Taking the Train

Austin FM 11/16/01 3:09 PM Page i TAKING THE TRAIN POPULAR CULTURES, EVERYDAY LIVES ROBIN D. G. KELLEY & JANICE R...

Author: Joe Austin

146 downloads 2324 Views 9MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page i

TAKING THE TRAIN

POPULAR CULTURES, EVERYDAY LIVES

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY & JANICE RADWAY, EDITORS

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page ii

POPULAR CULTURES, EVERYDAY LIVES

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY & JANICE RADWAY, EDITORS

Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century Kevin J. Mumford City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York David M. Henkin Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women Margaret Finnegan Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Century Nan Enstad Telling Bodies, Performing Birth: Everyday Narratives of Childbirth Della Pollock From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity Juan Flores

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page iii

TAKING THE TRAIN HOW GRAFFITI ART BECAME AN URBAN CRISIS IN NEW YORK CITY

JOE AUSTIN

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page iv

C

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2001 Joe Austin All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Austin, Joe, 1957– Taking the train : how graffiti art became an urban crisis in New York City / Joe Austin. p. cm. — (Popular cultures, everyday lives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–231–11142–8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0–231–11143–6 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Graffiti — New York (State) — New York. 2. Street art — New York (State) — New York. 3. Hip-hop — New York (State) — New York. 4. Subways — New York (State) — New York. 5. Urban renewal — New York (State) — New York. 6. New York (N.Y.) — Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. GT3913.N72 N415 2002 081 — dc21 2001042139

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Designed by Lisa Hamm Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page v

To Chris Powell, Rhonda E. Carter, and Bruce Palmer

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page vi

This page intentionally left blank

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page vii

CONTENTS

Prologue 1 1 A Tale of Two Cities 9 2

Taking the Trains: The Formation and Structure of “Writing Culture” in the Early 1970s 38 3

Writing “Graffiti” in the Public Sphere: The Construction of Writing as an Urban Problem 75

Austin FM

11/16/01

viii

3:09 PM

Page viii

CONTENTS

4

Repainting the Trains: The New York School of the 1970s 107 5

The State of the Subways: The Transit Crisis, the Aesthetics of Fear, and the Second “War on Graffiti” 134 6

Writing Histories 167 7

Retaking the Trains 207 8

The Walls and the World: Writing Culture, 1982–1990 227 Conclusion: A Spot on the Wall 267

Appendix: Sources from Writers 273 Notes 275 Selected Bibliography 341 Acknowledgments 345 Index 349

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page ix

TAKING THE TRAIN

Austin FM

11/16/01

3:09 PM

Page x


Austin Prolog

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 1

PROLOGUE

I

The ultimate point seems to be[:]

begin with two very brief stories.

What kind of city do people want to live in? The stone gray and earth colors that we’ve erected around us, the vast labyrinths of monolithic

On the evening of July 3, 1976, three writers,2 caine, mad 103, and flame one, entered the No. 7 Flushing to Manhattan subway line storage yard in Queens. Climbing through a hole in the fence, they brought along a huge quantity of (stolen) spray paint in precisely selected colors, as well as sketches for the “Freedom Train” that they intended to paint. They decided on a train and, during the next several hours, worked in the dark to paint all eleven cars, top to bottom, in a coordinated bicentennial theme, anticipating the city’s elaborate Fourth of July cele-

structures that dwarf the scale of man set the tone for the daily lives of city dwellers. It’s the natural impulse of people who are very alive to decorate their environment, make it beautiful. The ultimate question raised by graffiti is[:] What would a wildly decorated city look like? —Jamie Bryan, High Times (August 1996)1

Austin Prolog

2

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 2

PROLOGUE

bration. The final multicar work was approximately ten feet high and longer than two football fields. caine, mad 103, and flame one’s Bicentennial Train was to fly through the shared public spaces of New York City on the morning of the nation’s 200th birthday like a patriotic streamer. By all available accounts, the Freedom Train was magnificent, consisting of several whole-car paintings of the earliest designs for the U.S. flag, symbols that usually decorate the covers of high school history textbooks. Elsewhere in the city, New Yorkers prepared to celebrate the Bicentennial with a harbor parade of sailing vessels (“Operation Sail ’76”) and a citywide party that would be broadcast around the nation. Tourists were told to leave their cars at home and take public transportation; the Bicentennial Train seemed right in step. But despite its expansive, patriotic appeal on this most patriotic of national holidays, the Freedom Train never traveled through the subway system. Aside from the writers who painted it, no one but a few New York City Transit Authority (TA) workers and the Transit Police saw it. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) steadfastly refused to be upstaged by what they felt was vandalism—no matter the work’s patriotic appeal—and they would not risk the public’s mistaking the Freedom Train as part of the officially sanctioned celebration. Rather than allow the work to become a legitimate part of the national celebration (thus legitimizing the writers as participants in the civic community), New York City’s transit authorities pulled the train out of service, uncoupled the individual cars in the yard, and destroyed all of the paintings. The three writers were arrested at their homes the next day. There are no known photographs of the Bicentennial Train among writers, although it has been reported that the Transit Police photographed it before it was destroyed. Those photographs, if they exist, have never been made available to the public.4

A second story:

In February 1984, after a year in which the number of U.S. citizens traveling abroad had reached a new record high, a London-based tour agency and a major airline arranged a free weekend’s stay in New York City for four hundred European and Middle Eastern hotel managers as a token of appreciation for their hard

Austin Prolog

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 3

PROLOGUE

work. The visitors stayed at the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, visited several of the major tourist attractions, and experienced the city’s expected charms. On the Saturday evening of their stay, the visitors were to be carried by subway train to the World Trade Center, where they were to dine at the Windows on the World restaurant. To deflect the “dirty and dangerous” image of New York City thought to exist foremost in the European mind, a special renovated and repainted “graffiti-free” subway train had been arranged and paid for by the tour agency, at a cost of $4,000. The oddity of this particular train’s refurbished appearance did not go unnoticed by the visitors, who were well-informed about the city’s cultural pleasures. While a few seemed pleased, several others were genuinely disappointed that the writing had been removed from the train and wanted to know what had happened to the “real” New York City they had come to see. This led some of the visitors to question the authenticity of their guided experience of the city overall. “It’s very disappointing not to have something that’s part of the local color,” remarked a German. An Italian agreed: “We have graffiti on our monuments in Rome and we don’t whitewash them when Americans come over. . . . The subway should be like it is, not like it should be.” A Times reporter was there to record their reactions, which were duly noted in a news article for the paper’s Metro section.5 By the time of this visit, New York City was widely understood to have fully recovered from its financial crisis. The real estate market had enjoyed several boom years in succession, the city government had regained its ability to borrow money on the bond market, and herds of yuppies could be sighted everywhere on downtown streets. These were very real differences from the New York City of 1976, when predictable moneymaking seemed more doubtful. Tourism is the city’s second largest industry, and the European and Middle Eastern guests’ approval for the “clean” subway was important as a marker of the city’s renewed status—or at least it was important to the editors of the city’s most famous newspaper. The New York Times’ editors replied to the “Dear Deprived Hoteliers” the next day: “Let us fill you in. . . . You didn’t miss a thing. The trains are an unsightly mess and imply that no one’s in charge and no one cares enough except to shield distinguished visitors. Serves ’em right, in a way, that you feel deprived.”6

These two anecdotes hint at this book’s major themes. The first story highlights the sophisticated and illegal art practiced on the public subway

3

Austin Prolog

4

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 4

PROLOGUE

trains for two decades in New York City. Through their painting, writers “made a place” for themselves in the city’s public network, claiming a “right to the city” as a valuable and necessary part of its social and cultural life.7 While most writers were preoccupied with the everyday task of establishing and maintaining their reputation among other writers, the Freedom Train and innumerable other works indicate an equally powerful desire to speak to the entire city in new terms, and from a different perspective. Writers saw themselves as embodying an (illegal) urban beautification and education program for a fading city bent on denying its own magnificent cultural dynamics and destroying its own “local color,” both figuratively and literally. In taking the trains, writers created a new mass media, and in that media they “wrote back” to the city. Writing was inspired by the political mass movements of the 1960s, by the utopian strains swirling within the contradictory mixture of counterculture and commercial popular culture, by urban youths’ own sense of the narrowing possibilities for social acceptance and economic mobility in a postindustrial city, and by the traditions created within earlier youth formations, which they inherited. Part of the larger, dispersed, and ongoing struggle for public space among marginalized groups in the United States, writing quickly became a public forum for social criticism. It also served as a public arena for ritualized rebellion and rage for both youths and the adults who challenged them, particularly those adults who fostered an alliance in the “war on graffiti.” The work of these writers did not speak out from some isolated or specially confined elite space such as an art gallery or museum. Their work circulated (often literally) through the most commonly traveled shared public spaces—the public square—of the city. Nor did writing evolve from an obscure cultural form; the everyday handwritten signature was its starting point. But these artistic choices were not freely made from some bountiful list of expressive options; instead, they reflect the limited circumstances of the writers’ own lives. In making these restricted choices, writers invited the urban community at large into a public conversation about their work, and as such, the practice of writing took on important social meanings that extended well beyond those intended or anticipated by the writers themselves. The MTA (the “super authority” that oversees the New York City Transit Authority), in conjunction with the editors of the New York Times and several other powerful institutional forces within New York City, saw the paintings on the public subways in a very different light: as a dangerous and

Austin Prolog

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 5

PROLOGUE

even subversive threat to local authority. And so, in all the reporting of the Bicentennial celebrations, the Freedom Train was never mentioned; caine, mad 103, and flame one’s gift was refused. In that refusal, their “place” in the city was made clear. This turn of events points to a lost possibility, a history that was not allowed to happen, or at least, not yet. For decades, New York City’s image as the center of the world was tarnished by the (sometimes unintended) consequences of policies and practices at the highest levels of government, finance, and law enforcement, culminating in the city’s near-bankruptcy in the mid-1970s. In a hierarchical society, centralized authority stands as the yardstick for measuring overall social stability as well as for predictable moneymaking. The difficult questions raised in the aftermath of elite decision-making proved to be too politically dangerous to articulate clearly in the public sphere. Rather than struggle with these hard issues directly, authorities shifted the focus for these fractures in the social order toward easier targets, one of which was the “graffiti” on the subways. “Graffiti” became one of several symbols promoted as a stand-in for the sense that something fundamental had gone wrong, and its removal from the subways in the 1980s presented a visible task that could measure the tangible progress of elite efforts to right the wrongs that elites themselves had created. In the local news media, the eyes of the public were continually confronted with intentional representations of writing as vandalism. These repeated (mis)representations narrowed and then closed off the possibility for understanding writing on the trains as an important grassroots urban mural movement, a movement that could have complemented the already-significant cultural tourism that supports the city’s economy. Writing opened the possibility of once again demonstrating the amazing creativity that has continually reemerged from the city’s mixture of nationalities, generations, and histories. Recognized for what it was, writing could have been promoted as a homegrown public art movement and its energies directed to the drab concrete and brick walls that are everywhere, to the filthy and faded shells of the subway trains, and to the empty and burned-out buildings that signify the city’s deep social inequalities. Clearly, the hoteliers’ visit suggests that there was real interest in this art even from world-hopping sophisticates, an interest that could have been used to produce badly needed revenue for city coffers and useful work for its youth. Perhaps this sort of public recogni-

5

Austin Prolog

6

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 6

PROLOGUE

tion and appreciation would have been welcomed as a sign of social inclusion to the large numbers of young people in the city who wrote on the trains and walls without authorization. Instead, the public was encouraged to see writing as a sign that “no one cares” and to see writers as vandals who terrorized the city’s “decent” citizens. Yet writing could have served a more progressive function, and there is a further irony in this missed opportunity. At the same time that writing was being cast as dangerous and demoralizing vandalism in local papers, the federal government was dispensing millions of dollars through the National Endowment for the Humanities for community murals in the same neighborhoods from which writing sprang.8 While taxpayers laid out funds for young people to paint the walls in their communities under “expert” adult supervision, they paid further millions for another group of expert adults to remove the murals that the writers had created. But the final irony may be that writing is alive and well today, while the “authorized” mural movement has long since faded in all but a few cities as federal monies supporting it have progressively been cut off (the program having served its function to “cool out” central-city youth of color). At the foundation of this book’s argument is the assertion that the cultural forms that writers developed in New York City constitute what is perhaps the most important art movement of the late twentieth century. I am well aware that this is a controversial statement, open to debate on all sides. But it is a debate worth having. The history of writing intertwines with the “war on graffiti” and encourages us to ask difficult questions about art, about the democratic aesthetics of shared public space, about centralized governmental authority, about the place of youth in the urban landscape, and about the social obligations that bind urban residents together into a shared human city. These questions could be put to any city in the world, but they are most appropriately addressed to New York City—because of writing’s unrecognized significance in the history of contemporary art; because New York City claims to be the art capital of the world and, indeed, “the Capital of the Twentieth Century”; and because New Yorkers are not known for holding their tongues. Of course, no written history can ever be complete, even those histories written by the folks who were really there.9 The history of writing is not the same thing as the history of “the graffiti problem,” although the two are obviously interconnected. I built the history that I have written here around a few neglected but fundamental questions about the coevolution of writing

Austin Prolog

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 7

PROLOGUE

and the “graffiti wars” in New York City between the time of writing’s first appearance in the late 1960s and up through the early 1990s, a few years after the MTA declared the subway system to be “graffiti-free.”10 Writing is, at most, a minor violation of the already-restricted right to control the appearance of individual and public property amidst the uncontrolled clutter of New York City. Why, then, should this misdemeanor warrant a $500+ million “war,” a war that is still raging after more than thirty years? How has “graffiti” sustained its status as a so-called urban problem during this extended period of neglect toward the nation’s cities, when issues of poverty, public schooling, health care, and meaningful employment—the material structures that support everyday lives—have been passed over? Why did writing achieve such an extraordinarily rapid and sophisticated aesthetic development in New York City long before it had even appeared in most other cities? What has sustained that development across time, and why has it appealed to so many of the city’s youth? Taking the Train will not answer all these questions, but it can at least start the conversation. I caution the reader not to mistake Taking the Train for an adequate history of writing itself, a history that is best left to the writers themselves to debate and record. Rather, this book sketches out what I understand to be the general contours of the subject and some of the most significant trends and events in writing during its first two decades of development.11 For a detailed history of writing as art, I refer readers to the writers’ own publications (see chapter 8 and the appendix).

7

Austin Prolog

10/26/01

12:00 PM

Page 8


Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 9

1

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A

t no time in the last century have resident New Yorkers or outside observers been unanimous in their opinion about the present state or the future of New York City. Predictions of impending civic collapse have a long history in this metropolis, fueled by scare stories with an ever-changing cast of urban villains—the “dangerous classes,” “the immigrant threat,” “welfare queens,” “wilding youths.” In the shared public drama of urban life, New York City is sometimes portrayed on the newspapers’ front pages and in editorials as a chaotic human hive, an unstable structure whose frantic inhabitants are at risk of fracturing the moral and legal pillars that have held it upright in the past. At the same time, we may hear and read proud and fervent assertions that New Yorkers are living in the Rome of our time, the contemporary center of human civilization. Cast in these equally familiar terms, New York City is the Big Apple, “the City That Never Sleeps,” and the Capital of the Twentieth Century—the global ground zero for fame, fortune, culture, and the cosmopolitan good life. Somewhere between these

Austin Ch1

10

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 10


opposites is an undetermined, heterogeneous human collective of seven million people with coexisting presents and fluctuating futures, held together within the shared public imagination by the single name “New York City.” These seven million live within thousands of differing cultural, social, and economic networks, networks that overlap in one location, intertwine and integrate in another, or remain rigidly segregated in others. The city, as a whole, is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified.1 While [the city] may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is everchanging in detail. . . . There is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases. . . . The image of the Manhattan skyline may stand for vitality, power, decadence, mystery, congestion, greatness, or what you will, but in each case that sharp picture crystallizes and reinforces the meaning.2

We seem unable to envision the whole of New York City without significantly reducing its all-too-human complexities. Within the commercial marketplace, the communications and entertainment industries filter these complexities of urban social life through familiar framing stories about the city’s present and future. Mass-mediated public framing stories do the cultural work of simplifying the complex city by selectively guiding our attention to particular individuals, groups, events, or trends via representations of their most easily recognized and distinguishing qualities. In commercial broadcasts, framing stories sort things out on a citywide scale, and thereby reinforce and subtly revise the mental maps that coordinate and focus our shared public expectations. Framing stories transform the complex whole of New York City into a place that is transparent, legible, and relatively predictable for the newspaper reader and television viewer, as well as the commuter, the taxi driver, and the neighborhood stroller. Framing stories encompass and orient the myriad local stories—from a horrific murder on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a new shopping area in Flatbush— by placing them into an understandable relationship to common visions of the city’s present and future. They allow us to confront a constantly changing social environment with an always undetermined future, and yet still “put things in order” for ourselves: set daily expectations and make plans, initiate and adapt to change, interpret the past, and maintain the stability of everyday life. A framing story is a more or less unconscious and unex-

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 11


amined but nonetheless socially produced public narrative of “how things are” and “how things are likely to be” in the city. Powerful framing stories easily become “common sense.” As might be expected among seven million people, there are always several conflicting framing stories in widespread circulation at any given time. But these competing stories tend not to be equally influential. It is by way of the commercial public sphere—the mass media business—that most New Yorkers grasp the city as a whole place. It is by way of commercially produced stories that most New Yorkers know what their governments have done and are doing, which individuals or groups are in the public spotlight, what important events are taking place, what trends to expect, what the stakes are in interpreting “the way things are” in this way or that, and so forth. In a competitive information marketplace, the “important” events and “real” meanings of our shared public lives are sold as commodities to consumers, even if payment for this commodity is only an endless barrage of advertising. As a result, some of the most important documents of public life are contained within the dominant commercial framing stories: news reports, editorials, headlines and photos, radio talk shows, and so on. The commercial public sphere signals to its audiences their respective places in the several ongoing dramas of New York City. It informs them which of the several framing stories they were, are, should be, or will soon be living. Since New York City is a national center for the commercial media, these stories are not just local; they are frequently broadcast to the entire nation and to the world.3 Even though we usually think of stories as fictional and immaterial, the mass-mediated framing stories I have in mind here both alter and reflect concrete reality in important ways. The assertion that we are guided by stories that narrate our collective lives does not deny that there are more or fewer crimes committed in some areas, more or less economic prosperity now, more or less desirable housing in this neighborhood or that. Any observant New Yorker can easily produce a substantial body of undeniable material evidence in support of any one or several of the prevailing framing stories of the moment. Framing stories are intangible, difficult to recognize, and often unconscious—they are, after all, “common sense”—but they are nonetheless created and sustained through concrete human history, through real life. But a framing story, like all other stories, selects a certain limited number of recognizable aspects of human experience for interpretation, and discards or diminishes the others. (Distortion

11

Austin Ch1

12

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 12


and intentional fabrication are obviously a part of many framing stories as well.) On the basis of this selection and interpretation process, policies are created, public issues and problems are presented to voters, and solutions are formulated and justified. At the same time, the stories we tell ourselves are open to reflection and change. In collectively creating our present situation, we make our own story, and in interpreting our story, we create the possibility of new futures. Take, for example, the common and recurring framing story of New York City as the Big Apple, the New Rome, the Capital of the Twentieth Century.4 These fantasies are not without some basis in material reality. New York has long been the largest city in the United States and is among the five largest in the world. It overtook Paris at mid-century as the art capital of the Western world. It is a city of the world spectacle, an important center of global tourism and entertainment. New York City’s place near the top of the global capitalist economy is also long-standing and unquestioned. The physical structures of the city—its streets, parks, bridges, and skyline— are among the prime examples of twentieth-century modernism’s monumental urban vision.5 In this very real but stagelike setting, the story of the New Rome presents the social reality of the city according to a progressive vision that values economic growth, cultural prestige, social stability, and opportunity for individual advancement, emphasizing “the good life” and the city’s exalted place in the global hierarchy. This is the joyous, utopian New York City of Broadway musicals, reflected everywhere in clear-sky picture postcards and tourist photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, skaters in Central Park, and the crowds on Wall Street. This vision of New York is alive in every issue of the New Yorker, in the Times’s real estate and arts sections, in any brochure from the New York City Tourist Bureau, in Woody Allen’s movies, in popular television programs like The Odd Couple and Friends, and in hundreds of other massmedia texts. Even Disney’s attempt to make its mark on Manhattan has an understandable, if cruel and calculating, logic since the city has long been a national and global site for some of our most cherished myths and fantasies of life in the United States. Indeed, for an overrepresented few, New York City has been a real-life Disneyland. But this mythic New York City is always stalked by its Other, the Naked City, the Asphalt Jungle, the Rotten Apple, where the story is one of living

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 13


in the shadowy crevices of the modern metropolis. Poverty, crime, moral decay in infinite variety, claustrophobic surroundings, alienation, uncaring bureaucracies, inequality, struggle, restricted life chances, loneliness, ruin, and loss have equally long histories in New York City, but these stories are less frequently recited. The story of the Naked City is one of a fearful and inhumane present and a lack of hope for the future. It is recognizable in the small details of a century’s worth of charity agency case files, in public health campaigns against illnesses ranging from tuberculosis to AIDS, in reformers’ documentary photos, and in the background or foreground of thousands of popular movies, from the film noir classic Naked City (1948) to Planet of the Apes (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Superfly (1972), Death Wish (1974), Escape from New York (1981), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), and Godzilla (1998). The Naked City marks the city limits of the New Rome. The Naked City makes the New Rome possible. The New Rome is built across the Naked City’s back. Conflicts and contradictions between widely circulating commercial framing stories, like the conflict I have just described between the New Rome and the Naked City, often underlie our everyday conversations as well as public debates about the city and the meanings of the events and lives shared there. At certain historical moments it seems that most New Yorkers live in the New Rome; at another time, the shadows of the Naked City seem to cover the entire metropolis. For almost two decades after 1965, the conflicting narrative frames that sorted out the city’s events and “made sense” of the trends in the metropolis progressively narrowed and then became fixed into a single, repeating, formulaic storyline: New York City is falling apart, the New Rome is moving elsewhere, the Naked City is upon us. Heated local discussions in newspapers, in congressional meeting rooms, and on park benches often dealt with whatever particular aspect of the city that seemed to be falling apart at that moment: its moral order, its streets, its status in the national and global hierarchy of cities, its government, its commitment to its children, the safety of residents, its economy, the crime rate. And there were sometimes furious debates about assigning responsibility for these failures, and about the proper public actions to be taken in response. But the narrative framework of “urban decline” predominated and encompassed almost all these localized stories and debates. Understanding the fluctuating connections between the various framing stories of New York City in the past and the dominance of the Naked City framework after the mid-

13

Austin Ch1

14

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 14


1960s is fundamental, I believe, to coming to terms with why writers’ celebrations of the nation’s 1976 bicentennial were so brutally received. Writing was called to play a particularly important role in the public melodrama of the fall of New York City in the mid-1960s and its resurrection in the 1980s.

RENEWING THE NEW ROME OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

New York City was not the only U.S. city perceived to be in decline during the 1960s. But New York City was taken as an important index for all other central cities; thus, the decline of New York City was itself iconic. The narrative framework of “urban decline” made sense of a wide range of important yet conflicting public events and trends, and remained the dominant narrative for understanding life in the city for almost two decades. Among the most important events that this story could sort out were the various failures to renew New York successfully and completely for all citizens after the Great Depression and World War II. The decade of the Great Depression had been followed by a decade of war and demobilization, a long stretch of time to spend in the shadows of the Naked City. After the war, elite groups returned to the grandiose plans made during the regional planning movement and the economic boom years of the 1920s as guides to reestablish and renew New York City. The older plans were modified to fit the changed material circumstances, economic trends, and shifts in personnel, power, and ideology that had occurred in the interim years. In making these adjustments, New York City’s future-oriented renewers were confronted with immediate problems: longneglected physical infrastructures (such as streets, mass transportation, and sewers) in need of repair, a severe housing shortage, and the slow but growing out-migration of factories, warehouses, and the white middle class. These problems called, on the one hand, for significant capital expenditures to rebuild infrastructures and expand housing, but the out-migrations pointed in another direction, toward a shrinking tax base and fewer revenue sources. The impending revenue crisis projected from these circumstances would not only hinder the city’s renewal, but could prevent it altogether, as shrinking city funds had to be directed toward overwhelming demands already on the public agenda.

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 15


The renewal regimes in New York City are uniquely complex and difficult to untangle due to the large number of autonomous public authorities (public corporations) that are partners in those regimes. Most of the public authorities whose territory extends over New York City were created during the urban renewal era as a way to transfer certain local revenue burdens to the state budget, to coordinate the construction and maintenance of large infrastructural services (such as bridges, roads, and ports) on a regional basis, to implement specific urban renewal and economic development objectives (e.g., the Battery Park Authority), and to provide many of the basic services of modern urban life, such as public housing, hospitals, and the mass transportation system.6 Public authorities are administered from within the New York State apparatus and derive their power directly from the state legislature. Most are administered by a chair and an appointed board of directors. Since their funding originates either in the state capital or from their own capacity to collect revenues and sell bonds, public authorities are able to bypass many of the local public approval processes and insulate themselves to a large degree from direct electoral oversight and control. As a result, the actions taken by pubic authorities are very difficult for local citizens to challenge effectively, thus allowing for a large measure of “expert” discretion in their operations. Public authorities are frequently called upon to manage infrastructure and state-sponsored capital projects that elites have deemed essential, particularly in those instances where the local electorates would have voted against them.7 Robert Moses headed several of the key public authorities and other governmental posts with significant jurisdiction over the planning and construction of the city before 1960. His position at the top of these governmental entities is of first importance in understanding the continuity between the New York Regional Planning Board of the 1920s and the urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s. As Robert Fitch has shown, the forecasted business trends that guided, legitimated, and justified the urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s had previously been the planning goals of the Regional Planning Board; financial prophesies made in the late 1920s became self-fulfilling public policies in the 1950s.8 Although Moses and his allies claimed a deep and abiding faith in the ghostly invisible hand of the capitalist marketplace, the boards of directors of most public authorities were stacked with representatives of real estate interests, business associations and corporations, and families of inherited wealth who made

15

Austin Ch1

16

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 16


certain that the ghostly hand grabbed just the right properties and funded just the right redevelopment projects. By successfully influencing and shaping national urban renewal funding policies in the U.S. Congress during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the political/economic regimes of New York City, including the powerful public authorities, managed to anticipate and temporarily resolve many of the urban financial crises of the 1950s. The policies and programs they shaped also provided prime positions for them to direct the renewal and transformation of New York City. The necessity of repairing and rebuilding the decaying urban infrastructure of the Naked City became the opportunity to rebuild the New Rome. Because Moses and his allied urban renewers had ghost-written portions of the national legislation, they were able to anticipate federal funding with plans already in hand. As the site where many of the first major urban renewal grants were implemented, New York City held on to its iconic status and set the terms and guidelines that many other U.S. central cities would follow in their renewal projects. The broad historical pattern of geographic and economic change that resulted in the transfer of property taxes, revenues, and jobs outside U.S. central cities after 1950 is now retrospectively framed as “the postindustrial transformation,” which is sometimes discussed in a more positive light as “the rise of the service sector.” This process refers to movements and changes on at least three levels: international, national/regional, and local/ metropolitan. A substantial decline in the manufacturing and distribution (“goods-handling”) sectors of the U.S. economy occurred at all three levels, beginning with the local/metropolitan. The goods-handling industries had previously served as important employment entry points for new unskilled workers in central cities. This part of the workforce was predominately made up of young people and recent migrants and immigrants, which included most of the African American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican male workers in New York City immediately after World War II. These are also the groups that kept New York City’s population at a relatively stable level while most other U.S. central cities lost a significant percentage of their population to the suburbs. At the same time, the financial, governmental, and service sectors experienced a dramatic growth almost equal to the fall of the goods-handling sectors. The federal urban renewal and the War on Poverty programs of the 1950s and 1960s were put forward as remedies for some of the crises and problems this structural transformation in employment had produced.

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 17


Under the federal urban renewal programs, a city used its power of eminent domain to condemn and consolidate blocks of commercially attractive properties for economic redevelopment in order to bring the central cities physically in line with the new economy. Federal funds paid for the properties and for the destruction of existing buildings, thereby allowing the cleared properties to be sold by the city government to developers at prices and in conditions comparable to those available in suburban areas, where infrastructure was newer and land was much cheaper. Developers would then, ideally, construct new buildings that would raise the municipal tax base, create jobs, and spur further economic growth. In this plan, the invisible hand of private capital would reshape the public city in economically appropriate ways that would ultimately benefit everyone. The “productive destruction” (or “slum clearance” in its earlier stages) undertaken during this period spent public funds in an attempt to support capitalist profitability in the older, tightly packed core cities of the United States. The urban renewal projects that physically and socially reshaped New York City most dramatically were initiated between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s. They typically replaced lower-rent apartment buildings occupied by the working classes and populations of color with publicly financed middle-class and elite housing or office buildings. The renewal projects were intended to improve the city’s “business climate” and its declining municipal tax base. As a result, renewal sites were selected for their potential profitability after redevelopment, not because of the condition of the housing or the profitability of the existing business areas that were destroyed. Much of the worst housing in the city was left untouched, especially in neighborhoods outside the lower half of Manhattan. Other renewal sites were selected to “socially anchor” elite cultural institutions, so that new enclaves of middle- and upper-middle-income housing would give the appearance of safety and stability.9 This had the effect of establishing an increasing number of middle- and upper-class homes near the major economic and elite cultural institutions while dispersing poor and nonwhite populations away from these and other parts of Manhattan.10 Robert Fitch argues that the profitable midtown manufacturing district was put to death in order to renew the New Rome. The mid-Manhattan manufacturers of the 1950s were well ahead of the curve in adopting the “flexible” methods that proved successful in sustaining the manufacturing sectors of other central cities during the postindustrial era. The manufacturing district in midtown relied upon the specific interconnections and lo-

17

Austin Ch1

18

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 18


cations of industries that allowed them to sustain and share local producers, skilled professions, and specialized machinery. This configuration had developed through a long period of adaptation to this particular geographic area; a relatively stable “business ecology” had evolved over time. The system of established interdependencies, based on location, could not simply “move elsewhere” in New York City, unless all could have agreed to move together to a similarly situated place. Such a move would have required unparalleled cooperation and coordination between individual firms and could not have occurred without substantial help and regulation from governmental authorities, which were not forthcoming. Most of the firms simply left the city. In displacing midtown manufacturing, city officials and real estate developers actively destroyed many of the existing and future living-wage jobs of central-city residents. The manufacturing and goods-handling sectors were driven out not by the ghostly hand of the marketplace, but by the influence of large real estate developers seeking superprofits from speculation in new midtown office construction that could house the planned growth in the so-called FIRE sectors (finance, insurance, and real estate) and their related support services. The shifts in postindustrial employment patterns, evident at the national level by the mid-1960s, were more drastic in New York City. From 1950 to 1970 to 1989, the city’s manufacturing employment dropped from 30 percent to 20 percent to 10 percent of the city’s total, while the combined employment in the FIRE, service, and government sectors increased from 35 percent to 48 percent to 63 percent. These economic sectors, which require a college education for good entry positions, flourished in New York City in combination with a high concentration of major corporate headquarters: 25 percent of the Fortune 500 firms were located in New York City during the mid-1960s. Most of those Fortune 500 firms relocated outside the city limits after this peak, and every mayor since that time has struggled mightily to retain those that still remain. Despite the proportional loss of corporate headquarters, New York City has continued to provide the lion’s share of their major business services: five of the “big six” accounting firms, nineteen of the world’s thirty largest advertising agencies, and one third of U.S. banks’ assets were located in New York City during the 1980s. Only those manufacturing firms with strong ties to the service, government, and/or FIRE sectors, such as printing, did not experience a distinct decline in New York City, and even this stronghold slipped as printing firms moved to nearby areas in New Jersey and Connecticut.11

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 19


It is no great surprise that the evolving postindustrial economy in New York City could not and did not distribute its rewards equally, or even proportionally. On the contrary, when measured either by the number of persons living in poverty or by median and mean household income, the distribution of income between all New York City residents and the city’s African American and Puerto Rican population was and remains decisively split. If we use the percentage of the Euro-American population living below the poverty line as the point of comparison, twice the percentage of African Americans live in poverty, and three times the percentage of Puerto Ricans live in poverty, with income generally following the same proportional pattern. If these figures are compared to the incomes of the surrounding suburban areas, “where the money went” becomes evident: those who have gained the most from the changes in New York City’s economy— the upper-income professionals—no longer reside within the city limits.12 The social and economic transformations of New York City did not reflect national postindustrial trends, Fitch claims: they are “aberrant.” There may indeed be a systematic pattern here, but it is in no way rational or logical for a democracy, or even for a “free” market.13 The rapid fall of manufacturing and goods-handling and the subsequent rise in the FIRE, service, and government sectors, then, were not “natural” or “inevitable” or the only possible outcomes of the postindustrial processes in New York City. These patterns of economic change followed the “trends” identified as appropriate policy goals by city and regional planners since before the Great Depression and revitalized once again after World War II in the renewal and redevelopment strategies of public authorities. That is, trends were not simply followed like weather patterns on a meteorological map, but were actively shaped and promoted through public policies and expenditures. An unusual “wave” of poor and unskilled workers did not move to New York City; instead, their job prospects were run out of town. Like the urban renewal projects, the interstate highways built after the war changed the central cities’ physical layouts. In his capacity as director of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Robert Moses oversaw the planning and construction of federal interstate highways in New York City. Moses and his rival in the Port Authority used their power and positions to promote highway and bridge construction for car and truck traffic in place of mass transportation. The new highways facilitated white middle-class out-migration to suburban residential areas, initiating a daily flow of commuter traffic as well as dispersing city business firms to less-congested out-

19

Austin Ch1

20

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 20


lying areas, where they could now more easily move materials and products by truck. Although highway construction occurred in central cities throughout the country during this period, the population density, age, and geography of New York City (having an island as the urban hub), along with the number and scale of projects undertaken, mark its experience as unique.14 Moses’ and his allies’ grisly approach to “productive destruction” within the city’s logistical context is viscerally represented in an oft-quoted remark he made later in his autobiography: “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”15 Built through longestablished, densely packed neighborhoods, the construction of the interstates disrupted hundreds of thousands of households. Many of these areas were already severely overcrowded, due to the housing shortage caused by the previous fifteen years of depression and war; demand far exceeded supply. The postwar interstate construction projects forced large numbers of lower-income residents to find new apartments during this housing crisis, further disturbing already unsettled racial and ethnic neighborhood boundaries. As working-class housing was erased from the urban landscape so that new, more (privately) profitable buildings could be erected, former residents were thrown into a discriminatory housing market where the number of lower-income units had declined in proportion to need.16 Redevelopment plans always called for relocating those displaced by new construction, but at the very most this relocation amounted to paying a lump sum to move, and a substantial number of displaced residents never even received a relocation payment. Many Euro-Americans could trade on the color of their skin in the racially segmented employment and housing markets, and thereby finance a new home (and obtain a new job) in the suburbs. Displaced African Americans and Puerto Ricans, along with those Euro-Americans who could not or would not move out of the city, simply scattered or packed into the remaining ghettos. Moses’ major biographer claims that these projects displaced at least 500,000 people in fifteen years, a considerable forced migration even by the twentieth century’s dismal standards.17

THE FAILURES OF RENEWAL: RERUNS OF THE NAKED CITY

New York City did not transform itself into the bright and promising New Rome after the early 1960s as had been predicted in the renewers’ plans. In

