Bob Collinsfor a sense of scale, here's the only known picture of me working on the mural, by @_jaimielauren pic.twitter.com/EI33QfMcSF
— David Witt (@DWITT75) June 5, 2014
Stillwater’s purists are cracking down again.
Just a few weeks after an anonymous person called the cops on a coffee shop that drew chalk drawings on the sidewalk, the city’s preservation society has put the kibosh on the mural project of a St. Paul artist.
“I do the art. I don’t do the bureaucracy,” David Witt told Fox 9 News.
He said he was just a couple of hours from finishing the mural on the side of a caboose near a restaurant when someone sent him a photo showing it was being covered up with brown paint instead.
That someone was the senior manager of the Freight House — the restaurant that owns the Caboose. The reasoning? According to the HPC, the mural contains an advertisement for a specific product, which the city’s manual deems inappropriate. The restaurant didn’t want to fight City Hall, but Witt was unaware of the politics.
“It was a month-long process of them contacting the Freight House,” he protested. “Never once was I told that anything was going on.”
