A new Image : Students Try to Uncover Old Mural, but Efforts Only Scratch the Surface

BALDWIN PARK — Painted in an army-barracks color scheme of tan and brown, it looks like every other classroom wall at Sierra Vista High School in Baldwin Park.

But scratch the surface.

Underneath the latex skin lies a mural celebrating the Led Zeppelin classic “Stairway to Heaven.” Complete with a shimmering lady climbing gilded stairs, it is one of many campus murals painted over by administrators after gang troubles rocked the high school in the late 1970s.

Led by physics teacher Bob Bray, a group of Sierra Vista students is trying to dissolve the layers of paint hiding the murals and dispel the idea that tags and graffiti are the only things young people can put up on a wall these days.

“We’re trying to create a mural revival,” said 16-year-old senior Ching Lim, one of the students working with Bray to coordinate the project.

“We want to show that young people can do something positive--not just tags and crime. That’s an overexposed picture,” Lim said. Lim was born in 1976, the year the “Stairway” mural was finished.

Bray tackled the project after years of carrying a mental picture of the mural.

“I used to come up here and play basketball when I was going to Cal Poly Pomona, and I’d see the mural every night,” he said. After Bray began teaching at Sierra Vista, he saw a television special on restoring Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in Italy.

“That’s when I got the idea to try and uncover the mural,” he said. Daily announcements of the project over the public address system every second period generated student interest, and Principal Marilyn Ghirelli donated some money to buy a solvent to try to remove the paint. But technology threatened to erase history when the solvent ate through the paint of the mural as well as the layers above it.

“We’re going to try a heat gun now, and then as a last resort we’ll sandblast it,” Bray said. “Even ‘The Last Supper’ isn’t in its original state,” Bray added.

Working from slides provided by one of the original muralists, student artists will redo any parts of the mural that are damaged in the uncovering, Bray said.

But students will have to re-create the “lady who knows all that glitters is gold” because high school seniors who believed the song had satanic undertones sledgehammered her out of the original mural in the 1970s.

Sierra Vista was no heaven in the late 1970s and early ‘80s after rival gangs took root at the high school, Bray said.

Ghirelli, who taught at Sierra Vista during the early 1980s, said the school had been plagued by graffiti and vandalism that drove administrators to order that all of the murals be painted over in 1979.

“There was a lot of damage to the murals,” she said. “They just decided to paint everything over and make it easier for cleanup.”

Ghirelli sees the mural project as a source of pride for the school and a way to break up the tedium of all the brown and tan buildings.

“We have a handle on the gang situation on campus now and don’t get that much graffiti,” she said. “We’ll go ahead and uncover other murals if we can resurrect this one.”

Research in old yearbooks and annuals has uncovered pictures of half a dozen other murals, which range from Aztec calendars to a cowboys and Indians scene, Bray said.

“Everything runs in cycles,” Bray told the students as they stood in front of the wall, examining the spot carved in the paint by the solvent.

“I told some students a long time ago that bell bottoms would be back, and sure enough, they are,” he said. “The ‘50s were like the ‘80s, conservative and materialistic, and now the ‘90s are an offshoot of that, like the ‘60s.”

While most of the students nodded their heads in agreement, Juan Diego Pena, a 17-year-old senior, hung back.

“I’m just glad there’s no “Saturday Night Fever” mural, because the last thing we need to rediscover is disco,” he said.