I went out to Bonsai Beach on May 18th, 2014 to finish the graffiti restoration and beach cleanup job we started at our Bonsai Rock Graffiti Cleanup last November and check up on the progress of the site over the winter. So Much of the time here in Lake Tahoe when I cover things here on my channel about the environment, you guys never find out how it was resolved or whether it was even resolved at all. Also, I'm going to be catching up with some of the people from the original Bonsai Beach graffiti restoration.
Dylan Eichenberg, event organizer:
Hey you guys, I'm +Dylan Eichenberg and I helped coordinate the first graffiti cleanup last November and since then it's been a lot of progress. The +Tahoe Regional Planning Agency actually recognized me with a Lake Spirit Award and, I mean, I think it recognized everyone who was part of this for helping keep Lake Tahoe clean and beautiful, improving the quality of what we already have.
Also, my good friend Sam Rossi and I, we wrote a grant for Boreal's #ProtectYourPlayground grant program, thanks to Sam who discovered it, and we actually wound up recieving over $1000 that we're going to put towards graffiti supplies to clean up the rest of this beach. We're out here today scoping out how things look and it looks a whole lot better than it did last time out here in November and we think that over the winter the graffiti deteriorated a lot more. So we're working on catching where the new graffiti is if there's any or what spots we still need to hit up.
We're going to be back here in October. I want to get a huge group of people. I know we're going to have media attention and we're going to have a lot of organizations involved in this process. So, by October, I hope to see everybody out here. You know, our goal is to leave this beach immaculate. There have been over 50 graffiti tags but our goal is to annihilate all of it, and with this grant that really made that possible for us. We're going to be able to buy more graffiti cleanup supplies than I ever thought possible. So, I want to send a thank-you to Boreal ski resort who sponsored us for this. It's been a real good ride, there's a lot of people involved and I'm hoping to keep on growing that effort.
Cody Liberman of People-of-Tahoe:
My name is Cody Liberman and I'm with People of Tahoe, and we're here at Bonsai Beach doing a little catch-up on what we've done in the last 6 months. Man, it's great to come out here and see all the familiar faces and see all of the hard work that we've done. Things are just working out great, you know. A lot of stuff that was here beforehand is now gone. The trash is just down to its minimum. Spirits are so high and the morale is just, you know, everyone is happy to see that we've been doing something productive and it's coming along.
Much of last year's worst graffiti has been entirely eliminated.
Like I said before, it's been, probably, about six months since we've been here and we've been reaching out everywhere else we can and trying to help the lake out any way we can with the pipelines and the environmental studies. Anything we can. You know, we're a local clothing company and we've been trying to reach out and be as local as we can. Anybody who has any suggestions or knows anywhere that needs help -- we're there, any time at any point if you just let us know. Man, it's great to be back and thanks to everyone who did come out.
Martin Gollery, Photographer:
High Morale: Dylan Eichenberg plays ukulele while Martin Gollery sings along.
Hi, I'm +Martin Gollery, and I was one of the original people to work here at Bonsai Rock. In the meantime, I have published a number of photos in Tahoe Quarterly about the fall cleanup. And so we're out here today cleaning up some more and we will be out here in October as well.
[Jack Durst] So, tell me how much it's different...
[Martin] It's considerably different. There's a number of tags that we weren't able to get to because of lack of people and supplies So we did a lot in the fall and we did a lot more but there's still a lot to be done.
More things you can do to help protect the #LakeTahoe Environment
Let me just say that there's been huge progress in making and maintaining our environmental gains here in Lake Tahoe, and I want to let all you guys know that keeping Tahoe blue is something that all of you can do. Come out, later this fall we'll be having a much bigger Bonsai Beach cleanup and getting Bonsai Beach totally pristine.
