Banksy's Rat Shows Up in Haight/Ashbury This Week

Banksy's iconic rat in San Francisco, 2010. 

I watched a documentary recently about graffiti art, and it's current hero Banksy. His visit to San Francisco in 2010 caused a sensation, albeit a brief one. His iconic image of a rat in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood was cut out by an investor who wanted to save it from the building owner's paint brush. When the owner threatened to paint over it, or get fined by the city, the investor/savior stepped in and paid to have it safely boxed up and removed. He stored the work in pieces, in his apartment closet.

My question was, of course, "who the hell invented spray paint, anyway?" 

A paint salesman from northern Illinois is to blame. No Ed Seymour, no spray-painted rat. Seymour owned a paint company and had an aluminum coating for radiators he wanted to sell. So like most salesmen, his wife stepped in and told him what to do. She suggested a makeshift spray gun. So, in 1949, Seymour mixed paint and aerosol in a can with a spray head. Suddenly, Banksy's mother must have felt a twitch. 

After Seymour grew a business overnight manufacturing spray equipment and selling it to the auto and industrial-machine markets, the home-furnishing industry took notice. Rust-Oleum and Krylon stepped into the mist.  And by 1973, Big Spray was producing 270 million cans annually in the U.S., according to the Consumer Specialty Products Association. U.S. spray-paint manufacturers produced more than 412 million cans last year.

All of this is to point out the obvious: when you get stuck needing to sell something, ask your wife.

This past week, the Haight/Ashbury Rat reappeared above the Red Victorian, 1665 Haight St. It's hard to keep a good rat down. It's been reported a fake. Evidently it was created by two Banksy fans using a projector.

Banksy's rat, after being removed from it's Haight/Asbury home in 2010..