Finally, clean gas supply cabinets

The equipment cabinets below are on Dobroyd Parade, which is the final extension of Lilyfield Rd. I wrote to the MD of AGL 3 weeks ago, and my letter appears to have produced a result.

From Gas

The challenge now is to keep them looking this way.

I am hoping that when AGL or Alinta or Jemena staff turn up to do some work, and they find any vandalism at this site (or any other), that they will take it upon themselves to report it so that they can be cleaned up again pronto.

Spotting a vandal in the act

I like to go around the Bay Run on a regular basis (which is why I have been chasing the RTA to paint over graffiti on the Iron Cove Bridge, which forms part of the Run), and one of the sites that I go past is 91 Canal Rd, home of Legs on the Wall theatre, owned by Arts NSW and managed by PRP Values and Consultants.

After my post last week about the fence at 91 Canal Rd, I was contacted by Evan, a Property Manager with PRP.  We had a good chat on the phone about graffiti at this site, and the issues that he has to deal with in keeping it clean.  I have tried to deal with a number of Real Estate Agents and Property Managers over the last 4 months, and Evan is the only one that I have spoken to.  I have had an email from one other agency, and the remainder have hidden under a rock.

I have some good news and bad news for Evan this morning.  As I was going past 91 Canal Rd on Sunday at around 3pm, I spotted a bloke walking into the site in a suspicious manner.  He was looking around in a way that telegraphed that he was up to no good.  I kept my eye on him, and probably gave away the fact that I was watching him, so he quickly sprayed a tag on a roller door and legged it up an alleyway and out of my sight.  The shot below is a still from 12 seconds of fairly useless video that I shot of the vandal making his escape.  The red circle on the left is his tag, the red circle on the right is the vandal running away after he realised that I was watching him through the fence.

The map below shows the site in question.  The yellow "103 Field Workshop" is now an arts space.  I took the video from the path on the left of it that runs under the City West Link.  

Plotting our movements on an aerial photo, I was travelling along the path on the left at "A".  I spotted the vandal at the x marked "B".  Once he realised he was being watched, instead of backtracking out the gate that he came in, he took off up the lane marked with an arrow.  I turned around and went right around the entire block, and went up and down each street on the right to see if I could spot him.

It was at that point that I realised I had been so intent on trying to capture him on video, I really didn't get a good look at him.  When I got home and had a look at the video on my PC, I realised that I had in fact gone past him in Charles St, which is on the eastern side of this block.  He was wearing a hooded top that was black on the top half and white on the bottom half, black track suit pants and he appeared to be in his late teens.  Since he was on foot, I guess he lived somewhere close by.

Now all I have to do is see if I can report it to the Police.

The vandal appears to have walked in through the front gate, which was open as there were trucks coming in and out delivering what appeared to be theatrical materials.  A few vans and cars, presumably containing staff, went in and out whilst I was in the area.  He simply strolled in at a point when all the staff were inside the sheds loading or unloading vehicles, which left the car park unmonitored.

There's not much you can do about that, except to be extremely aware of how opportunistic these people can be.  It was broad daylight, there were many people walking around the Bay just a short distance away, there were people working on site not 50 metres away.  Yet he brazenly walked in, did his business and departed, and everyone would have been none the wiser if I hadn't seen him acting strangely as I went past. 

One thing that struck me is that you can spot guilt 100 metres away.  His body language gave him away before he'd even pulled out his can of spray paint and left his mark.  

Pedestrian bridge, City West Link

A small amount of graffiti has started to creep back onto the rear of the noise barriers along the City West Link, but it's quite minor, and seems to be inhibited by the proliferation of creepers and the newly erected mesh for the creepers to climb on. Since a lot of tags are applied with a marker pen rather than a spray can, the mesh stops it as it would be pretty hard to put your hand through it to scrawl something.

From City West Lin...

The only surface this vandal has found to write on is the uprights holding up the noise barriers. Everything else is too difficult to write on presumably.






Tags are already re-appearing on the approach to the pedestrian bridge - less than a week after a repaint. Maybe this section needs a treatment that makes it harder to apply graffiti via a spray can?



The leftovers from a graffiti spree.






I guess drinking and tagging go hand in hand. There seems to be booze at a lot of vandalised sites.

Burnt out red light camera

At the corner of Balmain Rd and Lilyfield Rd, the RTA has two problems.

The first is this defaced signal control box - number 87.

From Cooked red li...

A more serious problem is this rather blackened and defaced red light camera.




I doubt this is currently taking quality photos of cars running the red light.

I've used the "contact us" section of the RTA website to let them know about this rather useless camera and the vandalised control box. I go past this spot regularly, so let's see how long it takes them to fix both problems.

