In its heyday 60 years ago, the Belmont Tunnel was a prime passageway into Los Angeles, an early experiment in using a subway to move people across the city. Thousands of Red Car trolley passengers traversed it daily in their journey between downtown and Hollywood.
Today, the darkened tunnel set into a hill just west of downtown's gleaming skyscrapers is an outpost of urban decay.
The ground is littered with garbage and spray-paint cans. A building that once served as an electric substation for the trolleys is now a hollow, reeking, concrete shell. And nearly every bit of paintable surface -- walls, rails, even the bark on a few scruffy trees -- is covered with graffiti.
The land has sat for decades as a sort of no-man's land -- a place for homeless people to sleep, taggers to use as a canvas and drug addicts to shoot up. Then, earlier this year, the new property owner proposed tearing down the tunnel and replacing it with a 276-unit apartment complex.
The plan has sparked a growing movement to preserve the tunnel, not as a relic of the past, but as a monument to Los Angeles' underground graffiti culture. Today the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission is scheduled to vote on whether to grant cultural landmark status to the tunnel -- a key step in efforts to save it.
The tunnel's fate reflects the tricky embrace of graffiti by the art world and popular culture. The issue comes up even as some -- including Police Chief William J. Bratton -- argue that tagging is nothing more than vandalism and often a precursor to more serious crimes. In the end, the preservation effort may end up giving the Belmont lot a mainstream legitimacy that could turn away taggers who feel that their work in its purest form must be unsanctioned and illegal.
Since the early 1980s, the tunnel has been the internationally recognized epicenter of West Coast graffiti. Many of the lot's constantly replenished murals have been featured in magazines, photography books, art history textbooks and documentaries. Taggers come from all over -- San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London -- to paint there and document the murals. Art students from Japan make the pilgrimage to the lot where 2nd Street and Glendale Boulevard meet in the shadow of downtown to soak up the atmosphere.
