For years, a plaintive plea has screamed in six-foot, blood-red capital letters from the flood wall in downtown Ansonia between the Metro-North Railroad tracks and West Main Street.
“WHY LENNON?” the graffiti asked, in reference, one assumes, to the killing of music legend John Lennon outside his ritzy New York City apartment building in 1980.
The lament — and other messages covering the wall — irked John Marini, a former Alderman who railed against the graffiti as a detriment to new businesses and investment.
For years Marini was a relatively powerless minority-party Alderman who couldn’t do much about the problem besides complain about it.
But after engineering Mayor David Cassetti’s upset win last November — and his subsequent appointment as the city’s corporation counsel — that has changed.
And so, apparently, has Ansonia’s approach to graffiti.
Last month the city paid $7,000 to a contractor to roll a layer of “graffiti-resistant” paint over the bottom 10 feet or so of the flood wall, including the doleful message regarding the ex-Beatle’s demise.
Marini said the city will see whether the paint job succeeds in keeping graffiti away.
The city had considered “high-powered water blasts” to obliterate the graffiti but that would have cost more, he said.
“This was the most cost-effective solution,” Marini said. “So essentially we’re going to see how it works.”
The “Why Lennon” message had become something of a quirky landmark in Ansonia — especially since it always reappeared after past attempts to remove it.
And it wasn’t the only weird graffiti in the city.
Months ago a Valley Indy writer noted several philosophical messages painted on the side of the city-owned Palmer building on Main Street which begin with an invitation from an anonymous “philosopher” to ponder thoughts from Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, and Pope John Paul II.
“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace,” reads the quote from Wilde, a writer, poet and wag who lived during the late 1800s.
The city has since removed the messages.
When the Valley Indy did a story on “Why Lennon” in 2010, people who live near it and readers on Facebook didn’t seem to mind the graffiti.
In fact, more people were annoyed with the tall flood wall on which the message was painted. The wall is an ugly barrier between downtown Ansonia and the Naugatuck River, but the city says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prohibits even putting plants near it.
Marini said the impact of other recent beautification efforts and improvements downtown — the city’s parking lot on West Main Street and most of West Main Street were repaved last month, for example — would be lessened if the graffiti was allowed to stay on the flood wall.
“This wall was very bad the entire length and we don’t want to have people being greeted on their way into Ansonia by a wall filled with graffiti,” he said.
Marini said Thursday (Sept. 4) that since the graffiti was painted over, the city has received “only positive comments.”
As to the “Why Lennon?” question itself, he pointed out that Mark David Chapman, the man imprisoned since 1980 for killing Lennon, told a New York parole board last month that he shot Lennon because he was drunk and depressed.
So, the question has been answered.
“Given the answer to the question, I think it’s appropriate that it come down,” Marini, who goes to Paul McCartney concerts, said.
