A few weeks ago, there were two murals on one building, which stands at the southeast corner of Duane and Echo Park Avenue. On EP Ave, there was a big pink dinosaur, with a glint in its eye and huge teeth, friendly, with a bit of attitude. This painting was new. It appeared toward the end of March of this year. Around the corner, on Duane St., was a historic bit of business. How many years, I am not sure. This mural was a great equalizer. The "Worker's Mural" on the side of the building at Duane and Echo Park Avenue seemed to please everyone. It was there for years. The taggers left it alone, reportedly, because they liked it. Hipsters and artists liked it, and they left it alone, too. It seemed permanent, a relic from the time before the neighborhood had gentrified so widely. Less than about eight feet in height, it graced the side of the building said to be owned by photographer Gary Leonard. The building houses artists' studios; in the past, a carpentry workshop, and other studios.

So, it's March, all well and good. But then, in April, someone paints over the old kung-fu mural. They whitewash it, a la Gloria Molina down by the river. Reportedly Richard, the tenant of the corner studio. Shortly thereafter, someone throws about a gallon of pastel pale green paint on the pink dinosaur. (It's reminiscent of when someone threw a gallon of paint over the chicken mural at Chicken Corner, leading to Aaron Donovan's painting that particular chicken out entirely.) The dinosaur sits that way, humiliated, for a couple of weeks, and then it, too, is whitewashed into oblivion. I asked about this and was told that the artist who did the dinosaur is a skate kid, about 15 years old, and that his mural was defaced in a contorted retribution for the painting over of the community's martial-arts mural, because Richard, who painted out the first mural, had encouraged the kid. Well, then. (The pink-dinosaur kid has a smaller blue dinosaur across the street at the former Echo Beauty Salon; he also has a goofy-grapish face in a cap on the same building.)

There we have two white walls that would be unexceptional if none of this had happened. They are anything but tabula rasa. There are efforts underway to see if the kung-fu mural can be restored. I hope it can.

(Related: A Ruben Ortiz Torres mural of a bat-like creature recently turned into monochrome on a wall in the neighborhood. The artist is more famous than the others, but the mural has gone quietly.)