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 21


fact, representations of the Naked City increasingly came to dominate the stories of New York City circulating through the mass-mediated public sphere after that time. These stories were shadows cast by the unintended consequences of elite attempts to renew the city, but they were rarely framed that way. In a social structure in which inequality is a constituent part, apocalyptic stories and predictions of social decline can justify themselves quite easily. Plenty of convincing evidence is always around. Shifting economic trends and continuing discrimination had left many of the city’s residents in increasingly impoverished circumstances. Extreme fluctuations in residential locations and public institutions (like schools) destroyed any semblance of a stable community life in many neighborhoods. A growing sense of long-term social decline, most notable in the frequently cited crime and drug addiction statistics, overwhelmed the modest gains of public policies that had primarily benefited a very small number of elite residents as well as the mass of commuting suburbanites. These are very real, material inequalities that were well documented at the time, and sustained in scholarship since that time. Awareness of these growing imbalances once again brought the possibility of the city’s collapse into public view. Stories of the fall of Rome as a city and as an empire resonated with contemporary urban experiences. Still faintly glowing from its past glory as the Rome of the American empire, New York City began to predict its own fall. Fears of social and political collapse were not exclusive to New York City during this period. An important subset of a larger panic about the “crisis” of America, the rhetoric of “crisis” framed almost every public conversation about America’s cities. The financial and infrastructural crises of central cities across the nation that had been identified in the 1950s continued or abated only slightly during the 1960s. Most urban renewal schemes had, at best, mixed results and were as likely to promote corruption or make matters worse as they were to meet their intended goals. Urban renewal had done very little to stop the rush of middle- and upper-middleclass Euro-Americans, as well as retail and manufacturing businesses, from leaving the central cities. Interstate highway construction, federal home mortgage programs, and tax breaks mostly benefiting homeowners in the suburbs continued to facilitate and streamline this out-migration. As the middle class left town and the elite moved into their new, publicly financed high-rise fortresses, the “trickle down” market stimulation strategy at the foundation of urban renewal did little or nothing to address the needs of

21

Austin Ch1

22

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 22


the central cities’ rising number of less affluent residents.18 If anything, the renewal projects had destroyed a significant portion of their employment and residential prospects. At the national level, statistics indicated that the United States was enjoying an unprecedented economic boom and an expanding federal pie. King of the global hill, the United States held itself up as the planet’s model for democracy. But the statistical and world-status gains reflected public actions that had primarily benefited white suburbanites, real estate interests, and businesses while central-city residents experienced widespread crises in the most basic systems of social reproduction. After this “other America” was discovered by the commercial public sphere (newspapers, television, films, documentaries, government research, and so on) to be living in the decaying and ghettoized margins of the nation’s once-magnificent cities, the “urban crisis” was increasingly represented in more sinister and cynical tones and became associated with a much wider range of problems. Social problems joined the list of existing financial problems as reports in the public media began to focus on racism and racial conflict, segregation, poverty, unemployment, civil disobedience, deteriorating public schools, inadequate housing, unrepaired streets and a decaying infrastructure as well as crime and drug addiction in the central cities. These conditions contributed to a growing sense of political crisis, as reflected in academic writings that questioned whether the central cities were even governable anymore. The political disaffection of millions visibly erupted into galvanizing riots throughout the nation’s streets and urban ghettos and in widely publicized civil rights actions. These public events, through actions both peaceful and otherwise, challenged the legitimacy and ability of local, state, and federal agencies to protect democracy and to guarantee fundamentally decent living conditions for everyone. The desperate and sometimes nihilistic rhetoric of “urban crisis” manifest by the late 1960s differed dramatically from the inspired and hopeful “urban renewal” proposals of the 1950s.19 Kenneth Fox has argued that the urban riots of the 1960s occurred primarily in cities where large-scale urban renewal (“Negro removal”) projects had been undertaken. He interprets the rioting as a political response by African Americans and other communities of color to the physical disruption (and other unintended consequences) caused by highway construction and urban renewal projects in and through their neighborhoods. Brutal and repressive policing practices aimed unevenly at political dissent

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 23


and minor criminal activity further inflamed passions by reinforcing these inequalities and hardships. These events transpired while the suburbs enjoyed an extended, federally funded spending spree.20 The 1960s’ long season of urban riots began in New York City in 1964, in the African American neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. During the next five years, almost every major U.S. city, except those in the Deep South, experienced at least one riot.21 New national laws banning discrimination in voting rights (1964), employment (1965), and housing (1968) during this period were welcomed as signs of social change and inclusion, but similar statutes had already been in place (as well as the legal loop holes to dodge them) in the larger cities outside the southern states. The War on Poverty—another federal policy reaction to the urban crisis—was effective in moving a significant number of urban residents one step over the poverty line by means of public subsidies, and in supplying badly needed health services. But these changes actually did little to address the loss of living-wage jobs in the cities, particularly for populations of color. Jobs training programs taught (usually obsolete) skills, but they did not create places to work. After several years of struggle and protest by residents, local officials, and national experts, the disruptive urban renewal sequence of relocation, destructive clearing, and large-scale reconstruction (the fabled “New York Method”) at last gave way after the mid-1960s. As with most other aspects of urban change, the halt occurred sooner in New York City, where the authoritarian model by which earlier construction projects had been planned and implemented without public debate or approval was replaced with piecemeal, poorly planned, and timid attempts to gain community input on new proposals.22 Meanwhile, Moses’ allies were constrained but not prevented from carrying on the process of productive destruction. By this time, New York City had already been radically reconstructed and changed by these earlier massive attempts at renewal and their unintended social consequences. Of course, the reconstruction of New York City after World War II did not begin nor did it end with Robert Moses. But his signature and those of his allies can be found everywhere in the landscape of New York City, even today. They can be read in the design of the streets, the parks, the highway system, the architecture, and in the way the economy developed. By the late 1960s, New York City had been permanently and literally reordered and remapped. In conjunction with the changes in the city’s econ-

23

Austin Ch1

24

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 24


omy, this remapping segmented the greater metropolitan area so that significant portions of the poor and nonwhite populations were further pushed economically, physically, and socially toward the margins of everyday city life. The physical, economic, and social transformations of the 1950s and 1960s (supposedly moved by the invisible hand of the marketplace) now operated to maintain, reinforce, and increase the social invisibility of the poor and neighborhoods of color, since their labor was no longer needed. These neighborhoods and their residents were moved outside the shared public spaces of Manhattan and disappeared from representations of New York City in the broadcast media, except as “urban problem” stories on the evening news. Amidst the steady and rapid loss of jobs, the growing division between the economically secure and the disenfranchised poor, and the pervasive fear of crime, a major renegotiation of the racialized urban social hierarchy had taken place. This renegotiation was evident in myriad ways as it developed across time: in the actions of rioters and police during the 1964 rebellion; in the obsessive recounting of crime in the city’s major newspapers; in programs to assist “ghetto youth” in finding jobs; in the day-to-day conflicts between clients and government service providers within the public programs that attempted to ameliorate urban poverty and political exclusion. But mass protests and riots disrupted the planned invisibility of these racialized processes and played upon their cultural meanings by denying their worst possibilities and forcing these issues into public view. Still, rather than seeing the protests as a justifiable call to action, the commercial public sphere simply incorporated the rising discontent into the narrative of New York City’s decline. As the 1960s ended, New York City’s dwindling Euro-American majority and the white majority in the suburbs (both nationally and in the metropolitan area itself) came to view those central-city populations who had been left out of the economic boom as the personification of “urban problems.” The structural inequalities embedded within the postwar economic shifts, as well as the uneven and contradictory policy responses to those shifts, produced differing effects among different populations and locations. The structural shifts rewarded the majority of suburbanizing white folks well beyond the free market value of their hard work and individual efforts. But the “naturalness” of this good fortune, and its widespread enjoyment among so many whose parents had suffered through the Depression and the war, made it difficult for most of them to see the inequitable economic distributions at its core. Instead, as part of a long tradition in

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 25


U.S. cultural and political history of blaming the victim, the disparate effects of these structural flaws were sorted out in public debates and depicted as signs of the weakness, dereliction, and/or lack of moral virtue in the populations most harmed by their consequences. On the “common sense” level, the course of social relations followed an all-too-familiar trajectory: in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the urban poor were viewed somewhat sympathetically as being the victims of “urban problems”; by decade’s end, the widespread view was that the poor and people of color were themselves primarily responsible for the problems of urban America. This process of identity reconstruction within the mass-mediated public sphere thus proceeded, in part, as a shared story about the winners and losers of the postwar boom, and why they had won or lost. For those living through the late twentieth century, these repeated explanations became such a central part of the ritualistic consumption of mainstream news and opinionated discussions that they are now just considered “common sense” views. We recognize them as stories of the deserving and the undeserving poor, as stories about welfare cheats and single mothers, as stories about those who have successfully striven to “better themselves” against enormous odds, and as emotional dramas about the good life of consumerism, safety, and comfort as enjoyed by the professional class, all of which are the stuff of so many movies, television programs, and novels each year.

URBAN YOUTH AND THE SUBWAYS: AS ROME FALLS

To better understand why public government officials decided to destroy the Freedom Train paintings in 1976, two other histories need reciting. The fall of New York City, the narrative backdrop to so many other public chronicles after the mid-1960s, was frequently told through accounts about young “criminals” and the decaying subway system (both separately and together), eventually intersecting in stories about delinquent youth on the trains. These stories set the terms by which writing would later be discussed in the commercial public sphere, and were circulating well before the writers took the trains and there established their alternative public broadcasting system. Wild youth in the streets have long been a sign of the Naked City. Street urchins and children of the “dangerous classes,” both real and imagined, have stalked those who have found stability and hope in the promised New

25

Austin Ch1

26

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 26


Rome. But the detailed history necessary to show just how and why adults became afraid of the children is beyond the scope of this book. What follows instead is a sketch of some of the major signposts of that history.23 Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the expected social identity of urban young people shifted from “young workers” to “adolescent students.” This dramatic identity shift is located at the juncture of several other complicated historical processes of a much wider scope. I will mention three of these historical processes to indicate the more complicated, intertwined, and everyday nature of this social change. First, the rise in clerical, technical, managerial, and professional occupations formed the material basis for an expanding middle class in the twentieth century. Without the property wealth in businesses and farms that had supported the nineteenth-century’s middle classes, the new middle-class groups drew on the cultural and economic values of schooling and took up strategies of education as a way to pass their “respectable” social status and its modest security on to the next generation. As this profession-oriented middle class established itself as the arbiter and defender of these values through local institutions (the professions, school boards, churches, city government, voluntary and charitable organizations, etc.), its cultural hegemony was also institutionalized. Second, a ready surplus of low-wage adult immigrant labor offset the attractiveness of young people as entry-level industrial workers and craft apprentices, jobs that young people had performed in large numbers during previous periods. This shift in employment was accompanied by compulsory school attendance laws. Increasing urbanization and the efforts to “Americanize” immigrant children expanded the institutional structures of education to incorporate an even larger population and the more totalizing cultural/social task of preparing youth for adulthood. The school replaced the church as the family’s ally in socializing the young. Third, the expansion of education was bolstered by new conceptions of youth from the upstart discipline of developmental psychology, which had emerged from the cracks and overlaps between the social sciences and medicine. This new discipline identified “adolescence” as a universally experienced, scientifically verifiable life stage occurring between roughly ages twelve and eighteen. The newly identified stage of life was characterized as a period of idealism contradicted by emotional impulsiveness, moral vulnerability, and a lack of maturity and practicality in judgment. Experts built

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 27


on older traditions of adult chaperonage among the middle and upper classes and argued that this was a period of life best spent under adult supervision within the confines of one’s own age group, a ready-made task for schools as well as the Boy Scouts, summer camps, reformatories, organized athletics, Future Homemakers of America, and several other newly created youth institutions. In 1900, 7 percent of young people in the United States aged fourteen to seventeen were enrolled in high school, with the percentages in cities being typically higher. By 1920 the percentage had increased to 32 percent.24 The number of adolescents in the workforce dropped in every region of the country except the South, where child labor on farms and textile mills remained significant for several more years. These three complex historical processes, among several others, point to the ways in which young people became more and more confined and collectively managed as “adolescent students.” In the new institutional settings, new social and cultural bonds were created while older bonds (the structure of youths’ former identity as young workers) were eroded. Older connections to productive work roles, which would have integrated young people more securely into the daily life of their local communities, became weaker and were replaced by the new peer cultures formed within the confines of mass institutions of socialization. It was unrealistic to have expected young people to accept the extended subordinate status of “student” in exchange for a future promise of new consumer and career possibilities in just the way that middle-class adults had planned. Conflicts between adult expectations and the behavior of youth arose in part because these promises would never pay off equally for all young people in any case. Young women, young immigrants, youth of color, and working-class youth were less likely to embrace unambiguously the promise that any child can grow up to be anything he or she wants, since their experience offered too few examples of that actually occurring. Brought together into new disciplinary institutions of mass socialization outside the intimate bonds of family members and those provided by the customary routines of work, young people constructed new practices of pleasure and status through the shared experience of living in (and being disciplined by) those institutions. The limited but nonetheless shared public spaces that opened up within the school walls became places where individual youths’ resistance to professional management could be appreciated and developed. Just as schools collectivized the socialization of the young, the young collectivized their resistance to the power of adults. Peer

27

Austin Ch1

28

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 28


cultures began increasingly to act as separate social groups unto themselves. In defining the boundaries of their identities, young people tested the limits of the cooperative powers of the adults who managed them: parents, sitters, teachers, shopkeepers, employers, and police. Skills discovered or created by one generation were passed on to the next. Among these, one would find such skills as shoplifting and petty theft; techniques for exploiting the disjunctures between adult authorities (e.g., notes forged for parents or teachers); an incredible understanding of the physical landscape of the city (escape routes, hiding places, and sources of transportation); the construction of new collective identities through self-produced subcultural styles; and the creation of argots and coded languages (slangs). These practices are passed on through the fluid networks of age-based social groups. Cultural traditions, a shared culture among groups of young people, are one result.25 Given the precarious economic and social position of the professional middle classes, constantly being pushed and pulled by the more powerful elites above them and the “unwashed masses” below, it is perhaps not surprising that young people became an enduring target for their displaced social anxieties. For the middle class, “mobility” could always flow in either direction. Modest ambition and accomplishment were expected, but an unpredicted tumble down the economic ladder was always a threat. Widespread moral panics over the reproduction and future stability of the established social order reflected a deep distrust of the state’s abilities to enforce moral and meritocratic ideals on an overpowering and inhumane capitalist class on the one hand, and the deprived and “criminally inclined” working class on the other. And, as innumerable success manuals and child-rearing advice books published in the twentieth century attest, the middle-class family’s faith in its own ability to successfully shape its youth in appropriate ways was shaky. At several times during this century, the future appeared to have been teetering on the edge, needing only the slightest push for the fragile social order to plunge into the abyss of social and cultural chaos. Among the most recognizable signs of impending chaos have been the perceived “outside” threats to, or deviance from within, “the younger generation.” Thus the “youth problem” (variously defined across this century) has frequently been part of the larger social project of negotiating, regulating, and reshaping the social order to bring it in line with the moral and cultural values that reassure the professional middle class.26

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 29


The middle class in the United States experienced a growth spurt after World War II, as occupations requiring secondary education expanded along with large bureaucratic organizations such as the military, the government, and private corporations. Young soldiers returned from the war with renewed expectations of inclusion in democratic consumerism. Universities bulged at the seams to accommodate those attending on GI Bill benefits. In the early 1960s, 87 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were attending high school, and graduation rates reached 65 percent.27 The education boom was complemented by an incredibly rapid, federally funded expansion in home ownership. Newly demarcated suburban city limits redefined traditional social identities, as older boundaries that had once marked off mixed-aged ethnic communities made way for newly constructed neighborhoods and for a young and expanding white middle class. In the postwar economic boom, it appeared that the promise of meritocracy had actually paid off, at least for many. Despite continuing nostalgia for a national optimism that supposedly dominated the first two decades after the war, deep-rooted cultural anxieties arising from the rapid pace of economic and social change may better characterize this period. Along with fears of the Red Menace and nuclear holocaust, many of those who had thrived in the boom felt uneasy over the heavy emphasis placed on “fun” and consumerism as opposed to traditional middle-class values of deferral and thrift.28 The shifting boundaries (and contacts) of class and race within this mobile “affluent society” further threatened traditional framing stories of the white middle-class experience. With the ever-increasing focus on the nation’s youth as a primary topic where many of these public anxieties could be articulated, young people themselves gradually became objectified and reified as the source of the problems, and new public policies directed at young people were put into effect.29 After World War II, juvenile delinquency was among the key “youth problems” discussed and addressed. Recurring moral panics (over delinquency and its causes) inspired state and federal senate hearings. New legal restrictions as well as hundreds of popular books, articles, and parental advice manuals brought a vigilant and near-hysterical public surveillance of young people.30 Popular commentators and social science experts located the sources of delinquency in such areas as the lax social and cultural restrictions on youths (particularly those in working-class and/or ethnic neighborhoods); the adolescent psychological turmoil created by the di-

29

Austin Ch1

30

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 30


chotomy between the promise of upward mobility and the reality that many would not make it; the corrupting and deviant mass culture marketed to youth (particularly rock ’n’ roll and certain comic book genres); and individual, family, and social dysfunction. Public discussions of juvenile delinquency were often framed as an almost biological catastrophe, a threatening epidemic that could spread uncontrollably from one young person to the next through mere social contact. Any teenager might be a “carrier” or fall victim to the disease. The heterogeneous social mix of the schools and the unsupervised hours after school seemed to be particularly menacing, since both were beyond the watchful control of virtuous adults.31 Some of these fears were placated by supervised leisure in churches, community centers, and institutions like the YMCA or police-sponsored athletic leagues, as well as the more general race and class segregation resulting from the Euroethnic flight to suburbia. The commercial public sphere, with its significant stake in young people as consumers, created representational frameworks that distinguished its preferred youth customers from delinquents, thereby reassuring the buying classes that their children were safe, at least in the marketplace. By the early 1960s, young people had been more or less bifurcated in most popular representations. “Teens” were typically middle class (or aspired to be), lived in suburbia or small towns, were “quirky and carefree” but wellgroomed and fashionably dressed, used designated public and commercial leisure spaces as “hangouts,” and were generally responsible and respectful of adult authority. By contrast, potential juvenile delinquents (“JDs”) were poor, working-class, inappropriately dressed, marked by ethnic or racial differences, lacking in morals and respect for authority, hung out on the street or in other unsupervised settings, were rebellious and possibly criminal and as often as not came from a “broken home,” and mostly lived in the crowded core cities. By offering “safe” and approved (commercial) spaces for those whose leisure could be predictably contained within acceptable consumer desires and behaviors, the marketplace kept the haves (teenagers) separate from the have nots (JDs). Representations in the commercial mass media as well as effective segregation during leisure made each group more distinguishable and readily identifiable. Through these differences, both teens and JDs came to “know their place.” As this diffuse process of sorting out which young people were simply “quirky” and which were dangerous progressed during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the nation’s energy as directed toward the problem of delin-

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 31


quency focused more narrowly on the ethnic, working-class street gangs of the central cities. Even in this regard, New York City reinforced its status as the iconic central city. Eric Schneider’s important history, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York, attributes part of the increase in New York City gang formations during the late 1950s to clashes over shifting neighborhood boundaries that had once marked off class, race, and ethnic differences. As neighborhood enclaves of urban Euro-American ethnics dissolved in the migration to white suburbia, the vacated housing was bought or rented by new urban immigrants and migrants, including large numbers of African Americans and Puerto Ricans. Such demographic shifts did not occur overnight, of course, and it often took a decade or more for the new social balance to be negotiated. During the interim, the established but dwindling neighborhood populations and institutions were often openly hostile to the newcomers. Public schools did little to welcome their children, particularly those who spoke Spanish as their primary language. Many of the new arrivals quickly found that the promised equality and social mobility of the New Rome was, in actuality, the bait-and-switch ruse of the Naked City.32 In racially changing neighborhoods, such locations as street corners and movie theaters, municipal pools and candy stores, school yards and parks became violently contested territories where social and cultural claims to the city were lost and won over the bodies of young men. In the Naked City, street gangs inspired moral panic and the creation of several municipal youth service and surveillance agencies. In the New Rome, these same gangs inspired updated versions of popular coming-of-age and romance narratives, including the transformation of Romeo and Juliet into West Side Story.33 Street gangs have a long history in New York City, but after World War II they became a major marker for the impending fall of the New Rome. Within the shared public spaces of New York City, the growing fear toward inner-city youth could be located precisely, and the subways were among the most prominent and iconic of these locations. Crossing all boundaries, the city’s subway system brings the haves through the neighborhoods of the have nots while transporting urban youths to and from school. One could avoid “bad” neighborhoods and the empty urban spaces of the night, but everyone had to go to work. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the subway system was the site of many of city’s the most publicized gang and youth crimes.

31

Austin Ch1

32

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 32


Michael Brooks argues that fear of crime on the subways escalated rapidly in the mid-1960s after a youth attempting to intervene in the harassment of two young women was brutally stabbed to death by two of the harassing boys. Crimes by youth gangs continued to fuel this fear on the subways throughout the rest of the decade. In this ominous atmosphere, the public’s association of the subways with danger gradually converged with the urban crisis, rising crime rates, and fear of urban youths.34 But fear of crime in the subways had become noticeable in the city even in the late 1950s. Brooks has shown that social attitudes toward the subways became more and more negative after that time. Novelists, dramatists, poets, and visual artists increasingly represented the subways as a place of isolation, alienation, and dread. By the mid-1960s, newspapers were running articles on subway crimes under headlines like “terror lurks in the dark, lonely hours,” “terror rides along with you when you travel at night,” and “terror in the subways.” Crime on the subways was always represented as somehow being more terrifying than crime elsewhere (except perhaps in the home), even though it was much less likely to happen there.35 As Brooks shows, the subways ran through the shadows of the Naked City long before youth gangs appeared on the scene: the subways represented the dark underbelly of the spectacular, monumental buildings that formed the modernist Manhattan skyline. As the planet’s largest and most extensive system, New York City’s subway system, like the city itself, is a consolidation of several preexisting networks.36 The original subway lines, constructed during the heyday of industrial modernism, became an important infrastructural asset that has supported the city’s economic fortunes. But the tunnels and elevated lines proved to be equally important symbols of urban dread. As a common site of debate and discussion within the mass-mediated public sphere, the subways have occupied a central position in the way New Yorkers imagine their city. The subway lines juxtaposed a visionary elite civic promise with immense public controversy even during the system’s planning stages at the end of the nineteenth century. But the longevity and centrality of the system after it was built have given it iconic status. Over the course of its history, the system has acquired a set of enduring symbolic associations, meanings that far exceed the subway’s actual circulation through the public spheres and public spaces of the city. Initially, the subways were cast in utopian terms, using the rhetoric of speed, rationality, and the efficiency of modern life. These images were immediately challenged by associations with the hells of

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 33


everyday existence that have unintentionally resulted from modernization: anomie, anonymity, and loss of social connection; crime and incivility; the unequal and irrational distribution of resources; claustrophobic densities among strangers; loss of meaningful social and cultural boundaries. The subways are also one of the city’s major shared public spaces. Four million people (about half the city’s population) ride the trains each day. This is a ridership greater than the population of all but nine U.S. states. By the trainloads, New Yorkers briefly live together within the tight confines of one of the most exalted and yet most lowly of the city’s infrastructural networks. The number of workers who have died while building or operating the system, the corruption, bureaucracy, and scandals of its administration, as well as the questionable safety and physical condition of the system itself for passengers, are constantly reemerging themes in the city’s public history. The almost inexplicable complexity of the system—its recurrent scandals, accidents, robberies, murders, bureaucratic blunders, as well as its long-term underfunding and decay—has transformed it into one of the major symbols of the “indecipherable” modern city, where cultural chaos all but overwhelms any attempts by human beings to establish and maintain an acceptable social order. The subways also offer a prime location for “people watching” (civic voyeurism), a key observation post from which to take note of “the people.” Yet popular critics have rarely been pleased with what they have seen. Like the fractured image of the city itself, the subways embody both the brightest promises and the worst nightmares of modern urban life. After World War II, negative attitudes associated with the subways gained in force and today have overtaken (if not completely erased) any earlier symbolic associations with rational social progress. Neither set of associations is without material support. What is interesting, however, is the way, after the mid-1960s, that the subways became increasingly and disproportionately associated with the hellish experiences of the city. Adding to their infernal mythos, the subways became a new setting for growing public fears of urban youths.

FEAR, CRIME, AND THE SUBWAYS

By the early 1960s, images of criminal youth were firmly established as malignant icons of the Naked City. The historical conjuncture of fears about

33

Austin Ch1

34

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 34


urban youth and rising fears about crime in the subways and other public spaces set the initial terms by which writing became the “graffiti problem,” and the “graffiti problem” became a sign that the city was out of control. As fears of crime in the dark, dank, deteriorating subway system rose, the delicate balance between the subways as civic heaven and the subways as social hell tipped in the decisive direction of the latter—and were frequently joined in the public’s mind with urban youth. How was this association of gangs and subways sustained in public discussion? First, let’s examine the position of young people in the urban crisis of the late 1960s. Amid the rapid economic, demographic, social, and cultural transitions taking place in New York City and the nation during the early 1960s, fears of urban youths intensified as the spectacular visibility of youths within public spaces became strongly associated with the “urban crisis.” Consider the age of persons identified with some of the common “urban problems” pinpointed by the end of the decade: unwed mothers (along with a general concern about “children raising children” in inner-city families); drug and alcohol addiction; school dropouts; unemployment, particularly for young workers; crime and vandalism; street gangs; riots in the cities.37 Compounding the concerns and anxieties connected with this parade of the horrible, young political radicals were disrupting the established boundaries of deferential behavior and cultural decorum. African Americans of all ages, demanding to be publicly seen and heard, put the country on notice that the time of waiting for justice was coming to an end. Drawing on tactics of the civil rights movement, youth across the social and political spectrum also initiated dramatic, high-profile media events to express their dissent on a number of divisive issues.38 Institutionalized authorities of all stripes—from university presidents to boards of regents, from the ROTC and other military agencies to state legislatures and police departments, from school faculties to the academic disciplines themselves—were called to answer for the failed promises made to the younger generation during its schooling in the 1950s and early 1960s. With plentiful coverage in the commercial mass media, students excoriated local, domestic, and foreign policies in the language of patricide and revolution. And New York City, with several of the nation’s major colleges and universities as well as having the nation’s largest public school system, was in the forefront of these controversies. Radicalized youth of color had an especially strong presence in the city, particularly the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, who were active in many of the neighborhoods the writ-

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 35


ers called home. High school youth as well as college-aged youth were radicalized by these incendiary events and in many cases were independently responsible for significant acts of civil disobedience.39 Despite national population increases, the total number of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds in New York City grew only slightly relative to the entire city population, from 6.8 percent to 9.3 percent of the total. But the ethnic/racial ratios within those age groups changed noticeably, as the proportion of Euro-American youths in the city dropped from 85 percent in 1950 to 58.7 percent in 1970.40 Approximately 15 percent of all people under age eighteen lived below the poverty line in 1970. When more accurate figures were available a few years later, they showed that more than 40 percent of African American children were living in poverty, and 30 percent of Hispanic children.41 A national youth unemployment problem was identified in 1963 (the first of the post-1945 period), as the earliest baby boomers reached sixteen. Inner-city jobless rates for youth were repeatedly represented as “social dynamite.” Initially, the federal response was to create programs modeled on those undertaken by the National Youth Administration during the Great Depression. These were modified and made a part of the manpower programs in the War on Poverty during the next several years, which offered assistance to young people disproportionally.42 Despite these federal programs, and a significant number of state and local-based programs like them, youth unemployment remained high throughout the 1960s, even with the overall national prosperity. Unemployment rates never dropped more than four percentage points, and the unemployment rates of African American teenagers were twice that of European Americans at the national level, a drastic change from the employment parity of these two groups in 1954.43 This gap formed in spite of the decreasing racial inequalities in the labor market generally.44 These trends in the relative racial/ethnic and class balances of the city are important in understanding how young men of color came to be “the bogeyman” on New York City’s streets and subways.45 New York City has never been lacking in “crises” and “problems.” But with the exception of muggings, it has never made it to the top of the FBI’s lists in per capita crime statistics. As a national news and media hub, on the other hand, the terms used to describe and discuss New York City were taken as measures of the current state and projected future of life in U.S. central cities generally. As “the Capital of the Twentieth Century,” New York City has served as a national reference point for any number of “urban crises.” Thus, the city was represented as a major gauge of rising national crime

35

Austin Ch1

36

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 36


trends, even though it was safer than many others. Fear of crime was an important campaign issue for John Lindsay in 1965 and has remained on the primary agenda for every mayoral race since that time. Building on earlier associations, the assumed connections between youth of color, crime, and urban social disorder were strengthened by studies showing that many of those arrested during the riots in New York City in 1964 and in central cities across the nation later in the decade were youths. The seemingly random and heartlessly violent acts of young criminals, which had become a staple of urban commercial news reporting in the decade before, continued throughout the 1960s, even as it does today. Neglectful or intentionally criminal property owners may deprive their neighbors, renters, and customers of a long life, but these offenses, even if more deaths result, will never sell papers the way three teenagers with a gun will. There was no need to work too hard to find teenagers like these in a city of seven million souls. The commercial news business had plenty to choose from; it rarely let an opportunity go by.46 The social equation between youth of color and dangerous criminals was further intensified in New York City when the number of territorial gangs surged once again in the late 1960s.47 Made up primarily of teenagers ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen, the new gangs were more effectively organized, aware of their own strength and the injustices their community had suffered, and much better armed than their predecessors in the 1950s. Their presence and activities convinced some local neighborhood businesses to leave. Crossing some of the gangs’ territories became a problem even for the police and the fire department.48 At the peak of gang activity, policing authorities estimated that there were over 20,000 affiliated gang members in New York City, with some gangs having as many as forty divisions spread across every borough.49 Adult authority, no longer mocked just in the schools, was now being tested in the streets. The urban crisis (in its various guises) was frequently assessed by observing the city from “the streets,” and it was “in the street” that the crisis was most commonly located in representation. As a coded phrase referring to shared public spaces, “the street” included the subway system. Crime was “in the street”; protests and riots were “in the street”; traffic congestion, delinquency, school dropouts, the unemployed, air pollution, drugs, and a long list of other “urban problems” were all located “in the street”—in shared public spaces. Thus, the “urban crisis” of the late 1960s was a crisis in the public sphere in two senses: it was a crisis constructed and represented

Austin Ch1

10/26/01

12:06 PM

Page 37


in the mass-mediated, commercial public sphere of television and newspaper reporting and, at the same time, it was located in the physical territory of shared public space. As this chapter has suggested, these two public spheres are difficult to keep separate. Actions “in the street” were discussed and debated in the news and represented in fictional form in television programming and films. At the same time, the news, television shows, and films shaped perceptions, expectations, and experiences of public space through mediated representations of social life “in the street.” But in another sense, the segregation of metropolitan space by race and class had already produced a widening gap between “the street”—shared public space—and the mass-mediated public sphere. Newspapers, television, and popular movies brought home a frightening view of city life framed as “crisis” and “social decay” that contrasted sharply with everyday lives in the suburbs and defensive urban neighborhoods where increasing numbers of people (including most of New York City’s upper-middle class and elite) lived.

CONCLUSION: READY FOR WAR

Before the names began to appear all over the walls of New York City in the late 1960s, there were already several frameworks in place within the commercial public sphere to “make sense” of this new writing. These framing stories—these maps of meaning—had evolved through complex, long-term processes of economic, social, and cultural change at the national level, which had resulted in an equally long-term reevaluation of the possibilities and limitations of life in New York City. At the same time, the new writing was created during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period of intense social upheaval, economic transformation, and cultural change in New York City and the nation. The drastic and sometimes violent nature of these historic changes and social conflicts were portrayed as “crises” of the national and the local social order. The commercial mass media—which broadcast the public issues most readily available to adults—placed the new writing within the repeating, overlapping, and interconnected “crises,” and thereby shaped what many New Yorkers thought about what they were seeing on public walls. This particular juncture of trends, events, and public representations shaped the ways in which the public meanings associated with the new writing were debated, negotiated, and established, as well as the ways that writing evolved as a cultural practice among New York City youth.

37

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 38

2

TAKING THE TRAINS THE FORMATION AND STRUCTURE OF “WRITING CULTURE” IN THE EARLY 1970S

TRACING ORIGINS

The history of writing and the history of the “graffiti problem” are related but separable stories. The latter is the story of how New York City officials reacted to the former, and will be taken up in the next chapter. Here, I want to sketch out the way writing developed in New York City. Writing is a complex cultural practice that continues to evolve, and as such, it bears the marks of several originating influences. These influences form a web of historical and cultural connections, a tangled, rhizome-like network that works against establishing a clear, singular “root.” Despite these difficulties and the partialness inherent in any narrative, it is worth following a few of the major threads that make up this dense network in order to situate writing in the specific cultural and historical contexts of the United States in the post-1965 period. Writing is not, as its critics commonly claim, simply a cultural aberration indicative of social decay in the central city. It is a long-standing aesthetic tradition that has always been in-

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 39

TAKING THE TRAINS

timately connected with the major social trends and cultural innovations of its time. The proliferation of posters, advertisements, and signs bearing the images and names of products and proprietors in twentieth-century cities is one obvious place to begin. These are the directly visible extensions of individual/corporate identities into the new shared urban public spaces of the streets, a quantitatively and qualitatively new site in human history where hundreds of thousands of often spectacularly displayed names abound, each intent upon catching the eyes of potential consumers and imprinting itself on their memories. Whatever its particulars, every advertising sign broadcasts at least one common message: “Don’t forget this name.” The twentieth-century city is written over with the names of store owners, corporations, brands, performers, and stars. Written language has become an everyday, expected part of the urban landscape. Writing-inpublic has been normalized; most urban dwellers are rarely conscious of its collective presence, although individual signs catch our awareness intermittently. The proliferation of signage, the riot of signs in urban public space, occurred many years before the late 1960s, of course.1 But the commercial signage in New York City is unique. These signs are cultural landmarks of the highest order; the neon and lights in Times Square and on Broadway are on a par with Old Faithful or Mount Rushmore in the national imagination. In the United States, to see one’s “name in lights” is to achieve an exalted public status in the eyes of the world, and the phrase still carries strong connotations of Broadway, of “making it” in “the city that never sleeps.” Long before the new writing appeared in the urban landscape and entered the fray of competing names, New York City was already the undisputed capital of the spectacularized name written in shared (commercial) public space.2 This cultural connection is often taken up by writers in explanations of their craft.3 iz the wiz and twoill point to the names of well-known businesses and brands in urban space as touchstones to explain their own writing. IZ THE WIZ: OK: Mr. Mobil; Mr. Amoco; Mr. Exxon. They’re rich. They can put their name on any sign, any place. Build a gas station and there’s their name. TWOILL: Macy’s. Alexander’s. IZ THE WIZ: Mr. Gimbel’s.

