The Stakes of Warm Water Cove

Cyrus' piece on Warm Water Cove, Sun Sludge, reminded me of a ridiculous graffiti cleanup event that occurred in August 2007 at that very location. Considering six months have passed by since the ballistic whitewashing festival of a district that was once considered a bombing oasis, I find myself at an opportune moment to measure the projected success of these operations.


Taking a trip to the Cove, I noticed that the same industrial junk still litters the grass and the waters. The old port is still crumbling, barbed wire placed haphazardly throughout the environs, as if the very sight of glistening steel spikes is supposed to intimidate park goers from entering hidden obscene locations. Stay away from this part of the park, it's not gentrified yet!

When the tides are low, the towering truck tires still rise to the rocky shore, covered in a drippy brown grease, pushing out into the horizon of Oakland's purple skyline.

Despite all the ruckus, Warm Water Cove is still unabashedly beautiful.

While a good portion of the walls are plastered with a glowering greenish gray paint, the graffiti placed at more difficult to reach locations still remain blazing strong. New aerosol puffs and lines spiral out of the cracking buff paint with the vigor of the weeds that spring forth from the ground.

Graffiti art always prospers in the areas most neglected by burgeoning commercial interests, untainted by a neutral taste for cleanliness and strictly rigid geometry, unafraid of man's submission to the forces of nature, boldly accepting our ephemeral destiny with a bright name on a wall, fading away day by day, the wall itself eventually decaying into the Earth's crust from where it once came.

Some remnants of the homeless that took refuge in these lands remain; shopping carts, discarded tent posts, and shaggy wool blankets. Occasional needles shine in the sunlight between the rocks. Discarded machine parts coalesce in the thick waters, congregating together with the plastic trash and decomposing sea life that washes up to the shore.

So it seems that the proposed cleanup project of Warm Water Cove in preparation for dense residential development of the Central Waterfront has not completely taken its course. Community groups chose to wash away the artistic life of the abandoned seaport, strip the cove of its active human elements, while they threw a blind eye to the myriad pieces of toxic waste and industrial junk that still thrive in the Cove.


It seems that the murals of graffiti artists are more threatening to San Francisco's redevelopment projects than the factories that continue to deposit pollutants into the Bay. Even though the industry causes the predominance of environmental destruction to the Cove, these businesses still have the sort of economic interests for which the San Francisco Planning Department can accommodate.

On the other hand, the City does not know how to accommodate graffiti artists. Gripped by the theory that unofficial murals plastered on walls lead to a neighborhood's downward turn to the worst kind of blight, the City has adopted a rigorous city-wide graffiti cleanup policy that requires private homeowners and businesses to whitewash defaced property within 30 days of the surface marking or face harsh penalties. These policies exist on top of a huge tax payer budget for public graffiti removal as well as California's three strike policy that locks up many writers for years.

The argument is that graffiti is a quality of life crime that depreciates a typical citizen's style of living. However, under what guidelines do we determine the interests of the typical citizen and how do we judge this concept of normalcy? If graffiti alienates and intimidates the typical San Franciscan then how does residential redevelopment of the waterfront projected by The Blue Greenway, from the China Basin to the Souther Border, effect the San Franciscans that already live there? Will it not alienate them from the world with which they are familiar?

Who will be displaced and pushed out of San Francisco by these "community" redevelopment projects that transform historic working class neighborhoods into bustling commercial districts, which play into the developers' vision of what this city should become? Is it not absurd that the redevelopment of a neighborhood for the sake of that very community first requires a whitewashing of the artistic expression of those people who live in and contribute to the existing vibrancy of that community?


Silencing the people opens up the space to quietly push those people completely out of the equation. The concept of neutral public space, baptized by the washing over of painted names on the walls, an acidic purification of the organically expressed old to prepare for the regulated construction of the dazzling new, is determined by the narrow interests of those with the money to develop the city. No matter one's opinion of graffiti as vandalism or art or anything in-between, the math simply does not add up. To the quote the seminal De La Soul album, Stakes is High.