The L.A. River, that really long and rather ugly concrete scar running through the heart of Los Angeles, is home to a thriving graffiti community. The area just south of the river and east of the 2 freeway, known as Frog Town, is one of these graffiti pockets.
Walk or bike along the uneven concrete trail next to the river, and you'll see miles upon miles of scribble-scrabbles adorning every wall.
The most prolific taggers like "Urge", "Petoe", 
and the innovatively-named "THC,"have their names scrawled everywhere.
There's even one dude that just writes "Frog Town", in huge, proud gothic-script font.
There are some amazing tags, like some on the side of the freeway, where the kid probably had to hang off the edge in a harness to paint it,
However, up until recently, this thriving graph community was devoid of ART. No pictures, no color, just scribble-scrabbles.
That was all to change when I, anonymously known as A, and my associate, T, starting making stencils and putting them up around Frog Town.
We really didn't have any agenda. We just liked the way stencils looked. We liked creating them and spraying them. And we knew that Frog Town offered some big walls away from the view of the police.
The whole time we sprayed, we joked that nobody would ever notice our artwork down here. And besides, the uncultured taggers would probably just cover it all up anyway.
So we were surprised when, only a week or two after we started putting up our stencils, we went back to Frog Town, and noticed something amazing: Someone had probably noticed our artwork. And they had responded by putting up stencils of their own.
Encouraged, we started putting up more stencils:
One day, we were spraying this elephant head in broad daylight, when a dude road up on a bike. At first we were startled, expecting trouble. But we explained that we were artists testing out our work.
The guy turned out to be cool, and he didn't seem to give a fuck about us spraying on the walls. He said he was a Frog Town resident; he was used to the graffiti.
We told him about a plan that we had to beautify the area by encouraging a community of artwork. We told him that we were thinking of whitewashing an entire wall and writing "Art Only." To encourage the neighbors to get artistic. He said "That's just fine. But this is Frog Town. The kids will spray right over it!"
We figured the dude was probably right, but we went right ahead with our plan anyway. One night we snuck down to the river with a bucket of white paint and two rollers. We white-washed a section of wall about 100 feet white and wrote "Art Only." We were hopeful that someone would get inspired and, like, make some stencils themselves.
In our imaginations, we visualized the psychic energy of our deed attracting art to the community.
With our fingers crossed, we checked back on our project days later. It was totally blank.
Then we checked back on it two weeks later. Something HAD to have changed in that time.
Sure enough. Something had changed. Our white wall was........ ........... ........ wait for it............ wait for it............ ............... totally covered with bullshit tagging!
But then! An amazing thing happened. An amazing, wonderful, exciting thing happened...
We walked about 50 paces to the right, and lo and behold! There was a mural! A big, bright, MURAL! Someone had painted a mutherfucking MURAL on the wall next to the L.A. River. Yes, a mural, right there on OUR WALL, where for years and years there had only been scribbly scribbles.
We were so overjoyed that we couldn't help but tag "THC" all over the mutherfucker.
Just kidding.
