the larger graffiti culture that was blossoming around us. Before Downtown San Diego’s “Gaslamp Quarter” revitalization had fully taken hold there was an entire network of youth culture oriented boutique businesses taking advantage of the lower rents. This included a small shop dedicated to the “Four Elements” of the B-Boy Hip-Hop subculture that mysteriously didn’t seem to be selling much of anything at all. We came in looking for caps, custom spray paint tips that allow you to create different line thicknesses and other effects, and promptly failed the vibe check.
On a visit to New York we went to see the famous “Phun Phactory” in Long Island City. Later renamed “5 Pointz” and eventually demolished, this warehouse was a Street Art destination made famous by countless album covers and music videos. In the late ‘90s this extended to every paintable surface in a two block radius, creating the closest thing the movement had to a dedicated museum. We walked this hallowed ground in what seemed like total isolation until we attempted to climb one of the numerous fire escapes. From parts unknown a disembodied voice came booming out of a hidden loudspeaker:
“Yo B! No Roof Action! Fuggedaboutit!!”
Back in San Diego there was plenty of roof action. The same economic conditions that allowed stores such as the Hip-Hop Boutique to keep their doors open created plenty of empty and abandoned buildings. The El Cortez Center wouldn’t be reopened as condominiums for almost ten years, it sat empty next to a pair of disused parking structures that were popular with unsanctioned muralists. We were eager to make our debut as locally recognized street artists and thought one of these buildings would be the ideal spot. The location’s notoriety was a double edged sword unfortunately. We had barely begun our pieces when we saw the lights of an approaching security truck and had to escape to the edges of the nearby 163 Freeway.
Painting Graffiti wasn’t the only reason to explore abandoned buildings, it wasn’t even the most important one. We were effectively straight edge, not because we had any interest or connection with straight edge culture, we simply had no interest in drugs or alcohol. Urban Exploration checked a lot of boxes for us. It was something to do, it gave us a bit of an adrenaline kick and it gave us something to impress the cool kids with. Underneath the layers of weird art pranks and quirky thrift store clothes we were essentially nerds and we weren’t immune to the charms of social climbing.
All of this is to say that I wasn’t actively looking for spots to paint when I first discovered the California Theater. The California is a once opulent movie palace that has somehow avoided the redevelopment bug and remains a blight and eyesore to this day. The city has been talking about demolishing this building since 1990, even issuing a new demolition order in the Summer of this year. Like many theaters it has a small hive of apartment and office spaces perched above it, all in a similar state of disrepair. I will never forget the eerie sight of the word “SATAN” scrawled loosely across a wall with an arrow pointing to a darkened hole in the ceiling above. I never brought a chair or table to check if there was anything up there but the building had no need of invisible boogeymen.
It boasted a perfectly threatening living, breathing human being.
I must have missed him on my first visit but when I brought my friend Paul we heard the sound of a television cutting through the midday silence. Tiptoeing toward the sound we came across the sight of a slovenly, overweight man with long hair and a beard sitting shirtless and arguing with his television. His room was sparsely furnished and he didn’t look like he even owned a shirt or pair of shoes much less ever went outside.
Whether the owners of the building allowed him to live there to scare off other squatters or he had just spliced himself into the city’s power lines I’ll never know for sure. He could have been some developer’s neckbeard failson they wanted to store as far from themselves as possible or a tenant from more prosperous days that simply never left. We were able to creep away undetected but other friends said he had chased them from the building screaming. Later I even heard that someone had come across his unit while he was away and stolen journals full of rambling poetry. I never saw it in person but I was told the words “whores” and “Hollywood” were often repeated.
The truly crazy thing happened when me and Francois came back to paint and it wasn’t even face to face. At this point lots of our friends had been checking the place out and we pretty much knew how to stick to the parts of the building where he wouldn’t notice us. We hadn’t accounted for the possibility of batshit crazy Home Alone level booby traps.
We were climbing up the rear fire escape under cover of night with backpacks full of spray paint. Francois was above me and heard an elastic twanging noise in time to instinctually yell “DODGE!”. We swung our bodies outward, leaving one hand and foot on the thin, metal ladder just in time to hear loud impacts and breaking glass on the alley below. He had taken the kind of small wooden wash tub usually used to display apples at a health food store and filled it with rocks, chunks of cement and empty 40 bottles then used bungee cords to wind it around the top of the ladder. The small vibrations we created on the ladder’s edges as we climbed toward the top were enough to cause this bucket to pitch forward and dump it’s contents onto whatever had triggered the vibrations.
The complex of feelings is hard to describe if you’ve never successfully disarmed a potentially lethal booby trap that somebody had specifically set to hurt or kill you. There was a lot of adrenaline, definitely some relief, an undercurrent of anger and indignation but the top note was pure, unadulterated admiration. We were certainly happy that the trap hadn’t gotten us but we were also undeniably impressed that our opponent had thought of something so brutal and clever at the same time, especially considering that it almost worked. We had all watched the same cartoons and read the same Spy vs Spy comics in Mad Magazine. This was the one and only moment in which we were able to view the Ogre of the California Theater as a kindred spirit.
After this we got our pieces up without incident and the spots were prime real estate. We started to meet other writers who had seen our stuff and been impressed with it. Street Art was in vogue at the handful of independent downtown Art Galleries and some of our new acquaintances invited us to a group show. We were happy that we were finally making names for ourselves.
At the Art Opening there was a bit of a disagreement between one of the featured artists and one of the attendees. Their tag names were somewhat similar and Featured Artist was unhappy about the potential for brand confusion. Attendee suggested a minor change in spelling. Featured Artist grabbed a nearby hammer and hit Attendee in the face.
Suddenly it wasn’t so exciting that we were recognized in the local Street Art circles and it seemed to be the perfect time to stop making Street Art altogether…
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 