39

Austin Ch2

40

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 40

TAKING THE TRAINS

Sear’s. OK, now you’re on a poorer economic level and what do you have? Years ago, and even today, a boxer makes a name for himself in the boxing ring. So when this art form starts developing, why would it be any different? It’s all in the name. When you’re poor, that’s all you got.4 TWOILL:

IZ THE WIZ:

“A boxer makes a name for himself.” iz the wiz’s explanation places writing within a conflict-ridden and competitive social-class hierarchy of spectacularized public names, the “boxing ring” of shared urban space. As he implies, this hierarchy works to circulate and promote the names of the famous within the public sphere/public space, while ignoring most others. The hierarchy of fame justifies and naturalizes itself through a circular argument: the names of the famous are exalted because their names are widely known, and their names are widely known because they are famous. The door into fame can be obscured, although most writers seem to have understood the social dynamics involved quite well. New York City is frequently mythologized in popular narratives (and in its own boosterism) as a city where a person can “make a name for him/ herself,” where the “nobody” can change herself into a “somebody” whose autograph is collected, whose name appears in lights. Hundreds of popular stories, from Horatio Alger’s plucky bootblacks to the striving young performers in Fame (1980), have recited tales of “making a name” by means of the idealized opportunities offered by New York City.5 Midnight Cowboy (1969) is an interesting and important film precisely because its main character attempts and fails to make this passage from a “nobody” to a “somebody,” in the process revealing one of the more likely outcomes of actually putting this myth to the test. Despite attempts to deflate the celebrity success myth in this movie and many others, the cult of the “overnight success” story, Broadway’s own recurring rags-to-riches tradition, continues to enjoy an enthusiastic following.6 Fame may only last for the fabled fifteen minutes, but there has been no shortage of contenders. On the other hand, New York City does have a unique capacity to create publicity, to quite literally manufacture a name. The city is the central hub in the global advertising industry, with the highest concentration in the world of major firms and their ancillary support specialties.7 New York is rivaled only by Hollywood in its importance in the film and television industry, and is home to many of the top theatrical and dance companies and performance venues in the United States.8 The city also has a long history

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 41

TAKING THE TRAINS

as an important site for small, often newly arrived entrepreneurs to develop and popularize new forms of entertainment that have risen to national prominence. Youth cultures have played a key role in sustaining this aspect of the city’s reputation, both as subject matter (as in musicals such as West Side Story or Hair) and as actual entertainers (e.g., Dion and the Belmonts, the Velvet Underground, Public Enemy). Rap music is only the best known of the recent major music genres that have been nurtured within the city. Any cultural cartographer would place New York City prominently on the map of doo-wop, soul, Glam, punk, and techno.9 Naming the many music genres and the great performers that have emerged from New York City neighborhoods suggests another of the many origins of writing: the cultural traditions of urban youth. The culture of young people is often considered to be a matter of adult-sponsored, moneymaking, commercialized fads, characterized by the cyclic eruption of trends in the marketplace rather than by continuity over time or by the authentic affective investment of young people in tradition. The condescending adult perceptions of youths’ challenges to established authority, the exploitative relationships between young people and the consumer marketplace, and the social emphasis on the transitory nature of the adolescent life stage all work to make “youth” appear to be the antithesis of “cultural tradition.” And yet the historical continuity of practices, beliefs, and customs among young people are discernible and verifiable. These youth-culture traditions, frequently disparaged in the current generation, are well-remembered by adults in later moments of dreamy nostalgia, but are rarely noted as important traditions that had a powerful impact on later collective life in and of themselves. The history of popular music, dance and dance events, dating practices, rituals of daring, drinking, and drug use, and a large portion of the car culture are examples of easily recognized youth traditions.10 Writing names, messages, and drawings in the shared public spaces where young people congregate or pass by has been known to exist in cities since the early nineteenth century. If writing is be understood as part of the history of graffiti at all, then it belongs within this subset of urban youth graffiti. Written within neighborhood boundaries and dealt with locally, these graffitied names have usually been inconspicuous in size, and/or small in number, and/or written in places where adults rarely travel, like alleys. They have not usually received widespread public notice.11 Writing did not begin in New York City, but in Philadelphia, perhaps as early as 1959, but the history of Philadelphia’s writing culture remains to be

41

Austin Ch2

42

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 42

TAKING THE TRAINS

explored in depth.12 Notwithstanding the proximity of the two urban centers, however, no incipient “northeastern migration” from Philadelphia to New York has been traced out until topcat 126 arrived on the scene and originated the “Broadway Elegant” lettering style a few years after New York City’s own writing culture had established itself. Yet despite the temporal disconnection, there are remarkable similarities in the ways that writing developed in these two cities. While some accounts trace the history of urban youth graffiti back centuries, most New York City writers usually begin descriptions of their own origins at no earlier than the late 1960s.13 Following the trail of these more specific influences is important because it emphasizes the ways in which traditional practices, handed down over time by urban youth, have been reshaped and adapted to meet the circumstances of new generations.14 Although the title of “first writer” in New York City is contested, the most popular origin-story among writers goes back to the late-sixties youth gang graffitiists who inspired taki 183. julio 204, a Puerto Rican youth who wrote within the boundaries of his Manhattan gang turf, is usually credited as being the original New York City writer. But julio 204 was not the first Puerto Rican teenager to write his name on the walls of New York City. In 1967, educator Herbert Kohl observed that some of the walls in his Spanish Harlem neighborhood had “coats of graffiti” on them, consisting mostly of names. At that time, Kohl was a reading tutor for a local Puerto Rican boy, Johnny, who in turn acted as Kohl’s graffiti tutor. Although functionally illiterate when Kohl met him, Johnny could nonetheless read the names that he and his friends wrote on the walls, and could spell and read about one hundred other words, about half of which were brand names or the names of famous sports and media personalities. Although Johnny couldn’t read, he knew who and what was important. He wrote his name in this way: johnny of 93 [street]. The “[name] of [street number]” form of name-writing may have evolved as a practical solution to living in a densely populated city where the lives of young people are organized by mass institutions such as public schools, where one’s first name alone cannot provide a reliable means of distinction from others. But for Johnny, it is likely to have been of greater importance that the street number located his identity within a specific neighborhood, which simultaneously placed him in a particular street gang. Johnny taught Kohl that local youths (both males and females) wrote on the walls with some regularity, often using several different names. For in-

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 43

TAKING THE TRAINS

stance, Johnny wrote his name alternately as Bolita, Johnny Cool, and Johnny of 93.15 A different audience was imagined for each of these several names. “Bolita” (“Little Ball,” referring to his size and energy) was the nickname given to him by his family and connected Johnny to the private sphere of his home, as well as to the Spanish-language public sphere of his predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood.16 “Johnny Cool” would have resonated within his neighborhood peer group. Eric Schneider argues that the “cool” breeze blew into urban youth culture from the bebop jazz scene (centered around African American musicians and their fans in nearby Harlem) and informed the masculine self-presentation of several urban subcultures, including street gangs and beatniks.17 Via this “cool” self-construction, Johnny reimagined himself in the stylistics of the male “hustler.” In a much more mainstream way, cartoonist Charles Schultz narrated the beatnik-hipsterish daydreams of his comic character “Snoopy,” with Snoopy imagining himself to be “Joe Cool.”18 “Johnny Cool” and “Johnny of 93,” names that bear connections to the avant-garde world of bebop and a nationally recognized comic-strip character as well as to a neighborhood street in the nation’s largest city, simultaneously gestured inward toward local meanings, and outward toward the imagined community that existed outside Johnny’s local neighborhood. The practice of multiple self-naming is in tune with the fractured and disjunctive identities of the modern urban self that has been much noted by philosophers, novelists, painters, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists during the last several decades.19 These fragments of self form part of a complex inner dialogue that connects our individual, local imagination to larger cultural entities (regional, national, ethnic, diasporan, gender, etc.). The signs, both literal and figurative, of this self-fragmentation are all around us. Kohl was interested in the meanings of the writing on the wall at a particular moment in time, and related Johnny’s name-writing to political slogans and murals painted in inner-city neighborhoods and near college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.20 The political radicalism of youth in the 1960s was very much in evidence to the early writers and served as a third cultural source for the new writing. New York City’s universities became pivotal locations in the national student movements, and the city’s ethnic neighborhoods were also important sites of action and organization for grassroots radical groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Black Panthers, and the Young Lords.

43

Austin Ch2

44

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 44

TAKING THE TRAINS

When we were coming out, we had the Black Power movement, Martin Luther King, the Panthers—all that awareness. PHASE 2: It wasn’t technical politics. It was just knowing. It was always in the newspapers. AMRL: James Brown shouting! WICKED GARY: Say it LOUD! AMRL: The times gave us an awareness. The Black Panthers used to hand out their paper and cats used to hold their reefer in it. The ones who read it knew that something was going down.21 AMRL:

Shit was deep. You had Viet Nam and all types of protests, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, racism and hatred at a peak and brothers and others fighting inequality and dying trying to put a stop to it. Burn, baby, burn. Tension. The odds were against you. You can’t be unaffected by all of that. Once you see things clearly and understand “the real picture,” at some point it’s gonna help mold your mentality and it’s not gonna be singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”22

LEE 163D!:

From this swirl of sources and ideas, which informed and affirmed their own emerging practices, writers inherited and borrowed notions about racial identity and ethnic heritage, local autonomy (“power to the people”), radical or alternative cultural traditions, and the distinct impression that “something was rotten in America” (phase 2). Tricia Rose and Ivor Miller among academics, and phase 2 among writers, have traced some of the political and aesthetic influences that connect writing to the African diaspora, African American cultural traditions, and the African Caribbean migration to New York City.23 Juan Flores has written about the Latino edge in the founding of hip-hop, including its influence on writing.24 Writers from all backgrounds consistently mention these influences. Another cultural influence is also frequently mentioned: the counterculture of the 1960s—hippies, psychedelia, and underground comix. I do not mean to imply that African and Latino influences can be explicitly separated from the counterculture or from each other, since there was a substantial process of mixing and borrowing. On the other hand, understanding writing as an inheritor of countercultural and psychedelic art reveals an important cultural continuity that bears further study, even if it can only tell part of the story. lsd om, tracy 168, zephyr, daze, team, and revolt, among other writers, have brought this lineage to notice in their interviews.

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 45

TAKING THE TRAINS

zephyr has said: “For me, graffiti came out of being a 1970s hippie and a Grateful Deadhead. . . . My real influence [was] Rick Griffin.”25 The visual evidence of psychedelia is noticeable throughout the history of writing. Broadcast media also shaped writing, even before the “graffiti problem” was taken up. Kohl reported that the names he saw in the late 1960s were sometimes written in an odd kind of equivalence. Johnny sometimes wrote “Bolita as Johnny Cool.”26 This type of “doubled” identification “[name] as [other name]” has precedence in the conventions of popular television shows broadcast during the 1950s and 1960s, which often began with introductions of each principal performer dressed in character, a convention borrowed from the theatrical stage. The popular Leave It to Beaver show began with each of the main characters walking out onto the living room set and pausing as the announcer introduced the actor’s name as their character’s name, ending with “And Jerry Mathers as the Beaver,” a line scorched into the memory of an entire generation of viewers.27 Although Kohl did not make the connection between popular stars and the names he saw on the wall at the time, the “[name] as [other name]” form used by neighborhood graffitiists mimics the televised introduction of characters in popular programs. These television conventions can be used to create a spectacularized and glamorized version of everyday social life, allowing the individual to imaginatively position her/himself in relation to one of the more powerful public spotlights in the contemporary fragmented social world. This gives some freedom to a necessity: in the urban social landscape, several different identities must operate simultaneously every day (“jaime of 89 as batman,” “maria the black queen of 89th”).28 The connections between this predecessor of the writer’s tag, or signature, and the everyday transformations of identity that take place in grandiose terms on television shows and in “superhero” comic books are significant. In particular, they point toward the ways in which the commercial mass media has reshaped notions of the self in public, so that personal identity has become an arena of self-conscious, serialized, and situational re-creation. Obviously, children have played “pretend-identity” games for untold past years. And from at least the second decade of the twentieth century, advertising and the star system altered the ways we thought about our public selves. Erving Goffman’s seminal 1959 work, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, analyzes the ways in which humans “perform” a self in public. His definition of “performance” (“all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a

45

Austin Ch2

46

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 46

TAKING THE TRAINS

particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers”) covers almost all actions in shared public spaces.29 Copresence with an audience seems less important to the definition of everyday performance within the context of a surveillance society, where one is imagined to be observed at all times (the cop in our head or the angel on our shoulder). Marginalized populations in modern nations (which included many writers’ home communities) have adapted to oppressive environments by taking on a “doubled” consciousness.30 However, the conjuncture of these trends in the form of explicit pronouncements written on public walls by young people must be seen as marking a new stage. The “[name] as [other name]” form is suggestive of the local/national cultural connections that give the act of name-writing on public walls its power and meaning.31 In particular, this form of naming may point toward explanations of why so many urban youth quickly took up the practice of writing, why it might have been culturally recognizable and important to them, and why the writers were able to gain such instant respect within the wider youth culture of New York City. Although Kohl provided no historical background in his short essay (aside from the seemingly obligatory mention of prehistoric cave paintings and graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii), it is clear that Johnny did not invent the name-writing practice or the name-forms he wrote. The “coats of graffiti” that Kohl saw indicate that Johnny was not unique nor was he an innovator among his peers. Public name-writing was an established tradition among urban youth well before 1967.32 Despite an imagined audience that was much larger than Johnny’s own neighborhood, these names were almost always written within local boundaries. Although Kohl knew Johnny during a period of relative gang peace in the city, the ethnic tensions to which gangs often respond had exploded in a localized riot in Spanish Harlem during 1967.33 It seems unlikely that local graffitiists would write outside the bounds of their home turf unless they were intentionally provoking another gang. julio 204’s innovation to the name form was to drop the “of” from the “[name] of [street number]” form (e.g., Johnny of 93), which rightly secures his place in the history of writing; but as a member of a territorial gang, he too was obliged to remain relatively close to his neighborhood turf. To see julio’s name, one would have to travel to his neighborhood.34 Here is where the first generation of writers saw the writing on the walls.

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 47

TAKING THE TRAINS

THE NEW PRESTIGE ECONOMY OF WRITING New York City has at least 500 neighborhoods, (depending on your definition of “neighborhood”). . . . The neighborhood is arguably the first influence on the formation of all Hip-Hop/ Urban culture. —Jessica Green (1999; emphasis added) 35

Early writers, like taki 183, were more interested in “the way the name looked” in the urban landscape rather than in claiming some part of that landscape as exclusive territory. He, like many others, learned to write through trial and error and observation, rather than through socialization in a local neighborhood gang practice, as had johnny of 93 and julio 204.36 With neither the rewards nor the sanctions of this neighborhood tradition, the early writers wrote their names everywhere they went, beyond the local places where they could reasonably expect their faces and names to be recognized together. In extending the circulation of the name beyond the local arena of face-to-face social connections in the streets, they scattered the renamed self throughout the shared public spaces of the anonymous city. The urban landscape became an unbounded billboard, a mass-mediated prestige economy pirated by the young.37 midg: “People know us because we paint trains. If we just stayed in the neighborhood, no one would ever know who we are.”38 Recognition throughout New York City became a possibility for the sons and daughters of adults whose names were rarely mentioned outside the block where they lived. In realizing this possibility, writers initiated a new economy of public recognition, status, and prestige. A prestige economy refers to the cultural rules by which status is allotted among a group of individuals: how status is accumulated and lost; how it is created and promoted; how it circulates. In local neighborhoods, status was ideally equivalent to “respect” exchanged within a community of familiars. In the less-bounded spaces where the new writers wrote their names, respect could not circulate in this way; familiarity was overwhelmed by anonymity. Respect had to take the more mediated but more widely circulated form of “fame.” “Fame” usually refers to the quality of renown attached to the spectacularly commodified personality—the star—that circulates through the commercial mass media. The body/face/persona as well as the name of a famous person are made known through the arenas of popular or prestigious

47

Austin Ch2

48

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 48

TAKING THE TRAINS

cultural performance, such as acting, music, politics, broadcasting, law, sports, or modeling. Having witnessed these performances (or having read the publicity), an informed audience often comes to recognize the face of the famous star without recourse to the written name.39 Although the fame sought by writers bears a strong family resemblance to the star’s state of being-known-in-public, the two are in no way equivalent. Stars whose faces are easily recognized in public may occasionally seek to limit that recognition in order to maintain some semblance of a private life, but their careers depend upon instant connections between their bodies and their names. In order to have the kind of anonymity that allows them to travel unnoticed in shared public space, successful writers then and now must court a “doubled” public identity consisting of a well-known written name but an unknown face. We might say that the social concept of mass-mediated fame was “borrowed” (or stolen) by writers and subsequently transmuted into something new. The fame of writers circulates through a set of institutions markedly different from the typical New York City star variety, and thus carries a different set of cultural meanings. Unlike the performances of stars, writing did not hold out occupational expectations and economic rewards for taki 183, or tracy 168, or joe 182, although other kinds of rewards may have been in the backs of their minds. taki later claimed that when he began, since he rarely revealed his identity as taki to anyone, he was primarily interested in seeing the reactions of others who were unaware that he was the author of his frequently seen name.40 phase 2, who gained fame a couple of years after taki, was similarly interested in these sorts of reactions when he first began: “My first intention was to get my name known and remain anonymous. If you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing in [writing], the recognition comes with the territory, it’s not something you have to strive for. This is ‘impact expressionism’ so, having the impact is a duty.”41 The playful, tricksterish quality of this recognition, this fame, is usually not available (or desirable) to successful mass-media stars. The public performance that gains recognition for the writer is the performance of the signature, created as a lettered art work to be evaluated, learned from, and, hopefully, admired. The name that the writer puts into public circulation is rarely the one that appears on a birth certificate. Rather it is more likely to be some self-conscious design that bears little resemblance to the commonplace forms of a personal name (e.g., in, phase 2).42 Writing is the performance of another self. This is suggested by cay 161’s provocative

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 49

TAKING THE TRAINS

characterization—“the name is the faith of graffiti,” a phrase that Norman Mailer subsequently took as the title of his 1974 essay on the subject.43 taki 183, joe 182, tracy 168, lsd om and others began to practice the new writing around 1969.44 They wrote on buildings, buses, subway cars and stations, and even on ice cream trucks, usually beginning with the less risky and more familiar locations first. Creating “free time” by playing hooky from school, writers began to take trips to other parts of the city in order to spread their exposure. tracy 168 remembers: “We hit the buses [in our neighborhood] first. And then, like some Tom Sawyer thing, looking for adventure, we traveled around the city tagging subway cars.”45 taki 183 became the best known (at least in the public eye) of these early writers. Working as a courier-messenger afforded him the opportunity to write along the routes of his deliveries, in areas where his name was more visible to the elite of the city but less likely to be seen by other appreciative teenagers. taki concentrated his work on the Upper East Side and the business districts of Manhattan, the stomping grounds of novelists, journalists, television executives, and other media brokers who might see his tag and mention it in one of the media.46 Writing on public walls drew more and more young people to the practice during the early 1970s. Most observers at the time (including lsd om) claim that the number of writers increased dramatically after the New York Times took notice in the summer of 1971.47 A meeting and interview with taki resulted in an article illustrated with a picture of an apartment door in taki’s Washington Heights neighborhood that was covered with writers’ names, taki’s prominently centered among them.48 The recognition taki received from this article has become legend, spurring more young people to become writers while simultaneously expanding the possibilities for writing fame in a crucial way. Shared public space (the streets) had already served as a broadcast medium for commercial advertising for more than a century by the time the new writing appeared on the urban scene. Following this lead, writers “borrowed” shared public space to propagate their names. Now a second means had appeared: the commercial mass media could circulate a writer’s name. Photographic, video, and film images in movies and television broadcasts as well as printed mentions of their work in newspapers and magazines flowed through the commercial public sphere. After taki’s interview, dissemination in almost any form of commercial mass media offered a route to fame.49 Getting into the commercial media circuits did not require an interview with the Times or NBC News. Writers discovered what Guy Debord and the

49

Austin Ch2

50

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 50

TAKING THE TRAINS

French Situationists had realized during the decade before—that shared urban public space is always a mass commercial spectacle, always watched by the mass media, always under surveillance in one form or another.50 This insight was already evident in the writers’ understanding and use of city walls, but realizing that cameras (and not just passersby) were watching and recording opened up an entirely new system of exposure. Writers immediately capitalized on this fact and utilized these watchful eyes to broadcast their own works. Writers now deliberately sought to write their names in urban locations that they thought were likely to be photographed, videotaped, or filmed. Many writers during these years could boast that they had repeatedly appeared in the newspapers and on television, although these “appearances” were usually made in the background of photos and camera shots intended for other purposes.51 Nonetheless, these appearances were proudly claimed and highly prized. Using this method, taki added to his already mythic status when an actor in a frequently aired, nationally televised antismoking commercial paused and wheezed emphatically as he climbed the stairs of the Statue of Liberty; taki’s name was clearly visible on the wall behind him.52 And if you examine an early subway scene in The Exorcist (1973), you’ll notice super kool 223’s tag on one of the front cars as it rushes toward the camera. Already watching mass-mediated images of the subway system closely, writers saw his tag right away, intentionally placed there for that reason. iz the wiz’s work can be seen in The Warriors (1979), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), Defiance (1980), and Dreams Don’t Die (made for TV, 1982).53 A quick pan shot in the introductory sequence that precedes every episode of the popular Welcome Back, Kotter TV series briefly displays the names of p nut, jester, and diablo written on the side of a subway train.54 Their repeated (though very brief) national media exposure here was a major coup for these writers, and Welcome Back, Kotter was sometimes referred to possessively as “their show.”55 The appearance of a writer’s name authorized him or her to literally graft the emerging culture of writing onto the commercial mass media itself. Writers appropriated the mass-mediated public sphere to extend their alternative economy of prestige, their own brand of fame. By understanding the connections between shared urban public space (the street) and the mass-mediated public sphere (newspapers, TV, film), writers were able to transmit their names from one of these spaces to the other without the conscious cooperation of the people behind the cameras.

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 51

F I GURE 2.1 stay high 149 (note early character), super strut, tass, and at 31 tags (signatures) in the subway tunnels, dating from the early 1970s.

(Courtesy R. Smith)

By the summer of 1971, the practice of “getting up” or “getting around” town—saturation—was well established as the core activity of writing culture.56 The community of writers had grown large enough that their names had been declared a “problem” by the New York City Transit Authority (the TA) and other guardians of the public walls.57 The fame gained by “getting around” operated in much the same way as the success of a star or other celebrity, since both could be measured by her/his “name recognition.”58 To be famous, a writer’s name had to be seen, and seen often. Since there is no commercial relationship between a writer and the audience beyond prestige, “overexposure” was not a liability but the foundation of a legacy. On the other hand, a star’s fame is produced and managed by expert technicians working in the commercial networks of the media. Writers managed their own fame and, through a shared ethic, managed their own network as well. Writing fame is based on the recognized name, but that

51

Austin Ch2

52

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 52

TAKING THE TRAINS

recognition could not be acquired through a privileged access to power, preexisting status, or the manipulations of image brokers. Wealth would not open the door either: to be credible, a writer had to steal the paint and markers he or she used.59 According to kase 2, “If you didn’t have racking [shoplifting] skills, you wasn’t considered down.”60 Hanging out with famous writers might provide some opportunities to write your name near theirs (and, by association, gain some measure of status), but access to famous writers, like “stars” in the broader culture, was limited. As early as 1972, a hierarchy had formed among writers based on who “got up” sufficiently to be well known (and appreciated) by other writers. To hang out with the best-known writers, the neophyte had to show commitment and a promising talent for letters, at least in the majority of cases.61 The fame writers gained by getting around rewarded the hard work, dedication, and long hours necessary to write successfully.62 In this way, acquiring writing fame has, ironically, offered a continuing means for urban young people to validate the liberal, meritocracy-based work ethic that had so starkly failed to produce the promised economic results for this group during the 1960s and 1970s.63 Per osd om: “It had nothing to do with race or age or size or deformity. . . . You wrote, you were a part of the culture, and it was beautiful.”64 As I argued earlier, fame, shared public space, and the mass-mediated public sphere were “borrowed” and transformed by writers. In a similar way, writers transformed and resituated the “American” work ethic into a new context, directing its productivity toward the more autonomously managed cultural realm of writing practice. The emerging writing culture institutionalized values of hard work, creativity, persistence, autonomy, and skill in ways that few educational and occupational avenues open to young people ever have. Fame is not bequeathed to a writer haphazardly. As in any economy of prestige, fame is not open to everyone; fame is socially defined, and New York is a big town. A writer gains widespread fame by creating a large number of works— signatures—across a large geographic area, which requires long hours and a lot of traveling. As the number of writers grew and their practices became more sophisticated, writing’s economy of prestige became more elaborate. The pinnacle of status was to be known as a “king.”65 A king achieved that title through community recognition that his or her name was up within some bounded area more than anyone else’s, as determined by simply counting. This opened the way for a large number of kings and kingdoms—from the king of an apartment building’s stairwell, to a high school,

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 53

TAKING THE TRAINS

to a neighborhood, to a subway line, and finally to king of the entire city. For instance, clyde was recognized as the “Bus King of the Bronx” during the early 1970s, according to rize; freedom and haze cite moses 147 as the king of the no. 1 subway line during roughly the same period.66 The informal, collective, and social nature of this prestige economy meant that an individual’s status was always open to renegotiation, always “in play.” Any particular viewpoint on the status hierarchy revealed as much about the relative status of the viewer as it did about the hierarchy itself. From the perspective of those who occupied the upper rungs, the kingships of smaller domains were claimed by writers who were toys—neophytes or writers who were judged to be lacking in the requisite skills, experience, and commitment. Toys were more likely to stay within circumscribed local boundaries, or otherwise fail to get around sufficiently to gain widespread fame. Their low status was frequently sounded by the upper echelons of writers, although a writer who was a “toy” in one location might be respected within the more narrow bounds of another—say, a school yard, a block, or a neighborhood. During the early 1970s, the individual writer, having set himself or herself apart by the number of times his or her name appeared to the public eye, might add to that distinction through any number of other means. These writing acts were varied, but frequently involved being among the first to get up in a particularly well-known but unexpected or inaccessible place.67 “Unexpected” or “inaccessible” might have any of several different meanings. Per tracy 168: “It became like a macho thing. Who could be wilder than the next guy?”68 Inaccessible might be defined in physical terms, such as the middle of some high wall with no ledges, so that it appeared to be impossible for a writer to have found sufficient footing to write.69 Or, inaccessible could refer to the complicated mesh of steel beams supporting the junctures of the elevated subway lines, which required considerable daring and not a little planning to climb. air was known for his work in this kind of inaccessible location in the late 1980s (fig. 2.2). Or inaccessible might be defined in terms of the social daring needed to accomplish a hit. taki tagged a Secret Service car in a diplomatic parade in 1971.70 ja, among others, made Transit Authority police cars a favorite target later. stoney added to her fame by being the first to hit the Statue of Liberty with a large tag, executed while tourists were present.71 For writers of color (who made up the majority during the 1970s), “inaccessible” might also include hits in certain “white” neighborhoods.72 For young women, a certain fearless attitude was needed

53

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 54

FI G URE 2 . 2 air throw-ups on the elevated subway tracks, Queens (New York City), 1990. (Courtesy Laurence

R. Mabie)

simply to be in the stations and other shared public spaces after the crowds from the commercial day had left the urban scene; it seems unlikely that this gendered difference could be adequately appreciated or understood in the same way by young men. The value placed on the daring necessary to write in these inaccessible locations is similar to the more standard public fame given to explorers, discoverers, and daredevils. It is a sign of collective admiration for their skill, ingenuity, and courage. Writing culture’s emerging economy of prestige was held together by two ethical precepts that became the customary basis for mutual interactions. As a new sense of community solidified among writers from across the city, the older neighborhood peer traditions of face-to-face “respect” were again altered slightly and adapted to the culture of writing. Out of respect for the practice, no writer wrote over another’s name.73 To do so was an aggressive and provocative act, and it was expected that physical conflict would result—either a fight or a concerted effort to “cross out” the offender’s name

54

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 55

TAKING THE TRAINS

in retaliation. This type of conflict seems to have been relatively rare during the early 1970s, particularly among better-known writers.74 Nobody in ’73 went over anyone else’s name and a lot of cats were out there writing. WICKED GARY: Even if there wasn’t a space [on a subway car], guys would go to the next car. . . . I went to a tunnel one day, the day I met pistol 1. It was the New Lots Ave. line between Nostrand and Utica. There was about 45 kids in there from everywhere. . . . We had the train really packed, yet still one seemed to always find a corner.”75 AMRL:

Each writer had to have a unique name and a relatively unique style, a second ethical precept. During the early 1970s, many writers attached a street or apartment number to their name, which made distinctions clear. As the preference for street numbers faded (they were never very popular in some neighborhoods and boroughs) and more and more names were created across the city, differentiation was maintained through the addition of Roman numerals or serial numbers, usually indicating the writer’s genealogical distance from the one who wrote the name originally (e.g., pistol 1, star iii, kill 3). This established a kind of lineage through time, not unlike the naming traditions of royalty.76 It was a much greater offense to claim someone else’s name as your own than to write over someone’s name. To take someone’s name was certain to cause a fight—the writers’ alternative to a copyright infringement suit.77 Although the interior walls of subway cars quickly became a popular and highly visible writing location, most writers had only occasionally written on the outside of the trains before 1970.78 tracy 168 told journalist Jamie Bryan that he and fellow writers “used to walk the lay-ups and take a tag or so on the outside, and we thought it would never last. It was like a test to see if they would clean it. And it took so long for them to clean it, that’s why we bombed the outsides.”79 By 1971 different groups of writers had “discovered” the yards and the lay-ups where the trains were stored. Hager points out that in the South Bronx there was no need to discover the yards—they were located directly across from Dewitt Clinton High School. The writers in this school had access to the yards even during lunch hours. The discovery of the storage yards was pivotal in the development of writing since it opened the way to writing on the outside of the trains.80 Gaining access to the yards and lay-ups (eventually, the keys to the trains were

55

Austin Ch2

56

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 56

TAKING THE TRAINS

acquired as well)81 permitted writers to radically reinvent practices that had first developed on the public walls and inside the cars. The fences surrounding the yards were in very poor repair during the 1970s. Still, the possibility of being caught by police and transit workers was much greater in the storage yards and lay-ups, a rare concern for early writers who could wait until a moving subway car was empty of passengers to “motion tag” the inside walls.82 Although some writers were known for boldly writing in the presence of adults, most were not willing to directly challenge adult authority or risk being reported to the police.83 On the other hand, the rewards gained from working in the storage yards could not be ignored by any writer with ambition. While parked in the yards and layups, the trains could be tagged on the inside without hindrances or time limitations. But the outsides . . . In the yards, the work on the exteriors of the subway cars could begin in earnest. During the summer and fall of 1971, the first large “outlines” were created. An outline (at this particular stage of development) was simply a signature written with large outlined letters without further embellishment. Later, the space within the outlined letters was filled in with another color, and then simple designs would be added such as stars, polka dots, or candy stripes. This new, larger, and more visually elaborate name-form came to be called the masterpiece. Within six months, those who were seriously pursuing fame were working on masterpieces (“pieces”). While getting up remained the first and primary criteria for fame, the move to “piecing” became the usual second step for high renown in the writers’ economy of prestige.84 Aesthetic innovations came at a rapid pace during the next several years. Distinctive new letter designs were created, prompting some writers to change their names or create new names in order to make use of a new letter design. Borrowing letter designs and creating new names to gain style did not end in the early days. According to daze, “tracy 168 had his name all over town as tracy 168, but noc would write just as much in ten different names . . . just for the style. For a while we were doing w names like word, warm, won, warped, worm, wish, wisk, wink.” 85 It was not uncommon for a famous writer to have several names in circulation. By the summer of 1972, the writers’ designed names had taken on a new visual coherency and consistency. Whereas visual aesthetic considerations had always added distinctiveness to one’s name, “style” gained an institutionalized place in the writers’ prestige economy. Jack Stewart argues that important stylistic consistencies were introduced and promoted on Man-

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

F I GUR E 2 .3

12:55 PM

Page 57

phase 2 signature piece, 1972. (Courtesy IGTimes Aerosol Archives)

hattan’s West Side subway lines by topcat 126, who had migrated to New York City from the original Philadelphia scene with the “Gangster” style (renamed “Broadway Elegant” in New York City),86 and on the East Side lines by phase 2, a Bronx writer whose stature rivals taki’s in the history of writing.87 While writers are quick to give topcat 126 and phase 2 their respect, the early stylistic categories were usually differentiated along borough lines. In the early 1970s, an experienced writer could easily distinguish a Brooklyn style from those created in the Bronx or Manhattan.88 stoney wrote in the Brooklyn style, which was still popular when she left the scene in 1974.89 Brooklyn and Queens are serviced by several long-running lines that connect the borough with the Manhattan hubs, but that do not travel significant distances within Manhattan itself. These lines sometimes supported more localized scenes that were not as tightly linked with other parts of the writers’ public sphere. Occurring alongside these new aesthetic innovations, the competition for public fame and peer respect motivated writers to create larger, more easily seen works.90 The early signatures had been relatively small in size, usually not more than a few feet in length if written with spray paint, and even smaller when written with ink. The outside of the subway cars offered a new set of challenges to this scale. The increasing size of new masterpiece works was as-

57

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

F I GURE 2.4

12:55 PM

Page 58

super kool 223 masterpiece, 1972. (Courtesy IGTimes Aerosol Archives)

sisted by the discovery of the “fat cap” by super kool 223 in 1972.91 A “fat cap” is a plastic aerosol spray nozzle taken from a consumer spray product (oven cleaner and starch were favorites) that produced a wider dispersion of paint than the original spray-paint nozzle, allowing writers to cover an area with paint more quickly and evenly. Further experimentation produced a broad range of effects possible with various “caps”; on the other hand, some writers always stuck with the original equipment. Earlier I mentioned the growing number of young people who took up writing after 1971. Because writing is both illegal and informal (in the sense that there is no way of officially certifying a person’s status or commitment as a writer), there is no reliable way of ascertaining the number of writers involved at any particular time. City officials rarely made estimates of the number of writers, and when they did, the estimates varied so widely that their intentions to manipulate public policy and arouse citizen outrage are obvious. Although the police frequently reported that writers were a broadbased population of all classes and ethnicities, those observers closer to the community describe it as being comprised mostly of African Americans and Latinos from poor or working-class families.92 The areas of the city where writing first developed—northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, and central Brooklyn—also contained some of its most economically depressed neighborhoods and were among the areas most threatened by gangs.93 A small number of Euro-American kids made up a part of the early scene, but their representation among writers was out of proportion with their numerical representation in the city as a whole.94 This changed over the course of the decade as more whites and youths from well-to-do families became involved; however, African Americans and Latinos continued to be the largest presence in writing throughout the decade (see figures 2.5 and 6.5).

