The Hampton Inn Downtown Kansas City at 801Walnut Street is in the heart of the city’s business district and caters to a lot of travelers throughout the year. General Manager Darryl Bulson says keeping the building free of graffiti has been an exasperating chore, but not to do it is bad for business.
“You can look up a hotel, and it's a five-star hotel with the highest reviews, and you drive by it and there's graffiti on the wall. You're probably gonna keep driving,” he said, “because that just automatically makes you think that, well, this is a really, really bad part of town.”
The Hampton Inn is one of the buildings in the Downtown River Market Community Improvement District, or CID, a nonprofit supported by special assessments, sales and use taxes paid by residents in the district. In exchange, the CID provides public improvements, safety measures and private projects. One of the CID’s most vexing problems has been keeping up with graffiti. But businesses like the Hampton Inn are banding together with the CID to ensure their neighborhood stays welcoming and safe.
The Hampton Inn has been hit by graffiti about five times during Bolson's time there, mostly in that back alley. It’s a narrow path that reeks of dumpster smells. The hum of air conditioners drown out the sounds of the street. The alley used to be open for anyone to walk through but now has a door with two deadbolt locks, preventing access.
But the barrier has not been a deterrent for vandals. Bulson pulls out a picture of tags on the front of the building last February. Workers with the CID were the first to discover it.
“They said 'You realize you have graffiti on the front?'' We didn't even know it had happened," said Bulson. "'We can be back first thing in the morning,' they said. And by noon the next day, it was cleared off.”
The Downtown CID was established in 2003 to address areas of concern: security, landscaping, marketing, maintenance and growth. The Graffiti Removal Initiative, a team of two staffers with the CID, are in charge of staying on top of the graffiti problem.
Relentless clean-up
On the corner of 8th Street and Grand Boulevard, a block from the Hampton Inn, Sheila Tatum, 39, stands in front of a wide concrete barrier covered with dark colored graffiti. It's a scribble of words that only the person who tagged the barrier can make out.
Standing behind a line of orange cones blocking off the right lane, she wields a long nozzle attached to a hose, which connects to a 500-gallon hot water pump sitting on the flatbed of a nearby pickup truck. Before washing the graffiti off, Tatum dips a big brush into a small barrel of a cleaning material known by the unusual name of Elephant Snot. It’s a thick, gooey whitish substance, which Tatum scoops out and heaves onto the vandalized surface. She rubs it around, waits 20 minutes, then power washes the dark paint off.
Every morning, she drives the truck around downtown, surveying all the potential canvases on public and private buildings to see if they’ve been tagged. She says in a typical month, she’ll deal with some 200 incidents.
“I'll probably be taking off anywhere between 30 to 40 tags and stickers that we consider as tags (today),” she said. “This poster — we consider it as tags, if it's spray paint, we consider it as tags.”
Tatum loves her job. It gets her outside. She’s contributing to the betterment of the city. But she doesn’t like graffiti – especially with inappropriate words, some even with hate speech.
“9th and Wyandotte Streets were a big problem, and the message they were putting up there was about Jews,” said Tatum. “My thing is to treat others the way that you want to be treated.”
It is also common for Tatum to be cleaning some of these messages near where kids learn and play. It concerns her that the young children are exposed to sometimes vile and obscene words, gestures and images.
But she’s been doing this job for more than 17 years. Sometimes she has a hard time wiping away the work of skilled artists over and over each day.
“The color figures that they even put together, they're really nice,” she said, "but you know, it is no longer art when it's not asked for.”
Tagging in plain sight
The headquarters of the downtown CID are in a shiny high rise at 1000 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri. Sean O’Byrne is the executive director, and he’s spent years studying graffiti culture.
He confesses that the cyclical process of cleaning graffiti is frustrating, especially because taggers tend to hit in areas with the most traffic, where the most eyes will see their work.
“Most of the tags happen overnight," he said. "You'll see the biggest consolidation of them generally in areas where it's highly visible."
Even the bank of monitors in the CID offices that display what cameras in multiple corners of the downtown area record, can’t stop the taggers. CID staff work a regular day-time schedule – no one is watching the monitors overnight.
“Our goal is to respond to it and remove it as quickly as possible,” said O’Bryne. “I would say that Kansas City is slightly ahead of the curve, especially as it relates to graffiti removal, because we put such a big push on it.”
Forrest Decker, Director of the Kansas City, Missouri, Neighborhood Services Department, says public graffiti is inevitable, and it’s almost impossible to catch a tagger in action.
“Graffiti is really hard to prevent,” he said. "You can't have a police officer or security guard stationed beside every building in town.”
He said the city has tried one preventative measure with some success. They've invited muralists to paint something on spaces that are frequently tagged, such as the walls along U.S. Highway 71 near downtown.
“Sometimes we would commission an artist to paint an entire wall,” Decker said. “And the people that tag a lot, that do graffiti, they’ll respect another artist, and they’ll start leaving those areas alone. But then they’ll shift to a different area.”
O’Byrne said if the data is any indication, their cleanup work has achieved an important part of the CID’s mission – to make things better downtown.
“So there is a lot more population, there's a lot more density,” O’Byrne said. “There were 6000 residents back in 2003. Now we have over 34,000 residents. We have built over 400,000 square feet of service-level retail.”
O’Bryne said organizations outside of CID have interacted with taggers and are discussing possible ways to redirect their talents.
Back in the alley behind the Hampton Inn, Darryl Bulson's break is almost over. Despite the problem graffiti creates for his business and others downtown, he tips his hat to the creativity some taggers exhibit. He'd like to encourage them to come out of the shadows.
“Find a canvas that is yours," he said. "Find a place where you can display your art proudly instead of having to spray it and then run.”
