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Some apparently vegan vandals hit a McDonald's mural at Huntington Beach.
The mural is on the side of a liquor store that faces a McDonald's, and it depicts the McDonald's characters, including the Hamburglar, Grimace and Ronald, hanging out on the Huntington Beach pier. The mural was created by the late Saeed Danosian, an artist born in Iran who took a job as a McDonald's manager to support his family, according to The Huntington Beach Independent.
The restaurant owner John Patterson asked Danosian to paint the mural once he learned about his artistic background. (Danosian went on to become a professor at Westwood College, but he died at the age of 54 in 2008.)
Patterson, who still owns the McDonald's, told the Independent that the vegan vandalism showed up while the restaurant was being renovated: "We were heartbroken when we came in the next morning and saw this. In 20 years, we had never had any graffiti vandals touch the mural."
The vandalism was bad enough that they decided to paint over the whole thing and start from scratch. Patterson said he hopes to get the community involved in recreating the mural: "We want to recreate his legacy somehow on that wall. His work deserved better than what happened."
You can see a photo of the vandalism here.
