191-197 Toole in 2023, post 1 of 5: Southwest side

This is the first of five posts showing the strangely-shaped five-sided building at the strangely-shaped intersection of 6th Avenue, Alameda Street, and Toole Avenue. (Here's a closeup on Google Maps.)

There've been so many murals on these walls that we made a special page for the building that shows blog posts from over the years:

    Layers of murals: histories of a few walls

The last time I showed photos on this blog was a year ago: January 20, 2023, in All around a mural maze.

I stopped by the building several times during 2023 to catch the latest, but I saved the photos to post early in 2024. This post shows the southwest side, along Toole Avenue itself.

April 29, 2023

I snapped photos of two murals. The first was on the roll-up door not far from the left (northwest) end of the wall:

The second was just to the right (southwest) of the door:

Among other things, this building has artists’ studios. That sign at the right center was for an artist's open studio:

December 16, 2023

When I stopped by again eight months later, the two murals had changed (of course). The first, on the roll-up door, was completely new:

The second had new detail everywhere:

That much change is typical here!

I also noticed something I hadn't last time. Maybe it wasn't painted yet? This stood in front of the right (southwest) end of the building:

Next time, we'll walk to the left, around the corner of the building, to the northwest side.

Carson DeYoung

South facing fence of 504 E. Helen St., Tucson, AZ
Artist is Carson DeYoung (@DEPSONE).
Apparently, the artist is the subject of the mural.
Other artists have contributed to the painting: @PERISHTNR (Guadalupe Vargas) and @SABAWEAR

Click on the photo for a larger image.

Update from Jerry Peek: Carson's Instagram page says “Currently in Tucson, AZ”… the previous two posts, during November 2023, are from Flint, Michigan and the from Roma Sur neighborhood of Mexico City. Carson gets around!

My Little Angels (on St. Marys)

Last time, we showed My Little Angels (on Park Avenue) day care center. Today, a look at My Little Angels on St Marys Road. I don't know how long they've been open in this location, but the mural looks newer to me. I didn't spot the artist's name.

First, the front (north) side of the building and the wall on the west side of the parking lot:

Close-ups along the front of the building from left (east end) to right (west end):

And the wall from left, closest to the building (south end) to right, closest to St Marys (north end):

By the way, here's a geeky bit of Tucson knowledge. The road that runs west of I-10 is named St. Marys, not St. Mary’s. You'll see the name without an apostrophe on street signs, and in this fragment of a City of Tucson GIS MapTucson:

Once the new Maclovio Barraza Parkway is finished from Stone west to I-10 — maybe in 2025 or 2026? — I'm guessing the part of St Marys east of I-10 will get the new name — and, east of the Parkway, become 6th Street. Just a guess. 😁

My Little Angels (on Park Avenue) 15 years later

It was March 9, 2008, when Randy Garsee — who founded this blog — posted Don't Pooh-Pooh Cartoon Murals. (His post titles always made me smile. He was part of the most popular TV news team in Tucson, and he kept viewers smiling.) He wrote: “Neil Amstutz submitted the pictures below and wrote: ‘At Park Avenue and 30th Street is a yellow building with Winnie the Pooh overlooking a dirt lot that may have been for a day care.’” The first photo in that post shows an empty sign at the top left corner of the first photo… In 2017, Google Maps said that the business was named (then, at least) Little Angels Daycare.

On May 14, 2023, I was driving along Park Avenue and remembered the murals. I stopped to take new photos. Now a sign (which was an empty box in our 2008 post) and the top of the building both had the name My Little Angels Daycare. Let's look around — first, the front of the building from the southeast:

Next, along the front of the building from the left (south) end of the previous photo to right (north) end:

Around the yard that's just north of the building, clockwise from the side of the building to the wall north of the dirt playground:

(As always, you can click on a photo for a larger view.)

The photo below is the artist's signature, taken from the bottom right of the photo above:

So the mural was painted in 2007, the year before it first appeared on this blog.

Next time, the My Little Angels location on St Marys Road.

