Neighbors mourn mural creatures' extinction

Of course there are explanations as to why the city totally painted over a colorful, 50-foot-wide public-art mural near the Woodland Park Zoo.

All that Greg Zuhl wanted to do was his civic duty by calling the city's Graffiti Report Line

But his innocent calls led to the obliteration of the very piece of art he was trying to save.

What we have here, as the famous saying goes, is a failure to communicate.

In this case, the mural is at the underpass at North 57th Street and Phinney Avenue North that leads to the park. Each side of the underpass, 13 feet high, was filled with giant, friendly paintings of elephants, a frog, a monkey, a rooster, an owl and other animals.

In October 1994, with about $2,000 from a city grant, a couple of hundred neighbors helped paint the murals. Since then, the whimsical animals have greeted thousands of passers-by.

The mural had been done in conjunction with Street Smart Art, a now-defunct program that channeled the energy of kids doing graffiti into legal venues, not sides of buildings.

The designer of this particular mural was Josh Howard, now 33, a New York City-based artist with several shows to his name. He graduated in 2003 from the prestigious Pratt Institute Brooklyn.

In 1994, Howard was attending Seattle Central Community College, sporting long hair and baggy pants, part of a group of young men enthralled with graffiti as art and sometimes getting in trouble for it.

Howard remembers how the neighbors enjoyed helping paint the zoo mural from his 10 drawings that had been projected onto the underpass walls.

"It was kind of like paint-by-the-numbers, orchestrating all these people," he says. "It came together pretty nice."

Early last month, much to the surprise of neighbors and the Phinney Ridge Community Council, the mural went gray.

It all starts with Zuhl, a 48-year-old consultant who designs online corporate training. His family lives within walking distance of the underpass. His wife also works at The Seattle Times.

To his neighborhood, says Zuhl, the mural was a landmark, like the "Waiting for the Interurban" statue is to Fremont.

"These neighborhood icons help provide our identity, they bring us together and bind us, and it's why we love our city," he says.

Then, in March, he made his fateful phone calls to the Graffiti Report Line. He simply wanted to call attention to a handful of "tagging" done to the mural — those squiggly signatures that kids like to spray-paint. They didn't cover much, he says, maybe 1 percent of the mural, but they were an eyesore.

"I've played it over in my mind a million times," says Zuhl. "Why am I so damn civic-minded? If I hadn't pressed the issue to get this cleaned up, the murals would still be there."

Zuhl says he called the hotline three times, but nothing was done about the tagging. He also called the zoo, which then also twice called the hotline.

In the past, the zoo staff had painted over small tags with colors to match the art, even though the underpass is actually maintained by the city's Department of Transportation.

But over at the graffiti hotline, the multiple calls made it sound like numerous neighbors were upset.

On the morning of May 6, Zuhl was on the way to a bus stop when he looked at his favorite underpass. The animals were gone.

"I was just about sick to my stomach. I could hardly work that day," he says.

The city's Graffiti Rangers, a six-person crew, had been at work. They're good at their jobs.

Last year, the rangers removed 103,713 graffiti tags and also removed or painted out 337,000 square feet of graffiti on city-owned walls, bridges and stairwells, according to the city.

Says Marybeth Turner, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Transportation: "We gave the Graffiti Rangers the OK to remove the graffiti. Unfortunately, the whole mural was painted out."

Turner says the city had called the zoo and asked who was responsible for maintaining the murals.

Usually, a neighborhood group takes on such a task, and that was true of this mural in the past. Neighbors would informally gather to scrub out graffiti or paint over it.

The zoo says that whoever called from the city ended up talking to a woman working the front desk, and she couldn't find any helpful information.

"They didn't tell her, 'We're considering painting over the whole thing,' " said Jim Bennett, the zoo's communications and marketing director. "She's resourceful. At that point, I'm sure she would have told them, 'Wait a minute, someone needs to be informed.' "

Irene Wall, president of the Phinney Ridge Community Council, says, "My goodness, my name shows up on every list of citizens that the Department of Neighborhoods has. And somehow they couldn't contact the community and tell them, 'We're going to paint this thing out'?"

So now what?

The city will work with Phinney Ridge neighbors to figure out a replacement for the mural, says Stella Chao, director of the city's Department of Neighborhoods. In the meantime, the city will make sure the Department of Transportation becomes "aware" of other neighborhood murals.

But Zuhl still keeps mulling over the what-ifs.

"This was not only a neighborhood mural," he says. "It looked like it could have gone in a museum, a piece of modern art. That's what drives me crazy."

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com