Vandal tags symbol of Coffey Park recovery

The Hopper Wall in Coffey Park is more than just another sound barrier standing in a suburb in northwest Santa Rosa. A handsome, fire-resistant, 8-foot stucco partition, it is also a potent, $650,000 symbol of the grit, resilience and resourcefulness of the folks who drive past it every day.

That’s why people took it so personally Sunday morning when they discovered the wall had been vandalized in the night. A tagger had spray-painted what appeared to be a cursive, upper-case D on a panel of the wall on the southeast corner of Hopper Ave and Coffey Lane.

Scorched and blackened after the October 2017 Tubbs fire that razed much of the neighborhood, the damaged wall stood for more than a year as grim reminder of the disaster. In August, when the neighborhood threw a party celebrating the completion of the new Hopper Wall, which cost $650,000 and took 18 months to finish.

That party was thrown across the street from where the vandal struck this weekend.

“It just pisses me off,” said Anne Barbour, a board member with Coffey Strong, a neighborhood support group, who spent hours organizing residents to rebuild the wall. “We’ve fought so hard to get our neighborhood back.”

Gray with a blue undertone, the stucco was not treated with an anti-graffiti coating, which simply wasn’t in the budget for the project. “From what I understand that stuff doesn’t work well on stucco,” said Steve Rahmn, who spearheaded the Hopper Wall project and is now Coffey Strong’s president.

In true Coffey Park fashion, residents sprang swiftly into action. By noon Monday, the graffiti had been painted over by a good Samaritan, though its faint outline could still be detected, the vestige of a not very talented vandal.

On a Facebook group called “Coffey Park Recover Together,” Katie Delzell threw out the idea of a “neighborhood painting party.” Looking out the back of her house on Santiago Drive, she is greeted by the sight of eight graffiti-filled panels of a wall that runs along the SMART tracks.

One of those panels now features an upper-case D, left sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning, and similar to the graffiti blighting the Hopper Wall.

Upon moving back into her family’s rebuilt home, she found herself staring at “two lovely cuss words - and I have small children.”

Once her proposed neighborhood-wide graffiti-covering exercise has taken place, Delzell explained, she would be on call to paint over any fresh tagging that “popped up,” on the Hopper Wall, or the wall she sees out her back door.

“I know the kids want their artwork seen,” she said. “But if it gets covered up quickly, hopefully they won’t come back.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com.