Los Angeles is a city best seen at 30 miles per hour, when its squalor and splendor even out to create a neutral grandeur; it’s at the slower speeds that our angels’ dereliction becomes evident. Pedestrians know this and that’s why nobody walks in LA—like the Missing Persons’ song. However, there is another method of getting around which combines the best qualities of walking and driving: bike riding. Thanks to forward thinkers at the Bikeways Unit at the Los Angeles Department of Public Works, there are bike lanes on the streets and dedicated bike paths away from vehicles. Because of Lewis Macadams’ promotion of the river as a usable urban green space, one of these paths parallels the LA River and has become a popular two-wheeled thoroughfare.

Photo by Anthony Ausgang

In the tradition of motorcyclists, one can find both “lone wolf” riders and groups of all sizes on the river’s bike path. It’s not unusual to see ballers on crazy custom bikes with so many appurtenances they resemble Mod scooters and the occasional bike-powered shopping cart train. Since Street artists crave exposure, the number and variety of riders has proven to be attractive to sticker taggers, Graf painters, and agitprop wheat pasters. Thus, whether timing a ride between the Harbor Freeway and Burbank, or just taking it easy, an alert bicyclist can see an impressive array of guerrilla public art.

For years the concrete banks of the LA River have been a favored canvas for Graf artists, and while Saber’s massive 60 x 250 feet piece was buffed long ago, new ones are thrown up nightly. Up along the path, much of the renegade art is like that on the boulevards, but there is a genre taking the bicycle as its main motif. The artist “Ra” uses a fat Sharpie to scrawl his three-quarter profile drawings of bicycles and the phrase “Ride On” across the walls beside the path. Like most Graf artists Ra has a rival, and his work is often crossed out by an unidentified aerosol artist who sprays a side view of bicycles in the wild calligraphic style of Lettrists.

Photo by Anthony Ausgang

Although the path is generally used as a route to get from one place to another, there is a group of people that live in the parkway between the Golden State Freeway and the bike path. They are a Darwinian offshoot of the overpass dwellers, managing to cross the bike path repeatedly without collision. Even so, the astute rider must exercise caution when passing through their villages, for this isn’t picturesque peasantry but a group of the disenfranchised and unwell. As such, they have their own specific artistic style: a jittery meth-addled Expressionist depiction of “the night before” stretched into the sunburned hours. It’s almost as rewarding to look at as it must be to make.

In the unsentimental world of Street Art, both the hysterical and the calculated eventually get buffed, so enjoy it today because tomorrow it’s gone. But the bucolic perseveres like the river itself, and on a graffiti-less wall near the LAPD stables, there’s a painting of a horse that returns the gaze of the observant cyclist; now that’s something worth slowing down for.