You can go to the 5th of July cleanup in Marla Bay and help clean up the fireworks debris after 4th of July. It's a real easy one-day project. If you're a Tahoe local you can become a Pipe Keeper: pick a pipe and monitor the effluent coming out of it. All of these things are available so you can you can do your part to help keep Tahoe blue. Or, if you're not a local and you just want to give to the cause you can visit KeepTahoeBlue.org and give to the League to Save Lake Tahoe and we'll see so much more environmental progress here in Lake Tahoe.
Bonsai rock is one of Lake Tahoe's most famous photography sites Full cleanup gallery
Famous Lake Tahoe photography site Bonsai Rock got tagged with about 50 sprayed on graffiti over Labor Day weekend 2013. I went out to a graffiti cleanup event at Bonsai beach organized by Dylan Eichenberg and People of Tahoe, Inc.
As Dylan Eichenberg said: "I've been helping to organize this graffiti cleanup effort. I first saw the pictures two weeks ago, and I came down to the beach because a good friend of mine, Cody Lieberman with People of Tahoe company organized the first graffiti beach cleanup. We decided that day that we couldn't really do as much as we wanted to, so we decided that we really needed to take some action and get the community together to clean up this unique area.
So, what we did is that first we talked to the state parks, the League to Save Lake Tahoe, the US Forest service, the TRPA, and a bunch of important organizations at Lake Tahoe that deal with environmental cleanup; and we decided that, you know, this is something that we could totally take on. We're trying to get as much of this graffitti as possible. They've tagged over 50 rocks out there. You may have seen the pictures on Facebook, and they don't even come close to what's out there. So, it's gonna take a lot of us and we're gonna get it, hopefully, pretty much done today. State parks won't be able to get it until July so what we're doing here is really gonna make a big difference."
We worked hard scrubbing all day with wire brushes, blowtorches, and graffiti remover. The rock I was scrubbing was so thick with paint there were archeological layers: scrape off the silver and there's black underneath, scrape off the black and there's blue and gold underneath... Despite two people scrubbing, I never did get all the way down to bedrock on the rock pictured above. Luckily most of the rocks weren't as heavily covered as this one as you can see:
Regarding the cleanup product, Cody Liberman, co-owner of People of Tahoe said:
"The product we've been using out here is this product called Motsenbocker's Lift Off. It's actually an environmentally friendly based cleanup. It's a solution that breaks down spraypaint as well as cleaning it up, but it's still environmentally friendly. You know, it doesn't polute the lake, it's not harmfull, and so far it's been the only solution. We've tried many things, we've done scrub brushed, we've taken torches to try to change the effect of the paint and nothing has worked as well.
So, we're out here, we've got a bunch of people we've gathered up. The pictures have gone viral, and, like I've said you can see behind us that we're cleaning up, and it's everywhere.
And I'm with People of Tahoe. I'm the owner, I'm the co-owner and we've contributed a bunch of stuff. You know,we've brought a bunch of stuff and we've reached out to Meeks Hardware in South Lake Tahoe and they've donated all kinds of Motsenbocker product that's cleaning up for us. Truckee hardware as well as Incline has donated Motsenbocker as well as buckets and brushes. We actually had a local Safeway that's donated some food out here for us. And, y'know, we've reached out and tried hard and we've spent some money on the company, with the company money and it's worked out. We're just reaching out and trying to get a good cause going."
The graffiti has been particularly rough on local photography tourisim. "Bonsai beach is one of the main places that photographers come to Lake Tahoe to make their images." said North Tahoe area photographer Martin Gollery "This is a well known and famous and well loves area for Lake Tahoe area photographers, and this is one of the places where we bring people when other photographers come from elsewhere to visit Lake Tahoe and want to see a special location. And so, for us as photographers, this has been a real travesty because it spoils our images and it spoils what we want to show to people that visit."
My Message to Potential Taggers:
And finally, a message for those of you who are aspiring graffiti artists. Though it is terrible to do graffitti on nature, there is a place for graffiti in society and if you are a grafitti artist in the Lake Tahoe area there is a great non-profit called Sphere of Influence. (Contact them on facebook) Sphere of Influence can find you legit places to put up your art where you can do graffiti and get away with it and know that your art is going to be standing for years and years with nobody scrubbing it off. So, PLEASE, graffiti artists, don't tag on nature. Perfect your art on plywood at home and then call Sphere of Influence and they will give you a lightbox to decorate the way you want. It's really cool.
