Leaving A Mark at the La Brea Tar Pits

Last Fall, I spent a couple of hours walking along Wilshire Blvd. through Beverly Hills and the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles.

Smack dab in the middle of Los Angeles - located on our city's busiest street - is the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea Tar Pits has the distinction of being the largest deposit of Ice Age fossils in the entire world.

It would be easy to spend a couple hours walking around outside the outdoor excavation sites as well as the adjacent Page Museum. If you've never been there, it's worth visiting. Here's a link: www.tarpits.org.

But as I was just passing through, for me it was a matter of just taking a couple extra minutes to snap some photos.

The large fiberglass mammoths (including one pictured above literally floating on the top of the largest tar pit) gives an idea of the kind of animals that existed in this area in pre-history Los Angeles - as well as the rest of North America. Really amazing. And right in the heart of the city.

One of the many urban problems here in Los Angeles is vandalism from graffiti, commonly known as "tagging." Millions of dollars are spent every year dealing with graffiti - which, unfortunately, only seems to get worse.

So while I'm no friend of the urban decay arising from taggers (more on that in a future post), I found something unique about tar from the La Brea Tar Pits being used by passer-byers to write their names or initials at a small observation platform right off Wilshire Blvd.

So what am I saying? That graffiti from spray paint, pens, or knives (etching on glass) is bad, but graffiti from tar on the wall next to the tar pits is fine?

As that doesn't make any sense, how about: graffiti limited to a 4 foot x 20 foot wall = fine. Everything else = bad.

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