It’s a Road, Not Disneyland

During the June 15 council meeting, city employees gave details of their plan to install pictures on 16 recently erected pillars along Crown Valley Parkway. This blog’s staffers dubbed the display the A.R.T. (Another Rattay Travesty) gallery.

Among images to be installed, one piece summarizes the tone of the project. “Untitled” by Suki Berg is reminiscent of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. Although Berg’s A.R.T. has no title, it’s another scream.

City employee Keith Rattay will place Berg’s macabre and disturbing self-portrait in the middle of a road that fairly screams for relief. Rattay’s gallery will join the other dysfunctional elements of Crown Valley: visual noise, blaring horns and angry drivers who sometimes jump from their cars to punch out road workers who aren’t working on the road.

Mission Viejo residents have watched – mostly in disbelief – as city administrators have degraded Crown Valley. “Before” and “after” photos show the roadsides were unplanned but not previously tortured by people with bad taste. That changed as Rattay decided the medians needed strange-looking stone structures, soon to be decorated with his A.R.T.

When a blog reader said the structures look like tombstones, it all came together. The grisly and morbid A.R.T. planned for the tombstones on Crown Valley is the second phase of the city staff’s message to taxpayers: the grim reaper is coming to town. For years, city hall has quietly been installing tombstones at every turn. Look at what the city staff demanded of retail centers and HOAs in the way of “monument signs.” The shapes are unmistakable. Nearly every major entrance has a family-size grave marker. Does someone in city hall have a relative in the tombstone business?

The crowning touch for Rattay’s Crown Valley fiasco could be the Kaleidoscope, Mission Viejo’s “entertainment hub.” If it could become an A.R.T. center, the Kaleidoscope’s top could flip open like a jack-in-the-box. Out pops a gigantic Chucky, the evil doll from “Child’s Play,” wielding a huge sickle and taking swings at passing cars.

When Rattay in 2006 described Crown Valley to the OC Register, he called it a “vehicular-oriented street.” WHAT? The problem becomes clear, now that he’s spent millions of tax dollars creating road hazards and other oddities. He has no idea that people driving on Crown Valley are trying to GO somewhere! He’s done his best to bring traffic to a standstill so everyone can contemplate dead palms, pillars that look like outhouses, an A.R.T. gallery and 400 trees planted during a severe drought.

Check other blogs for additional coverage: http://missionviejodispatch.com/?p=9508 and http://orangejuiceblog.com/2009/06/grand-opening-finally-arrives-mission-viejo-open-cv-pkwy-art-gallery/#more-23493