LCI’s Trachten at one of the crime scenes.
As a nurse, Marjorie Wiener has had no problem seeing patients’ penises. Seeing penises scrawled on the walls of her neighborhood is another matter.
Wiener and her neighbors have been seeing a lot of the latter.
What started as scribble of the word “penis” has spawned into large, explicit sketches of the organ on walls, next to shops, on utility boxes in Westville’s otherwise clean and business-friendly commercial district.
That had Wiener and other Westvilleans steamed at Wednesday night’s monthly neighborhood community management meeting.
“I should not have to look at it,” Wiener said after the meeting at Mauro-Sheridan School. “It’s not art.”
Whalley Avenue.
The first drawing appeared in January along Whalley Avenue and Fitch Street, according to Livable City Initiative specialist Evan Trachten. After it was cleaned up, the drawing did not stop but began to “spread like an epidemic,” extending to Whalley Avenue and Emerson Street.
Trachten said both the Mayor’s Office and LCI, the city’s neighborhoods anti-blight agency, have received phone calls complaining about the graffiti. The city has been wiping the illustrations away once they’re reported but they keep reappearing. And the office has not succeeded in tracking down the perpetrator. Trachten said he has reached out to top district cop Sgt. Renee Dominguez, who plans a review of video surveillance footage to augment the hunt.
Qi Xu Photo
Sgt. Dominguez at the Wednesday night’s Community Management meeting.
Dominguez said the office will tackle the issue in the next few days, but admitted that it will be a time-consuming task, because the police do not have any information about when the drawing took place. Dominguez said the police department first received complaints about two weeks ago, and started to notice more graffiti along the border of the district.
“A guy like this does not stop,” Trachten said as he scrolled through photos of the drawings in his phone, “He is playing a cat-and-mouse game with us.”
An LCI-cleaned spot.
Trachten pulled up pictures of him standing before the graffiti, before and after its removal. In a half-joking tone, Trachten recalled that calls from residents often started out funny in the first five minutes, but soon became serious. Although drawings on a wall can be covered, the wall will never look the same.
Although the drawing has been going on for a few months, Community Management Team Chair Becca Allen said Wednesday’s meeting was the first time that people brought up the issue. Allen has seen the graffiti, and found it “incredibly disturbing.”
“It’s not something people want to see in our neighbourhood.”
Another Whalley Avenue scene.
Faced with repeated offenses, LCI is aware that continuous removal is not a long-term solution: it takes resources for the city and business owners to clean up the property. For the past five months, the “penis artist” has let loose his mindless “talent,” but watch out, Trachten vowed: An arrest and trial probably await. He said LCI will collaborate with police, look at camera footage and identify the perpetrator.
“We are going to bring him to court. We are going to tell him how offensive and stupid this is.”
(Update: A synagogue surveillance camera may have caught the perpetrator in the act. Click here for photos and details.)