Local Businesses

Against the ordinance
Texas Skate does not agree with the ordinance.
The owners of Texas Skate asked seven different artists to paint murals in their store. Murals and tags are all over the inside and one on the outside of the store. On the back door some tags had been covered up by the city, but Texas Skate co-owner Jeffery Quick said he didn’t mind the tags being up there. The inside of the store is covered with colorful murals. Shoes were on display against a mural of Texas Skate in graffiti styled done by a local artist. The artist left a post it of his information on his mural that said he was cheap for anyone is interested in his art. Along a hallway other elaborate pieces of a ninja, skulls, and the name of the artists. The back of the store is covered in tags with very few spots of white on the wall from the floor and all the way up to the ceiling.

Quick said the ordinance was ridiculous and said that a graffiti wall would not be enough to extinguish San Marcos graffiti. He said artists try to ‘wow’ an audience through their skill of the art or their coverage of their tags being seen everywhere. He hopes to promote the skill of an artist on the murals inside and outside of the store.



For the ordinance
Cedar’s Mediterranean Café waitress, Faith Thomas, thinks the ordinance would be a good idea since it is her work that is getting graffiti. Cedar’s has been defaced by graffiti three times this year. She said no one likes the graffiti and thinks the proximity of the bars on the Square is to blame because the graffiti is done by kids as a practical joke because they’re bored.

Each wall of the building was been marked with graffiti and two sides were not covered up. Thomas said the City of San Marcos takes a while to come clean up the graffiti. The white brick still has faint outlines of the original graffiti. One tag that said ‘shrooms’ had been pressure washed but each letter was still clear enough to make out. The tags were large and in different colors and styles, indicating it was probably more than one culprit. The graffiti that was left up was a stencil repeated at least 12 times of a woman that had an x on her hand and ‘x hard x core’ vertically along the side.