58

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 59

F I GUR E 2 .5 Writers in the subways, early mid-1970s. Clockwise from left, facing: super kool 223, unidentified Brooklyn writer, lava 1, com 161, tuc II, unidentified Queens writer. (Courtesy tracy 168)

Young women were always in the minority among writers, although several gained citywide fame during the early 1970s. Schmidlapp and phase 2 mention barbara 62, eva 62, michelle 62, barmaid 36, s.pat 169, big bird 107, irene 159, line 149, tash 2, t.t.smokin 182, charmin 65, stoney, and grape 1 as “pioneering female writers.”95 As the prime writing site shifted from the public walls to the subway trains, the number of female writers appears to have diminished. After the mid-1970s, famous female writers were very rare.96 It is difficult to retrace this loss with precision, but several bits of evidence are suggestive. Some of the recognized female master writers, like stoney, were more or less “uninvited” (i.e., not invited) to join some of the early writers groups. Although some male writers stood up for women in these groups, most males do not seem to have been willing to do so, which reflects their lack of interest in gender diversity.97 Still, stoney felt that most male writers of her time treated her as an equal in all respects. The yards might have been considered an overly dangerous space by some young women who would have otherwise joined in. This danger cannot be attributed solely to the more rugged terrain of the yards, or the likelihood of being captured by police, although these were certainly distinct

59

Austin Ch2

60

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 60

TAKING THE TRAINS

drawbacks. But female writers had not been deterred by similar conditions in other places and had proven to be as bold as males. It seems more likely that young women may have felt vulnerable to sexual violence in the yards, although I have found no evidence that this ever happened.98 Later female writers frequently mentioned that their sexual reputations were a constant source of community gossip.99 Such gossip may easily be interpreted as a kind of encoded threat, since some men set their expectations accordingly. At the very least, this public scrutiny of sexual behavior is something with which male writers did not have to contend. Stewart argues that young women were deterred from writing by their boyfriends, who were concerned about them being hurt or arrested.100 lady pink, a major master of the late 1970s and early 1980s, has commented: “Very early on, I gathered very strong friends. I was down with a lot of important painting crews. I had a lot of back [support], so guys wouldn’t mess with me.”101 Writers feared beatings by police in the yards, since there would be no witnesses, and the brutalities of “night stick justice” are traditional practices of law enforcement in New York City.102 Young men wrote the names of their girlfriends as a kind of tribute, but this practice may also reveal some sense that young women were not expected to write, and that it was considered “unfeminine” or too dangerous by young men.103 vandal has claimed that young women were “not crazy enough” to write.104 It may also have been more difficult for young women to escape from their parents’ homes at night. In many family households, daughters are much more likely to be assigned domestic chores, like housecleaning or child care, which obligates them in the evenings, the prime writing time.105 While the predominance of the train yards did not signal the end of young women as writers, it did mark a significant decline in their numbers.

WRITING CULTURE

Culture is never static, never singular. The limitations of written narrative, including this one, make it impossible to convey the incredible variations in social and cultural life. At no time has there ever been a single, unified culture of writing that situated all writing practices. The complex negotiations that have created (and re-created) writing as a collective practice among New York City youth took place at diverse locations and at varying

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 61

TAKING THE TRAINS

rates, and these negotiations continue to the present moment. Innovations created and/or received by writers in one location circulate among writers at other locations where they are critiqued, reworked, rejected or accepted, and then passed on in a dynamic process of continual cultural reproduction.106 At the microlevel, the process appears chaotic, as writers struggle with their materials, with policing authorities, and with each other to develop and define the meanings and proper practice of writing. But it is this same process of continual negotiation that has yielded a “community” or a “writing culture,” despite the occasional use of fisticuffs to resolve the differences between individuals.107 I was from Queens. I never went to the Bronx to learn how to write, but I did go through the same learning process. I experienced the same evolutionary steps as a writer with the rest of my peers. Tags, buses, trains, insides, outsides, throw-ups [larger, abbreviated tags], burners [pieces], we all went through it, and we all borrowed bits and bobs from each other in sort of an unwritten, unified manner. Once I really got into writing I felt that I belonged to something.108

IZ THE WIZ:

Although an identifiable body of widely accepted norms, techniques, and standards of evaluation emerged from the shared practices of even the earliest writers,109 the continual, collective struggle to re-create and apply this body of knowledge in the situated contexts of everyday life means that writing culture has never been static or singular and never, in the end, truly definable. The members of any and all cultural groups transgress the accepted norms and values of their respective communities in their everyday practices: scholars no more nor less than the “subjects” they study, Baptists no more nor less than bookies, vegetarians no more nor less than Republicans. Writers likewise violated the cultural norms of their emerging community (sometimes knowingly, sometimes not) while simultaneously asserting the validity and necessity of those same norms. It is not unusual for writers to define the correct standards of their activity in one way, and then practice them in another. Beyond this common contradiction, the incomplete and uneven distribution of any specific aspect of writing culture across the densely packed spaces of New York City has meant that there are always several different writing subcultures in existence at any given time. These different variants may be in competition or conflict with each other or they

61

Austin Ch2

62

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 62

TAKING THE TRAINS

may be unaware of their differences, while at other times they may coexist in a state of peaceful self-awareness. Because writing culture initially leaned heavily on its borrowing and alteration of existing cultural traditions, forms, and practices, any parameters regarding that culture are always provisional and permeable. Creating a new cultural practice (and a new community) through borrowing and alteration is not unique to writing. Of necessity, such borrowing informs some of the cultural practices of all subordinate social groups, and has long been observed in the case of youth cultures. Contingency, uneven distribution, and a continual process of cultural reproduction (remaking) accompanies and sometimes undermines the homogeneity of commonly shared practices. Writing culture emerged from the already existing network of youth cultures within the city. As young people followed the lead of the early writers and took up the new practice, they brought along various common forms of peer sociality. Particularly after “style” became a primary arena for gaining fame, acquiring the skills necessary to produce a respectable tag or piece was difficult and required tenacity as well as a considerable investment of time. A few writers were able to acquire these skills through observation and trial and error alone. The oral history and hagiography of writing tend to follow the romantic conventions of art history, which emphasize the accomplishments of individual “geniuses.” But writers do not create from nothing. Like other artists, they are influenced by the historical conditions in which they live and by their life experiences, and they do their work in the company and context of friends and fellow writers who bring along their own diverse experiences. Many young people are introduced to writing through ties of friendship and kinship, and are motivated to become writers in part by the pleasures of shared company in an exciting undertaking. As bama noted: “You know, you sit there in the train yard at two o’clock in the morning with four other people and you’re spraying and you look down the track and you see all these brothers working on one goal—to make this train beautiful. There’s so much peace in that. You got that creative feeling, that vibe that comes out of all that work happening.”110 Most acquire the necessary writing skills through the guidance and experience of fellow writers.111 The existing forms of peer sociality (“best friends,” the clique, the gang, the team) shaped and influenced the early organization of writing and, in turn, were adapted to accommodate the situations, conflicts, and pleasures of writing.112 These social relations informed and structured the ways in which writing skills have been circulated

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 63

TAKING THE TRAINS

among writers, new and old, and the ways in which the “work” of writing has been accomplished at the everyday level. Youth gangs had a strong influence on the emergent writing culture.113 As with the other borrowings that make up writing culture, the borrowings from gang culture must be viewed with an eye to their subsequent transformation by writers. Gangs have a long tradition within New York City youth culture and have been a part of the city’s social order since the nineteenth century. A large number of new territorial gangs began to form in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s they had become identified as a “problem” by New York City mayor John Lindsay, the police department, and several youth services organizations. The various agencies that identify and interact with these groups estimated that there were more than three hundred active territorial gangs in the city in the early 1970s.114 As I showed earlier in this chapter through the examples of johnny of 93 and julio 204, the kinds of public name-writing practiced by gang members were important precursors to the new writing, and many of the early writers were also gang members. To gain recognition and exposure, a writer had to be able to travel around the city, which involved crossing other gangs’ turf. In general, it appears that writers were usually treated with more respect than the average unaffiliated youth walking into a gang’s territory.115 Per blade: “Most of [the gangs] did not like graffiti writers anyway, but they did not care. They were too busy fighting against themselves. . . . While they were fighting everybody was writing on the trains and having a good time.”116 stoney felt there was mutual respect between writers and gang members, and the Tomahawks and the Jolly Stompers (the dominant gangs in her area) rarely bothered writers.117 After writing became a popular practice, some gangs even participated in hitting the trains; but, for the most part, gangs remained confined to their own territory for security reasons.118 Many of the new writers saw writing as a better alternative to gang membership in their neighborhoods. Here again, young people chose to pursue a more reasonable route over the social conditions they had inherited; but since this alternative was not sanctioned by adults, it received no legitimacy. The decision of most writers not to join a gang has been seldom noted, despite the repeated hysteria about gangs and youth crime in New York City. Gangs became the model for the first organized groups of writers, as distinct from informal peer groups that had characterized writing since its earliest days. The first “writing gang” appeared in 1971.119 The best known of

63

Austin Ch2

64

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 64

TAKING THE TRAINS

the writing gangs, such as the ex-vandals and the vanguards, had memberships of fifty or more and created new techniques of getting up (saturation) by writing a gang’s name or abbreviation alongside the tag of the individual writer, a gesture toward group affiliation borrowed from territorial gangs.120 The individual writer and the gang had mutual interests in sustaining their fame.121 The new organizations proved incredibly productive and became known throughout the city soon after coming together.122 Unfortunately, the success of these writing gangs attracted the attention of territorial gangs who were also seeking respect and reputation. As writers’ collective fame proved to be a more and more valuable commodity within the city’s youth-culture networks, it became a commodity worth fighting for, and the graffiti gangs found themselves unexpectedly involved in selfdefense against territorial gangs. As fighters, writing gangs were not so effective. Their short history ended after mid-1972, when most disbanded or assumed a new form of organization.123 This new organizational form emerged at about the same time the writing gangs were breaking up—the “crew.”124 Some of the first crews emerged from various fragments of the writing gangs, usually centering around one or two of the writing gangs’ more prolific (and famous) members.125 Aside from the few short-lived writing gangs, writing had continued as an activity pursued in a group of loosely organized friends (usually not more than four or five), who traveled together to the train yards or to other locations to write.126 In a similar way, many crews began with a few committed and perhaps well-known writers and their friends, to which other writers were added over time, depending on the longevity and reputation of the crew.127 wanted, war (writers already respected), and the inds (independents) were well-known early crews.128 The crew developed as a kind of social hybrid, combining the informal organization of a peer group, the shared-goal orientation of a sports team, and the collective identity and protective functions of a gang.129 Members of the long-standing crews developed a fierce loyalty. kase 2 remembers: “When I finally met the whole tfp [the fabulous partners] squad, I was shocked. I had already known a few of them individually, I just didn’t know how tight they were . . . like a family.”130 Crews served as important arenas of information exchange and sources of assistance with writing problems, such as acquiring paint, working out the color schemes for a masterpiece, or planning a hit on a risky location. They also served as a writers’ school.131 A writer committed to the craft has to master a wide range of specialized

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 65

TAKING THE TRAINS

knowledge. Most of this knowledge was acquired by the novice through occasional contact with more experienced writers, through observation and trial and error, or through direct instruction in a crew. Writing reproduced itself through the peer culture, since the skills necessary for writing are not available elsewhere. Information circulated among writers through meetings in the yards, at school, at the writers “benches,” while serving a “cleanup” sentence after being arrested, or through some chance encounter.132 Crews were the most institutionalized form for dispensing these knowledges and skills. In the early 1970s, this body of specialized local knowledge included such things as the qualities of various types of commercially manufactured ink markers; the construction of homemade ink markers; and formulas for homemade inks, many of which were more resistant to the TA’s solvents than those that were commercially available.133 Writers knew the policing patterns on the subways while they were in service, since many worked while the trains were running, creating “motion tags.” After the yards became the primary sites of production, a writer had to know when the trains were taken out of service for the evening, when the cleanup crew could be expected to arrive and leave, which of the yards and lay-ups were under surveillance by the police, and the geographies of the yards and lay-ups that they might want to enter. This included the orientation and arrangement of the tracks, the holes in the fences, the likely directions from which TA maintenance workers and police might approach, and the locations of towers or windows where they might be observed.134 Since the quantity of paint needed for a piece was beyond the economic means of most writers, necessity was made a virtue, and theft or swapping were considered the only ethical means of acquiring paint. This requirement called into play the existing shoplifting skills within youth culture. A writer had to become an accomplished thief or be in close contact with another writer who specialized in “racking up” (stealing).135 He also had to have extensive knowledge of the qualities of several brands of spray paint and of which types of spray nozzles would produce the desired aerosol effects.136 While some of this local knowledge remained relatively stable over time, a significant portion of it changed rapidly as writers adapted to changing conditions and created new techniques. A complete list of the skills needed to become a successful writer would stretch into several more pages—even without mentioning the considerable aesthetic skills necessary to actually create a respectable tag or piece.

65

Austin Ch2

66

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 66

TAKING THE TRAINS

TAKING THE TRAINS: INSTITUTIONS

Writing culture made a place for itself in New York City by selectively appropriating institutional spaces created by other organizational entities and re-forming these into its own physical and cultural networks. In the same way that writing itself was created from a recombination of “borrowed parts” from a broad spectrum of cultural domains, the spaces that became important to writing culture were similarly borrowed from what was at hand. Primary among the several preexisting sites that were of major importance to the writing culture was the subway system, which includes the trains, the stations, and the storage yards and lay-ups. In taking the trains, writers grafted a new, “un-author-ized” social function onto the largest public transportation system in the United States. Writers “borrowed” the subways insofar as they remade a car’s appearance. Writers approached the sides of the trains not as inviolate and finished surfaces, but as a series of blank frames—like unexposed film, like unused billboards, like fresh canvases. As one writer put it, “We’ll look at a train and see a caravan of canvas, a row of strictly measured steel, yeah— a playground.”137 What emerged from the early period of writing was a kind of hybridization whereby the trains were transformed into a mass communications network that circulated messages, fame, and aesthetic works among the community of writers and within New York City more generally.138 The writing on the subways was not only an attempt to grab the attention of the public and the commercial media (although writers were happy to oblige any opportunity), but was also an attempt to create an alternative “screen” where the writing community could make itself visible to the city and to itself.139 The major sites for the transformation of the subway system into a medium of communication were the lay-ups and yards. Writers first began to enter the yards in significant numbers after 1971.140 The yards were subsequently pressed into service to function as studios, galleries, and classrooms, enabling artistic production, exhibition, and education. All the major work done on the outside of the trains took place in the yards and lay-ups. Located throughout the city, the yards facilitated the formation of local centers of production.141 But since the trains circulate across great distances and intersect at several points within the system, these local centers remained relatively integrated within the writing culture across the city.142 Innovations made at one location were quickly

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 67

TAKING THE TRAINS

noted and incorporated at another. Writers also frequently traveled from yard to yard to lay-up, as some locations became “hot” while others were ignored by police, or simply because a writer wanted to meet new writers.143 According to phase 2, “It was like one big gigantic network. We’d see names from Brooklyn and be impressed and inspired with them. You looked forward to meeting people like dino nod, la-zar or devilish doug and evil eric, partly because of their styles.”144 The diversity within the massive 700-mile system allowed a hierarchy to emerge, with those lines that ran the length of Manhattan on the east and west sides of the island being the most prestigious. phase 2 remembers: “At one point it was all about the 2s, 4s, and 5s [subway lines]. They traveled through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, which was where a lot of history was being made.”145 Thus, a writer might begin on a less prestigious line, develop a local reputation, and then move up the ladder to more well-recognized locations. The hierarchy among the various train lines was also related to their ease of use as a writing surface. Some train lines were made up of cars with flat, smooth surfaces that could be painted easily. Others were made up of cars with a “ridgy” or multipaneled exterior sheathing that was much more difficult to work on.146 Small crews of transportation workers were in the yards (and, less frequently, the lay-ups) for a period of about five hours late at night during the week and for about the same period during most of the weekend.147 These periods of reduced official activity and surveillance afforded several hours of working time each night, plus added time on weekends when subway schedules are even more limited.148 During these windows of opportunity, some yards might have several writers’ crews as well as some unaffiliated writers working on the insides and outsides of the trains at one time. Writers used the yards as a workshop and a studio, experimenting with new designs and techniques while creating new works for circulation. The shared space and experience of the yards were important in creating and maintaining a citywide writing culture. ale one recalls: You could go from having four good friends, to fifty good friends. That’s the best thing. You’re never bored or lonely, because the phone just constantly rang. The ultimate feeling is when you go someplace where writers hang out, and all of the sudden there are 30 people saying hello to you and that’s not normal. You go to an area that you’ve never been to and all these people want to hang out. It’s a respect. You’re networking every day that you’re on the trains.149

67

Austin Ch2

68

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 68

TAKING THE TRAINS

The collective evaluation of individual works and artists is central to the development of any aesthetic practice and its associated economy of prestige.150 This evaluation requires a common space for observation and discussion. Before the trains became the primary writing surface, the “writers’ corner” at Audubon and 188th Street in Manhattan was the most famous of these meeting places.151 Graffiti broke down a lot of barriers . . . being afraid of going into the Bronx or coming into Manhattan. WICKED GARY: It got me to Writers’ Corner (188th and Audubon) to meet coco, snake, and all the cats. Into the Bronx to meet phase, stay high, amrl, . . . that is the way we traveled—as a brotherhood.152 COCO 144:

Other writers’ corners were subsequently established.153 After the subway trains became the primary writing site, similar kinds of meeting places were established underground and became yet another type of institutional space “borrowed” from the Transit Authority. Subway station walls had always been an important writing site because of the number of people who flowed by, particularly young people.154 A station is visible from a train even if the train doesn’t stop there, and a large work in a station would be seen by almost as many people as a large work on a train itself. As a result, stations located at the junction of several lines acquired a new strategic importance. Writers gathered at the benches of these stations to critique, compare, and count each other’s work as the trains passed through. The benches at the 149th Street and Grand Concourse station in the Bronx, the Brooklyn Bridge station in lower Manhattan, and the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn were among the best known and the most prestigious of these. Writers’ benches proved useful as a common place to meet up with friends from across town, and as the status hierarchy developed, these benches also became places where new writers might hang out, hoping to be introduced to the famous writers who were frequently there. As an initiate, the new writer was likely to be snubbed unless he or she had already gained at least some measure of recognition or knew someone who could make the introductions. Thus, the benches became a place where the status hierarchy—the writers’ economy of prestige—was established, evaluated, and adjusted.155 The trains, the stations, and the storage spaces are under the jurisdiction of the Transit Police. Although the threat and even thrill of being caught by police has always existed for writers, it does not appear to have been a pri-

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 69

TAKING THE TRAINS

mary motivation for those who first developed the practice.156 However, after writing was defined as a “problem” and a “war on graffiti” was declared by city authorities, pursuit by police became part of the everyday circumstance of writing, and many writers embraced the resulting danger with an enthusiasm that young people often demonstrate when their activities are policed.157 A kind of cat-and-mouse game developed between writers and the cops as they struggled over these territories. For the writers, being able to play this game successfully became one of their necessary survival skills. SEEN: I suppose the attraction [to writing] came from the actual act. The excitement from being able to get away. Ultimately it came from the feeling of once seeing a piece you did go by like a moving billboard that says that’s me, I was here. Knowing that people all over the city see your name. Not to mention the fame that came with it.158

As police tried new techniques to capture writers, the presence of friends and fellows made the cat-and-mouse game more fun and police tactics less effective. The game became an important part of writing culture and has been the source of thousands of writers’ adventure stories since it began.159 tracy 168 managed to go six years before getting caught: I was on a subway station between Kingsbridge Rd. and Fordham Rd., and I was on the middle track painting a laid-up train. I was doing a huge Dick Tracy cartoon and the cops watched me from the platform waiting for me to finish and come back on the platform to arrest me. I fooled them and climbed down an el pillar. They had no idea of where I went. But I was with a guy who . . . couldn’t climb. So I had to help him. The cops chased me for miles, and they finally caught me.160

No clear-thinking writer would physically confront the police; evasion and escape were (and remain) the only available tactics. If seen writing in an underground station, a writer could run away—through one of the entrances (the larger stations have several) and out into the street; across the tracks to the platform on the other side of the station, and then out; or down the tracks into the tunnels. Since most of the lay-ups are in the tunnels, writers became familiar with their geography, knew how to avoid oncoming trains and the electrified third rail, and had memorized the location of the

69

Austin Ch2

70

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 70

TAKING THE TRAINS

stairways that lead to the street, which are usually covered by metal grates. Most of the yards were surrounded by chain-link fencing in various stages of disrepair during the 1970s. Writers cut more holes in these ragtag fences, but they continued to function as barriers. Writers kept these barriers and passageways in mind as they worked; when raided, writers would scatter throughout the yards (most are larger than a football field), hiding among the parked trains as they made their way back to one of the passageways.161 Toward the end of the decade, Transit Police hid in the trains and waited for writers to begin working, then would jump out and attempt to catch them. But there is a question of bodies here: the bodies of young men and of older cops as well as bodies of local knowledge and of universal laws and standard enforcement techniques. Writing on the trains was always practiced with escape routes in mind, a consequence of working within a space claimed by a more powerful, state-sponsored group. Writers cut new holes in fences as older ones were repaired or were discovered and watched by police; writers learned how to climb up and down the steel beams that support the elevated lay-ups and stations, as tracy 168 described above; writers learned how to run through the yards without tripping over the rails, particularly the third rail, which carries the 650-volt current that powers the trains. Writers in the 1970s typically ranged in age from twelve to eighteen. Their agility and speed made them hard to catch for most cops over thirty,162 and their determination and knowledge of the mazelike yards made them difficult prey for anyone. There is no doubt that the writers’ struggle with the Transit Police was a major contributing factor to writing’s development as a distinctive culture, but writers’ participation in the cat-and-mouse game was never the primary motivation for their involvement in writing. Teenagers are constantly subjected to police surveillance. Conflict between young people and police authority offers itself in too many other places in the city, making it difficult to seriously argue that “the thrill of the chase” alone drew writers into the yards. But once the game was established, many writers embraced its challenges with glee.

WRITING ART

Writing did not announce itself to the world as an art movement when it first appeared in the late 1960s, and certainly writers at that time did not as-

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 71

TAKING THE TRAINS

pire to careers as galleried artists.163 One could argue that aesthetics has always been important in writing, all the way back to the studied linearity, even spacing, and uniform lettering of julio 204’s first tag. But this aesthetic does not depart significantly from the one taught in the handwriting lessons of the public schools or seen in standard typefaces such as the one you are reading now.164 As has been the case with many of the new aesthetic forms created during the twentieth century, writers discovered, developed, and emphasized the aesthetic possibilities of existing cultural practices. In this case, the aesthetic possibilities of the name and the signature in shared public space were the raw materials. Writers did not, however, begin with a self-conscious sense of themselves as artists selecting an appropriate form for their expressions; instead, the aesthetic intentions of writers emerged as part of the evolving historical practice of writing. Meanwhile, many New Yorkers at this time were being encouraged by newspaper articles and editorials to see the writing on the walls simply in terms of disruptive and dangerous youths, fears of impending social collapse, and the urban crisis. But alternative sources of information and representation, primarily in the arts media, frequently framed the writers’ work as art. Writers began to incorporate this understanding into their own self-conscious construction of themselves. And writing was occasionally referred to as “graffiti art” (often with some irony) during the early 1970s, even in newspaper and magazine articles that were otherwise hostile to writers. In 1972 a young sociology student, Hugo Martinez, organized a number of the most skilled masters of this early period into the United Graffiti Artists (UGA). Martinez was working with gangs when he first became aware of the writers, and he used a vocabulary drawn from social work to justify the group’s initial entry into gallery spaces. Despite the rhetoric of “rechanneling” writers’ creativity, only two UGA members actually stopped writing (illegally) on the subway system after they joined.165 UGA’s intentions and its productions were wholly artistic. Martinez encouraged these writers to place their work on canvas and to take it seriously, as worthy and valuable art, and the group—whose work was based on the name and the letter—developed toward something like the avant-garde groups that have formed throughout the history of modern art.166 UGA upheld rigorous aesthetic standards for continued membership, and those writers who could not convince the group of their seriousness or maintain the kinds of discipline necessary for gallery production were asked to leave. The group’s first

71

Austin Ch2

72

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 72

TAKING THE TRAINS

exhibition received some attention from the news media, but more for its novelty than for its aesthetic importance. Through the interest of a photographer, connections were made that led to a series of works painted on stage during the performance of Twyla Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe” in the spring of 1973 with her world famous dance company. Subsequent exhibitions, like those at the Razor Gallery in New York City in 1973 and the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology in 1974, drew much more attention from the mainstream art press, including a favorable review from a leading Times art critic and another from Newsweek magazine.167 Jack Pelsinger founded Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA) in early 1974 as an alternative to the rigor and mastery demanded by UGA. Like Martinez, Pelsinger sought to rechannel the unschooled artistic talents of young people toward art careers. Whereas UGA worked to define and build an artistic movement based on the letter, NOGA did not cater solely to writers, although it did attract some of the major masters of the period. This group was more like a community youth arts program and allowed young people to participate in whatever style they wanted or whatever media Pelsinger could make available; a lack of resources hindered the organization from the start. Still, the NOGA studio served as an important meeting ground for writers.168 The critical attention that UGA and NOGA received from the galleried art world offered an important alternative understanding of the relationship between the writers, their work, and the city at large, counterbalancing the constantly reiterated accusation of “vandalism” from the chorus of antigraffiti warriors. On the other hand, UGA never consisted of more than twenty members.169 NOGA had more members, but it never achieved the media visibility of UGA.170 Although UGA’s members sold a respectable number of paintings and the exhibition reviews were favorable overall, enthusiasm for the work was limited. The work did not attract a great deal of attention from galleried art world’s trendsetters and gatekeepers. Aside from UGA, the galleried art world (including the art press) remained distant from the everyday lives of most writers. Despite this distance, the art press did play an important part in the general conceptualization of writing as art among writers. Two articles published by New York magazine during the spring of 1973 were important to this trend. Written by Richard Goldstein as part of the magazine’s facetious “taki Awards,” the articles nonetheless took writing seriously as an important new artistic and youth-culture phenomenon. Although many

Austin Ch2

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 73

TAKING THE TRAINS

of the writers featured were UGA members, Goldstein celebrated the work on the trains, undermining any claims that the work was art in one location and something else in another. The magazine’s audience could read short biographies and see photographs of the artists and their work. Goldstein placed writing in a historical context in a way that no other reporting in the mass-mediated public sphere had done. Stewart argues that these articles, along with the attention gained from the exhibitions and other media sources, pushed writers to think of themselves as artists, and this shift in self-consciousness, which had been gradually gaining ground for some time, had a strong influence on the way writers subsequently worked.171 Creating “art”—creating “masterpieces”—supplemented the drive to “get up”; “writers” became “artists.” This reconceptualization reinforced and reaffirmed the collective trend toward more and more elaborate works that had begun earlier. A third voice of support was sounded from Print (“America’s Graphic Design Magazine”) in May 1973. A photograph of a writer’s work served as the cover for this issue and contained a very favorable review of the work on the trains: “Sometimes these extravaganzas achieve an almost architectural quality; in motion, the effect is positively kaleidoscopic. Another favorite of graffiti enthusiasts are the filigree patterns created by dense superimposition of small- and medium-sized logos over one another. These can be particularly nice on station walls where the tiles lend them a mosaic quality. Again, movement adds an unexpected dimension: streaking past the stations along upper Broadway is a bit like being showered with confetti.” While there were no interviews with writers included, and the journalist who wrote the article strove for a balanced presentation of writing’s “controversy,” she reiterated that most of the art world favored the work on the trains. One member of the profession was quoted as saying that it was inevitable that the typographies writers had invented would be copied by commercial graphic designers sooner or later, a prediction that did indeed come true. Thirteen photographs, many of the period’s best writers’ works, were included in this seven-page article.172 A fourth important art-media event occurred in 1974 with the publication of a coffee-table book of photographs, The Faith of Graffiti.173 The subway scene had gained sufficient national attention that photographers Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar felt that a documentary work would be able to find an audience, and the two had spent the early months of 1973 photographing works on trains and walls all over the city. Norman Mailer

73

Austin Ch2

74

11/13/01

12:55 PM

Page 74

TAKING THE TRAINS

wrote an essay to accompany the photographs; the essay was also published in Esquire. In it, Mailer contextualized writers’ works within the Great Tradition of art and suggested that writers were on the cutting edge, having created a satisfying expression for certain existential problems that other, more Traditional artists had not found.174 If writers were uncertain about being taken seriously as artists, comparisons to recognized master artists in The Faith of Graffiti could easily assuage any doubts. On the other hand, Kurlansky’s and Naar’s selection of works for inclusion in the book was guided by their own standards of judgment as photographers, and not by the criteria of writers.175 Many of the best writers’ work did not appear in the book, while the works of several toys did. The book paradoxically celebrated writing as an important art form, but failed to make the kinds of aesthetic distinctions among the various works that might validate that claim or guide the eye of new admirers. Nonetheless, the accumulated cultural capital of favorable reviews from powerful critics lending their support to writing as an art form had tremendous power. That power was, of course, much greater for writing’s audience than for writers themselves. Writers already had a strong sense of their collective self-worth and their contribution to the city. The shared public spaces that writers’ “borrowed” formed a kind of network that remapped the city for writers, constructing a “Writers’ City,” if you will. This Writers’ City emerged from the cracks found in the existing institutional and social structures of New York City. With the exception of the yards and lay-ups, this alternate city was comprised of places where writers “hid in the light” of adult surveillance without adults being aware of their purposes.176 A subculture is always “under” another, more powerful entity. But this has never meant powerlessness nor docility. At times, it has not even meant successful domination. The writers in New York City during the early 1970s offer a case in point.

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 75

3

WRITING “GRAFFITI” IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE THE CONSTRUCTION OF WRITING AS AN URBAN PROBLEM

THE URBAN TEXT: JOHN LINDSAY, URBAN CRISIS, AND NEW YORK CITY IN THE LATE 1960s

The sometimes violent conflicts surrounding the sources and solutions to “urban problems” that mark U.S. history in the second half of the 1960s materialized in New York City during the mayoralty of John Lindsay. Lindsay was elected in 1966, after having served as the congressional representative for the Upper East Side (the “silk stocking district”) of Manhattan. The Republican Herald Tribune was a major contributor to his campaign, but more significantly, the newspaper extended its support in a less overt way through an influential series of articles published during the spring before the election. “The City in Crisis” series appeared on the front page almost every day for four months and was then collected and republished as a nationally distributed, mass-market paperback.1

Austin Ch3

76

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 76

WRITING “GRAFFITI”

The series covered almost every “urban problem” conceivable in the mid-1960s—from air pollution to crime to bureaucratic inefficiency— and directly tied New York City’s local circumstances to the urban crisis at the national level. The “City in Crisis” series worked against four-term Democratic incumbent Richard Wagner by making it appear that he had allowed New York City to come to the edge of collapse during his watch: the shadows of the Naked City had fallen over the bright lights of New York, New York. This perspective was reinforced by the pseudo-populist journalistic style of the articles which sought out the opinions, observations, and experiences of the “citizen in the street” while casting suspicions on the officials and experts who usually serve as the authoritative sources on the city’s problems. These representational tactics created an (imagined) consensus about the crisis of New York City: despite the spin of public officials, people “in the street” knew that things were bad and getting worse. The series set the stage for the appearance of a charismatic and innovative leader unconnected with the status quo, a role perfectly suited (and designed) for John Lindsay.2 Lindsay would rescue the failing New Rome. Despite being hailed forth by the “City in Crisis” series, Lindsay’s electoral coalition was an unstable, contradictory mix of groups with opposing goals. On one hand, Lindsay appealed to the city’s excluded minorities and impoverished populations and their liberal allies. To these constituents, he promised justice, more local community participation in city government, and greater access to housing and municipal jobs. On the other hand, he appealed to some corporate interests and their allies who wanted to effectively integrate (but not necessarily empower) the socially excluded minority populations, thus ameliorating the racial and class tensions in the city that were manifest in the 1964 riots. For this corporate constituency, Lindsay could also install a corporate-managerial style of city government and would continue to support the economic redevelopment of Manhattan that Moses and his allies had begun. Lindsay’s power was even more unstable than this odd mixture of the city’s most marginalized and privileged populations might imply, since it accounted for less than 50 percent of the voters in the 1965 race.3 He came to office without backing from the established (white ethnic) city bureaucracy, who were concerned about his promises of integrating their job niche in government service. With some justification, the moderate and

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 77


conservative wings of the Republican Party suspected him of bearing the ideals of a New Deal Democrat. Despite that appearance, Republican Lindsay had little power to leverage support from (mostly Democratic) municipal unions and, to make this point, he was welcomed to his new position with a series of municipal service strikes. The Transport Workers Union walked off the job during Lindsay’s first day in office and shut the city down for almost two weeks.4 The cracks in Lindsay’s political base opened up in an even more dramatic way during his first term in a series of challenges to his projects for progressive minority empowerment. He could not forge effective coalitions to support his plans for governmental decentralization, access to housing, or minority participation in city government over the resistance of those groups that had established stable economic, residential, and cultural footholds in the city earlier in the century. Concerns among African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and immigrant populations about police brutality, which had initiated the 1964 riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, were answered by the new mayor’s promise to create a Civil Review Board to oversee the New York Police Department. But proposals for the board immediately ran against a wall of opposition from working-class and middleclass Euro-American voters, who held that such a review board would hinder police efforts (the force was overwhelmingly Euro-American) to maintain law and order amidst rioting and rising crime (which were popularly associated in the “white” mind with people of color). The catch-22 situation left Lindsay with little room to maneuver and, after heated public debate, the review board was voted down in referendum. His attempts to locate public housing within stable working-class and middle-class neighborhoods outside Manhattan were met with similar resentment and loud rejection by the majority of Euro-American voters.5 Reform Democrat Edward Koch was among the leaders of the resistance to “scattered site” housing proposals. These are but two of the several clashes over demographic shifts and racial succession during this period. Lindsay narrowly won election to his second term in 1969 by creating a humbling image of the New York City mayoralty as “the second toughest job in America,” and by conceding that he had made some mistakes. He received neither of the two major parties’ endorsements for his campaign and took office as an independent with 42 percent of the vote in a threeway race. In 1970 he defected from the Republican Party to become a

77

Austin Ch3

78

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 78


Democrat, and subsequently adopted a more conciliatory style of governmental management (particularly toward municipal unions) as a way of decreasing local conflict within New York City and to curry national Democratic Party favor.6 These dramatic changes were made in preparation for his run at the Democratic presidential nomination, which took up much of his time in 1972. Lindsay had established a solid reputation on the national scene as a leading urban progressive. Of necessity, the New York City mayor was a major player in the national policy debates surrounding the urban crisis. The sometimes violent renegotiations of the racialized social hierarchy, the steady and rapid loss of jobs, the growing division between the economically secure and the poor, and the pervasive fear of crime all marred everyday urban life during this period. Lindsay had gained his reputation in part by his response to these tensions, which included walking through Harlem’s streets to urge calm at times when rioting was anticipated. He was credited with successfully managing and deflecting any further violent conflicts in New York City after the 1964 riots, despite the “long hot summers” that burned in almost every other major U.S. city. He served on the national Kerner Commission, which in 1968 reviewed the causes of the urban riots. Lindsay became a spokesman for both Great Society-type social reforms and increased federal funding to cities. Lindsay understood public transportation to be a key infrastructural resource that must be preserved and expanded if U.S. central cities were to maintain their place as centers of national life. In line with this goal, he supported Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s proposal to form the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the “super authority” that now oversees the New York City Transit Authority (TA), which operates the city’s bus and subway system. The MTA bill passed the New York State legislature in 1969. The MTA is one of ten “super authorities” created during this era; it served as the regional coordinating body for the Metro-North Railroad, the Metropolitan Suburban Bus Authority, the Long Island Railroad, the New York City Transit Authority, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority, and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.7 The MTA reflected Lindsay’s corporate-managerial style of governmental leadership as well as a strong belief in rationalized regional planning for collective social benefit. While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Lindsay’s criticisms of interstate highway construction and his advocacy for public transportation verged on the radical.8 Lindsay’s commitment to

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 79


public mass transit is key to understanding his reactions to the “graffiti problem” as it developed on the subways.

