Lauderdale’s graffiti guerrilla

‘Mr. Clean’ cruises around downtown on borrowed bike fighting a never-ending battle

FORT LAUDERDALE — A one-man graffiti-busting brigade is cruising downtown streets on a search-and-destroy mission to erase all signs of the blight. He’s Mr. Clean on a bike. Matthew Ingersoll has only been on the job a month, but the part-time city employee has quickly learned where to find the street scribblings.

“They usually hit the same boxes, the electrical boxes, the light poles, the stop signs,” he said.

“The bus shelters, too. They get tagged up,” said his supervisor, Dave Marcus.

The anti-graffiti operation grew out of the Clean Team crews the city started earlier this year. Those crews cover downtown on foot, picking up trash, sweeping up debris and scraping gum from sidewalks and removing stickers and graffiti from signs and street poles.

Officials figured out they could attack the ever-resurfacing graffiti better by dedicating a single employee with increased mobility to the scourge, one who was able to hit the hot spots faster and more regularly.

They borrowed a park ranger bike for the task. It’s easier to spot graffiti from a bike than a truck, and the bike doesn’t block traffic when Ingersoll stops to clean up a spot, Marcus said.

Ingersoll has his trusty pack of cleaning products strapped firmly to his ride. He’s armed with black, silver and concrete-colored spray paint, a can of Graffiti Buster spray that breaks down the markings and Scrubs, which are wipes specially designed to remove graffiti.

Ingersoll, 28, gets plenty of exercise on the job, riding about 10 miles on a typical workday and making 40 to 50 stops. His six-hour shifts go from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday through Monday. His work area stretches from Sunrise Boulevard to Southeast 17th Street along Fed- eral Highway, Northeast and Southeast Third Avenue, Andrews Avenue and Northwest and Southwest Seventh Avenue, and between Interstate 95 and Federal Highway on Sistrunk, Broward and Davie boulevards.

Ingersoll drives to work from Plantation in his Chevy Silverado, then trades the pick-up in for the white park ranger Cannondale.

He hadn’t spent much time on a bicycle since graduating from high school a decade ago. He lost five pounds his first week on the job, he said.

He is only responsible for cleaning up defacing done to public property. He’ll take pictures of graffiti on private buildings and send the photos to code enforcement, which will contact the property owners to have them remove the markings.

If the graffiti is on a sidewalk, Ingersoll will alert a city pressure-cleaning team to take care of it.