It was supposed to be a vibrant public mural stretching down an entire city block, but it ended with the police getting called and a giant elephant’s head being whitewashed, leaving organizers wondering what they did wrong.

The enormous orange, yellow and blue mural was to be a city-sponsored visual revitalization in the Gerrard India Bazaar.

It stretches across a half-dozen shops on Gerrard St. E. and wraps around the buildings with murals on the side streets at each end of the block. At the corner of Glenside Ave., there’s a piece of Arabic calligraphy. Highfield Ave., at the other end, was to be adorned with a stylized elephant’s head.

“We could have stuck with our own building, but we wanted to do something for the community,” said Nuzhath Leedham, executive director of Riverdale Hub, a local organization that spearheaded the public art project.

The group consulted neighbours, hung renderings of the planned mural in their window and had all property owners sign off on it before receiving a $17,250 grant from the city’s StreetART program.

Yet only days before the mural’s public inauguration last weekend, someone painted a long white stripe right through the elephant. Soon afterward, the owner of the building wrote the city to say he would whitewash the entire thing.

“It’s disconcerting,” Leedham said. “We’ve worked with this community for years.”

Local Councillor Paula Fletcher says this destruction of public art is upsetting. She’s disappointed a property owner gave permission for the project and then reneged.

“This was significant revitalization effort. There were significant public resources put into this. All the homework was done, and somewhere along the line someone’s decided that this mural shouldn’t have an elephant on it,” she said.

The building in question is owned by a numbered Ontario corporation that lists its sole director as Moshuir Rahman, who lives in Bangladesh. Rahman wrote a letter giving permission for the mural in May and offered a $500 contribution, according to documents provided by the Riverdale Hub.

On Nov. 12, Rahman sent a letter to the city department that supervises the StreetART program, claiming he was not consulted on the mural and has decided to “restore the building to maintain its original working environment, for the commercial taxpayers doing business in the premises.”

At some point this week, a larger portion of the mural was whitewashed. No one knows who did it.

The Afghan Palace restaurant rents the front of the building, where the elephant can still be seen under a thin coat of white paint.

Umer Choudhry says he rents the space from Rahman and told the painters to stop because Rahman never gave his permission.

Adrian Hayles, one of the two artists commissioned to paint the mural, alleges Choudry threatened him and said he would paint over it.

The police were called, but no charges were laid.

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Choudry said police told him not to talk about the incident and that he would not erase a mural.

The vandalized mural mystery, Hayles says, stands as a reminder of “the fractured community that sponsored it.”