City Water, Light and Power crews of Springfield, Illinois, wasted little time in covering over graffiti on the Chatham Road Bridge that once carried Route 66.
WICS-TV in Springfield posted a report this week about the vandalism:
A viewer sent us the photos of the vandalism before CWLP was able to paint over it.
Painted on the bridge were phrases such as, “All KKK go to Hell,” “#BLM,” “Die Young” and “Read a f—-n book.”
The graffiti happened sometime between Thursday afternoon and 2 p.m. on Sunday.
CWLP says it has asked security to increase patrols in that area since the graffiti was found.
The station’s online report showed about a half-dozen pictures of the graffiti taken by the viewer.
A spokesperson at CWLP on social media told me the graffiti was covered over with a neutral-colored paint by Monday or Tuesday.
The spokesperson also supplied a couple of photos of the new paint job. As you can see, the color resembles the original concrete:
The 1919 span often is called the Old Chatham Road Bridge, or sometimes Schuster Bridge or Lick Creek Bridge, that carried Illinois 4 (an early alignment of Route 66) over Lick Creek north of Chatham, Illinois.
It was closed in 1989 after a new Illinois 4 bridge was built in 1975. It’s part of the Lick Creek Wildlife Preserve.
The bridge no longer is open to traffic, but it can be traversed by pedestrians. It sits near the Chatham Pumping Station.
Reaction on social media by Route 66 advocates of the graffiti proved somewhat mixed. No one advocated for tagging an old bridge with spraypaint. Then again, few disagreed with the vandal’s apparent dislike of the Ku Klux Klan — a notorious racist group in the U.S.
One Route 66 advocate who’s contacted me insists vandalism and graffiti have increased on the Mother Road in recent years. I’m not sure that’s true. By my lifelong observations, tagging objects with spraypaint was common since the 1970s, as was general vandalism, along with ebbs and flows of such activity. The ruins of the old gas station at Cadiz Summit in California were covered with spraypaint 20 years ago, as was the Ozark Trail obelisk near Stroud, Oklahoma.
And anyplace on Route 66 that obviously was abandoned became a target of ne’er-do-wells even then.
That doesn’t excuse it, but it’s not a new thing, either.
(Image of Chatham Road Bridge in 2013 via Route 66 Bridge Database; images of repainted Chatham Road Bridge near Chatham, Illinois, courtesy of CWLP)
The invention of the paint spray-can certainly made visual vandalism much easier. But when does a graffito become part of history? Take a walk to the top of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Georgia and you will see, carved in the rock, “David Pollond 11-14-66” with the initial E at the top and N at the bottom. I was there in 1979. Nearby is, “W.W. Roark, J.W. Mehottey”. Each ‘graffito’ was carved with the skill of a stone mason. So was “11-14-66” (note the American month-day-year date order) 1966? I was there in 1979. No – it was 1866; for the Roark/Mehottey carving also bears the date 1879.
Another carefully carved graffito reads: “Annie Logan Anderson, Mrs G.A Goodyear, Joe A. Carter. 1878.”
There are others of the same era. One had “Jeff” in black spray paint next to it, but not obscuring the finely carved names and 1886 date. So are the 19th century carvings any more valid than the sprayed “Jeff” signature? And should the Old Chatham Road Bridge sprayings be removed? If “All KKK go to Hell” needs destroying, then so do the Stone Mountain carvings. And what about the millennia-old Roman ‘small drawings’ that gave us the words graffito and graffiti? Should the present day Italian authorities obliterate them?
These are interesting and complicated questions. I don’t have a hard-and-fast answer; whether graffiti is historic must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Does the graffiti stand the test of time? The National Register of Historic Places generally deems something historic if it lasts for 50 years. Does the graffiti have any historical context? Did anyone historically significant write it? Some or all those questions have to be considered.
This graffiti in Wyoming is indisputably historic: https://youtu.be/-EY5RN6scec
This graffiti at the Oklahoma City bombing site has become acknowledged at historic, though it’s not hit the 50-year mark: https://images.app.goo.gl/p6JTSDuiU86ckCeM9
Thanks, Ron. As for ” Did anyone historically significant write it? “, I am reminded of a BBC radio series called Quote Unquote. It is all about ‘famous quotations’, and who said or wrote what first. Countless people will have said or written the same or similar things, but it is only when someone “historically significant” has been recorded as saying or writing something that it too becomes “significant”. I imagine Anderson, Goodyear, Carter, etc were just ordinary people, but with a flair for artistic chiselling.