LINCOLN HEIGHTS : 12-Month Cleanup Effort Launched

At 73, Fred Partida has seen his share of urban blight, especially since he began volunteering to paint out graffiti in Lincoln Heights.

“I’ve been cleaning up graffiti since 1945,” he said. “Back then, they didn’t call it graffiti. They called it vandalism.”

Partida, a retired painter and lifelong Montecito Heights resident, heads a crew that will continue graffiti abatement and also pick up trash and steam-clean sidewalks as part of the new Lincoln Heights Beautification Project.

The $150,000, one-year program sponsored by the Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce and the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency will focus on brightening the local commercial and industrial areas. In addition to paying salaries, the money is used to lease the cleaning equipment and buy paint, brooms, brushes, garbage bags and the tints to make the paints match the walls.

“We want to bring business and industry back in and work with them,” said chamber President Roy Wolze. “Our city wasn’t very cooperative in getting our businesses to stay, so we have to work with them ourselves.”

Project manager Robert Paz said he is informing all the Lincoln Heights businesses about the project. He and students from Lincoln High School are passing out flyers and posters.

Partida took on the task of keeping his family restaurant on North Broadway tag-free. It wasn’t long before other business owners asked him to extend his work to their shops, and shortly afterward, he was maintaining an entire block of buildings.

With his expertise, he was able to match colors almost exactly, eliminating unsightly splotches. “I match the paints or I do the whole wall,” he said.

Partida said he tried to persuade the neighborhood homeboys to stop writing on the walls, by bringing some of them together to paint the side of a market with their placas , or signatures. He talked to them about keeping the area free of graffiti. In return, he said, he would intervene when they got in trouble with police or teachers.

“They used to keep it up pretty good,” he said. “Now, we’ve got kids, young kids that are taggers. . . . Some are as old as me that just haven’t grown up, so we’re starting all over again.”

Merchants may call the chamber to get involved: (213) 221-6571.