Oceanwide Plaza: A Beautiful Reminder of Why You Can’t Take Too Long

Oceanwide Plaza is quite beautiful — because of the graffiti.

Credit for this photo goes to West Coast Aerial Photography, Inc.

In downtown Los Angeles, California, across the street from the LA Convention Centre, on some of the most splendid, accessible, and valuable land in the world, there sits a cluster of buildings known as Oceanwide Plaza. It was supposed to be a residential and retail project but now it’s something different.

Photography credit to the LA Times.

Construction of the cluster began in 2015 but stopped when Oceanwide Holdings ran out of funds in 2019 and couldn’t continue. Sometime in 2024, local taggers and graffiti artists had had enough, and they took the power into their own hands (as artists can do like no other)!

Stunning. Photo credit to iErickDGAF on Reddit.

They graffitied the entire top of the ‘project’, very quickly, and as a team. Honestly, it has never looked better! Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the buildings have taken on a different form and meaning now.

Instead of a derelict, wasted, grey mass there now sits a beautiful monument to — productivity and creativity. To independent expression. Possibly to frustration. Even when those buildings were just sitting there, occupying land, tax dollars (did I mention that they have government-funded helicopters patrolling the buildings hunting for those dangerous graffiti artists?) and not providing housing, retail, entertainment, and local jobs, in an urban downtown core, they became a monument; they became an artistic expression!