Elmer's Twomile Blog

The largest birthday greeting I’ve ever gotten was probably one of those tall cards with a check in it from my grandmother. Selena Gomez, whoever she is, got a big chunk of a wall in a prime location on one of Boulder’s open graffiti walls. This one is a long wall next to Oscar’s Pub. The photo above shows the north-facing wall, which is in a parking lot of sorts between 29th Street and the rear of some businesses on 30th Street. It’s just south of Valmont Road. It’s constantly changing, and is much longer than I’ve bothered to photograph here. There are about five discrete sections of it.

It’s neat to look at during the day, though I guess I’d rather look at it from the back porch of Oscar’s Pub with a beer in hand.

I found a little bit of history about the wall when I searched through some Camera archives — see story below — and I asked Mike Rayback, whose LLC owns the property about it. He said the wall had been part of a collaboration with September School since before his father bought the property in 1989. So it’s at least a 21-year tradition, which is pretty serious history in this neck of the woods, especially when you consider what the public perception of graffiti would have been in the 1980s.

The Camera story about local graffiti walls below isn’t available online right now, so I’m posting it in its entirety. I don’t currently have the date of publication, but it’s dated by the mention of Rich’s Roadhouse — which is now Oscar’s — as being somewhere 1993-2001.

Project supports graffiti

Graffiti wall in Scott Carpenter park is brainchild of two local teenagers

By Halle Shilling
Camera Staff Writer

The 100-foot legal graffiti wall alongside Rich’s Roadhouse is workable, but the uneven brick surface is not ideal for the best spray-paint art.

“The indents between the brick can sometimes mess you up,” said Winston Cressman, 18. “They change the lines. It’s harder to get real clean edges.”

Which is why Cressman is looking forward to a new 40-foot long, 7-foot high art wall completed Tuesday near the skateboard park at Scott Carpenter park.

“The new wall is concrete, which is better,” he said. The wall, estimated to cost $4,600, is the brainchild of Cressman and his friend Jory Rabinovitz, 16.

“We felt like there weren’t many places really, in our area to paint and we felt it was necessary to have a legal place where kids could paint without getting in trouble and express themselves,” Cressman said.

It was made possible by a grant from the Youth Opportunities Advisory Board. Rabinovitz first wrote a proposal for the wall back in 1996, but he had to wait a year to submit it at the right time.

The youth board, part of the city’s youth opportunities program, approved the grant in the fall of 1997 and the City Council approved funding soon after. But it’s taken nearly two years to construct. The first challenge was finding a suitable location, said Alice Swett, youth opportunities coordinator, which meant finding a place that was safe for the artists and agreeable to neighbors. After the park was chosen, the youth program had to get approval from the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. The site chosen is also in a floodplain, which meant getting special permits for construction.

Now, the wall is a blank slate — so to speak.

Only three rules apply to the wall, Swett said: no profanity or nudity can be depicted, artists must respect their surroundings and the rights of other users, and all users must keep the area clean.

“It’s a continuous use wall,” Swett said. “There is a code of respect. If something is good it stays up for a while and if something is bad, they paint right over it. The artists monitor themselves.”

Boulder doesn’t have much of a graffiti problem, said Dick Reznik, one of the city’s community service police officers, though sporadic tagging — the practice of marking territory with spray painted initials — does occur.

Even so, the police department has worked with the youth opportunities department on the art wall concept.

Tags: 29th Street, 30th street, art, graffiti, graffiti wall, open graffiti wall, Oscar's Pub, Rich's Roadhouse, September School, Valmont Road

Posted by Dave. This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 6:50 am and is filed under Art, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.