LA's Graffiti Towers Are Getting Wiped Clean: The Last Days of Oceanwide Plaza

For more than two years, you could see them from the 110 Freeway. Three half-built towers across from Crypto.com Arena, covered floor after floor in tags, fills, and bright block letters. People called them the Graffiti Towers. Now they're being washed back to bare glass.

A bankruptcy judge cleared the sale of Oceanwide Plaza in July 2026. The new owners, KPC Group and Lendlease, agreed to remove all of the graffiti within three months. Crews started on July 23. That puts the deadline around late October. If you want to see what's left, the clock is running.

How a billion-dollar project became a wall

Oceanwide Plaza was supposed to be a big deal. Construction started in 2015. The plan was luxury condos, a five-star hotel, shops, and a private park. The tallest tower was planned at 49 floors. The other two were planned at 40.

Then the money ran out. The Beijing-based developer stopped work in 2019. The towers sat empty for years. Cranes came down. Fences went up. Not much else happened.

In late December 2023, writers got inside the tallest tower and hit its windows. By late January and early February 2024, LA's graffiti community had covered at least 27 floors. Tags, pieces, fills, every floor, every corner.

Photos and drone videos spread around the world. It happened right before the Grammys, held across the street. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. Panic 39 was on it from day one: Graffiti Artists Transform Abandoned Skyscraper into Urban Canvas in Downtown LA.

Art or vandalism? LA argued about it for two years

Let's be real. Painting the towers was illegal, and people paid for it. About 30 people were arrested. BASE jumpers leaped off the roof. A YouTuber walked a tightrope between two of the towers. City leaders called it dangerous and embarrassing.

But a lot of people saw something else. Writers told reporters they went for it because nobody was using the space, and a chance like that might never come again. Graffiti has been part of working-class Southern California for decades. The towers took that history and put it on the biggest canvas the city had ever seen. The towers even ended up in the remake of a Tony Hawk video game. (We broke down that whole debate in Art or Vandalism? Decoding the Debate on Graffiti.)

The politics got loud too. Back in February 2024, we looked at how the towers clashed with then-Councilmember Kevin de León's vision for downtown in this story.

Meanwhile, the cleanup kept stalling. In February 2024, the city voted to bill the owner about $4 million for graffiti removal and security. Then in March 2025, the city said it didn't want to pay for the removal itself. The paint stayed up.

Why this buff is a big job

Crews ran a test day with power washers on July 22. Some of the work wasn't easy to strip. Many pieces had a coat of primer under the spray paint. Some even had a clear sealant on top. That's writers protecting their work like a real mural.

In late August, John Petty from KPC said the job was moving forward and on track to meet the three-month promise. The owners also brought in 24-hour security, and neighbors in South Park have promised to help watch for new paint.

What comes next

Once the sale fully closes, the plan is to finish what Oceanwide started: more than 500 homes, a hotel, and shops. City leaders want the block looking good before the 2028 Olympics.

So the towers will finally get finished. But the paint won't be what people see when they drive by. It'll live on in photos, videos, and the memories of the writers who climbed all those stairs with cans and rollers.

The Panic 39 take: a landmark we knew wouldn't last

By Don Landrum, Panic 39

Seeing the towers get buffed feels like the end of an era. We all knew they were temporary. That's graffiti. But this was still graffiti history, a landmark the whole world saw.

A lot of people were against it, and most news outlets talked down on it. But look back at the street interviews from that time. When reporters asked regular people walking by, a lot of them said they were happy the towers were painted.

Think about the other way it could have gone. If this never happened, those buildings would still be sitting there abandoned and run down, just an eyesore on the city. The paint brought in tourism dollars too. People came from all over just to see the towers, and some folks were even making shirts and selling them right there.

I talked to a few writers who were on the ground when most of the painting was going down. They said it was like the Wild Wild West in there. For a while it was crowded, almost like a party inside the towers, before the site got locked down and it got harder to get in. It was also dangerous. People were getting into fights, and writers told me a couple of gunshots went off. That's part of the streets. You put that many people together in one place at one time, and things are going to happen.

Watch: the towers at their peak

Nothing runs forever

Buildings get buffed. That's how graffiti works, and every writer knows it going in. What made the Graffiti Towers different was the size of it. Dozens of writers, one city block, and the whole world watching.

The full Graffiti Towers story on Panic 39

• Graffiti Artists Transform Abandoned Skyscraper into Urban Canvas in Downtown LA (February 2024)
• How Oceanwide Plaza's Graffiti Movement Clashed with Kevin de León's Vision for LA (February 2024)
• Art or Vandalism? Decoding the Debate on Graffiti

New to graffiti? Start here

If you're not from the scene, a few words you'll see in this story:

• Writer: a graffiti artist. In the culture, you write graffiti, you don't "draw" it.
• Tag: a writer's name done fast in one color, like a signature.
• Piece: short for masterpiece. A bigger, more colorful work that takes real time.
• Fill: the color painted inside the outline of the letters.
• Buff: when graffiti gets painted over, scrubbed, or power washed off.

Graffiti is part of the culture Panic 39 comes from, and we'll keep covering it as it moves. More in the Graffiti section of the Panic 39 Magazine, and follow us on Instagram.

Top photo: The Oceanwide Plaza towers in July 2022, before the graffiti. Photo by Benoît Prieur via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).