By the way, We really do have a good street art scene in South Lake Tahoe. Don't let the Bonsai rock graffiti fool you, graffiti can be right in the right places. Check out my interactive walking tour of South Lake Tahoe Street Art to see some of the legit art you can see there.
Lake Tahoe has a long tradition of doing art and doing it in a public way where anyone can see it, and there is, frankly, so much public art in Lake Tahoe that if you go by car you're gonna miss a lot of it. So I've taken the trouble of laying out a public art walking tour that most anyone can do.
Though there's a lot of hills and mountains in Lake Tahoe this particular route is 3 miles of very flat walk. There is great public transportation all the way along the route so that if you get tired you can just hop a bus back to wherever it is you were staying. It is not a very difficult walk. Just about anyone who can walk three miles can do this tour, and it's a really good tour. There is so much great public art here in Lake Tahoe: all the way from Stateline all the way to far, far into California. This particular tour covers the area from Stateline to the American Legion. you can see everything in the interactive map below.
We begin our public art tour with one of the most recognizable pieces of art on the south shore of Lake Tahoe: The Harrah's Pony Express statue. This statue was dedicated by Bill Harrah himself in 1967 to celebrate the centenial of the Pony express. There used to be a Pony Express stop about 1/4 mile up the road near Edgewood at Friday's station, where the Pony Express riders would refuel, change horses, and get ready. The Pony Express, if you don't know, was such a dangerous job that they would only hire orphans because they didn't want to have to pay compensation to the families of those who died delivering the mail in the dangerous mail conditions of the 1860s.
Little known fact about this statue: in the base of the statue is a time capsule -- put there by Harrah's in 1987 that can only be opened in 2037.
Chainsaw Sculptures by Jerry Toste
One of the art forms that Tahoe is most strongly associated with in people's minds are the chainsaw bears. There's a company down in Carson City called Timeless Scluptures, that employs an artist called Jerry Toste, who, whenever one of the trees is taken out, dead, and there would otherwise be a big ugly stump that couldn't be easily removed; instead of leaving a big ugly stump they have a chainsaw artist come up and carve it into bears, eagles, and all sorts of other forms. Read more here about how he makes his sculptures here:
"From a mighty redwood a Statue was carved" article on Chainsaw artist Jerry Toste of Pollack Pines by The Mountain Democrat.
Now, after this, I would suggest that after you check out the fabulous chainsaw bears in front of Heavenly Village that you go in to Heavenly Village and check out the famous fountain. The next stop on our Public Art walking tour is Heavenly village. Besides the famous fountain at heavenly village that freezes over every year and is famous from a lot of my videos -- if you've watched my videos you've probably seen that fountain many times.
Lightbox Art at Heavenly Village Cinemas:
There is a lot of other great public art that is available to anyone, just for visiting Heavenly Village. The Heavenly Village cinemas also has some really amazing public art. The lightbox art in front of Heavenly Village cinemas is some of the best lightbox art in town. It was done by DreamsAndVisionsArt.com and they did a truely amazing job.
I want to thank +Paulo Block on Google Plus for making the image of the Eagle from then go truely viral on Google+: It is amazing how many hits that image got! And several of the other pieces of lightbox art at Heavenly Village cinema have also gone viral on the internet, and rightly so because it's some of the best lightbox art in town.
Art Galleries in the Crescent V Center
Also, if you're the sort of person who likes to see their art in a gallery, right across the street from Heavenly Village at the Crescent V center, there are 4 different art galleries of 4 different kinds of art. Scott Wyland has a gallery where you can look at some of his famous paintings of the whales and dolphins in California and Hawaii. There's an Untamed Art gallery in that space that does a lot of local artist's art. There is also a Jon Paul gallery which shows Lake Tahoe photography from photographer Jon Paul. There's also a Marcus Ashley gallery that shows a lot of local artists and does a lot of paintings of Lake Tahoe.