WRITING IN THE MASS-MEDIATED PUBLIC SPHERE: THE FIRST ANTIGRAFFITI ALLIANCE, 1971–1973

Encountering “un-author-ized” writings on the public walls of major U.S. cities was hardly an uncommon experience in the late 1960s, when the new writing first began to appear. During this period of social struggle in shared public spaces, the city’s walls were frequently pressed into service as a public announcement system, a function they also serve on an everyday (i.e., legal) basis for advertisements and business signs. Popular observers made note of the unauthorized messages.9 There were several successful books on toilet-stall graffiti (“latrinalia”) published during this period, and while these focused mainly on the humor in the writings, much of that humor was found in the cultural disorientation caused by social change. In a similar vein, a New York Times essayist reminisced in 1971 that “in the days of my preadolescence, [subway] stations . . . offered a show-and-tell of cheerful obscenity. . . . As with so many facets of New York life, the graffiti have gone political.”10 On the walls and in the subways, the new name-writing was only one of several kinds of writing practiced, initially no more noteworthy than any other handwritten message on the walls and probably less memorable, given its common forms in the early 1970s. Unauthorized public hand-writings are commonly referred to as if they were categorically equivalent: they are all “graffiti.” Even if many citizens do make distinctions between the varieties of political commentary, sexual fantasy, names, profanities, and proclamations of love on the public walls, these distinctions are of little importance for most property owners, managers, and the maintenance workers whose task it is to keep the public walls “clean.” The new name-writing in its early stages of development—plainly printed letters written with marker or spray paint—gave little reason for casual observers or for maintenance workers to reconsider their usual ways of understanding what they saw. Nor did the new writing seem to convey a particularly interesting message: a name, usually followed by a number. For these reasons, writing was not immediately recognizable as a new and developing aesthetic practice to anyone except the writers and their peers. The names appeared to most people to be more of the same. In this way, writing, which would later

79

Austin Ch3

80

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 80


emerge as an unmistakably aesthetic undertaking, was initially recognized as “graffiti,” the generic category of handwritten scripts in public space. Aside from street gangs, the local neighborhood youth cultures from which the new writing emerged had largely gone unnoticed by newspaper reporters and other observers of urban life.11 One of the important initial innovations that mark the beginning of the new writing was in extending an older name-writing practice beyond the local walls and using the entire city as a writing surface for names and signatures. Not knowing that the letters and numbers represented a name and a street number when the new writing first appeared, some New Yorkers began to speculate about their meaning. Among these speculations was the suggestion that the letters and numbers were a coded reference to an upcoming terrorist action, a kind of warning for those who could decipher the code.12 The article on taki 183 in the New York Times (July 21, 1971) and a few others more or less ended this mystery for the newspaper-reading public. The recognition and construction of writing as a “problem” within the mass media did not begin in earnest until February 1972, when a Times reporter working the transportation beat focused on the difficulties the new writing was creating for subway maintenance officials. Despite a coordinated station-cleaning effort begun in the late 1960s to “beautify” New York City’s subway stations, the amount of graffiti in the subways had increased dramatically after 1970.13 To some, the graffiti threatened to overwhelm the visual order of this shared public space—this public sphere—by exceeding the budgeted capacity of city workers to keep it “clean.” The language of the 1972 Times article is worthy of our scrutiny, since it establishes many of the rhetorical conventions used to frame writing as a problem during the next decade. The article begins on an ominous note: “Subway graffiti are fast reaching what an IRT conductor has called ‘the epidemic stage’ here.” Although the number of writers in New York City was near its peak, none was interviewed for this report. Instead, MTA officials, some unnamed psychologists, an expert on the graffiti found in public toilet stalls, and the chairman of the Magic Marker corporation are the authoritative voices, the experts who “know” the problem and can convey its meaning and importance to readers. An MTA official placed the cost of removing the writing from subways and stations at more than $500,000 yearly, a factoid appearing in the second sentence of the article and clearly designed to cause a New Yorker, frequently reminded of the city’s increasing budget problems, some alarm.

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 81


In contrast to the earlier article on taki 183, the new writing in this report is made to appear as a malicious youth craze. A Transit Police official is given the space to tell of the arrest of a “14-year-old girl marking up a brandnew R-44 [subway] car at 1 a.m.,” evidence of the cunning of the vandals and their lack of civic appreciation.14 Psychologists were consulted to help explain the writers’ motives. Reflecting the general damning tenor of the article, they interpreted the new writing as “an attempt by insignificant people to impose their identity on others” (emphasis added). Readers were informed that apprehending writers was a difficult policing task and that current laws governing these illegal acts were inadequate when dealing with juveniles, since the only judicial recourse was parental consultation, which carried no guarantee of punishment. Despite a rather detailed accounting of the wrong done to city property, the article leaves the reader with little hope that the virtuous MTA would be able to successfully stop the new writing on the walls. The article ends, “Students of graffiti . . . endorse efforts to halt the current flood of graffiti, but they doubt it can be eradicated.” The New York Times and the MTA only partially understood what they wanted to represent here. The unnamed psychologists and the “latrinalia” expert quoted in the article refer to the kind of graffiti found in public rest room stalls in their explanations of the writers’ motives. This type of message-writing was again mentioned at the end of the article, citing the graffiti discovered in the ruins of Pompeii. As art historian Jack Stewart has decisively shown, writing is not graffiti, in the same way that advertising, murals, and signs are not graffiti. Although there is a family resemblance between these various types of writing-in-public, the distinctions between them cannot be overlooked. Of course, a single article does not in itself mean that the Times had established a set pattern or framework for representing the “graffiti problem.” In most urban newsrooms, it is simply part of regular professional practice to preselect information sources in such a way that official city or state views are given the main forum on almost all issues framed as “problems.” In this context, the article is a more or less standardized product of a staff writer assigned to cover the transportation beat, lending a sympathetic ear to his connections within the governmental bureaucracy.15 The Times’s perspective on the new writing emerged through a pattern of exclusions and misrepresentations of other viewpoints in its reporting on the “graffiti epidemic.” These exclusions and misrepresentations were much more noticeable in the paper’s editorial columns.

81

Austin Ch3

82

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 82


The Times’s editorial staff did not immediately join its news reporters and their MTA informants in alarm over the new writing. Appearing about two weeks after the article announcing that the new writing was an “epidemic,” the first Times editorial to deal with the topic adopted a rather weary, cynically bemused, and paternalistic view of contemporary graffiti, with the new writing included. The editorial jumps forward two thousand years into the future and looks back on the new writing, speculating on how it might be interpreted by a future archaeologist comparing the walls of New York City (once again) to those in ancient Pompeii: “From such scrawls, it appears, Pompeii at its most daring was higher-toned than Manhattan. But if that is the way it is, that is what the diggers two thousand years from now should find.” The somber conclusion is supported by examples of contemporary wall writings that are judged to be obscene, radical, racist, or “some comparably incisive social analysis.” The new writing makes a brief cameo appearance in this lineup as “the name and address of someone who, psychologists explain, simply needs to impose his identification on others,” a reference to the psychologists’s conclusion in the “epidemic” article two weeks earlier. The Times’s editors do not call for an eradication of the writings on the walls, since they are useful, and perhaps inevitable, signs of the “political temper of the day.” In fact, the editorial states that such efforts would be wasted and calls the Transit Authority’s attempts to maintain the visual order of the cars “a foredoomed effort to cope with the rising tide of graffiti.”16 Instead, the editorial ironically suggests that the MTA regularly supply free markers and spray paint once a week so that all “compulsive commentators” would be accommodated on a predictable schedule. The tone of this first Times editorial would lead the reader to believe that graffiti (writing) was a more or less natural human response to the urban environment, one that we, as humans, are obliged to live with. Such toleration and humanistic consideration of writing in the Times was singular and shortlived, and a less-than-condemning word has never again appeared in the Times’s editorials on this topic. At the end of April 1972, two teenagers with previous convictions for writing were sentenced by a family court judge to remove their work from subway walls. Since this sentence required the MTA’s cooperation to be carried out, we can assume that it had been designed with the MTA’s help and support. Concerning this cleanup duty, Judge Shirley Kram told a Times reporter that “I wanted to give [the defendants] the chance to adopt

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 83


a responsible attitude rather than to punish them.”17 A short editorial roundly praising Judge Kram’s sentencing decision appeared in the Times a week later.18 It snidely suggested that such punishment befitting a crime should be seen as an important legal precedent and further declared that close contact with the “low intellectual quality of subway graffiti” might convince the convicted writers to cease. The stern patriarchal voice of this editorial replaced the Times’s earlier attempt at world-weary tolerance and moved the paper’s editorial staff into line with the MTA and the family courts as a defender of city property and the state-sponsored aesthetic order. During the next three months, those seeking to frame the new writing as a problem were increasingly pushed to adopt a defensive stance. The notion that the new writing was a problem at all was open to debate, and other interested parties with access to the mass-mediated public sphere interpreted the new writing as culturally significant in positive ways. Countercultural views held considerable intellectual legitimacy and cultural capital at this time and had successfully argued for an expanding range of visual expressions to be covered under the term “art.” The new writing had powerful friends in certain cultural arenas, and they persuasively made their case within these contexts. Even the letters columns of the Times that year demonstrates that not all New Yorkers were convinced that an epidemic was occurring. As art—or, more pedantically, a kind of people’s concrete poetry—the sweeping organic calligraphy [writing] and the brilliant day-glo colors are pleasantly evocative of the “psychedelic lettering” which middle-class kids invented for their underground newspapers.19 The colorful names and blobs are not at all “pointless.” . . . Even “feeble minds” will chafe against the restraints of a social order that offers nothing but continued isolation and frustration.20 I say bravo to the kids who are changing an otherwise depressing, dank environment into something which at least has association, color and vitality.21

In response, City Council president Sanford D. Garelik proposed a “War on Graffiti” that would include a monthly “Anti-Graffiti Day” modeled on Earth Day.22 Calling on New Yorkers to “band together,” Garelik claimed that “graffiti pollutes the eye and the mind and may be one of the worst

83

Austin Ch3

84

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 84


forms of pollution we have to combat.” Why and how graffiti might violate the purity of a New Yorker’s mind, and what might make it such a heinous form of bodily pollution, are never specified, but Garelik’s blustering entrance into the issue signaled the elected city government’s interest in joining the emerging antigraffiti chorus line. The proposal for an “Anti-Graffiti Day” was never given serious consideration, but the militaristic threat encoded in the call to “war” became a mainstay of antigraffiti rhetoric thereafter. Although the Times panned Garelik’s idea as unrealistic, its editorial staff nursed similar ideas about the social dangers of writing. They found some value in “modestly written, sometimes revealing inscriptions,” but the new writing was maligned as “pointless names and blobs that now disfigure the city in Technicolor.” How did this disfigurement occur? As with Garelik’s pronouncements, the matter is presented as common sense, needing no further explanation. Writers are represented in this editorial as “feeble minds,” maniacally attacking the walls again and again, “regarding each clean-up as a fresh challenge.”23 The Times’s representation of writers as malicious, crazed youths searching for the social order’s slightest weakness was clearly intended to dehumanize writers and distinctly separate their intentions from those of advertisers, store owners, artists, or the city government itself, all of whom paint their names on the city’s walls in an authorized way. In these representations, New York City was made to look like ancient Rome, with the invading Visigoths at its walls; in this view, the city was under attack and defenseless against a barbaric, primitive, outside Other. A few months later, Lindsay himself became interested in the “problem” of the new writing. For the mayor, the first order of business was to change the laws in hopes of making writing more easily controllable within the shared public spaces (the streets) governed by city hall.24 Lindsay’s staff wrote and introduced legislation to the City Council that would make carrying an opened spray-paint can or ink marker in a public area a crime punishable by a fine of $100, six months in jail, or both. The law would greatly assist city police in their attempts to arrest writers (by no longer having to catch them in the act) but would apply to city-controlled territories only. The MTA’s shadowy status as a public authority (i.e., a branch of the New York State government) meant that the laws governing its territory could only be changed by the state legislature. Following the City Council’s proposal against writing, Lindsay wrote a series of letters to various governmental entities encouraging their partici-

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 85


pation in a coordinated antigraffiti effort. In a letter to the family court’s Judge Kram, who had created the “cleanup” sentence for convicted writers, the mayor joined with the Times and the MTA in expressing his approval of such punishment. Letters to the heads of municipal branches, including the chancellors of the Board of Education and the Board of Higher Education, asked for help and suggestions concerning the “epidemic.”25 Lindsay’s staff also began watching the MTA more closely on this issue, suspicious that the “problem” was not being taken seriously on the subways, where it was most noticeable. Despite these suspicions, for the most part Lindsay and MTA director William Ronan agreed on the nature of the “problem,” and the two chieftains exchanged letters about the use of neighborhood welfare recipients as work crews for removing writing from local subway stations.26 After another series of letter exchanges, Lindsay called a press conference to herald the emerging gentleman’s agreement between the mayor and the MTA, which also included the presentation of an award to a Transit Police officer for his special efforts to arrest writers. Ronan used the event to inform the public that the cost of removing writing from MTA property had risen to $1.3 million per year, almost $1 million more than had been claimed the year before.27 The language of these and other intergovernmental letters is important, since the Times obligingly reported on their exchange as newsworthy events and quoted from them verbatim in articles. The letters reflect the way that Lindsay and Ronan picked up the Times’s characterization of writing as an “epidemic” (originally attributed to a lowly, unnamed subway conductor only a year before). Thus, the antigraffiti alliance emerged slowly but steadily through the adoption of certain specific representations and rhetorical strategies that circulated among its members, and by way of their routine and official access to the mass-mediated public sphere, were passed on to the general population of New York City. These representations and rhetorics educated the public about what it saw on the walls by framing the new writing as a dangerous problem, which contrasted with the more humanistic and liberal representations of the alliances’ opposition. When Lindsay’s proposed antigraffiti legislation came out of City Council committee in the fall, it had been expanded and made considerably more harsh. The council, eager to affirm its place in the alliance of antigraffiti warriors, added an age restriction on sales of spray paint and markers and a retailer’s licensing requirement, to be supplemented by monthly reports of the names and addresses of all consumers who purchased mark-

85

Austin Ch3

86

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 86


ers and spray paint. A Times editorial dutifully appeared the next day.28 However the final bill, passed in October, resembled Lindsay’s original proposal, and only included the ban on open markers and cans.29 It is likely that retailers were able to persuade members of the council that the licensing and public name-taking would hinder their private enterprises. With the new law in place, Lindsay moved to institutionalize the network of public officials dealing with the “graffiti problem” by recruiting and creating an Anti-Graffiti Task Force, headed by his chief of staff, Steven Isenberg. The task force was to consist of those city agencies and public authorities that were in some way affected by “the City’s distressing graffiti problem”30 or related to its proposed solutions. This included the New York City Corporation Counsel, Environmental Protection, the Housing Authority, the MTA, and the Boards of Education and Higher Education, among others. The letters of invitation to create the task force (the city could not compel public authorities to participate) were collaged from bits of earlier letters and contained references to the “obscene or racist” nature of writing. This indicates that the distinction between the new writing and ordinary graffiti was still misunderstood or otherwise unimportant to the alliance. The letters were made up of recycled representations and phrasings that were themselves subsequently reproduced in letters and memos sent out by other offices. This bureaucratic language recycling is standard practice, but it also served the desires of the alliance to set the terms by which “the problem” could be limited in public discussion, framing it in such a way as to promote the least defensible view of writing. True to form, the press release announcing the formation of the task force borrowed its language verbatim from the recruitment letters. News reports gave the alliance an opportunity to put words in the mouths of their adversaries: “Even those who once professed mild amusement about graffiti are becoming increasingly indignant at the damage being done.”31 But only a few weeks earlier, the Times’s editorial staff had moved on to a more ominous conclusion: “The graffiti are no longer amusing: they have become a public menace.”32 Meanwhile, Lindsay became interested in finding a “technological solution” to the “plague,” something like a chemical coating that would prevent ink and spray paint from adhering to building surfaces, or a solution that would easily remove ink and spray paint from existing surfaces.33 Members of the alliance often implied that the real source of the problem was the ready access to inexpensive ink markers and spray paint. Such accusations

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 87


were common in the Times’s editorial pages: “The paint spray can is at the root of the current insanity; it is not only easy and attractive for feeble minds to exploit but it can be safely applied from a distance, even through open subway windows.”34 The fragmented collection of semiautonomous public authorities and city bureaus that were gathered into Lindsay’s task force could understand and respond to a change in technology much more easily than a complex and human “youth problem.” The ease with which the Times and other alliance members dismissed any serious consideration of the writers’ motivations for their work reflects an inability to think of writers as fully active human agents. Nonhuman technology provided an easier target. Thus, one of the first actions of the task force was to contact the directors of ink marker and spray-paint manufacturers’ associations as well as retailers’ associations. “The seeds of this epidemic lie in the technological breakthroughs that made possible indelible pen markers and spray paints,” read the task force’s letters to these directors. This was followed by an explicit claim that manufacturers and retailers had a responsibility to assist the city government in its search for solutions. The letters mention two kinds of assistance. One focused on a technological solution: industry-sponsored research and development projects for new resistive coatings, better paint and ink removers, and new paint and ink formulas that are more easily removed. The other idea involved vague suggestions for some sort of new restrictions or controls at the point of sale. The success of a small-scale effort to prohibit paint and marker sales to minors in the Washington Heights neighborhood provided the only concrete example.35 Other warnings had already reached the retailers’ and manufacturers’ associations. A newsletter of the Paint and Wallpaper Dealers Association of Greater New York two months earlier made a pitch for members to keep paint and markers behind counters or in other areas where they could not be easily stolen. The appeal carried a veiled warning in the form of a report on an antigraffiti education drive in high schools funded by several private sources.36 Although not explicitly stated, it was implied that negative repercussions would befall the association or its members if they appeared to be uncooperative in such efforts. The association’s executive secretary assured Lindsay’s task force of its complete support. The close relationship between paint manufacturers’ associations and antigraffiti campaigns, characteristic of antigraffiti efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, dates from these exchanges in New York City in the early 1970s.37

87

Austin Ch3

88

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 88


No further reporting on the task force appeared in the print media for several months, but New Yorkers were constantly reminded of the “epidemic” in other news stories, reports that provided opportunities for the antigraffiti alliance to once again educate the public to see the new writing as a “problem.” For instance, the Times reported on a City Planning Commission’s meeting where the city’s portion of the Transit Authority’s annual budget was the principal topic of discussion. But the article’s title and text indicated that the request of $373 million from a dangerously overextended city budget was not the most important issue—most of the article was instead concerned with the “graffiti epidemic.”38 Readers expecting information about transit financing were made aware that every subway car in the system now had writing on it, and that tests had shown that an expensive experimental Teflon coating for the subway cars was ineffective. (This was the first of what was to become a long string of failures to find a “technological solution.”) An MTA official also told the commission that an educational campaign had been discussed during task force meetings, as well as an antigraffiti media appeal aimed at young people by using popular sports figures and movie stars. Then the article cited a new atrocity tale: twentyfour freshly repainted cars had arrived at their Manhattan destination once again covered with writing. This story, recounted before the commission and duly reported in the Times article, was clearly meant to demonstrate the crazed demonic energy and pervasive presence of the writers and was equally intended to get this representation in front of those newspaper readers worried about the city’s finances. Even though several alternative sources challenged the representation of the new writing as mindless juvenile vandalism, the antigraffiti alliance often responded to such cultural authority with demonstrations of its side’s own pragmatic common sense—usually voiced through “the people” in various guises, especially teenagers. For instance, the Times published three articles in five months about various adult-supervised youth groups (one of which was a city-led confederation of street gangs) that were volunteering to remove writing from subway trains and stations.39 Isenberg, the chair of Lindsay’s task force, claimed to have taken an informal polling of subway riders and found that the overwhelming majority did not feel it was art.40 Almost every public statement on the subject by the MTA or by Isenberg contained derogatory references to those who felt that writing was anything other than a vicious destruction of public property. MTA director Ronan spoke as the urban equivalent of a sage patriarch when he told the Times

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 89


that New Yorkers have “got to get away from the idea that [writing] is cute or a way for someone to express himself in a mechanistic society. . . . That’s a lot of nonsense.”41 Ronan’s ire was directed to those representations of writing that collided with the alliance’s view of a “graffiti epidemic.” Although these alternative opinions had little to no effect on the policies or actions taken by governmental authorities against writing, they continually bedeviled the alliance in the mass-mediated public sphere, undercutting its legitimacy and authority in the public eye. Ironically, these opposing ideas frequently appeared in the Times’s own letters to the editor columns, just across from the alliance’s fortress on the editorial page. Of course, a letters page cannot be considered “the true voice of the people” any more than a newspaper’s reporting is a “true reflection of reality.” Letters are selected, rejected, and edited, and viewpoints are contradicted or reinforced as in any other commercial mass media. But the professional practices that guide the selection of letters are different from those that guide news reporting or the editorial page, and these differences were enough to allow alternative criticism to appear with some frequency for a while.42 Earlier short quotes have given some notion of the lively debate over writing that took place in the letters column of the New York Times in the early 1970s. The letters included responses to and from various “authorities” on the issue, as well as from New Yorkers speaking simply from their own perspective as urban residents. The volley of ideas and comments began shortly after the first Times editorial about writing, an editorial that was less than condemning in its tone. Murray Rubenstein asked, “Why condone such cowardly vandalism with this light approach? . . . I am for getting back to simple verities such as punishing the abuse of property. It’s my city too and I don’t care one bit to have it destroyed or to offend the good taste of my fellow citizens. It’s out of control, and spreading.”43 Similar concerns were frequently echoed in the letters column between 1972 and 1974. For instance, Paul Seligman wrote claiming that it is the leniency [i.e., of sentencing the writers to wash the walls] of judges and the city administration—and leniency is permissiveness—that permits this desecration and crime against property that may have contributed to [murder] and other crimes. If children and young adults think they can get away with defacing property, perhaps in their fragile minds they feel they can get away with more.44

89

Austin Ch3

90

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 90


George Jochnowitz saw in writing the harbinger of an equally grand slide into social chaos: Graffiti are an offense against public space. Subway walls belong to the people—to all the people. . . . Urban dwellers brave the muggers and put up with high rents because they wish to live in the centers of civilization. . . . If they [writers] succeed in making the city’s public space unattractive to a majority of its residents, New York will become a backwater.45

In these letters we find everyday commonsense connections being made between writing, the youth problem, and the urban crisis. Circulating through the mass-mediated public sphere of the period are inferences that society’s tolerance of young people’s autonomy has produced a generation teetering on the verge of becoming murderous Visigoths, with civilization itself now at stake. The conflicting, disorderly, and out-of-control actions of youth can only be moderated through the established authority of the state, and thus, the state’s aesthetic order must always prevail. These apocalyptic forecasts were frequently challenged by other citizens with equal force. Wrote Ronald Gross: The subway graffiti which have so upset people, seem stunningly beautiful and socially heartening to me. . . . Is anyone really hurt by colored letters? Must we literally whitewash spontaneous communication? Can we afford to lose one more impulse of affirmation in a city dying of anomie? Why are we so uptight?46

An art history professor from Lehman College lovingly described writing with the poetic flourish allowed his academic discipline (“words made flesh in noisy catacombs and stretched high and wide in piercing color ribbons”), ending his letter with the authority of a historian: “This efflorescence of dormant sensibility . . . will excite our curiosity and respect long after tidy citizens have scrubbed the cars back to chase impeccability.”47 Carol Morse Ginsberg was much less restrained, her authority grounded in an informed cultural citizenship: “I must say here and now that I am higher than a hophead on subway art. . . . Growing up in the city has given me the insights that enable me to look at the subway cars and see that they are decorated, not desecrated. And I’ll be damned if I’ll sit and groan over the graffiti issue.”48

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 91


In January 1973, a year after framing the new writing as an “epidemic,” the Times reported the progress made by Transit Police against writers during the previous year: over 1,500 youths had been seized for their “graffiti work.” Most had received citations; almost one in three had been sentenced to cleanup duty.49 But this bit of good news for the alliance was quickly replaced by acknowledgment of a new development in the writers’ practice. Although it appeared to MTA officials that smaller writings (signatures, tags) had “reached a saturation level,” they had to recognize that what they called “grand design or masterpiece” works, which covered much larger areas on the outside of the trains, had increased sharply during the previous six months. An often-quoted MTA executive officer for operations and maintenance told the Times that these new, larger works were dangerous to passengers, since they sometimes covered the windows on the subway doors. (Why this was such a danger is unclear, although for whites and well-to-do New Yorkers, the pervasive fear of getting off at the wrong station brings it more into focus.) The article, which included a large photograph of a “piece” on the side of a subway train, provided at best an ambiguous view on the future of the “graffiti problem.” While the article assured the reader that the Transit Police had made more arrests and increased surveillance in the train storage yards, the article’s title reinforced the worry that the MTA was loosing the war in the subways: “Fight Against Subway Graffiti Progresses from Frying Pan to Fire.”50 The development of new works on a larger scale signaled to everyone that the “problem” was not going away. The report of the mayor’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force on the cost of removing graffiti was completed during the early spring and carried more bad news for the alliance. At least $10 million a year was being spent in New York City to reduce the surface covered by graffiti to just 50 percent on schools, public housing, municipal buildings, and subways. Reducing graffiti to “a more acceptable level” (10 percent surface coverage) would require an estimated $24 million per year.51 Isenberg tried to put the best face on the report to Lindsay by attaching a memorandum listing the task force’s various prevention programs. “Technology” was first on the list. City technicians were still working on easier and cheaper methods of removal and protection, and the National Paint and Coatings Association and even NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) had agreed to assist in testing and research. Isenberg’s list also contained the graffiti arrest statistics for 1972 (1,562) and the first two months of 1973 (282), and cited

91

Austin Ch3

92

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 92


the willing cooperation of the Paint and Wallpaper Dealers Association in making paint and markers less accessible to theft. Finally, the list of preventive measures included considering “legitimate and constructive” alternatives to graffiti in the near future; but while it listed some examples and suggestions, definitive plans were not mentioned.52 New Yorkers had been warned about the city’s finances for over a decade, but these warnings had always been followed by reassuring reports of the proper measures being taken by responsible officials. Although the deceptively calm public discussion on the municipal debt issue did nothing to betray that the city was two years away from bankruptcy, by the spring of 1973 the city’s high poverty and unemployment statistics, its extraordinary rate of job loss, and the continued flight of the Fortune 500 beyond the city limits were difficult to ignore. The Times’s coverage of the task force report did allow the mayor to place the “graffiti epidemic” in the pocketbooks of New Yorkers, quoting Lindsay as saying, “It’s a dirty shame that we must spend money for this purpose in a time of austerity . . . to reduce the demoralizing visual impact of graffiti.” This once again demonstrated the mayor’s frustration with the problem, and the Times took a great deal of its hope from Isenberg’s list in the previously cited memorandum (which had morphed into a press release), but the article’s title would likely have left a reader scanning the headlines yearning for reprieve: “At $10-Million, City Calls It a Losing Graffiti Fight.”53 The Daily News provided no reassurances either, implying that writers were holding the city hostage: “Graffiti Makes City Scribble $10 Million Check.”54 The letters columns in the Times were not the only place where alternative views could be expressed. The task force report appeared the same week as the two articles by Richard Goldstein in New York magazine mentioned in the previous chapter. The juxtaposition of the task force report and Goldstein’s articles offered sharp distinctions in understanding the writing on the walls. One of Goldstein’s articles hailed writing as an important new youth culture and the second announced the results of the magazine’s “Taki Awards,” “in recognition of [the] grand graffiti conquest of the subways.”55 These articles openly celebrated writing and contained biographies and photographs of writers and their works. Goldstein’s articles on writing stand out as perhaps the most detailed and insightful of the decade, recounting the culture’s formation and its relationship to the city, to shared public space, and to other youth culture traditions. His concluding paragraph nicely summarizes the potential of writing at that time.

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 93


The graffiti movement is a lot like rock ’n’ roll in its pre-enlightenment phase. To me, it announces the first genuine teenage street culture since the fifties. Not another season of imitation-psychedelia, but a fiercer, hotter style, much closer to the spirit of West Side Story than Easy Rider. If all this begins to seem as compelling to middle-class kids as the J.D. [juvenile delinquent] style did twenty years ago, then we are in for some inventive times.56

The idea of such youthful autonomy was anathema for the alliance, and Lindsay’s technocratic liberalism stood in stark contrast to Goldstein’s countercultural progressivism: “Mayor Lindsay . . . ridiculed those who called this ‘vandalism’ an art form. . . . He suggested that those who wanted to beautify public properties . . . should work through the schools and adopt subway platforms on which to exercise their aesthetic cravings under expert guidance.”57 Goldstein’s articles constitute a persuasive justification for taking writing seriously as popular culture and as art rather than crime. The articles parade several well-known art world authorities who speak affirmatively of writing’s artistic merits, including art critic Saul Steinberg and pop artist Claes Oldenburg, while Lindsay, the Times, and the MTA are predictably represented as philistines. Indeed, Oldenburg’s approving remarks were repeated in several articles in other newspapers and magazines: You’re standing there in the [subway] station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America. At first it seems anarchical—makes you wonder if the subways are working properly. . . . The city is like a newspaper anyway, so it’s natural to see writing all over the place.58

But Goldstein and New York had not been the first to suggest that writing was, at the least, a valuable cultural expression and possibly even art. Authors writing for publications that took a more openly countercultural stance or were connected to the art world (which occasionally included the Times’s own art pages) challenged the portrayal of writing as vandalism, or else championed its “vandalistic” aspects as socially valuable or at least understandable. Some of these alternative views were formulated even before graffiti was constructed as a problem. The first Times editorial (mentioned earlier) focused more on writing’s wider cultural significance than on its ille-

93

Austin Ch3

94

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 94


gal relation to private property, and in its studied liberal humanism the editorial primarily reflected a concern with increasing social alienation and the declining quality of urban life. Several similar suggestions that the new writing was a kind of public communication by alienated youth appeared during the first few years of the 1970s. For instance, an editorial in the New York–based magazine Industrial Design claimed that writing was “a cry of alienation, a plea for recognition” and (again citing the walls of ill-fated Pompeii) placed writing in the context of the physical and social “decay that surrounds all of us.”59 The recognition of writing as a product of alienation was more commonly combined with another alternative view that recognized writing as art. This understanding was put most succinctly by Margaret Donaldson in the Times’s letters columns: “Graffiti in the subway . . . is primitive pop art on the part of inarticulate people looking for some way to say ‘I’m alive.’ ”60 Anti-Graffiti Task Force chairman Isenberg defensively challenged this common viewpoint and told New Yorkers that “the most important notion to be discredited publicly is that graffiti vandalism and defacement of property can be cloaked with the justification or excuse that it is an acceptable form of pop art.”61 Paul Korshin, in a letter to the Times, lined up with the alliance partners: “[Writing is] not the cry of an anxious ego, eager to communicate joy or angst, but the defiant snarl of a nuisance. The uniqueness of art ought not to be confused with a phenomenon so pervasive as graffiti.”62 But the MTA and the Times’s editors had little credibility on matters aesthetic. Their claims were challenged by no less an authority than the paper’s own worldly art critic John Canaday, who reluctantly admitted that Harlem writers had actually improved some “authorized” public murals by (illegally) writing over them, giving them “a living, breathing, sweating identity with their time and environment.”63 Mitzi Cunliffe, a Londonbased architecture professor also writing for the Times’s arts section, extended the “cry of alienation” analysis even beyond art: “[Writing] is the last stand of the individual against encroaching anonymity, against enclosure by bricks, concrete, real rock. . . . Compared to Jackson Pollock’s painting they seem realer, much realer than art.”64 Once writing was removed to a studio or gallery and “performed” on canvas, however, its apprehension as an art object was assured, since the “frame” of art—that is, the context of the (literal) frame, the white walls of the gallery, and the exhibition space—more or less guaranteed its status. Hugo Martinez’s sponsorship of the “reformed” writers group, United

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 95


Graffiti Artists (UGA), opened venues to translate the work on subway trains and walls onto canvases. During the summer of 1972, he arranged for City College to sponsor an exhibition for writers who promised to stop writing illegally. But the translation of writing into art in this space and in the galleries did not disrupt the city and state’s aesthetic order, even if the paintings themselves directly challenged that order. The Times covered the City College exhibition and included a mediumsized photo of a writer at work. The article contained a significant number of quotes from writers promoting writing as art. For instance, super kool 223, the first writer quoted in the article, claimed, “Like it or not, we’ve made the biggest art movement ever to hit New York City.” Aside from writers, the only other source interviewed was Martinez, whose justification for writing was grounded in social work rather than the form’s aesthetic values: “We are trying to rechannel the energy of these young people toward a more constructive goal. . . . Maybe if people see graffiti on the walls inside buildings instead of on walls outside of buildings, they will think it is art.” The article never addresses the issue of writing’s aesthetic merits as art and not-so-subtly conveys the alliance’s negative judgment of writing by referring to both Martinez and the writers as “graffiti scrawlers.”65 Still, the fact that writing was acceptable as art in that place made it more difficult to claim that writing was not art somewhere else. Likewise, Goldstein’s articles for New York drew almost all of their information from UGA. The group served as one of the few sources of information that originated from writers themselves and this allowed a few of its members to become something like media celebrities for a short time. Goldstein reported that ray-b 954, for instance, had appeared on four different television stations within three months. The exposure worked in the writers’ favor by again challenging the alliance’s characterization of their work. The second largest source of income to the city came from tourism, and in the early 1970s New York City was still arguably the art capital of the world. But solutions to the “graffiti problem” that might in some way economically capitalize on this fortuitous set of local circumstances were never seriously considered by the alliance. Articles covering UGA’s exhibitions provided forums for other art authorities’ positive judgments. The New York Post, for instance, reported on UGA’s Razor Gallery exhibition in September 1973. Although the Post was more sympathetic to the alliance’s understanding of writing than New York magazine, it still quoted approving remarks by Art News editor Elizabeth

95

Austin Ch3

96

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 96


Baker, art archivist Barbara Moore, and Warhol associate Ronnie Cutrone about the writing on the trains.66 Art critic Peter Schjeldahl also reviewed the exhibition in a substantial article in the Times’s arts section. Schjeldahl joined the praise for the work on the trains; he, unlike Cutrone, was also enthusiastic about the work on canvas, even encouraging collectors to buy it: “None of these [works], for all their untutored crudities, would do discredit to a collection of contemporary art.” Like the letter from the art historian mentioned earlier, part of what secures the place of writing in the frame of “art” is the way language is used to describe it. For instance, Schjeldahl was much taken with phase 2’s work, describing it as “couched in fat, sensual, screaming-pink script set in an ambience of blue billows.”67 Even the mainstream Newsweek reviewed this exhibition of writing-oncanvas in its art section.68 These alternative views, lacking the force of public policy, were nonetheless important to the development of writing culture in New York City. In the first instance, they demonstrated that writing was appreciated by cultural elites who were willing and able to use their authority to speak out in the mass media. Second, the alternative stance questioned the alliance’s authoritative representations of writing as a calamity and showed that other experts and New Yorkers had just cause to celebrate the new writing as art—or at least as a reasonable (and not particularly threatening) expression of the human condition in the Naked City. Not only did such positive judgments force the alliance to adopt a defensive posture during this first “war”; they also pushed the alliance to reconsider the strategies it had used to broadcast its views of the “blighting plague of graffiti.” Meanwhile, the task force report issued in the spring of 1973, which had called for massive expenditures and efforts to win the “war,” seems to have turned some of the alliance’s supporters against the alliance itself. Again, while letters to the editor cannot be taken as a quantitative index of New Yorkers in general, they can show the range of disaffection. With the report’s release, the Times began publishing letters that called into question the city’s efforts to prevent writing. “Who is kidding whom?” asked P. R. Harper on the day the report was made public. “There must be cooperation with these vandals somewhere along the way from transit authority officials.”69 Harper was not alone in his accusations of governmental complicity: “Has our transit system and city government not been asleep . . . in controlling the graffiti nightmare?” asked Blandinia Ijams.70 Others felt compelled to offer suggestions to the city on how to prevent writing more effectively.71 These letters are

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 97


all addressed to the MTA, even though the subway system was not the only public space used by the writers; according to the task force report, it was also not the most costly to maintain: the schools were.72 But subways are the most heavily trafficked of the shared public spaces used by taxpaying adults, and it was in the subways that most New Yorkers (nearly four million each day) came into close contact with the writing on the walls. By the time the dust settled on the task force report, Lindsay was clearly approaching the end of his political career. Although he had been represented in the national media for several years as a leading liberal spokesman on the crises facing the nation’s central cities, as early as 1972 a resigned cynicism about the fate of urban areas (masking a white conservative backlash from the suburbs) had become the predominant mood among elite commentators. Political scientist Norton Long proposed that the central city be made “an Indian reservation for the poor, the deviant, the unwanted, and for those who make a business or career of managing them for the rest of society.” Another expert, George Steinlieb, told U.S. News and World Report that the central city would best be used as a “sandbox” to contain undesirables: “I’m saying that for real because I don’t want these people climbing up over the [suburban?] walls, and that’s a tax that I am willing to pay.”73 “Law and order” (at that time, political code words for enforced social control) replaced older values of rational planning as the primary urban policy paradigm. Lindsay had not won an outright majority in his second mayoral election, and his controversial stances during an incredibly tumultuous period of social struggle also worked against him. His electoral base, always fragile, would clearly not be able to carry him a third time, and he was advised not to seek the mayoralty again. He made his announcement not to run in March 1973, just before the release of the task force report.74 Lindsay nonetheless maintained political ambitions, and mass transit in urban areas had been one of the key issues in his unsuccessful presidential bid. Before leaving office, he had several transportation projects he wanted to see completed—or at least symbolically recognized as his own.