Substation 1937

This Energy Australia substation is in Fairlight St, Lilyfield - the damaged sign in the next post is right next to where I stood to take this photo.  

Sign pushed over - Fairlight St, Lilyfield

This appears to be a clear cut case of malicious damage - someone has lifted the sign out of its hole and dumped it on the verge.  Something for Leichhardt Council to take care of.

Legs on the Wall gets hit again

It's only a week since I visited the Legs on the Wall theatre site, and since then, vandals have struck again.

There is a chain link fence topped with barbed wire around the entire site, but that has not kept the vandals out.  The fence is not much use to this sign, as it sits outside the fence.  Someone has had fun modifying the address.

The graffiti appears to be limited to a number of roller doors on only one building.  I didn't have a proper look through the entire site - I'll leave that to the property managers - Preston Rowe Paterson Valuers.  I have emailed one of their Directors, Greg Preston, asking him to get someone onto it.

It took me about 1 minute of sleuthing to discover how they gained entry - the fence has been pulled up at the bottom next to this building and the vandals have obviously crawled in and out.

I have helped to build a number of fences on farms to keep livestock from running amok, and this fence would not pass muster on any farm that I've ever been on. The red line shows a bottom wire stringer that runs along the bottom of the fence.  Whoever put this fence up should have wired the chain link material to this bottom wire to prevent it from being lifted up. Sheep, goats and cattle usually try to same trick as this to get under a fence, but if it's built properly, they can't.  But whoever built this fence didn't do it right, which allowed someone to trespass and vandalise the site.  

All that it needs is a length of fencing wire, some strong pliers and someone to go around the entire fence tying it off properly at the bottom.  Unless vandals are quite organised, it is unlikely that they would be wandering around with the type of pliers that could cut through the fencing ties or the chain link, and that also presumes that they are patient enough and have enough time to cut through the fence without being detected.  In this case, because the fence is not constructed properly, anyone with a modicum of upper body strength could have easily lifted this bit of fence in a few seconds.  

A better built fence would take longer to get through, and the more time it takes to gain entry, the greater the risk of being caught, so a properly built fence is more likely to deter future vandalism.

The contractor who built  the fence should be told to come back and do it properly - for free.

Abandoned car - Lilyfield

The rego on this car expired in July.  The back tyre is quite flat, it is covered in leaf debris and it looks quite unloved.  I've reported it to Leichhardt Council as a possibly abandoned car.

Letter boxes on Lilyfield Rd

This is the letter box that got me started on this whole blog caper.  It stands at the corner of Victoria Rd and Lilyfield Rd.  This is how it looked on 8 May 2008.

This is how it looked on Monday, over 3 months later (and after I had written to Australia Post, and received a response saying it would be cleaned up).

Looks like the same old graffiti to me.

Granted, Lilyfield Rd is a hot spot for graffiti along its entire length.  But that doesn't explain why Australia Post not only let this letter box get into this state, but left it like this after I wrote to them and asked them to clean it up, and after they said that they would.

Slack.

Here is another letter box further up Lilyfield Rd.

Substations on Lilyfield Rd

These were freshly painted a few months ago.  Didn't take them long to get like this:

Legs on the wall theatre

Back in June, I wrote to Legs on the wall, a theatre company in Lilyfield, because they were the only people I could think of contacting regarding graffiti on the premises that they inhabit.

I received the following letter from Vyvian Wilson, the GM, last month.  

I went past the site last week, and it has been completely cleaned up.

Way to go, Vyvian.

The challenge is going to be keeping it looking like this.

The Red Box

This one might be interesting.  The Red Box is a theatre of some sort in Lilyfield.  I go past it on a regular basis, and have long noticed that the graffiti on every external door never seems to be cleaned up.

Even the sign at the front has been defaced.

The challenge with this place is finding who to contact in order to get it cleaned up.  I googled the company name, and quickly found a promising looking site with some contacts.  However, I am not sure that the buildings in the photos above actually below to this theatre company.  It's a reasonably large industrial-type site, and it may well be that the defaced buildings belong to some state government department that is overseeing their redevelopment, or a developer that is just sitting on them.

But there is no point in speculating.  I'm going to write to Vyvian Wilson, who is listed as the General Manager of the Legs on the Wall theatre company occupying the site and see what happens.  At worst, I'll be told that it is not their problem.  Fifty cents and 10 minutes of my time down the drain, but on the other hand, they might give me the contact details of someone who can fix it.

I'm not holding out a lot of hope.  In order to get to the Legs on the Wall theatre, you have to drive past all that graffiti.  They haven't lifted a finger to get it fixed to date, which means it is probably somebody else's problem to them.