If you're not a strong walker and you're looking to skip a part of the walking tour, catch the bus across the street from the Crescent V shopping center to the Ski Run Marina, where the next major collection of art is. If you're willing to keep walking do the extra mile of walking because there is some really amazing lightbox art along that mile that you really wouldn't want to miss unless you weren't a really strong walker.
Sphere of Influence lightbox and dumpster art:
As you walk down highway 50 in Lake Tahoe you will see a lot of the lightboxes have been painted up. In 2009 and before Lake Tahoe used to have a terrible grafitti problem when it came to people drawing on the lightboxes. So, they decided: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." and they hired a local group called Sphere of Influence that diverts kids from graffitti art into doing legitamite street art on the lightboxes.
Most of the lightboxes along US 50 and Ski Run were put in by Sphere of Influence, a local nonprofit that has a contract with the city to cover up graffitti with art.
Our next stop on the Public Art Walking Tour is the complex at Ski Run. Ski Run Marina has an amazing collection of public art that you can see totally for free just for walking in.
There is a wonderfull chainsaw sculpture in front of the Riva Grill that depicts an American Eagle with the "United we Stand" logo. It was made in 2005 by chainsaw artist Toste who has done a lot of the chainsaw art in Lake Tahoe. He also did the bears in front of Heavenly Village.
There is also a lovely mixed-media map of Lake Tahoe on the side of the Riva Grill building, a very impressive fountain, and most importantly of all, this is one of the concentrated places where you can find galleries in Lake Tahoe.
Dirk Yurkitch has a lovely photography gallery in this complex. There is also the Tahoe Art Connection gallery where you can buy some lovely paintings. In the summertime they have meet the artist events at both galleries, and there's a lot of great stuff to be seen here.
Also, while you're here definitely check out the Tahoe Queen, which is usually docked at Ski Run marina. If you're interested in seeing more of the Tahoe Queen click here to see my original video of the "Dixie vs. Queen Sternwheeler race" that we have every year. I did a great video last year of the Dixie vs. Queen Sternwheeler race in 2012. and you should definitely check that out too.
El Dorado County Building
Those of you in my audience who are history buffs will really enjoy this next mural on the side of the El Dorado County building. It depicts the S. S. Tahoe, which was the first ever steam powered tourist boat on Lake Tahoe and is one of the most famous shipwrecks in Lake Tahoe. it depicts a woman with a period camera waiving goodbye, presumably to the last voyage of the SS Tahoe from Glenbrook. It's a really awesome mural, it was put up in 2001 by Don Gray and his partner.
Lakeview commons just happens to have one of the most overlooked pieces of public art in Lake Tahoe and it's really much less famous than it deserves to be. There is a great tile mural at Lakeview Commons that actually predates Lakeview Commons itself.
It was originally proposed by Patrick Ferris Bennett in 1996, unfortunately he didn't live to see it completed. It was dedicated in 1997 by then vice president Al Gore as the centerpiece of the very first Tahoe Summit. The front of it depicts the view from Lakeview Commons and what all of the fish in the lake are, what all of the mountains that you can see across the lake from Lakeview Commons are, but I strongly encourage you to look at the back of the mural.
The individual tiles on the back of the mural were made by individual high school kids in South Lake Tahoe, and there are tiles from some rather famous people. Famous college basketball player Jared Hass who is now a commentator on ESPN has a tile on there. There's a tile commemorating Tahoe Tessie, there are many, many other great tiles. You can learn a lot about the people of Lake Tahoe in 1997 and the cool thing is that because I went to south Tahoe High School I was in high school with most of the kids who made the back of this mural. It's really cool.
Tahoe Daily Tribune Building
Tahoe Daily Tribune has a mural of the Tahoe Hotel in the 1930s. More murals in Tahoe .
