John Carswell’s American Graffiti

John Carswell Apex Everett is home to a lot of things: the 900-person-capacity concert venue Kings Hall; a moodily lit, steak-centric restaurant called 16Eleven; a white-walled event space with an attention-snatching chandelier named The Gatsby Room; and the soon-to-open, 1920s-inspired cocktail lounge El Sid.  But the haunts currently filling out the 30,000-square-foot brick building built by the Knights of Columbus more than 100 years ago weren’t originally part of the plan when Northland Contractors owner John Carswell bought it in April 2022. He was, above all, looking for a place to showcase his massive DogTown Collection, which he touts as the world’s largest collection of graffiti and urban art on canvas. Amassed over the last few decades, the collection’s works date back 50 years; span the U.S.; and feature legendary graffiti-world names like Cornbread and Ichabod and pieces seen in pop-cultural touchstones like Walter Hill’s “The Warriors” (1979) and John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” (1981).  “I have zero art talent of any kind,” Carswell told 425 while seated in a chair original to the building on a brisk late-October morning. “I grew up in Southern California, and so a lot of my friends in junior high, their older brothers...