Frank Somers vanquishes the mess.
Allan Appel Photo
While Cole Zakur was playing hide-and-seek inside “MOAI,” his dad David helped lead neighbors to rescue their reclaimed pocket park from a new wave of menacing attacks — carried out by spray paint-wielding intruders over the holiday weekend.
Wednesday morning Zakur, who’s lived on Pine Street at Front for 15 years, called into the parks department as well as the police to report the serious defacing of MOAI, the sculpture, a public sculpture by Christopher Solbert, along with a spate of nasty and ethnic-bashing graffiti all along the climbing gym and the picnic table.
It was particularly painful to Zakur and to Lee Cruz, of the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association to see the defacing. They have organized a broad Fair Haven community team that over the past several years has already reclaimed the park once. (Click here and here for stories on how they and neighbors helped rid the park of rampant prostitution and drug dealing by installing new play equipment and landscaping, a water feature, and a splendid history-of-Fair Haven mural painted by local kids. )
Zakur noted with relief that the park’s mural had escaped graffiti. Perhaps that was because local kids painted it, Cruz mused. He wasn’t sure who did the graffitting but both men, who know the local kids, sense it was outsiders.
Cruz sent a message on the Chatham Square Neighbohood Association website for Lewis Park lovers to gather Wenesday night not to bemoan but to address the problem.
On short notice some neighbors showed up. Among them was the family of Luis Bermudez, who regularly walks over from Dover Street with his four kids and his wife Birna to cool off and let little Luis Daniel play in the water in the ending heat of the day.
“We love it here,“said Birna. But they don’t love the garbage that accumulates or the graffiti.
A take-charge guy who regularly collects park litter by himself and prunes the fast-growing vines that compete with the new evergreens„ Zakur was prepared to take a deep breath and to do the new graffiti clean up himself, with neighbors.
Then ge got a surprise.
“I reached Christy [Hass, the parks department’s deputy director]. I told her if she got us the materials, we’ll remove it [ourselves]. She immediately got back and said, ‘No, no, this is a Parks thing.”
Zakur said Hass promised to send a crew with a power washer to Lewis Park Thursday morning to do the work; she kept that promise.
Somers to the Rescue
At 7:55 a.m. Thursday Frank Somers pulled up to Lewis Street in his hunter green parks department van. Inside it was the Power Eagle, the city’s only mobile power washer, a machine that holds 300 gallons of water and is capable of shooting it out at temperatures up to 180 degrees.
Somer had heard from Hass Wednesday night. She asked him to add Lewis Park to his list of locations for the next day. The schedule included graffiti removal at Chatham Square Park, Clinton Avenue Park, and the Green, among at least 25 items.
“We are always playing catch-up,” he said. “We try to get the gang, nasty stuff off first.”
Hass said that in general the mayor has directed the department to remove graffiti within 24 hours of its being reported. “And we try, even in tough economic times,” she said.
Somers, a 24-year veteran of the department, Somers surveyed the Chatham Square damage and declared, “This is kids’ stuff. Magic marker. That’s much easier than the gang stuff in the other parts of the city.”
First Somers applied a basic but strong paint stripper, “Super Strip A,” to the defaced areas on the climbing gym. He waited a few minutes for the marks to curdle and then sprayed with the water set at 125 degrees.
Removal was fairly successful. It was less so on the rubberized steps of the apparatus. Reapplication and higher heat could do the job. But that presented the risk of removing the rubber and exposing the metal below it to rusting. Somers decided to spray just enough to eliminate the words’ legibility.
As to the picnic table, he turned to a reporter and asked, “What would you do?”
His determination: Power-spraying it might cause splintering. He called it in to Christy Hass’s office; they decided to bring the table in for re-painting or replacement.
The public sculpture offered the biggest challenge. As Somers put it: “How far can I go before I take the paint off?”
Somers experimented with the stripper, which when applied with brush, not spray, is more potent. Then he aimed the hot water only on one point at the bottom. The red graffiti came off, but it left a residue. As he proceeded in spots the removal of the defacing red spray paint also took off some of the green paint of the sculpture. The defacing letters and messages be rendered unreadable, he said, and they were.
“It’ll need to be repainted,” he conceded when he finished. Who’s to do that? Somers wasn’t sure.
“There’s no real clear responsibility [when it comes to the public sculpture],” Hass replied later by email. “I believe that those responsible for that art will have to find the funds to repaint.”
Another Way To Fight Back
Somers spent an hour at Lewis Park. Then he rolled up his hose, drank most of a bottle of cool water, and was off to Chatham Square.
The Bermudez family had told David Zakur and Lee Cruz that they wanted to have Luis Daniels’ first birthday party in Lewis Park, graffiti or not. To Cruz, that seemed like the best continuing deterrent to defacers.
How oes one reserve a corner of Lewis Park for the little one’s celebration?
Cruz and Zakur gave Luis Bermudez Christy Hass’s telephone number. He said he would call.
Thank you New Haven Parks Department.