THE ALLIANCE STUMBLES, THEN FALLS

Among the important task force proposals were suggestions for deterring writing in the subway storage yards. But the available evidence indicates

97

Austin Ch3

98

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 98


that the MTA either ignored these proposals or could not implement them, despite its claims of having increased yard security. During April 1973, Lindsay’s liaison to the MTA was instructed to give the task force recommendations for yard security directly to Director Ronan himself at a meeting. The liaison’s notes from that meeting indicate that Ronan was in some unspecified way unhappy with the plan, even though publicly he was in favor of making the yards more secure.75 Lindsay needed the MTA’s cooperation to demonstrate his effectiveness and commitment to mass transportation during the spring as he kept open the option of another run for mayor.76 After he was advised not to seek the office again, Lindsay’s relationship with the MTA, which had always been somewhat strained, became more confrontational. In a letter to Director Ronan in June, he chastised the MTA for not giving “the problem of graffiti vandalism” a higher priority, and again plugged the task force’s proposal to increase security and surveillance in the yards. Frustrated by the lack of response to these demands, Lindsay made his criticisms public, telling news reporters that the MTA had not “even bothered to look at [the proposals]. They don’t give a damn and could care less about being responsive to elected officials.”77 The report of Lindsay’s attack on the MTA in the Times was accompanied by the first in a series of front-page articles that critically assessed the condition of the subways even as they maintained sympathy for the MTA officials running the system.78 The series examined a long list of “environmental” problems that made riding the subway an unpleasant experience. Graffiti made this lineup, alongside noise and air pollution. The break between the MTA and the Lindsay administration was sharp, and later actions indicate that the MTA had made plans that were not included in its discussions with Lindsay or the task force. The alliance had begun to fall apart after only fifteen months. Reports in the Times during 1974 signaled that the first rush of evangelical antigraffiti inspiration had quickly devolved into resigned cynicism over the possibilities of winning the war. That resignation is exemplified in a front-page article in the Sunday real estate section which evaluated the graffiti war’s gains thus far. The article quoted the opinion of an MTA official about the antigraffiti law passed by the City Council in the fall of 1972, to the effect that it “has proved no deterrent whatsoever.” Nor had the celebrated cleanup sentencing created by the family courts and the MTA been any more effective. “On weekends, the kids who have been found guilty

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 99


scrub down cars and stations . . . but to them it’s a lark and mainly an opportunity to exchange notes.”79 In fact, the “cleanup” sentence had served an important unifying function among writers and helped to consolidate the citywide culture of writing by offering a place for writers from one part of the city to meet those working in another. lsd om: There would literally be like twenty writers [together during the cleanup sentence]. And the cool thing about it was you always wanted to meet these guys, but there was no way you could ever meet them. So they were bringing us together and actually creating a situation where now we meet and now we can plan our next bombing [painting] spree. And that’s exactly what happened.80

Another writer told journalist Glenn O’Brien that when you got sentenced to clean up duty, you’d go up in the Bronx early one Saturday morning and they give you these gloves and this bucket and say, “Here, wash these wall.” You’d find yourself standing next to famous graffiti writers and it’d be “Yeah! Let’s get together and go writing tonight!” Being from Brooklyn, I didn’t know where too many of the yards were. You’d meet guys from the Bronx and they’d take you uptown and show you where the real yards [for the number lines, which run from the Bronx to Brooklyn through Manhattan] are.81

These were important contributions to writing culture. Writers from this period still readily express their appreciation for the courts’ and the MTA’s unintended efforts toward furthering writing culture through the cleanup sentence. Although the city’s Housing Authority had found some success with the antigraffiti law (by threatening parent-tenants with the possibility that their children’s convictions could have a bearing in eviction hearings), its moral persuasion was minimal. “These kids don’t consider it vandalism, they consider it art,” a detective reported, as though amazed that writers had not adopted the alliance’s framework for understanding the “problem.” Despite their protestations that the law and the judicial system were inadequate to the task, the Transit Police had continued to make more arrests each year. Carter B. Horsley’s article in the Times reported that over 1,100

99

Austin Ch3

100

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 100


writers had been charged during the first three months of 1974, only 300 less than the entire previous year.82 Another Times article in 1974 spoke with no less ambivalence about the possibilities of ending “the plague.” A reporter positioned himself between a small group of writers and a much larger group of two hundred neighborhood residents from Queens that had organized a “graffiti good-by party” to remove the writing from the walls of a local school. One of the writers told the reporter, “It hurts me to see them take it down. I think it’s creative and makes things look much better.” The people who had gathered for the “party,” occupying the space in daylight and attempting to restore each wall’s uniform [aesthetic] orderliness, saw the writing as a sign that the neighborhood was decaying. “We don’t want this [neighborhood] to turn into a ghetto,” a homeowner told the reporter. Another woman stated that she had “lived here 38 years and it is awful to see this neighborhood go down like this.” The reporter posed these two views as a “controversy,” implying that each view carried weight. Norman Mailer was cited as the heavy for the writers, and the MTA was the cultural authority for the “party goers.” But the outcome, at least within the article, appeared to be inevitable. The writers are represented almost as enemy spies. In no way thrilled over the “party goers” activities that day, they were nonetheless pleased to have newly repainted writing surfaces, and the article reports on their plans to write on the school’s walls again at the next opportunity.83 There is no indication that they would not succeed. After 1974, the Times withdrew its interest in writing, in part because of the other, more immediate problems that New York City faced. But the city had always faced more pressing problems than the “graffiti epidemic.” Asking why this minor threat was cause for “war” is one reason for following the construction of “the graffiti problem” so closely; cultural preconceptions were clearly guiding what otherwise seem like irrational behaviors by elites. The Times had written four antigraffiti editorials during 1972; after 1972, only one other editorial appeared during the decade that concerned writing. In keeping with the collapse of the alliance, this last editorial sarcastically criticized an expensive MTA proposal to use attack dogs in the storage yards, asking that “the [subway] service in general [be] improved to the level of the transit system in Baghdad or Kabul” first.84 The Times published approximately 120 articles and letters about writing between 1972 and the end of 1974; in the remaining five years of the decade, it published less than 20.

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 101


IN RETROSPECT

The basic frame for understanding writing as an urban problem initially formed during 1972 did not significantly change until the end of the decade. The new representations of the late 1970s did not completely erase those created earlier; rather, newer representations came to predominate within a complex, overlapping network of different (hostile) framings. Because of their continued importance, it is worth pausing here to note a couple of the recurring themes and limitations of these early representations of writing by the antigraffiti warriors. Most striking in retrospect is the odd sense of inevitable failure that appeared in their broadcasts right from the start. Those who made war on graffiti often seemed convinced of the futility of their efforts. This sense of inevitable failure can in part be connected to the supposedly transhistorical nature of “graffiti” so frequently implied in the constant references to illfated Pompeii. If the writing on the walls had existed as long as humans have built walls, then how was New York City, with its multitude of problems, to effectively change the “natural” course of human history? But the resignation to an inevitable loss in the war was also part of a growing consensus that New York City as a whole was falling apart and sliding downhill. In this regard, the connections between youth problems and urban problems are important. In the view of many, the responsibilities of the city’s moral order were not being successfully passed on to the younger generation, who were instead exploiting and mocking the city’s weaknesses through petty crime. Many felt that neither parents nor the state were willing or able to provide the necessary discipline to right the city’s course; crime had become the number one concern among the citizenry since the mid-1960s, and much of the rise in crime was associated with young people. New York City was also falling apart physically, as was clear to everyone: the subways were besieged with breakdowns and collisions, the streets were filthy much of the time, and housing was scarce, expensive, and dilapidated. The city seemed filled with youth gangs who took to the subways for sport, while several buildings in the Bronx were set afire each day. The modern Rome, the seat of the empire, was falling. The defeatist tone was sounded most loudly, outside of the early Times editorials, in Horsley’s article mentioned earlier, although its title belied that fatalism: “Graffiti’s Foes United by Hope.” The article covers the problems of landlords and building managers in addressing the writing on

101

Austin Ch3

102

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 102


their walls, and chronicles what were mostly failed efforts. Consistently, the managers interviewed had given up, while a few continued in frustration without hope of completing the task. Isenberg, head of Lindsay’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force, speaks about the lack of public tolerance for writing and uses the opportunity to counter writing’s defenders. This attack was a weak substitute for concrete victories in the war. The article ends with a vice president of the National Paint and Coatings Association saying that writing is “a sociological problem, not a product problem,” in an attempt to fend off suggestions that manufacturers might be to blame. Nonetheless, the “sociological” nature of the problem meant that it was less likely to be containable.85 The characterization of writing as a “blight,” a “plague,” and an “epidemic” did very little to bolster hopes for an alliance victory in the war. The metaphor of catastrophic disease at the root of these characterizations may have successfully relieved the city administration of responsibility for the appearance of the “problem,” since epidemics are commonly thought to appear naturally and without warning. But it offered few avenues for imagining effective action. Instead, characterizing writing as an epidemic promoted a scenario of uncontrolled biological catastrophe that pictured writing as a powerful threat that must be quickly contained, lest calamity befall the community. To complicate this scenario, the assumption of a preexisting healthy organic city that underlies the image of an “epidemic” was hardly persuasive to anyone in the early 1970s. New Yorkers had been constantly reminded that all was not well in the New Rome for over a decade. In the scenario of epidemic, the alliance was placed at the city’s bedside, desperately searching for a (technological) cure, while evidence that the plague was spreading was visible to everyone. A large number of New Yorkers were already convinced that the city was near death, even before the “epidemic” had arrived. The rhetoric of an epidemic implied a fated tragedy rather than a melodrama. The arrival of an antidote at the last minute was unlikely. The images of biological disaster used to represent writing in the massmediated public sphere made the city’s shared public spaces seem diseased. The natural order of the New Rome was under attack by a spreading viral script that “disfigured” shared public space. But that “natural order” is both implicitly and explicitly linked to the social meanings of property ownership and the legal uses of property. The new writing pointed to new ways that certain features of property might be put to use by nonowners.

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 103


Writing disrupts the uniform orderliness of shared public spaces, “re-coding” or “re-territorializing” them. By coding I simply mean the everyday surface signs by which people socialized within the United States have come to communicate and understand that property is not available for free use, but is restricted to use by its owners and overseers, whether private or public. These codes mark off territory, defining the acceptable order within a particular area. The acceptance of these codes is fundamental to a society based on individual property ownership. So accustomed are we to this social order that this sign system—these aesthetic cultural codes—are invisible to us, part of the everyday, unconscious expectations that police the behaviors of most citizens.86 In this frame, the vague references to the serious and degenerative effects of writing on the people of New York City (polluting the mind, etc.) gain some clarity. Antigraffiti warriors and their allies consistently spoke of the “demoralizing” effects of writing. Writers ignored property boundaries (private/public, as well as separate ownership) and assessed all surfaces in terms of their potential usefulness as a broadcast medium for their names. If we accept the alliance at its word, this implies that the moral order of New York City was underpinned by a shared social consensus about the practices and signs of property ownership, as opposed to a consensus about the value of democracy, the family, or some equally fundamental value.87 Writing pointed to dangerous cracks in that consensus among the young; it appeared to be a public announcement that some people in the city had very little, if anything, invested in an orderly social system of property ownership. The names that appeared on the walls were a recruitment poster for an alternative to the established moral order. Writing not only said “I am here,” but also “You are not alone in your rebellion. The city is ours.” The situation was made all the more frightening by the fact that the writers were youths, who would eventually grow to adulthood. Since they were not being socialized to respect property as young people, could they be expected to respect property when they became adults?88 For some New Yorkers, the answer to this question was of the utmost importance. Writing was taken as a sign that something in the city’s social reproductive mechanisms was seriously malfunctioning. Commonly held fears about urban youth culture (particularly youth of color during this period of racial succession) and popular assumptions of New York’s social and physical decline combined to produce a bizarre assessment of the threat posed by writing. Sheldon Pitterman spoke of writers as maniacs in

103

Austin Ch3

104

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 104


his letter to the Times: “Should there not be, besides the rather lenient and unworkable penalties, methods by which the destruction of our subway system by ravaging, mentally ill ‘artists’ can be prevented?”89 To Blandinia Ijams the triumph of writing was even more ominous: “Is Manhattan on the rocks? One begins to suspect that it is when . . . teenaged and subteenaged barbarians can keep the city in a state of siege. . . . Are we really so helpless?”90 Here the comparison between contemporary New York City and the fallen cities of antiquity, overrun by marauding barbarians, becomes more explicit, in a fantasy of impending social apocalypse, much worse than past fears of the Naked City. Young people were not the future of New York City, but an irrational, maniacal outside presence who would bring about the New Rome’s final destruction. The alliance’s explanations of the writers’ motivations were borrowed from theories about graffiti in public rest room stalls. The Times’s editorials reduced writers’ motives to simplistic slogans (e.g., “the need to impose their identity on others”). Like Pitterman and Ijams in the letters quoted above, Lindsay and the Times represented the writers as mentally disturbed but nonetheless culpable for their crimes. For instance, in August 1972 the Times reported that “the Mayor said it was ‘the Lindsay theory’ that the rash of graffiti madness was ‘related to mental health problems.’ He described the scrawlers as ‘unsecure [sic] cowards’ who sought recognition from their peers.”91 There is real irony in an elected public official—one who had recently made a run for the presidency—attempting to pathologize the pursuit of public renown in this statement. That irony notwithstanding, the “theory” carries the strain of an insult directed at writers rather than a serious attempt to understand their motives. Lindsay appears here as nothing so much as an outraged parent, screaming in frustration at the inexplicable misbehavior of a clever teenager. The alliance presented writers as juvenile delinquents participating in a malicious craze and in need of “a good lesson,” which, of course, they longed to provide. But the ability of the city and the MTA to administer such a lesson was bounded by law rather than enabled by intimate familial authority, and the writers were clearly not impressed with the threat the alliance presented. Writing could have been framed in terms of other youth problems, particularly gang and race problems. But these would have given voice to other, perhaps even more fearful, fractures in the social order. Alternatively, objections to writing could have been focused on writers’ safety instead of their vandalism. The patriarchal policing of shared public space prohibited

Austin Ch3

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 105


that possibility from emerging. It was more important that the alliance show stern condemnation of the writers’ property violations than open the possibility that writing could be acceptable if it were made safer. The continuation of the system of property rights was clearly more fundamental to sustaining the social order of the city than preventing a few youths from being injured or killed while committing mischief.

CONCLUSION

The representations of writing within the mass-mediated public sphere during the first half of the 1970s revealed more about the impending sense of doom and decay among New Yorkers than it did about writing. Representations of writing and writers were constantly contextualized within a “crisis” framework. Several of the speakers in this dispersed discussion felt that they were peering over the edge of the abyss. In this light, writing had taken on a very strong symbolic value before a meaningful discussion of its social, cultural, and economic possibilities could take place. The pessimistic predictions about the outcome of this first war on graffiti, which began to appear in print even before such a war was officially declared, point toward an unspoken cultural renegotiation of New York City’s national identity. This gloomy renegotiation had only the most tenuous of connections to the actual merits of the new writing on the walls, despite claims that writing was presenting a “horrible picture of New York.”92 A sense of doom and loss even pervaded the representations of those who were unwilling to condemn writing; it is difficult to see affirmation in the representations of writing as the last cry of the individual in a faceless, monolithic society. It is important to point out that although writers were not difficult to find and were eager to be interviewed, the Times only did so three times during the 1970s: in the initial 1971 article about taki 183, a second time in its coverage of the “decriminalized” UGA exhibition at Hunter College, and a third time in 1973, when the newspaper gave ali, a sixteen-year-old master writer, an open forum to tell other writers to “stop the spraying.” The Times carefully staged ali’s call from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from severe burns suffered during a freak accident in a train lay-up. It was the first and only article that the Times printed that gave the everyday reader a sense of how the writers themselves felt about their work. Said ali: “I really thought of it as an art form. The first art form born in the slums.

105

Austin Ch3

106

10/26/01

12:18 PM

Page 106


What all of us were saying was ‘Look at me. I’m somebody.’ . . . As far as that goes I’m still not against graffiti. Some of those people [writers] were real artists and they liked being recognized.”93 ali’s attitude toward writing was mixed in the article, fluctuating between using the opportunity to speak approvingly of writing as art and using it as a warning to other writers. The article also revealed some details about the way writers had organized themselves. ali pointed out that writers’ groups were not gangs, that writers were of all races, both genders, and a range of ages, and that groups were interested in developing their art: “To join [SOUL ARTISTS (later, Soul Artists of Zoo York)—ali’s group] people had to submit designs. We really wanted good artists and we would help each other developing techniques.” Writing was also a part of working-class urban youth culture: “But of course the danger was part of it too. It was the idea of being defiant, of going on the tracks with the trains going by and the third rail down there and cops.”94 Although his location in the hospital underlined the deadly stakes involved, ali made the writers’ pursuit by the police seem like a sport or a game. Aside from these three interviews, writers never spoke in the Times. In the representation of writing in the mass-mediated public sphere, writers were objects of discussion, not active participants. No matter. By the end of 1973, the antigraffiti alliance was in worse shape than ali, who was at least convalescing in his bed. New York City, on the other hand, seemed to be calling for its last rites.

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 107

4

REPAINTING THE TRAINS THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF THE 1970s

THE FIRST TRY

During the fall of 1973, the MTA initiated a project to rapidly repaint the entire subway fleet, almost 7,000 cars, at a cost of ten million public dollars. There is no record that the repainting strategy was planned or executed with the knowledge or advice of Lindsay’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force. In fact, it appears that the MTA chose the repainting strategy in place of repairing the fencing around the storage yards, which the task force had recommended.1 As a public authority accountable to the New York State Legislature, the MTA is under no compulsion to play fair with the New York City’s mayor’s office.2 Under ideal operating conditions, individual subway cars are repainted as part of their scheduled maintenance, but the general repainting was timed so that any new writing would have to take place during the winter months, when the weather would make it more difficult for writers to

Austin Ch4

108

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 108

REPAINTING THE TRAINS

paint. The MTA intended the repainting to deliver a quick and decisive blow to the unsuspecting writers. The authority’s reasoning seems to have gone something like this: Writers were participants in a vicious youth fad. Youth fads had come and gone in years past, which means that the young people who participate in fads have no real, meaningful investment in the activity itself. Therefore, the short, sharp shock of rapidly painting over all of their names would demoralize the writers, take the fun out of it, and cause the “graffiti fad” to decline. The majority of graffiti writers would move on to something else—another fad—preferably involving something outside the MTA’s territory. Eventually the graffiti fad would come to a near-complete stop, at which time the Transit Police could move in and arrest the few remaining hangers-on. Graffiti writing would then return to its status as just another kind of vandalism, like breaking windows, which required only standard enforcement procedures. In actual practice, the general repainting had almost the exact opposite effect. This period is often seen as one of the high water marks of aesthetic innovation in writing history, and the 14,000 “fresh canvases” (one on each side of a car) played a significant role in facilitating that burst of creativity. The MTA’s massive erasure unknowingly resolved one of the writers’ most pressing logistical problems: space for new work. Early in the culture’s development, writers had adopted an ethical code that forbade writing over someone else’s name.3 This ethical principle was put to the test as the total number of writers grew exponentially and the works on the outside of the cars increased in size. The space on the trains was filled, and painting over the names of other writers had become more common, causing insults and conflicts between them. By completely repainting the system, the MTA provided a much-needed supply of “new canvas” at a key moment in the collective aesthetic development of writing.4 But the repainting also destroyed writing’s permanent collection, all of the work from the first era in the history of an emerging public art movement. Both results had an important influence on writing culture thereafter, setting two new trends into motion. On the one hand, the new “free space” opened up by the repainting inspired a new enthusiasm for innovations in style and scale. On the other, it initiated more aggressive competition for space, exemplified by the rise of the “throw-up” form (see below). Writers immediately set to work repainting the trains. Within six months, space for new work was once again at a premium, es-

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

FIGUR E 4. 1

12:26 PM

Page 109

cash 2 (aka riff 170) masterpiece, circa 1973. (Courtesy IG Times

Aerosol Archives)

pecially on subway lines connecting the Bronx to Brooklyn by way of Manhattan. Advances in both style and scale were well under way before the repainting began, but the repainting erased the social convention of respect for existing work. There were no marks from the history of writing’s development on the trains to be preserved; the repainting had wiped out the important visual record of the early prestige system, while simultaneously clearing away some of its customary limitations. After the repainting, many more of the writers seeking high distinction turned to stylistic innovation within the masterpiece form. For these writers, creating large multicolored works that demonstrated masterful painting skills and a unique style became a necessity for gaining writing fame. Getting up was still the first step in the conventional “career” of a writer; the new attention to style did not completely replace the older conventional ways of gaining fame, many of which are still in play today. But the turn toward masterpieces did initiate a more or less generational division between those older writers who had gained their fame primarily through saturation (getting around) and those writers who now sought prominence through the new language of style and scale.5 In an early attempt to resolve the space problem, writers created a few customary visual forms by which writing over the work of another would

109

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

FI GURE 4 .2

12:26 PM

Page 110

ajax masterpiece from the early-mid 1970s. (Courtesy IGTimes

Aerosol Archives)

be allowable and (more or less) acceptable to all parties. Among the first of these were two-dimensional or shallow-space background designs. To create a background, a writer first painted a large shape in a solid color, usually trimmed in a second color, so that the shape completely covered the previous writers’ works underneath. For instance, pjay remembers the way that seen ua painted over marker tags on the outside in silver, a very dense and opaque paint, before beginning a piece, so that the tags would not show through afterward.6 Some background designs became more or less conventional: clouds, flames, and checkerboards, for instance. The writer’s name was then painted within the bounds of the background, which now served as a striking two-dimensional decorative frame that highlighted the name’s silhouette. (See plates 1, 2, 3, and fig. 4.6.) These early experimental “fixes” to the space problem came into common practice along with a wave of new alphabet designs.7 At first, style was a quality valued as a way of distinguishing individual writers within the crowded arena of the public walls. The transition from single letter designs to entire alphabets opened new potentials for writing. The prestige allotted to designing an alphabet slowly shifted some of the conventions and terminology of writing culture, as writers across the city saw, appreci-

110

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 111


ated, and learned the new styles and then adapted them into their unique personal repertoire. The practice of borrowing styles from another writer’s work is termed biting, which has come over time to refer to all kinds of artistic borrowing from almost any source. The number and complexity of styles created during the 1970s is overwhelming, and a catalog of these styles could require a separate book, which Jack Stewart’s work already partially fulfills. For brevity, I will mention only three of the more popular lettering styles, but I reiterate that these three must stand in for a much more complex and overlapping arena of hundreds of letter designs during this period.8 phase 2 is credited with having invented the “softie” style, which came to be called the “bubble” style. Softie letters are three-dimensional, rounded, and “puffy” or inflated in appearance. “Blockbuster” letters may or may not be three-dimensional (if they are, they are usually called “3D blockbusters”), but unlike softies, they are squarish and sharp-edged and are perhaps the most akin to the advertising sign lettering seen every day in the urban landscape. Blockbuster letters usually run from the top to the bottom of the car, have solid backgrounds with no images, and their color selection is based on high contrast. It is a design that is meant to gain maximum visibility for the name. Blockbusters are easily read by any literate viewer, and most works using some form of the softies are also legible. That is not the case with “mechanical” lettering. The origins of “mechanical” lettering are contested, and it seems to have had several different legitimate precursors, but most agree that it originat-

FIGUR E 4. 3

p nut 2 masterpiece, 1975. (Courtesy tracy 168)

111

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

FIGURE 4 .4

12:26 PM

Page 112

jester, 3-D piece from the mid-1970s. (Courtesy zephyr)

ed with tracy 168, who was writing wildstyle at this time. Many writers, in tribute or otherwise, have since used wildstyle to refer to this lettering style, and the term is still sometimes used today. Mechanical style incorporates several different innovations from prior styles—twisted, fractured, or crumbled letters as well as interpenetrating arrows, bars, and “extensions”— into a more or less consistent but abstract pattern of perpetual motion. Mechanical lettering is a clear move away from legibility or, rather, is not concerned with legibility at all. It requires a very high degree of skill and considerable experience to execute successfully, since the letter-shapes often have very little resemblance to those that you see on this page. Instead, the spectacular name appears to have been put into a typographic blender that has crushed, sliced, stretched, and reshaped the letters, and then sprayed them onto the side of a moving train. The alphabet simultaneously comes alive and falls to pieces in a cloud of moving fragments. It improvises on the standard alphabet, like bebop jazz improvises on popular tunes. The development of entire stylized alphabets, as opposed to designs for single letters, signatures, or names, is significant in ways that are easy to overlook, and it points to a critical intellectual development in the writers’ practice generally. While most people of our era create a unique signature for themselves, few extend their signature-writing to create entire lettering

112

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 113


systems. A unique signature directs its audience to consider the uniqueness of the individual, and perhaps toward matters of ownership or binding commitment as well, since signatures are frequently found on official documents in this capacity (“your John Hancock”). A unique alphabet, on the other hand, directs us to look beyond the individual or the message to the more general ways in which written meanings are conveyed via lettersymbols. It pushes both the writer and the audience to consider written communication in a cultural meta-context, as a fundamental material practice of culture, like architecture, music, or industrial design.9 The hundreds of different typographies that emerged during the middle of the 1970s—of which softies, blockbusters, and mechanical letters are but three—provided a rich resource to consider the visual structures that held the letter and the word within the boundaries of everyday cultural recognition. In the works of several writers during this period, letters were released from their duties as conventional carriers of meanings and became more or less autonomous symbols in a wordlike string. In short, writers deconstructed the alphabet, rearranging the broken parts into new symbols that gestured toward the speed of the trains and the ephemeral quality of writing.10 For some writers, this understanding was the basis of a sweeping cultural critique of the Western Great Tradition. Among these writers, the

FIGUR E 4. 5

lsd om masterpiece from the mid-1970s. (Courtesy IGTimes

Aerosol Archives)

113

Austin Ch4

114

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 114


power of the letter and the word in shared public space became the basis for vernacular theories of culture. phase 2, although certainly not the only writer to do so, has published more on this topic than others: This art [writing] evolved 15 years ago with the invention of the masterpiece, to intricate formations that even with direct pretenses denounced the English language in “school taught” visuals.11 I’m absorbing and devouring language in its co-existing state and creating something else with it. . . . The English language isn’t much, especially in its current state. By comparison (to Chinese and Japanese) it’s like a dot. Why not go beyond that and just create an alphabet or language? You can’t put a limit on communication or how one can communicate, you’ve always got to look further, that’s how style expanded in the first place.12 If they really need Western thought, why don’t they examine the Greek myth of the alphabet. Cadmus sowed dragon’s teeth and they sprang up as armed men. Greco-Roman letters were rudiments (regiments) for an imperial, militarized world—social realities that still curse us.13

Like style, size had been a distinguishing characteristic of the masterpiece form since its invention. By the mid-1970s, writers had precisely mapped out the exterior areas of a subway car in terms of their use as writing space and, in the process, created a new terminology to identify and distinguish the kinds of works that could be located there. Pieces created in the large rectangular (horizontal) areas under the windows were called “window downs.” Other writers extended their work in the vertical direction, typically in the unbroken areas at either end of a car. Such works were known as “top to bottoms,” usually abbreviated “T-to-Bs” (see fig. 4.2, for example). A work that extended the entire length of the car (or most of it) was called an “end to end.” Eventually, the scale of a masterpiece would increase to cover the entire side of a car (approximately 10 feet by 75 feet, depending on the model of the subway car): the “whole car” piece.14 The whole-car masterpiece, which literally covered the entire side of the car, including the windows, offered another common solution to the space problem after the mid-1970s and became the scale for later stylistic innovations.15

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 115

FIGUR E 4. 6 tracy 168 and pro-soul train, 1973. Note the use of the backgrounds to create space for larger works on the outsides of the train. (Courtesy tracy 168)

THROW-UPS

The MTA’s general repainting opened the way for a second formal innovation in writing—“throw-ups”—that proceeded in opposition to the emphasis on style and scale. quik explains: “Throw ups: noun. pl. (thro upz) 2 color names or abbreviations done in volume to take over a subway line; usually a simple misted fill-in by a fat cap with an outline sparing as little paint as possible.”16 The evolving masterpieces bore a family resemblance to the aesthetics of the Great Tradition and of commercialized art. “Throw-ups,” on the other hand, were foreign to these conventions (see figs. 4.7 and 4.8). To a viewer versed in the Great Tradition, throw-ups may have little in the way of aesthetic merit. It is easy for such a viewer to dismiss the throw-up’s claim to being an art form and to assume that throw-ups were created by writers who couldn’t develop a respectable piecing style, or to assume that they are simple-minded manifestations of competitive masculinist excess. As I talked with New Yorkers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I came to the opinion that throw-ups are the form of writing that most folks now associate with the “graffiti problem,” and thus, the form appears to have contributed to writing’s bad name by being misunderstood as vandalism.

115

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

FIGURE 4 .7

12:26 PM

Page 116

in and to throw-ups from the mid-1970s. (Courtesy iz the wiz)

Throw-ups therefore seem to have been perfectly suited to the antigraffiti alliance’s agenda. But there is another history to be told here, one in which the MTA itself is not entirely innocent. After the general repainting, writers struggled with each other and with the Transit Authority for use of the limited space on the trains. Throw-ups were created within the older competitive tradition of getting up as well as from the perceived historical necessity by some writers to “take back the trains” from the MTA. On the most popular lines, works by rising stars and respected writers were crossed out by other writers with greater frequency, as demand grew and new writers entering the culture sought to establish their reputations.17 A piece that had been partially gone over with throwups (which are typically much smaller) was considered “damaged” and was thus more likely to be used as an “open” space for other, smaller works (more throw-ups, tags, or other pieces).18 Writing had become an increasingly ephemeral practice as writers of necessity covered over each other’s works in the competition for space. On other lines, where competition between writers was less intense, writers responded to the MTA’s general repainting by re-covering the trains with quickly executed works. Throw-ups evolved out of this intense competition for space among writers, and be-

116

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 117


tween writers and the MTA. Later, throw-ups would challenge the territorial dominance of the masterpiece form on the outside of the trains. The MTA’s repainting strategy, as well as other antigraffiti strategies that followed, promoted the throw-up’s emergence and eventual dominance. Writers intimately understood the symbolic gesture of the MTA’s repainting: painting-over was already part of their economy of prestige, where it was taken as an insult.19 Between writers, painting-over usually resulted in a fight, some sort of negotiated agreement, or a “cross-out war.” Since writers could not directly confront the MTA, a cross-out war was the most appropriate response to its move. The throw-up is one evolutionary step beyond the early outline forms of the pre-repainting era. Like the tag, the throw-up is oriented more toward getting up than toward style or technical proficiency, but it requires more skill and is larger than the tag. There were several writers employing a simple piecing style after 1972 that would appear today to be precursors to the throw-up. james top (aka jee2) credits mickey (aka TO) with the inven-

FIGUR E 4. 8

ike (aka iz the wiz) throw-up from the mid-1970s. (Courtesy iz the wiz)

117

Austin Ch4

118

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 118


tion of the two-letter throw-up that has since become the conventional throw-up form.20 james remembers mickey as an intellectual and a strategist who sought a way to “take back the trains” from the MTA as well as take over lines from other writers and crews. mickey, hurst (aka oi), and kill 3 (aka in) originally formed top (The Odd Partners) crew in Brooklyn with the intent of saturating and taking over every line in the city. JAMES TOP: We would put in’s, to’s, and oi’s in the corner panels [of a subway car] and get the floater spots [between the windows and the doors] above the pieces. After we established ourselves we would then aim for the king of the target line. We’d absorb the king. We’d put our pieces on top of him and strip the line of its identity. There’d be in’s, to’s, and oi’s on all of the king’s pieces, so this way the kings you’d see would be members of top. . . . The basic concept was to use the throwup as a weapon of offense and defense on all lines and neighborhoods. This radical approach was revolutionary for its time.21

During 1974 and 1975, top crew perfected the technique of throw-ups and used them to “bomb” trains and take over lines. Other writers also began to engage in a more overt form of competition for king of the line. While top and several other crews and writers gained fame during this period, the throw-up did not become a major writing form until in (of top) began to hit the trains in a bid to become king of the entire city. in’s prolific output gained him the distinction of being the only king of every subway line, creating 10,000 throw-ups before other writers had even produced 5,000.22 iz the wiz comments: “I gotta give [in] credit. . . . He definitely was an influence on the path I took. . . . It got devastating when he hooked up with mickey, when he got down with The Odd Partners. Those guys did some serious damage. But by the mid-70s he was through and I kept going.”23 By the late 1970s the increasing competition for space resulted in another renegotiation of the writers’ ethic of “respect” for existing works. One writer justified it this way: “Traditionally, quantity has played as much of a role as quality. The man with the most pieces was always considered the king of the line. . . . moses, blade, comet, hondo, death, iz the wiz, even the ‘Throw Up’ King in (kill 3) have more fillins and became king by ‘using’ their spray paint.”24 duster ua further explains the strategy: “We used to use throwups to get up and over people. You didn’t want to waste your good weapons on a subway train, you wanted to waste your dummies

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 119


up there to get up and clear the line. The most famous guys known for that were comet and blade, iz the wiz and quik.”25 Style was of less importance once a characteristic throw-up was designed and adopted, since the need to get up constrained the time available to produce a work. A skilled bomber could produce a decent throw-up in less than a minute, while at least an hour or more was needed for a decent piece. The throw-up artists disrupted the established economy of prestige that validated most style masters. blade remembers having “wars” with other writers that lasted for “a month or so” in which he would lose fifty or more pieces.26 quik, often cited as a major throw-up practitioner, makes it explicit: “Throw up kings are usually the shortest reigning type of bombers. It was easy for some to bomb hard one season or two, then disappear into obscurity only to be replaced by another throw up maniac.”27 cap, who began writing in 1979, may have set the terms for all future conflicts between bombers and piecers. Immortalized as the throw-up villain in the documentary Style Wars! (1983), cap wrote over everyone. According to cap: “Writers I was dogging had to leave the 5’s and 2’s [subway lines], so I went after their pieces on other lines. Also I went all city so the cops had less of a chance to put the squeeze on me and my boys.”28 cap later taught cope 2, a major bomber of the next generation. cap gave me the throw-up I have today. He taught me how to bomb every lay-up or yard; it was an honor being taught the ways of bombing by cap, who was one of the most notorious bombers of all time. He was just like any normal writer at the beginning, he was just getting up. But then he got tired of it [being written over by other writers] and started ragging everybody’s pieces to get respect. To let people know if you’re gonna go over him you gonna pay. He just wanted respect.29

COPE 2:

cap got respect, if only in the form of infamy. His aggressive style of competition moved toward the center of writing practice during the 1980s.

