The Bay in Downtown Vancouver is taking steps to protect the messages of hope written on plywood boards outside the store after someone with a can of spray paint decided to sneak past security and destroy hundreds of the messages people left following the Stanley Cup riot.
New plywood boards were installed Tuesday night to protect the thousands of messages of support left there over the past week.
They were installed after an entire wall was covered over with spray painted graffiti reading "I love you."
People CTV News spoke with were very upset by the tagging.
"I think it's unfortunate that someone decided to cover the whole thing," one man said.
"I don't know what to say. I think it's sad. People who have done that to all of us," said Linda Temple.
"I love you" may seem like kind words, but the community is decidedly unimpressed.
Charles Gauthier of the Downtown Vancouver BIA says the painting is not art.
"Well it wasn't. Because it was done when other people weren't looking," he said. "It was basically being disrespectful to other people's comments, and there like hundreds if not thousands of comments on that board."
There is a website devoted to "I love you" graffiti, but the woman who runs it says she had nothing to do with what happened here.
The website has posted photos with similar tags from all over the world, including New York, Berlin, Paris, Toronto and even Vancouver.
The city says it's been a problem for a year now and the tags have been showing up on heritage buildings for some time.
The website says "I love you" is meant to spread joy and the author sends healing wishes to Vancouver.
But she can't understand why people are so upset. On her website she wrote "a graffiti writer writes a message of love, but because it is written over other people's messages (fitting with the nature of graffiti), it's a tragedy."
Vancouver's anti- graffiti program was cut back severely over the past couple of years. The city was trying to save money but the impact was immediate, says Gauthier.
"I was starting to see tags all over the place – on lamps, on sidewalks, on buildings I had never seen it on before," he said.
The good news is that the city hall realized the cut was a bad move and is phasing back the program.
For now, the protected boards at The Bay will stay up until all the windows at the bay are replaced.
The messages of hope will be soon moved to the Museum of Vancouver.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's St John Alexander