Early Joe Pagac murals trashed

During 2023, I found a couple of Joe Pagac murals downtown, which had been there for years, with graffiti tags. They're two of my favorites by Joe. It used to be that taggers would respect murals… but I guess some people these days don't care if they selfishly trash something other people enjoy. I listed both mural’s location (shown at the end of this post) as the fake address “131 East Toole Avenue.” Actually, the murals are a bit northwest and southeast on either side of that point.

191 East Toole

On February 17, I saw Joe's unique mural showing homeless people he had recruited as models to swim underwater. Some of the paint was falling off the wall — probably a base coating Joe had painted on the wall before adding the mural. But the long tag was the most heartbreaking:

There are photos of the mural in good shape in our November 24, 2017 post Much better photos of Joe Pagac's underwater mural. One photo is of the door that's now painted grey in the photo above.

Behind 119 East Toole

If you walk to the end of the little stub of 7th Avenue off of Toole Avenue, near Stone, Joe painted a mural on the side of Borderlands Brewing along the railroad tracks. There are lots of photos in Joe Pagac's Borderlands Brewing mural, posted April 10, 2015. Sometime not too long ago, someone decided to show how much he loved the IRA by ruining Joe's masterpiece. I'll start with one original closeup, then tagged versions of the same place and two other places:

How very, very sad.

Eleanor Kohloss repaints very faded mural

Twenty years after Eleanor Kohloss painted a mural on a Tucson Water site — a water well, maybe? — she repainted it.

I found an old photo on Bing Maps Streetside View. (It looks like Google's Street View photo, from March 2022, was taken after Eleanor repainted the mural.) I can't see how to embed the Bing photo within this web page, so here's a link:

2803 East Adams Street

The repainted mural…

…and a closeup:

I took the photos on December 17, 2023.

John Henry's bar (Murals being made, part 76)

If you come across a work of art for the first time, it's not always obvious whether the artist will keep adding or changing it. That's what happened with this mural on John Henry's Bar downtown on April 29, 2023. I saw the mural with a lift parked in front, so I guessed there was more to do. Here's what I saw:

April 29, 2023

No need to use your phone on that QR code… I've done it for you. It's a link to the Wikipedia page John Henry (folklore).

The Arizona Daily Star article New bar named for railroad folk hero set to open in downtown Tucson this fall — published Aug 2, 2019 and Updated Dec 22, 2023 — says that the owner wanted to hire Joe Pagac to paint the mural. But I've heard it's by Michael Schwartz; the way John Henry is painted does look to me like Michael's work. (If you know better, please leave a comment below — you can stay anonymous if you'd like — or use the contact form along the right column of this page.)

A month later, I came back.

May 29, 2023

When I compare the photos from both dates side by side, I can't see a difference. (If you can, please leave a comment or use the contact form.)

There are lots and lots of photos — mostly of drinks etc. inside — at John Henry's Tucson (@johnhenrystucson) on Instagram.

Murals being made, part 75: Volcano in detail

Happy New Year! Here's news for you about this blog. David Aber and I have been posting here twice a week — Tuesdays and Fridays. But we have so many murals on our to-do list that we'll start posting three times a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — until we work down the backlog (??).

On December 12, 2023, in Volcano, David Aber posted a photo of Joe Pagac's volcano mural on the northeast corner of 6th Street and 6th Avenue. I had taken photos on May 12, 2023, while Joe was painting… but I forgot to update our to-do list of murals, so David didn't know about my photos. After I saw David's post, I decided to stop by again and take a few close-up photos. So this is another post about the same mural.

May 12, 2013

Here's Joe painting. He told me that scaffolding is so expensive to rent that he decided to buy his own. His car — I believe that's a shark — is parked next to the scaffolding. In the vertical photo below, check out the poster he hangs at the top of the scaffolding.

December 16, 2023

A few days after David posted his photo of the mural, I was downtown in the middle of a day of mural-hunting. (I was trying to shorten our long list of murals to photograph.) As I drove by the corner of 6th and 6th, I decided to take photos here with my point-and-shoot camera that has a 40x optical zoom lens; it let me get detailed shots from the fence along 6th Avenue, quite a distance from the mural. I could even zoom in on Joe's signature at the bottom right corner.