THE CREW LIFE

Crews became an institutionalized part of writing culture after 1973. Since then, most writers in New York City and elsewhere have been “down” with one or more crews for at least some portion (if not all) of their careers, par-

119

Austin Ch4

120

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 120


ticularly if their commitment to writing has extended over a long period of time. Here, I want to outline some of the ways in which the crew life evolved and served as a social institution among writers during the mid- to late 1970s. Many of the writing crew’s customary forms, still in effect, were established during this period. At the most basic level, crew members are committed to writing and to each other. They write the crew’s initials alongside their own names, although in most works the crew’s name does not challenge the centrality of the individual writer’s name. On the other hand, the reputation of the crew depends on the reputation of its individual members as much as on their collective reputation as a group, and so a productive member reflects well on a crew. The two are mutually reinforcing. Crew members serve as lookouts for each other, particularly while executing works in places where they might be seen (like the yards). They are trusted to protect the identities of fellow members when questioned or arrested by authorities. These are common forms of mutual support that can be found in successful churches, unions, peer groups, benevolent associations, and street gangs. The sense of commitment between members is an attractive feature for some young people, for whom crews might serve as an alternative family network of primary support; but many writers also entered writing by way of connections with actual biological kin or through romantic relations: boyfriends, cousins, brothers. Crew members could usually be expected to defend the reputations of other members in their absence to the point of a reasonable fight, and to participate in cross-out wars with rivals of the crew or its individual members. But crew membership did not always trump other kinds of social connections; “best friends” may not be in the same crew, and “beef” between individuals from different crews may not be more important than maintaining other social ties. Tensions around the various social connections between writers grew in proportion to the aggressiveness of their competition. “Who was down with who” became a hot issue as top crew and cap perfected the use of throw-ups to take over a line. Reputations of active, contemporary writers were at stake rather than the historical preservation of writing history and customs of respect, and crews became a primary organizing mode for establishing a reputation. A well-organized and enthusiastic crew could take a line with a month’s hard work in most cases. This led to tighter and more coherent crews, but it also led to more “beef” between writers, since crossing out others could work in the opposite direc-

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 121


tion: writers were necessarily less certain of the shifting personal alliances in a more competitive network. To attract attention, a newly forming crew spends a good deal of time designing a unique name, much as the individual writer does.30 Crew names are likely to be influenced by any number of sources, but most crew names have a definitively masculine or aggressive, often boastful resonance.31 The hyperbolic masculinist conventions of crew-naming are attributable to any number of overlapping factors, including the overwhelming presence of males within writing culture; the competitive interactions between crews (and between experienced writers and toys); the male rebel image within post-World War II youth culture; the outlaw identity of writers, borrowed from gang culture (and the mass media); and the response to the militaristic rhetoric of the antigraffiti alliance, among others. For instance, consider these crews, active during the late 1970s and early 1980s: the killers (tk), three yard boys (3yb), the master blasters (tmb), the death squad (tds), wanted, mad transit artists (mta), the vamp squad (tvs), mission graffiti (mg), the mob. As with other aspects of writing culture, writers “borrowed” whatever suited their fancy from other sources. In the case of the mta crew, this extended to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s own initials, which were already painted on every train as part of their “official” design. Thereby, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority got up for the mta crew. Despite their design work, a crew’s name is most often made visible, established, and remembered as initials rather than words. Not all writers were aware of the crew name’s original wording, and names with the same initials were constantly substituted for the originals by crew members, friends, and rivals. Wordplay of this sort is common among writers, as with youth culture in general.32 No two crews have the same initials for long; inevitably, two crews with the same initials (even if they refer to differing words) either leads to a merging of the crews or, more frequently, a fight. As the discussion above indicates, it would be idealistic (and nostalgic) to argue that there was no fighting or violent conflict among writers during the 1970s. Most writers grew up in one of the most inter-personally violent nations in history, so it would be remarkable if their autonomous organization as writers had produced conditions that overcame this socialization. We can say that writers were able to sidestep most of the racial differences that kept the city separated in other locations. They were less able to distance themselves from the traditions of masculine hierarchy they inherited.

121

Austin Ch4

122

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 122


Fighting was part of writing culture, but it was no more prevalent among writers than among any other grouping of young men of a similar age. lee 163d!, ale one, and comet map out their expectations of fighting in common terms that could have described any street corner or school yard in New York City at that time: No one infringed on anyone else’s shit. Everyone respected everyone else. You go over someone’s name and we’d put the name “hot 110” over you [your work]. That was a safety valve to prevent the going over of someone. If you dissed, you got “hot 110ed.”33 LEE 163D!:

Even though I was scared shit I managed to meet all the original masters [at the 149 St. Grand Concourse writers’ bench]. Most of my fear was wondering if someone there was after me. Back then a fight started for any stupid reason on the subway station. . . . To [some of the writers] it was as much fun as bombing.34

ALE ONE:

Back then you wouldn’t go out and have wars. [There was] no nonsense. You would fight it out on a train station and HOT 110 [go over] a guy’s piece. Within two weeks everything would be squashed and everyone would go back to having fun.35

COMET:

It is important to note that the hot 110 sanction was meted out in the name of the community rather than the individual, whatever the individual’s intention. hot 110 was used by everyone to cross out writers who were perceived to have offended community ethics or violated an individual’s or a crew’s customary respect. hot 110 has a different practical emphasis than the method of crossing out that developed in the late 1970s, in which one individual or crew crossed out another using their own name (or an abbreviation); the latter is more direct and indicates that something is a “personal” matter in an obvious way. It signifies a competition between individuals within a community, even if this competition is about maintaining some of the community’s customs. A direct confrontation between individuals opens the way to, and promotes, greater aggression: more beef. An individual who is collectively sanctioned for the violation of a community custom faces all those who uphold the custom. An individual who faces only another individual has a much greater likelihood of prevailing.

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 123


Writers in the late 1970s were aware that things had changed. lsd om comments: “A writer was . . . a person who wrote his name with some sort of style and respect, not to go over other people. It seemed in the beginning there was a lot more respect—people didn’t go over each other”36 Toward the end of the decade, the competition between writers was developing in ways that harmed community cohesion. zephyr saw this as a loss that had aesthetic implications, since black ink could cover over any other color available: Right before I got into it [1973–74], [tagging] was super super colorful, psychedelic. . . . There was a big change between [then] and the time I was really bombing the trains [1978–79]. . . . [Tags] had gone from a colorful thing . . . to black ink. Basically there was a lot more writers and competition for space. A lack of respect that the earlier generations didn’t have to deal with.37

For some piecers, this level of conflict could be serious, since a cross-out war could easily destroy a year’s work within a month. Others thrived in this environment. For instance, blade claims that he and comet did “eight hundred to a thousand pieces within a year and a half’s time” in the late 1970s and had at least one or two pieces on both sides of every train that passed through the 180th Street station between 1978 and 1981.38 blade is often remembered for his prodigious bombing as well as for his piecing and innovative lettering styles. Other masters could also produce at or near these levels, but the situation overall favored bombers, whose work was even more quickly produced. The throw-up was ideally suited for competition between individual writers, and between writers collectively and the MTA. These simultaneous competitions added another layer of social meaning to the practice of (literally) “covering” the public territory of the trains.

BETWEEN THE WARS: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WRITERS’ CITY

For most New Yorkers the “war on graffiti” ended in a decisive defeat for its promoters just as New York City’s financial emergency became a national news item. The alliance that had formed around John Lindsay’s AntiGraffiti Task Force fell apart as he left office at the end of 1973, and the next

123

Austin Ch4

124

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 124


mayor, Abraham (“Abe”) Beame, did not attempt to rebuild or renew the alliance. The prevention and removal of writing from shared public spaces were carried out by the various separate property-holding city/state entities (e.g., the MTA, Board of Education, Housing Authority, and Parks Department) without citywide coordination. On a practical level, this was really no change at all. Most of these administrative entities had integrated “graffiti removal” into their regular work routines, where it joined the replacement of broken windows, garbage disposal, and floor mopping as an expected maintenance cost. The coordinated “war” of the alliance had principally been an effort to educate the eyes of the public to see writing as “graffiti,” a form of vandalism. But an all-out “war on graffiti” in shared public space never really occurred. For the remainder of the 1970s, “the graffiti problem” was more a matter of funding in austere times than a topic of public debate or a call to moral panic. Although writing was occasionally noted in the press, it was usually covered as part of some larger concern (e.g., the deteriorating state of the subway system); the topic rarely drew a significant article on its own. Writing continued in the public square, but did not take up space in the mass-mediated public sphere of the newspapers for several years after the collapse of the Lindsay antigraffiti alliance. During the first year of Beame’s administration (1974), the city’s financial problems reached the first of several crisis points, and municipal austerity took pride of place as the Naked City’s central drama. Antigraffiti programs were not essential city services, had yet to be proven effective, and have never been cheap. When municipal budgets were reduced, other items often took priority. Since New York City is required by law to provide a significant percentage of the MTA’s operating costs, the MTA’s budget and operations came under scrutiny soon after the state became involved in the city’s budget crisis. During the review, State Controller Arthur Levitt publicly criticized the MTA for, among other things, its inability to effectively manage the “graffiti problem.”39 The MTA’s chair responded to this criticism by characterizing writing as a “sociological” problem that had been “made more difficult” by the commercial mass media’s “encouragement.”40 This was an attempt to blunt further criticism of the MTA’s stark failures in the war by placing “the graffiti problem” beyond the organization’s expected realm of expertise (adolescent sociology) and also placing the source of the MTA’s failure at an equally remote institutional location (the mass media). Within a few months, the

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 125


MTA issued a press release announcing that the “war” would become a lower priority and that Transit Police would no longer make special efforts to arrest writers, citing as reasons for its enforcement program’s failures “lenient judges” and (again) the celebrity status that writers had attained in the commercial media.41 Blaming the media and a lax juvenile justice system for the continuation of a “youth problem” were hardly new tactics for failed policymakers by this point in U.S. history, and their use reflects the MTA’s frustration and humiliation at the hands of the writers. Writing refused to be a dim-witted “youth fad” that could be snapped back to order by a few dramatic public displays of adult authority.42 The press release announcing the “lower priority” of the war also promised a multifaceted “total package” attack on subway writing at some time in the future.43 With a few exceptions, writers in the late 1970s maintained their hold on institutional ground taken from the subway system earlier and expanded to “borrow” new territories. Most of these came from institutions for youth socialization and commercial exchange and were put to use as meeting and planning sites. These locations included high schools, commercial businesses (like coffee or doughnut shops) that catered to young folks, and the

FIGUR E 4. 9

slave of the fabulous five, drawing taped into a blackbook.

(Courtesy Joe Austin)

125

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

FIGURE 4 .1 0

Page 126

seen ua drawing, 1979. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

private spaces allotted to some teenagers within their family homes.44 Here, in places intended for social discipline or consumption—the very spaces where “youth” is produced as a subordinate social group—writers “hid in the light.” Writers borrowed these commercial, public, and domestic spaces as places to meet and make plans, hang out, talk shop, design new work, and gossip.45 Who was up, who was king, who had beef, and who had style was a never-ending conversation that was always worth having in a competitive, masculinist culture. Information about new policing tactics, which yards and lay-ups were hot, or where new entranceways had been created was exchanged, as well as the locations of businesses where it was easy to shoplift paint or other valued commodities. The increasing complexity of the masterpiece works meant that entering the yards often required considerable planning beforehand. Writers frequently drew sketches before executing a piece, carefully planning letter designs, colors, backgrounds, and other compositional elements of their works. Color schemes were compared, discussed, and planned, and the correct colors gathered (stolen, traded, or seized from other writers), to avoid working ad hoc with whatever colors were on hand. A whole-car piece required more than fifteen cans of paint in several different colors and some-

126

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 127


times took several hours to complete. Sketches were taken to the yards to assist in the execution of these complex works. Sketches and designs were drawn in “black books” or “piece books,” made of commercially produced hardbound books with blank pages commonly used for sketching by traditionally trained artists. Black books also functioned as autograph books and were passed around to friends and writers the owner admired. Over time, they were filled with designs, ideas, photos of completed works by the owner, and favorite works by other writers.46 At hangout spots, writers often worked in their own or their friends’ black books, and over time these became important personal and historical records of writers’ everyday activities.47 As photography became the most important way of recording a writer’s work after the MTA’s repainting, the rise of throw-ups and, later, continual erasure of work by the MTA’s use of chemical solvents, these new “borrowed” spaces became places where photo albums were examined and individual photos exchanged.48 Despite the public announcement of a retreat in 1975, antigraffiti law enforcement reached an all-time high only two years later with the arrival of

dez outline. The notes surrounding the drawing describe the colors to be used in the work. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

FIGUR E 4. 1 1

127

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

FIGURE 4 .1 2

Page 128

Two drawings by crash from the late 1970s. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

the promised “total package” attack.49 It consisted of two main strategies: a new “vandal squad” enforcement unit within the Transit Police Department and a special car wash that sprayed paint-removing chemical solvents on the trains. These programs, initiated during the last half of the 1970s, are best understood as a substantial escalation of the MTA’s antiwriting efforts. No significant break in the MTA’s efforts to “clean” the subways of writing had occurred; only that portion of the “war on graffiti” in the mass-mediated public sphere had actually declined. Both of the new strategies had important effects on writing culture and practice, but at best they drew the conflict between the MTA and writers to an unstable and temporary stalemate. The first new MTA attack strategy relied on police surveillance and enforcement: a special vandal squad. The squad gathered as much information as possible on each writer whose name appeared on the trains: birth name, address, photos of work, and notes on the writer’s style and the subway lines where he usually worked. The squad also confiscated black books and address books when a writer was arrested, which were then used to glean further information. All this information was then gathered into files, indexed, and cross-referenced. These files represent a considerable public investment in intelligence work and probably contain the most complete documentation of writing on the subways during this time. The files were

128

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 129


also made available to the NYPD and other city/state policing agencies. Although the MTA claimed that there were less than four hundred writers painting the subways in 1975 (evidently hoping that the writers’ populist appeal would diminish by representing them as a small bunch of bad apples), the vandal squad boasted of suspect files on more than three thousand writers only two years later.50 Thousands of writers were arrested after 1977. But the ambiguous criminality of writing on a shared public space that was already covered with (prior) writings, and the fact that this particular crime appeared relatively insignificant to many judges within the overworked local judicial system, made it less likely that the courts would cause a major disruption in the writers’ lives. Most writers were more concerned about bodily harm from police than about actual arrest.51 By all accounts, the vandal squad was willing to use whatever method of enforcement seemed most effective in a situation, regardless of its legality. There are innumerable stories of police beating writers, holding them at gunpoint, and threatening to kill them.52 Still, a substantial number of master writers managed to retain an unblemished record. Toys were frequently not arrested at all but simply threatened, questioned, and searched; their black books and address books were confiscated, and then they were released. At other times, toys were not only intimidated but pressed into service as informants; police exploited the rivalries among crews and writers for the same purposes.53 The Transit Police’s attempts to regain territorial control of the subways in the late 1970s offered occasions for writers to publicly taunt them, and many writers did so with gusto, often leaving messages for the police in their works. seen ua’s “To The Boys in Blue, Catch Me if you Can,” reproduced in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art, is among the best known of these.54 The Transit Police occasionally responded in kind by scribbling messages over the (usually unfinished) pieces of the writers they were pursuing in the yards. Some writers suspect that the notorious tco (the cross outs) crew, which wrote over a significant number of masterpieces during the late 1970s, was actually the vandal squad.55 The police may have been attempting to heighten the internal conflicts among writers as a way of increasing the likelihood that one writer would reveal another’s name to the police. Or perhaps the vandal squad was simply demonstrating its ultimate domination over writers by itself engaging in the excesses of masculinist competition. The vandal squad forced writers to adopt a more defensive stance in the yards and provided an extra incentive for the less

129

Austin Ch4

130

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 130


dedicated not to seriously pursue writing on the trains. However, the documentary photographs taken by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant during the late 1970s and early 1980s reveal that writing on the subways was not only widespread but that the art was continuing to develop in sophistication, craft, and design.56 The second new attack strategy during the late 1970s was an extension of Lindsay’s search for a “technological” answer to the “graffiti problem.” At enormous cost ($20 million), during a period of financial austerity, the MTA built an automatic car wash that used highly caustic chemical solvents to remove the writers’ paint.57 The Times dutifully reported the good news about each new chemical solvent to be used in the car wash, seemingly oblivious to the fact that all previous “new” solvents had failed, sometimes disastrously.58 Early solvents sufficiently strong to remove most writing also stripped off a car’s “official” base coat, since writers stole a more durable, better quality paint for their work than the MTA purchased for theirs. Stripping the car bare meant that the entire car had to be repainted and then put back into the system, to begin the process all over again. The “new” solvent used on the cars in August 1977 was suspected of causing health problems for transit workers and children playing in a schoolyard near the car wash. A report by a transit engineer on the matter revealed that no studies as to this solvent’s safe handling had been made, an illegal safety violation that was extended as a commercial advantage to many other “new” solvents during the next decade.59 More than two hundred workers reported illnesses or injuries related to chemical solvents used at the car wash during its years of operation, including the death of one worker at the age of forty-seven from long-term exposure.60 Writers first called the wash “the Orange Crush,” after a popular commercial soft drink and the infamous defoliant “Agent Orange” used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Later, it was simply called “the Buff.” Aside from the health risks posed by the various chemical solvents and the MTA’s neglect of worker safety measures, the paint-removing solutions did not actually “clean” the cars. The solvents used in the car wash smeared and faded the writing, blurring the works beyond recognition without actually erasing them from view. The end results were subway trains that looked worse than ever. The muddy, grayish exteriors lacked both the “orderly” appearance of the MTA’s official design and the visual dynamics of the writers’ aesthetic re-visions; the evidence of a continuing semiotic war was still visible everywhere.61 A subway car came out of the new wash looking like a

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 131


faded and smudged newspaper full of unreadable, ghostly words and muted, dull colors, but it could hardly be considered to be restored, “clean,” or beautiful. The argument that the MTA was acting on purely aesthetic motives to “clean” the cars during this period cannot be taken seriously. The MTA was clearly willing to have uglier trains in order to stop writing. The car wash did manage to disrupt the writers’ prestige economy, since the masterpieces did not reliably circulate through the subway system. The long hours and skill put into a masterpiece might not pay off, denying a writer’s expectations of fame. This frustration may have had the effect of reducing the number of writers working on the subways overall, although there is no reliable way of supporting this claim. Certainly, it discouraged those who were not deeply committed. Several writers did see the Buff as the angel of death for writing culture, and it caused writers to make significant adjustments in their practice, particularly the ways in which the past was remembered. In 1980, lee observed: “I still see a lot of those cars that were there fresh when I was starting. It’s like a flashback. It’s a ghostly image—it’s half washed away, but it’s still there. I call ‘em ghost pieces or legends.”62 However, it was not so much an angel of death as an agent of change, since it did not prevent writing. But it did impede the customary circulation time of well-executed masterpieces. The Buff’s major unintended consequence was the creation of more space—once a car had been Buffed, it was fair game for any writer.63 The Buff made certain there was always a steady supply of open space for those writers who remained committed to the subways. But there is nothing to suggest that there was any real improvement in the subway’s appearance, regardless of whether one enjoyed the writing or not. Without a doubt, the Buff supported the throw-up’s rise as a major writing form. Again, the MTA’s strategy of destroying the writers’ work was well understood by writers, who used the same strategy in their competitions with each other. Bombers were invited to once again “take the trains.” At the same time, the circulation of a well-respected and carefully crafted masterpiece was no longer dependent upon the writers’ own collective respect for the works, but on the MTA’s rather random selection of which trains to run through the Buff at which time. Writers were unable to discover any system or schedule by which to predict which cars or trains would be put through the Buff next. It appears that either the MTA had no regular schedule, or that a regular schedule was supplemented by some second, less predictable, selection

131

Austin Ch4

132

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 132


process. Given the disorganization of the MTA during this period, it may have been simply a matter of bureaucratic inefficiency and cost-cutting. It is clear that some whole-car works were specifically targeted for quick destruction. On the other hand, other whole-car works often ran for months, sometimes for years, before being Buffed. Having one’s work picked out for special attention might be incorporated into the prestige system as a sign of the writer’s unique ability to antagonize the MTA, but this was very poor compensation for being denied the requisite access to circulation in the writers’ mass media. After all, writers were much more interested in their peers’ evaluations and the chance to broadcast their work to the city than in antagonizing the MTA. Without the reliability of fame gained from well-executed works, saturation was promoted as a favored alternative once again. The rise of the throw-up made the visual congestion of the trains much worse. Many writers at that time felt that the throw-up was further contributing to a decline in writing culture, as indicated by the loss of “respect” for the work of established masters, which were now written over with much greater frequency.64 This violation of older community standards in turn heightened the amount of “beef” between writers, as competition became more aggressive. lee thinks about this issue while reflecting back on a tagger’s work written over one of his station masterpieces: “The writers were not violent. Now, I’m not saying that some of the kids now who would like to be doing graffiti are not violent. . . . I blame the MTA for that [process]. I think that if you Buff history you get violence.”65 The combination of throw-ups, the new vandal squad, increasing beef between individual writers and crews, and the Buff may have pushed many young people away from considering writing as a subcultural alternative, or shortened the careers of some writers who would have stayed productive under less pressured conditions. The experience gained and the resources allotted to the vandal squad allowed them to effectively profile the “typical” writer, or at least locate the shared public spaces where writers hung out within MTA’s territory.66 As a result, the Transit Police were able to disrupt the established writers’ benches as gathering places during the late 1970s. Writers (or teenagers fitting the profile) who lingered in these locations were likely to be questioned, searched, asked to leave, or harassed. The vandal squad’s surveillance and disruption of the benches was never perfectly effective, but it did make writers adopt a much more circumspect and defensive posture in these locations, and made large meetings or long sessions there risky if

Austin Ch4

10/26/01

12:26 PM

Page 133


not foolish. Photographing one’s own and other’s works (which could then be examined and passed around) came to serve some of the same evaluative functions that the writers’ benches had. To a lesser extent, the yards were also a space to examine and evaluate works. The stations and the elevated lines allowed a better view, albeit a much shorter one, as the trains rushed by.67 But in practical terms, no satisfying institutional alternative to the writers’ benches emerged after the vandal squad began to crack down. Thus, even as the “war” within the mass-mediated public sphere was overshadowed by New York City’s financial crisis in the second half of the 1970s, the MTA’s efforts against writing in shared public space remained significant.

133

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 134

5

THE STATE OF THE SUBWAYS THE TRANSIT CRISIS, THE AESTHETICS OF FEAR, AND THE SECOND “WAR ON GRAFFITI”

THE TRANSIT CRISIS

The MTA’s capital improvement projects are funded through the sale of bonds. Like New York City’s government, the MTA by the late 1970s had for some time been routinely dipping into capital improvement funds to cover deficits in its yearly operating budget.1 This sort of “creative accounting” was part of a much longer history of underfunding both day-today subway operations and capital improvements. Without funding, the system had not been adequately maintained, rebuilt, or extended since the independent commercial systems were unified as a public authority two decades before.2 Given this history, it remains an open question as to whether a subway crisis of some sort was inevitable, come New York City’s municipal bankruptcy or not. After 1975, a “crisis” in the subway system was assured. The City of New York provides a significant portion of the operating funds for the Transit Authority (TA). During his first year in office (1974), Mayor Beame began

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 135

THE STATE OF THE SUBWAYS

to examine the MTA’s budget and, as a way of reducing the city’s contribution without raising the fare, he asked the MTA to adjust its subway operation schedules to bring the system more into line with ridership demands.3 Responding to calls for further cuts, the MTA again reduced its operating budget by introducing a “deferred maintenance” program into the subway system, which lengthened the time between routine inspections, overhauls, and scheduled parts replacements.4 The attrition from early retirements (won in the 1968 Tranport Workers Union contracts) had the effect of reducing the maintenance staff by one third, a relatively painless process for cutting the payrolls. But the coincidence of retirements and budget cuts also meant that the system lost a significant number of its most experienced mechanics in a very short time. At that moment, the MTA judged the budget to be the most immediate and pressing of the “crises” it faced, and acted with a singularity of purpose.5 Since there would be very few new hires until the budget problems were alleviated, funds for training programs were cut to almost nothing. The combination of smaller maintenance crews with fewer trained and experienced mechanics and deferring routine maintenance began to have a noticeable impact on subway service within three years, as the already fragile physical structure of the system began to fall apart. Deferred maintenance came to mean simply ignoring the equipment until it completely stopped functioning, and thus would have been better characterized as an “emergency repair/tow away” program.6 Arriving at a destination on time via subway became more and more a matter of random chance for millions of daily riders. Mimicking the rhetoric around the city’s finances, the newspapers began to document the “subway crisis.” By 1980, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chair Richard Ravitch’s repeated public characterizations of “crisis” in the subway system was news to no one.7 After the deferred maintenance program began, every subway service indicator dropped precipitously until 1983, and the system could not meet the service levels of 1974 with any consistency again until after 1986. The number of miles the average subway train traveled between breakdowns dropped from 17,300 in 1973 (the year before the deferred maintenance program began) to 7,400 in 1982. The number of breakdowns en route tripled between 1977 and 1981. More than 37,000 subway train runs were canceled before reaching their destination during 1981 (on average, more than 100 per day), requiring riders to empty out of one train and wait to pack into

135

Austin Ch5

136

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 136


the already crowded space of the next.8 A 1983 state inspection of the system reported that there were 300 “red tag zones” where track conditions were so poor that conductors were required to reduce train speeds by roughly 50 percent, to ten mph or less. Even if a train arrived on time, riders were frequently prevented from entering or leaving because the automatic sliding doors would fail to open.9 Unpredictable disruptions created ripples in subway service, requiring riders to plan extra time for delays each day. Arriving on time at any destination was a mixture of calculation, experience, and mostly luck. Although MTA officials repeatedly reassured New Yorkers that the system was still safe despite these “crisis” conditions, riders and their advocates found such reassurances difficult to believe. Collisions, derailments, and fires in the cars became increasingly common. The system suffered 1,800 car fires during 1981, 217 of which were listed as “major.” Images of riders suffering from smoke inhalation and being carried out of the subways on stretchers became a regular feature on the evening television news. During the five years between 1977 and 1981, sixty-nine subway train collisions and derailments occurred, twenty-one during 1981 alone.10 The number of train derailments increased to an average of one every eighteen days in 1983.11 Despite this dismal and dangerous performance record, most surveys found that on-time performance was not the major concern for riders (and those who had quit riding), but rather crime in the subways.12 Noticeable increases in subway crime had begun in the 1960s, and the official response had been to increase the size of the Transit Police force. By the early 1970s, the Transit Police was the sixth largest police organization in the nation (the NYPD, a separate police force at the time, was the largest).13 Despite the increasing number of police on the scene, the number of felony crimes continued to rise each year. Although the Transit Police was a division of the MTA, the City of New York supplied all its funding.14 Part of the austerity measures taken during the city’s financial crisis included a significant reduction in the size of the MTA’s police force, a fact frequently cited afterwards as the cause for the increase in subway crime.15 However, previous increases in the number of police officers had not significantly affected the crime rate. Crime was yet another seemingly unsolvable “crisis” for the subway system. By 1982 the Transit Police were initiating their second “war on subway crime” within three years.16 More overtime for officers was authorized, patrol schedules were shifted toward the evening hours, and despite the city government’s rhetoric of austerity, new officers were once again added to

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 137


the force.17 While the crime rate did drop in 1979 (during the first of these campaigns), it returned to its previous level the next year, then reached new highs during the next two years. In the decade between 1972 and 1982, the number of felonies in the subways tripled, reaching record levels in nine of the ten years.18 Over 15,300 felonies (an average of 42 per day) were reported in the subways during 1982, the peak year.19 These two wars on subway crime sought to reassure riders through the increased visibility of police. Undercover and detective operations were suspended and these officers were put into uniform. Police and firefighters were further encouraged to wear their uniforms to and from work, and to ride the subways. Uniformed officers were posted on most trains during the evenings. Riders took small comfort from the constant reiteration that they were safer in the subways than in the streets, since this claim only made it appear that there was no safe place left to escape from the terrifying subways.20 The view of the subway as a dangerous and unpredictable public space where criminals roamed was widely shared outside New York City and further damaged the city’s reputation as a tourist and business location. Speaking to this issue before the U.S. Senate’s Transportation Committee in 1984, Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) took public fear in the subways as a given when he asked for financial help from the federal government: “The public impression is that we have lost control of the underground transit system. We must reclaim our mass transit system from muggers and thieves.”21 By 1986 the police officers in the system outnumbered the motormen running the trains by more than seven hundred.22 The mass-mediated public sphere did not flinch in its reporting of the subway’s physical and social decline. By the early 1980s there were desperate forecasts announcing the system’s imminent collapse. For instance, in 1981 the Daily News ran a seven-article series on the subways under the running title “Doomsday Express,” which graphically represented the system’s deterioration in photos and statistics. The newspapers’ apocalyptic representations seemed even more powerful in combination with the everyday frustrations and fears of actually riding the subways. Despite a 21 percent drop in ridership during the 1970s, the subways remained the major mode of transportation for most New Yorkers and were still central to urban public life. The repeated representations of the “subway crisis” in the mass-mediated public sphere framed citizens’ common experiences in this shared public space, just as it shaped perceptions of writing.

137

Austin Ch5

138

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 138


Traditionally, rider advocacy groups, such as the Straphangers’ Campaign, have been the subway system’s strongest critics.23 In the early 1980s, nonprofit business organizations and powerful economic institutions also undertook critical studies of the system, another marker of its “crisis” status. In an economic culture where time is money, the subway system became a financial liability for New York City businesses as well as their workers. A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated that 41 million labor-hours per year were lost if the system was only five minutes behind schedule each day, and that two randomly occurring 25-minute delays per week meant a loss of over $300 million in the course of a year. Most of these costs would have to be absorbed by the riders, since their unpaid time traveling to and from work was extended by the unpredictable flow of trains. But, as the report pointed out, this “wasted” time also reduced “consumption-hours” as well, to the disadvantage of shopping areas requiring subway access.24 Despite this dire estimate of lost labor, money, and shopping opportunities, most riders would likely have welcomed the Federal Reserve’s hypothetical examples, since these would have been an improvement over the system’s actual performance during some periods. The most extensive report on the subways came from the New York Council of Economic Development, whose exhaustive year-long examination produced more than four hundred recommendations that the New York City Transit Authority could undertake at little or no cost. But the study’s major effect was to turn the news media’s critical eye away from the subways’ continuing physical deterioration and toward the managerial and bureaucratic tangle of the TA’s organization and the low productivity of its workforce. In the 1960s and 1970s, relations between New York City’s public employee unions and its mayoral administrations were notably contentious. During that period, Governor Nelson Rockefeller created a host of public agencies to oversee city and regional services (covering hospitals, education, urban development projects, etc.), including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that were primarily accountable to the governor, with only token connections to the mayor. Unelected public authorities and the municipal unions were easy marks for public anger in a period of overlapping crises. Edward Koch, who won the mayoral election after Beame’s single term, made it clear that he resented being held accountable for city services that were under the direction of public authorities.25 He singled out the municipal workers in these organizations when asking for sacrifices to stretch city budgets, and

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 139


worked to cut city payrolls through technological upgrades and changes in work rules.26 When the Transport Workers Union struck and shut down the subway system for eleven days in 1980, Koch represented the strike as pitting a weakened and vulnerable public against a powerful, entrenched, and selfish union. He met workers walking to work across the Brooklyn Bridge each day of the strike, cheering the walkers while damning the unions in the city papers.27 Like the Transport Workers Union, the TA’s upper-level bureaucracy was also easy to cast in a demonic light. The system’s continual snafus made it difficult for managers to defend decisions within their own ranks, and riders viewed the workings of the huge, complex system with a weary sense of resigned absurdity. Massive structural flaws in the frames of 750 new (and badly needed) subway cars were discovered soon after they were purchased.28 As the derailment and collision rate began to climb, a report revealed that a significant portion of the TA’s already overburdened repair and inspection staff had been reassigned to subway station beautification projects.29 And construction of a new subway tunnel underneath Central Park that had begun in the late 1960s was eventually abandoned—$1 billion over budget, fractured by corruption scandals, and projected to need at least another decade to complete.30 Reports issued between the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s revealed pervasive mismanagement and hundreds of everyday practices and new programs that defied common sense.31 To add insult to injury, some TA officials publicly admitted that, for safety reasons, they were no longer allowing their family members to ride the system they managed.32 With the subway system apparently crumbling at every turn, the MTA’s image slid to an all-time low. At this point in the city’s history, the deteriorating physical and social conditions of the subway system may even have boosted its iconic status relative to other New York City landmarks. Neither the glamour of Broadway’s neon lights nor the beckoning promise of the Empire State Building nor the sweeping spectacle of the Brooklyn Bridge could match the subway’s metaphoric power in the apocalyptic prognostications of commentators who interpreted the helplessness of New York City as the expected result of the more general “urban crisis” threatening U.S. cities. Because New York City was commonly understood to be at the forefront of the nation’s own continuing and inevitable “urban crisis,” the “subway crisis” thus offered a convenient shorthand for the larger set of crises often thought to be beyond solution.

139

Austin Ch5

140

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 140


Suspicions of the city as a place of immorality, corruption, degeneracy, and social chaos have deep roots in U.S. cultural history. The anti-urbanist views cities as evil in essence, always and forevermore decaying, corrupt to the bone, with no possibility for redemption. Cities suffering through a “crisis” may currently be in a frightening state of decay, but the term itself implies a lapse from some prior glory which could be reclaimed if the crises were adequately addressed. But after the early 1970s, the differences between the urban crisis and an outright anti-urbanist framework became much less distinct in public rhetoric and actions. By that time, popular support for federal efforts to renew the nation’s central cities had given way to a conservative policy backlash that soon hardened into a racialized, moralistic cynicism over the worthiness and motivations of the “unproductive” people who lived (and suffered) there.33 In this context, New York City maintained its standing as the American Ur-City during the 1970s, despite strong competition from Chicago and Los Angeles. Just as New York City was once a major setting for film noir’s caustic musings about the promises of the good life in the American Empire of the 1940s and 1950s, it also made the perfect setting for tales of the Empire’s much-anticipated fall in the 1970s and 1980s. In cartoons, television programs, and popular films made during the first two decades after World War II, the anonymous New York City straphanger had served as a kind of urban everyman, and the subways appeared as a public space where strangers or friends could witness together the absurdities of everyday city life and chat about its contradictions. By the mid-1970s, the bemused attitude toward these urban absurdities was replaced by an overt fear of shared public space itself. Movies like Death Wish (1974), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), and Escape from New York (1981) presented the city as a hellhole of social and physical decay and were, in effect, remakes and sequels of 1948’s The Naked City. Claustrophobic and threatening, the subways became key locations in these films and in similar stories that anticipated urban social and infrastructural collapse.