Here on the side of the Tahoe Daily Tribune building you will find one of the most impressive local history murals in town. It was painted by Alan Wylie and Mike Svob about 10 years ago. It depicts the famous Tahoe Hotel at the peak of it's popularity in the 1930s. It's got a great 1930s automobile, some wonderfull people in Great Gatsby era dress. It's a great thing!
Also, if you've worked up a bit of an appetite doing this walking tour -- I know I have, just walking down here. You will definitely see some great restaurants just walking by here. There's a sub sandwitch place less than a block from here. There is also the Sno-Flake Drive in, which is famous for having some of the best mildshakes and season fries in town right next door to the tribune building, so you can eat and be satisfied before you continue on or go home from your walking tour.
Tahoe Visitor's Center, Historical Society Museum, and Tahoe Art League
One of the reasons I reccomend the visitor's center is that there is a lot of very interesting public art right in front of the visitor's center on your way there if you're walking. There is a great big metal bicycle that was put up to celebrate the America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride and the Amgen Tour of California coming to Lake Tahoe a couple of years ago.
There is also another fine example of a chainsaw bear, this one with an eagle on it. There is also a lot of other really cool art that is within walking distance of the visitor's center. Stay tuned to Fabulous Lake Tahoe later this month for coverage of the Tahoe Business Expo put on by the Tahoe Chamber. The Tahoe Chamber of commerce has been nice enough to let me cover their business expo again.
And here we come to the end of our walking tour of Lake Tahoe for most of you, unless you're a really strong walker, because we've covered most of the public art on this side of town. I choose to end it at the history museum partly because you can get all of your questions answered right at the Tahoe Art Leage next door to the history museum, and the history museum will teach you a lot about the great public art that we have in Lake Tahoe and our long tradition of public art.
Tahoe Historical Society features a mural showing the story of the discovery of Lake Tahoe. More murals in Tahoe .
We have here at the Tahoe Historical Society museum a fine example of a mural in Lake Tahoe. This one depicts the discovery of Lake Tahoe by Kit Carson and John C. Freemont in 1844. In February of 1844, John C. Freemont and Kit Carson crossed over the Carson Pass to Lake Tahoe, to the very first sighting of what they called "Lake Bigler" after the then governor of California.
And it is a really, really interesting story. John C. Freemont, if you don't know, went on to become the very first Republican candidate for President of the United States. He was opposed to slavery 20 years before it was trendy, and Kit Carson has become so famous that they have a statue of him in
Carson City in front of the Nevada Legislature. Carson City, the Carson River, and the Carson sink are all named after Kit Carson, and, as Mark Twain said: "When they erected the statue of Kit Carson in Carson City, they made sure the horse's ass faced the legislature." Yeah, that is still how Nevadans feel about their legislature.
This is a good place to end our tour because there's good public transit access here and you can catch the bus back to wherever you came from from right in front of the visitor's center. Also I would strongly encourage you to stop by the Tahoe Art League's art center and gallery where they can answer any of the questions you may have come up with over the course of this
walking tour.
C. Meeks Lumber and the American Legion
Though I told you that a good place to end your walking tour is the museum, there's actually a lot of great material after the museum going towards South Lake Tahoe. Here on the side of Meeks Lumber is one of the most impressive murals in town. It's from the Art 4 Tahoe project and was painted exclusively by local kids with paint that DeVoe and Meeks donated for the process. It's actually one of the most impressive murals in town, and if you're willing to cross the street, usually the American Legion Hall in the summertime has meet the artist maker fairs where you can meet artists and actually buy some stuff, and there's a bus stop that's convenient to get you back to Stateline right there. It's almost as convenient as ending at the Tahoe Arts Project but a little longer walk.
Hey you guys, I'm +Dylan Eichenberg and I helped coordinate the first graffiti cleanup last November and since then it's been a lot of progress. The +Tahoe Regional Planning Agency actually recognized me with a Lake Spirit Award and, I mean, I think it recognized everyone who was part of this for helping keep Lake Tahoe clean and beautiful, improving the quality of what we already have.