THE AESTHETIC ORDER OF FEAR

The “subway crisis” pointed toward the collapse of a fundamental infrastructural service, one that held the city together socially and economically. New York City seemed to be rushing headlong into chaos as its problems

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 141


overwhelmed all established precedents for response. The city’s political leadership was unable to provide basic services at adequate levels; in the media, crime coverage convinced New Yorkers (with some justification) that they lived in an extremely dangerous environment that only grew more threatening every day; one in three residents lived in poverty; the city’s economy left large numbers of people without access to legal employment. Directly connected to the question of governability in major cities generally, the subway crisis was understood within the context of a much larger legitimacy crisis. New York City continued to negotiate its solvency after 1974 by allowing the State of New York to create two more public authorities, this time staffed by a group of private-sector financial managers, which would more or less govern by way of the city treasury.34 Meanwhile, New York City’s key position in the global capital network made the city’s fiscal crisis an item of international interest and concern. The extreme nature of the actions taken in response to the fiscal crisis—essentially, placing financial technocrats in the mayor’s seat—affirmed New York City’s national and international image as a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. Throughout Ed Koch’s first term (1977–1981), the city continued to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy as basic city services were cut further or the city’s established service delivery routines were placed on an emergency basis. Koch won the mayor’s seat in 1977 with only 48 percent of the vote. To expand his base of support after taking office, he quickly formed strong alliances with the city’s white middle class and the business community. His support for the death penalty (and for increasing incarcerations), personal attacks on minority political figures as “poverty pimps,” and blaming the fiscal crisis on the “liberal” policies of former mayor John Lindsay all worked to create cohesive support from white ethnic constituencies who were fearful of the changes that might be coming with their declining demographic majority in the city. Although Koch’s political career had been initiated within the reform wing of the Democratic Party, his taxation and economic development policies as mayor quickly made it clear that his record as a congressional liberal would not interfere with moneymaking in New York City. He immediately established connections with the city’s real estate and finance sectors.35 Although his administration had to struggle constantly to maintain an image of effective control and a positive outlook on the city’s future during his first term, his symbolic gestures, policy choices, and economic

141

Austin Ch5

142

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 142


development programs pleased these sought-after electoral constituencies. He enjoyed the support of most of the city’s major news vendors, especially the editorial board of the New York Times, and held informal daily press conferences, pushing forward an image of honesty, confidence, pragmatism, and accessibility.36 Koch’s first term took place during a period of extreme budgetary austerity, but he also had the task of maintaining the city’s image as a business and tourist center. Since the mid-1960s, the national media as well as popular culture had routinely portrayed New York as a dangerous, dirty, crime-ridden city. New York City’s gradual loss of Fortune 500 companies to competing cities continued, but repercussions from the fiscal crisis had the potential to transform that slow leak into a flood. Tourism ranked second on the list of the city’s most important economic enterprises,37 but the national attention given to New York City’s contemporary fiscal problems, service cuts, high crime, and failing subway system worked against what was left of its reputation as the nation’s center for culture and business. Tourists and executives alike were understandably wary of entering the New York City represented in Death Wish. The “I ⽦ New York” campaign, a statewide effort at boosterism begun in the late 1970s, worked effectively to challenge these national perceptions of the city.38 The supposed enthusiasm of New Yorkers for their city was set in contrast to representations of the city’s decay.39 But the strategy did meet with some skepticism. Time magazine: “If New York’s morale really is better these days, it may be because so many of those who hated the place left.”40 While fiscal restrictions did not predetermine the mayor’s priorities, they did push the Koch administration to look to “image-enhancing” spectacles and voluntary citizen actions as ways of gaining advantage with fewer tax dollars. In line with these goals, the administration studied municipal service programs in which a citizen’s behavior might make a difference (a resident’s voluntary, cooperative behavior, for instance, can make garbage pickup more efficient). In late 1979 the administration began to gather information and formulate plans to address the city’s “dirty” image, specifically its street litter and the ongoing “graffiti problem.” But surveys by nonprofit businesses and the Koch administration indicated that five years of deteriorating city services (with little hope for relief in the near future) had created among residents a passive, hopeless attitude toward the city’s physical and social condition, which stymied whatever spontaneous impulses

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 143


they might have had to “keep things in order.” Otherwise cooperative residents, the surveys found, generally viewed the city’s multiple crises as a more or less permanent state of affairs and thus preferred simply to wait out the situation. Such general apathy could of course have a devastating effect on New York City’s already crippled national image and cause even further losses in the vitally important tourist industry, to say nothing of the crises themselves. The surveys’ findings were mirrored in two articles in 1979 that drew a strong connection between the city’s image problem and the attitude of its residents. Both articles were pivotal in reframing the “graffiti problem” in preparation for a second “war.” The first story, “Vandals Take Psychological Toll,” appeared on the front page of the New York Times in May and lumped together the destruction of public sculptures, the toppling of gravestones in cemeteries, and the ransacking of public schools with the activities of writers, all under the rubric of vandalism.41 The occasion for this front-page article was not to report an increase in vandalism. In fact, it reported that vandalism had “leveled off in recent years” and quoted the Parks Commissioner as saying that he believed vandalism was no worse in 1979 than in 1949. Rather, the Times was reporting an atrocity tale42 of its own creation. No shift of position . . . will afford an unspoiled view in New York City. Vandalism is underground in the subways, above ground in the parks and schools. . . . The cost to New Yorkers is in the millions of dollars a year for the cleanup and in the psychological effects of cynicism, sadness and in some neighborhoods, a feeling of hopelessness and neglect.43

It is useful to keep in mind that this analysis (which posits the appearance of the urban environment as a primary cause for the cynicism, sadness, and hopelessness) is geographically located within a city where unemployment rates for youths sixteen to nineteen years old were between 74 and 86 percent;44 where an average of thirty-three buildings a day burned in the Bronx (the vast majority from arson paid for by the buildings’ owners);45 where essential services had been cut to the bone; where maintenance of the mass transit system had been dangerously deferred for several years; where the federal government withheld financial assistance until the city was on the brink of bankruptcy;46 where more than one in four of its residents lived in poverty;47 where almost 40 percent of African Americans and over 50 per-

143

Austin Ch5

144

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 144


cent of Hispanics lived below the poverty line;48 and where the dropout rate for youths of color hovered around 75 percent.49 But according to the Times, the real cause of cynicism, sadness, and hopelessness in New York City in 1979 was the actions of young vandals, including those writing their names on the subways. In attempting to make nebulous anxieties more concrete, the Times had once again turned toward the disorderly behavior of the young. Continuing a long tradition within the commercial mass-mediated public sphere, the Times encouraged its readers to ignore the more glaring (and more frightening) causes of the structural and political fault lines in the city’s social order. In my view, the article was itself a product of cynicism, parodying (if not mocking) the city’s significant social problems by locating their causes in the social-psychological affects of youth culture. Though muddled and convoluted, the issues raised in this article are important, since it marks the half-way point between the Lindsay alliance’s construction of graffiti as juvenile delinquency and the later, more reactionary reconstruction of graffiti as some kind of imminent terrorist threat. Starting with a comparison between New York City and the major cities of antiquity (typical of earlier graffiti-related news reporting), the article first presents a brief etymology of the word “vandal,” noting the part the Vandals may have played in the sacking of ancient Rome. The article then explains that most modern vandals are young males, and that their actions are caused by alienation, which in turn could be caused, the article states, by “a sense of normlessness” or being powerless in a situation where the rules of behavior seem arbitrary. (Of course, the situating background that might explain this sense of normlessness or contextualize the perceived powelessness is never explored.) The article later argues, again backed by statements from the Parks Commissioner, that the contemporary problem of vandalism stems from the city’s financial inability to undo the prior damage done by vandals. The Parks Commissioner asserts that when one act of vandalism goes unrepaired for a long period of time, it is taken to mean that other illegal acts can be committed with impunity. In this regard, the Parks Commissioner unknowingly agreed with pop artist Claes Oldenburg (quoted in chapter 3) that “the city is like a newspaper. . . ”; or in other words, that the public square (shared public space) and the public sphere are more or less equivalent. In this formulation, vandalism is represented as a disruption (an “unauthor-ized” writing) in the “text” of the city’s officially sanctioned order.

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 145


If such disruptions are left uncorrected (the argument goes), further distortions will appear, increasing in quantity, kind, and magnitude—to be “read” by the law-abiding and the criminal alike to mean that lawlessness is allowed to run rampant. The article provides no clear picture of the graffiti writer/vandal (is he a victim or a perpetrator of urban normlessness?), but the “graffiti problem” as represented by the Times is solidly anchored to the rise in social disorder and the growing fear of public spaces in the ever-present shadows of the Naked City.50 The dubious reasoning of the Times article was articulated more clearly later that year by the esteemed sociologist Nathan Glazer in an article for the public policy journal The Public Interest. Glazer argued that the significance of the “graffiti problem” was not its grave criminal nature, since graffiti was, he admitted, a minor crime. Rather, its significance as an urban problem was cultural, in that it told the citizens of New York that the city authorities were unable to deal with even minor misdeeds. According to Glazer, residents and tourists felt that if the city government could not control these petty crimes, then it could certainly not solve the more severe crimes committed on the subways, nor was it likely to solve the host of even more serious problems facing the city. Glazer concluded from this that the city authorities’ inability to eradicate subway graffiti was being interpreted by New Yorkers to mean that the entire civic order was lost, that New York City was the Naked City, thus creating a vague but pervasive fear—much like the sadness, cynicism, hopelessness, and feelings of neglect cited in the Times’s “Vandals” article earlier that year.51 Glazer’s article reinterpreted the failures of the first war, and thereby constructed a new framework for the “graffiti problem.” Like the Times’s “Vandals” article, Glazer’s article equated the public sphere and the public square. The public square—the shared public space of the city—could be “read” like a newspaper’s crime-reporting section. The important item that was being “read” in the public square, according to Glazer, was the city’s defeat in the “war on graffiti”; we are apparently to assume that the residents did not “read” much else from this complex text. The writing on the walls gave the resident/reader the uneasy feeling that the city was “out of control.” Further, it created the impression that the city administration and the powers that be were helpless and/or uncaring about the overwhelming fear this “uncontrollable” situation produced. This “reading” had a profound effect on the residents/readers, making them into passive, retreating victims.52

145

Austin Ch5

146

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 146


The assertion that the pervasive fear of shared public space experienced by some New Yorkers was directly related to the appearance of spray-painted names on the subways and city walls was subsequently reinforced in the academic work of several criminal justice scholars over the next several years. These academic partisans of the “broken windows” thesis returned to environmental factors as a way to explain crime and social decay within specific urban localities.53 The “broken windows” thesis also approaches the public square as a text, like a newspaper. It posits that crime in a neighborhood will continue to increase as the visual evidence of minor infractions is left unattended. This implies that civic order is a fragile text indeed, but one that nonetheless contains a powerful “preferred reading”: toleration of visible disruptions in the normative aesthetic order of urban space could lead to a general collapse into lawlessness.54 Writings on the walls were, in effect, assaults and riots waiting to happen. What is unique about this line of logic is the fact that despite its extremely conservative implications (and the reactionary outlook of most of its promoters), it is most assuredly postmodern in its emphatic attention to the surface appearance of social order. It implies that the basis, the foundation, indeed the cause of collective social order is a matter of appearances, a matter of aesthetics. It assumes that what undermines the social order of a community is not lack of jobs, the uneven distribution of scarce resources, status inequalities, or some other structural flaw in the social fabric, but the unkempt appearance of an area. Supposedly, the (innate?) human need for the state’s authorized visual order creates much more powerful expectations and motivations than many other, well-studied factors in everyday life, like income, status, identity, or social mobility. What constitutes “proper” order in a neighborhood is not located in the material conditions of the residents’ life chances, but in the surrounding spectacle of the urban environment. In this framework, it is of utmost importance to maintain the aesthetic order of shared public space. Government officials must reinforce the “preferred” visual standards of what is normal and acceptable in the minds of residents. In city documents produced during the next few years, this kind of reinforcement was explicitly referred to as “consciousness raising.” The framework is reflected in the police visibility campaigns that responded to crime on the subways, which likewise assume that the law-abiding will read the presence of police in urban space as safety.

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 147


I LOVE NEW YORK: THE SECOND WAR ON GRAFFITI, 1980–1983

To those looking back on this time, it might appear that launching another costly (and probably futile) campaign to “clean” the subways during an unprecedented period of infrastructural collapse and municipal austerity is evidence of an organizational psychosis within certain parts of the municipal bureaucracy. But the new significance attributed to writing by Glazer, the Times, and some of the social control intelligentsia demanded that a new war on graffiti be undertaken to save the city from itself. This new framework represented the writing on the subways as a (public) sign that the city was out of control, and that centralized authorities did not care. The framework offered two important innovations that would become central arguments for an emerging coalition calling for the new war. First, it allowed an image of unquestioned centralized government authority to be conflated with the good of all residents. It is important to keep in mind that we are describing the importance of the appearance of order here rather than an actual, lived, orderly society; remember that the “high visibility” police uniforms that may have helped some riders to feel better did not lead to an actual, sustained decrease in crime on the subways.55 Visible, surface reassurances would be made in place of real change. This logic, which suggests that New York would recover and its citizens would be at ease when it appeared that the central authorities were “in control,” helps to turn away the more substantial issue of why centralized governmental authority had so clearly failed in New York City in the immediate past. Instead, it turns the problem of disorder on its head: increasing disorder is caused by the existing disorder. And how did the existing disorder come about? There is silence on this question, just a pragmatic assertion that the solution to the problem is to “clean up” the disorder that exists now. With this move, the tarnished image of governmental authority can be laid at the feet of young people, the unseen barbarians who write their names on the city walls of the New Rome. Second, the rhetoric of a civic system out of control proposed both a new crime and a new victim for the “graffiti problem” in such a way that the new criminal was left unexamined, unspecified, and unrepresented. During Lindsay’s war, writers’ crime was disrespect for authority and the defacement of public property, the victim was an embarrassed city official

147

Austin Ch5

148

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 148


or an outraged property owner, and the criminal was a juvenile delinquent, a youngster who needed rehabilitation through a “good lesson” administered by an authority figure. This is a very old formula for viewing youthful misbehavior and public correction. As the new “graffiti problem” recrystallized in the early 1980s, the crime became the promotion of residents’ fears of shared public space and cynicism toward centralized authority (thus placing civic order into question), and the victim was a fearful public. In this scenario, the crime involves the disruption of the normative, “author-ized” urban environment; the crime of writing was not so much the destruction of property but the creation of a fearful state of mind in residents caused by “reading” the unauthorized disruption. Like the author of a novel, the writer in this scenario is simultaneously always present and never really there. And whereas the destruction of property decried during the first war offered a commonsense relationship between writer (criminal) and tag (crime), when the criminal act became the perpetuation of fear the identity of the criminal or the motivations and causes of his supposed crime are completely overwhelmed by the emotional terror he has created. With the invisible barbarians lurking in the city, known only by their marks, the fears they provoked (a legitimation crisis for the municipal regime) were too great to allow for other considerations aside from the crusade to “wipe out graffiti.” Who could sympathize with these terrorists? Who cared why they wrote their names on the trains? Heightened fears of urban young people were present throughout the city in any case. In the summer of 1977 a regional blackout on the East Coast had led to looting in several neighborhoods. Most of the looters, it was assumed, were young people. The average subway criminal had long been assumed to be young. The symbolic power of the Guardian Angels, organized in 1978, in part derived from a militantly anticrime stance taken up by youths. But as Dennis Jay Kenney and others have shown, this had contradictory effects. On the one hand, a youthful vigilante corps was welcomed, since it was assumed that subway criminals were similarly youthful. On the other hand, the Angels were themselves young and thus part of the suspect population—who, after all, could be sure that the young people on the train with you were “real” Angels?56 The new frame placed around the “graffiti problem” dovetailed nicely with image-improvement tasks that local elites were planning to undertake during New York City’s recovery from the financial crisis after the early 1980s. The city administration reasoned that if it could transform the cyni-

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 149


cism about changing the environment and the fear of public spaces into righteous indignation leveled at local offenders (such as litterers, writers, and vandals), then the city’s image might be improved while leaving the budget at current levels. Residents would rally around civic leaders and revitalize the city’s order through unpaid volunteer work motivated by righteous anger at the “terrorists.” If the city administration could convince residents to police one another, rather than assigning that responsibility to some branch of the city government, significant economies and visible results might be achieved at the same time. This approach also had the advantage of drawing both on Koch’s ambitions and his strengths. City beautification projects are a time-honored way to appeal to the business, real estate, and homeowning interests that constituted a major part of Koch’s constituency. The Sanitation Department’s “New York City Clean Streets Coalition” proposal, aimed at reducing litter, emerged from this framework.57 This private/public partnership was designed to cost the city treasury very little or nothing, since it would primarily be a motivational public relations campaign created from donated services. Koch’s carefully crafted representation of himself as an “ordinary guy with special abilities” and his adroit use of the media could be marshaled to pitch these sorts of plans as “commonsense” undertakings, as “taking back” the city. It was hoped they would help to bolster an imagined community consensus about certain behavioral norms that neighbors would subsequently enforce on one another.58 It could also draw on, and invigorate, the hundreds of neighborhood-level institutions already in existence, from homeowners’ associations to church groups. Koch’s emphasis on city cleanliness, city image, and the “quality of life” in New York City courted both the middle class and the business community. During the early 1980s, a second antigraffiti alliance emerged, built around an assumed, commonsense connection between the “authorized” aesthetic ordering of property and the foundations of social order in the city. Properties where writers had written their name without authorization reflected a city that was “out of control.” By removing the offending, unauthorized names from public space, the city’s leadership would rescue the citizens from their fears, reestablish citizens’ confidence in their leaders’ legitimacy, and, ultimately, restore elites’ image as effective, tough, and caring patriarchs. In this way, Ed Koch was able to articulate in precise terms what John Lindsay had meant in his frustrated references to the “demoralizing effects” of writing.

149

Austin Ch5

150

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 150


The new ideological framework differed markedly from the more traditional methods of demonizing youthful behavior. Young people had been constructed previously as “folk devils,” often supported by atrocity tales in the media that emphasized the moral extremes of youth crimes. The emphasis had been on the deviant values of the youthful criminal and their potentially disruptive (or apocalyptic) social repercussions, thereby reaffirming and reifying the values and behavioral norms of the status quo.59 In the new framework, the folk devil appeared as a terrorist engaged in a semiotic guerrilla war. The 1979 Times article had staged the graffiti writers as vandals, but also as (perhaps) pitiable victims of alienation in a normless world. Normlessness, it can be argued, is caused by paternal failure to provide, impose, or inculcate in the young a rational code of behavior. By the time the second “war” alliance had adopted the “out of control” rhetoric of the Glazer article, the graffiti writer had been freed from his alienation and was now victimizing the patriarch himself, and thus the entire paternal civic order. Here, we see a move away from the therapeutic models of social pathology to explain crime toward a more paranoid and absolutist style that identifies those who step outside the norms as dangerous threats to the entire community. In this move, the supposedly fragile civic order, overshadowed by the barbarians at the gates of the New Rome, necessitates an unquestioning allegiance to the city fathers, lest the walls break and chaos enter the apartments of Manhattan (as it had in Death Wish). This makes the consideration of writing as art, or as an alternative vision of the city, seem irresponsible and even dangerous. This was the ground of the second war’s propaganda. The claim that writing symbolized a city “out of control” was recited in almost every public statement about the “graffiti problem” by the MTA, the city council, and the mayor’s office during the next decade, becoming the politically correct party line on the “graffiti problem” within city government. The charge was repeated in the Times’s news reporting on this issue and appeared again in its editorial pages. Behind this representation lurked an unspoken nostalgia for some mythic past when city authorities had unquestionable and strict “control” of the established social order. As I argued earlier, there were plenty of other good (and visible) reasons to think that New York City was “out of control,” even as it began its celebrated recovery in the early 1980s. Despite these glaring problems, writing was enthusiastically and continually hoisted up as a main symbol—and cause—of New York City’s troubles. Making a “crisis” out of graffiti was al-

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 151


ways a way to “make visible” the efforts of authorities to create and sustain a familiar and legible urban order. I do not mean to imply here that an intentional plan was formed and then carried out to delude New Yorkers about the state of their city. The various crises themselves speak to the city elite’s inability to successfully carry out even its basic functions of leadership, maintenance, and reproduction of the standing order, let alone concoct some elaborate ruse. Rather, public survey research, new academic thinking in social control theory, the turmoil within the public bureaucracies, and the representations of the crises within the mass-mediated public sphere came together in a way that suggested that the writing on the subways was already a powerful symbol of the public’s fear—specifically, the fear that the city was on the verge of chaos. Thus, a second antigraffiti campaign appeared to be a necessary and correct step in maintaining public consent for the sacrifices deemed essential to successfully confront the city’s crises. A second antigraffiti campaign not only seemed reasonable but absolutely essential if New York City was to maintain (or regain) its place in the national and international urban network. The new antigraffiti agitation in the public sphere began to take shape during 1980 and 1981 and consisted of many of the same warriors from the first crusade: the Times editorial board, a few family court justices, the mayor’s office, the city council, and the MTA.60 Like its predecessor during the Lindsay era, the Koch alliance’s primary theater of operations was the commercial public sphere; individual agencies continued to operate autonomously within their own turf. But within the public sphere the alliance’s contribution was crucial: it created a framework in which this second “war on graffiti” took on important social meanings that extended the battlefield far beyond the subway system. The alliance framed the second war as a crucial civic endeavor that would have a significantly positive impact on the “quality of life” of every resident as well as improve the image of New York City generally. These were goals entirely worthy of any expenditures involved. Significantly, the study that initiated plans leading to a second antigraffiti campaign came through the New York City Planning Commission, which oversees long-range economic development goals and land use allocation. The study’s major “finding” was that writing had become the symbol of “a breakdown of law and order and had driven riders from the subways.” This claim demonstrates the circulation of the “out of control”

151

Austin Ch5

152

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 152


rhetoric among policymakers (and an odd ignorance of riders’ own analysis of their anxieties and reasons for leaving), but more importantly, the plan signals the new presence of the business community in antigraffiti efforts. The planning commission’s study was followed by a proposal, created in the Mayor’s Office of Operations, for action among the various authorities and city departments. The proposal, titled “Graffiti . . . the BLIGHT of New York City: A Research Study on Removal and Control” (capitalization in original), began by implying that the “graffiti problem” was central, if not equivalent, to the city’s image problem. “Graffiti vandalism in the past ten years has become the City Blight. . . . Graffiti is a costly, dangerous and ugly public nuisance; often obscene and racist.”61 The phrase “often obscene and racist” was a frequently repeated sound bite during Lindsay’s war and indicates that the Mayor’s Office of Operations had done at least some digging around in the documents from the earlier alliance. But writers were one of the most multiracial voluntary groups in the city. Obscenities were certainly written in taunts to the police or between rivals, but these constituted a very tiny percentage of the writers’ production: no one gained fame by writing profanities, since these were always the first (sometimes the only) marks to be removed. There are no grounds for accepting “obscene and racist” as an accurate representation of writing practice.62 This may indicate that, like their predecessors, those who created this study had devoted little time to direct observation; they maintained their distance, and this distance speaks to the city administration’s ignorance of the “problem” they were attempting to solve. Or we are left to think that these distortions were intentional—perhaps even part of the city’s action plan itself—and thus circulated to evoke sympathy for a new war that had few chances of success. The proposal called for a war on two fronts, in the public square and in the commercial public sphere, to be managed separately, in a much more conscious way than during Lindsay’s years. The war within shared public space had, of course, been under way for a decade. The first section of the document, which deals with this theater of operations, consists mostly of statistics that describe the cost and extent of the “problem” and the existing antigraffiti programs and removal methods. It proposes a more coordinated continuation of the “technological solution” begun during the Lindsay years and calls for sharing research. But the proposal offers nothing of real substance in this regard, nor does it present evidence that more effective tactics

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 153


or methods had been developed since the last war.63 The removal routines already in place were to simply continue. Since the existing removal programs were costly, difficult, and had failed before, and since the proposal could offer no new tactics, methods, or coordinated efforts, it seems unlikely that this section of the report would spark bureaucratic enthusiasm in a time of budget-cutting. The lack of a more vigorous proposal for action speaks to the city’s financial situation as well as the stalemate with the writers. The second section of the proposed action plan is bolder but much more vague and resembles notes on an idea rather than a fully considered, concrete plan. This section takes up less than two pages in the thirteen-page document. The central claim in this section is that the city “will have wasted valuable resources unless a program of public relations, education and public restraint is instituted.” Any new effort undertaken within the public square required a renewed effort in the commercial public sphere; advances made within shared public space must be mirrored (if not preceded) by changes in residents’ attitudes for the war to achieve its desired effects. Residents must be drafted into the next “war” to help secure the administration’s hold on any territories retaken. To gain support for this conscription, the city authorities must “arouse an awareness in everyone as to [the] damage, needless expense and ugliness of graffiti.” Oddly, the imperative “to arouse an awareness” implies that New Yorkers were not already aware of writing’s “ugliness”; on the other hand, the tone of outrage that runs throughout the document implies that the “ugliness” of writing is common sense and widely shared among its authors and their expected bureaucratic audience. In war, image management is of absolute importance in maintaining legitimacy and support for sacrifices on the home front. Due to the widely publicized defeat of the Lindsay alliance in the last war, the necessary image management in a second war would have to be extended beyond New York City to include the entire nation. At the local level, popular opinion against writing would ideally be channeled into unpaid resident action to “forestall the reapplication of graffiti,” after (paid) city employees had removed it.64 To win hearts and minds both locally and nationally, this second war would need commercial publicity. The city administration set about finding advertising agencies that would do this “image work” as a public service. Marking the end of the long hiatus that followed the first alliance’s defeat, four editorials condemning writing appeared in the Times during 1980, signaling the willingness of the paper’s editorial staff to join the new al-

153

Austin Ch5

154

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 154


liance. Eight more antigraffiti editorials were published in the Times between the beginning of 1981 and the end of 1984, a substantial increase in the newspaper’s support as compared to the Lindsay era. That support frequently surfaced in a new section of the editorial page titled “The Apple and the Worm,” which either cheered or criticized local events and actions of note. This outlet reinforced the framework of the “graffiti problem” as an issue of the city’s (business) image and its “quality of life.” The Times’s editorials of the 1980s were less likely to picture writers as “idiots” with incomprehensible motives (although this representation did appear on occasion) and were more likely to direct their moral wrath toward those who claimed that writers were legitimate artists. Countercultural ideals had effectively challenged the Lindsay alliance’s characterizations of the “graffiti problem” (even if that challenge had had very little effect on public spaces). Unlike the 1970s, however, support for writing in shared public space was more difficult to find in the mass-mediated public sphere during the 1980s, except perhaps in the Village Voice. Nonetheless, the Times took aggressive preemptive strikes to cut off any criticism of the alliance’s position on the “graffiti problem” before it emerged a second time. For instance, one editorial posed the eleven-day Transport Workers Union strike during 1980 as a validity test for the view that writing was art. “One or two of the city’s most outspoken intellectuals,” the editorial stated, had asserted that writers were “the last truly liberated artists of their generation,” risking “their liberty to cry out against our routinized society” and seductively “marrying artistic expression with civil disobedience.” According to the Times, “if the romantic explanation of graffiti were valid, the artists should have been reduced to a few dispirited splatters” during the strike, since the trains were unguarded. Predictably, the editors find that the writers do not measure up, since they used the MTA’s vulnerability to their advantage and mercilessly bombed the subways.65 “Thanks to the strike, therefore, riders are now free to criticize subway art without intellectual footnotes. It is boring, repetitious and a base surrender to the mere technology of the spray can.” The Times conveniently excused it’s own publishing from consideration as “intellectual footnotes” in this report from the war front, implying that it was simply speaking the commonsense truth. Note also how the editors have staged the ongoing war as a game (“Graffitiists, it seems, do not understand the sportsmanship of the artist”), rather like that played between the Oliver Twist-type rapscallion and the urban grocer from whom he steals. This representation would reappear in other editorials.

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 155


These Times editorials placed any support of writing outside the realm of reason by continually citing its powerful negative symbolic impact: It’s been a long time since people offered romantic defenses of graffiti as a new urban art form. Graffiti splattered across cars assault the sensibilities of riders. . . . Most important, tolerating graffiti conveys a message to rider and vandal alike: The system is out of control, and no one cares.66

The Times editorials of the 1980s were accompanied by a small number of letters to the editor about writing that began to appear again in 1979, after a three-year period in which the topic was not mentioned in this section of the paper. For the most part, these letters were complaints about the MTA’s lack of effective action and typically located their criticism within the larger context of the subway’s deterioration. Only one letter on the topic of graffiti was published in the Times after 1983, when the second war was “officially” under way.67 While the letters published in the Times during the first war had been relatively evenly balanced between writing’s supporters and detractors, only one letter in support of writing was printed during the 1980s. This letter-writer (a graphic designer) imagined a professional kinship between himself and the writers and questioned the veracity of the new alliance’s representations of writing: As a professional lettering designer and educator, I find it difficult to believe the Transit Authority’s contention . . . that graffiti have cost the authority $5 million per year in lost ridership. Certainly, the subways, with their noise, dirt, crime, crowds and tooth-shattering rides have ample means to sicken us, without blaming it on graffiti. I ride the subways precisely because of the graffiti, in order to enjoy that ephemeral flowering of rebellious spirits through graphic design. . . . This is not a unique view.68

But this challenge to the alliance’s stance was the singular exception in the Times’s letters column. The views of another graphic design professional (a dean of the Parsons School) epitomizes the paper’s more common fare: Of all the symptoms of a decaying New York, graffiti may be the most widespread and is to my mind one of the most demoralizing. . . . New York’s graffiti explosion may be merely a symptom or a symbol of our city’s deep social

155

Austin Ch5

156

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 156


illness, but the unwillingness or inability of our city’s administration to deal with the wanton defacing . . . is closer to the root of the disease.69

Although support for the new crusade was explicit in the editorial page, the second war also received favorable treatment by the Times and other newspapers through their selection of sources and through covert commentary made in other news reports about writing.70 Newspapers used their connections in the MTA and city government to supply information and quotes about the status of writing on the subways, despite the fact that the MTA was known to consistently provide false statistics about this and other areas of operation. In the newspapers, the MTA, city officials, and other members of the alliance received an uncontested platform to broadcast and reaffirm their view of writing’s place within the city. Such biased support was never acknowledged as a form of favoritism, of course—it was presented as “news.”71 As was the case in the 1970s, only rarely were writers used as sources of firsthand information about their lives, artistic practices, or views on the “graffiti problem,” even though journalists could easily make contact with writers. When writers did appear as a source, the article usually took an exoticized ethnographic slant of the sort that characterizes the reporting on street gangs and drug use among youth. This style of journalism couches its reporting in an overall context of spectacularized and reified social pathology. For instance, in October 1980 in its Sunday magazine section the Times published an extensive piece of ethnographic-style reporting on writers entitled “Graffiti: The Plague Years.”72 The article’s topic is the supposedly antisocial turn writing had taken at the end of the 1970s, an odd claim since for almost a decade the Times had not represented writers in any way other than antisocial. The article presents the most thorough overview of writing culture to appear in the Times at any time before or since, but does so in the name of demonstrating the writers’ psychological, social, and moral dysfunctions. Ultimately, the article must be seen as part of the alliance’s overall attempts to de-romanticize and malign the writers in the eyes of the public. The first sentence hails a familiar romantic image of the youthful rapscallion: “He saunters into the high-ceilinged paint store, a scruffy-looking 15-year-old right out of ‘Oliver Twist’—curly blond hair, blue eyes and quick fingers. . . . With a deftness Fagin would have applauded, [he] makes

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 157


five cans of spray paint disappear.73 This representation of ennobled juvenile delinquency is the straw man bashed throughout the rest of the article, in part by showing writers to be cruel and even brutal toward one another. In this way, the article attempts to deflate and corrupt the nineteenthcentury Dickensian image of honor and respect among poor youthful thieves by highlighting race and class conflict—the blond hair and blue eyes being carefully chosen details. Since writers are among the social groups in the city least likely to indulge these tensions, it is difficult to see this representation of writing as anything other than a finely tuned distortion that draws on the “common sense” of racial and class conflict that is so prevalent almost everywhere else in the city. From the innumerable examples of the everyday extremes of class and race conflict in New York City, the Times points to its horrors in one of the social locations where it is most notably lacking.74 The authors of this article are once again backed by a host of parents, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists who offer a range of social and psychological pathologies to explain the primary motivations for writing. These include peer pressure, territoriality (“like male dogs who raise their legs every 10 feet”), poor self-image, avoiding mature sexuality and intimacy, as well as “less-than-close relationships with their fathers,” “broken homes,” “whites aping [sic] black life styles,” “deep feelings of fear,” and “addiction.” The article concludes with the authors’ own well-considered evaluation of the abnormalities peculiar to writers: “essential childishness.” These pop-pathology analyses are reinforced with quotes from city officials who administer the “problem” on the everyday level, and with lengthy descriptions of the efforts being made to prevent writing.75 The illustration of the state’s call to action works to certify the “common sense” understanding of the writers’ deviancy. The state authorities would not act unreasonably, no? Like the Times, other members of the second alliance initiated important actions that signaled their agreement and support for another war. Again, these were mostly symbolic gestures performed within the public sphere which had little direct impact on the loss/gain tally in public space. Nonetheless, they provided rhetorical reinforcement for this undertaking, and perhaps more importantly, they provided fodder for news articles and editorial commentary which kept the alliance in the public eye. As the new alliance gained momentum, an increasingly punitive judicial stance began to gain favor. In 1980 the Transit Police changed its policies

157

Austin Ch5

158

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 158


and began arresting writers for criminal mischief rather than issuing summonses for transit rule violations. If writers were caught with train keys (common for those who bombed the insides), they could be charged with criminal possession of burglar’s tools; if writers were caught in the yards or tunnels, they could be charged with criminal trespass.76 These arrests were followed up with restitution fines for the writers or their parents. A threeperson staff was assigned to pursue payments. The Transit Police’s vandal squad (see chapter 4) was assigned about thirty officers through most of the 1980s. The squad was reinforced and assisted by occasional short-term enforcement campaigns that included saturation patrols, plainclothes operations, and canine units that targeted specific areas. During this decade, the vandal squad was as concerned with youths kicking out the windows in the trains as it was with writers, but the arrest statistics reported in the newspapers did not make a distinction between the two crimes. From the available evidence, I would estimate that around a thousand writers were arrested each year during the early 1980s.77 The courts were also part of the second alliance, although their activity did not receive as much attention in the early 1980s as it had during the Lindsay era. Conflicts between the MTA’s policies and the courts’ approach to the problem—made public at the end of the first war—remained, and one frustrated Brooklyn Criminal Court judge, unimpressed with the MTA’s request for restitution as punishment, sentenced two first-time graffiti offenders (they were reported to be gang members) to fifteen days in jail in 1981. The judge used the occasion of the Times’s coverage of this harsh sentence to rebuke the MTA, saying that restitution was a “totally unacceptable . . . solution to this enormous problem.”78 A year later, a district attorney renewed the “cleanup” sentence first initiated and then abandoned during the mid-1970s. In practice, the sentence was not primarily aimed at writers but was instead intended as a way to work off fines and to humiliate those arrested for other minor subway violations, like jumping the turnstiles.79 Nonetheless, the district attorney justified the program on the alliance’s terms. As the Times reported: “[The district attorney] said it was important that minor transit offenses as well as felonies be vigorously prosecuted, because failure to prosecute the lesser offenses, such as farebeating and defacement by graffiti, breeds cynicism among those responsible for such acts and may lead to more serious crimes.”80 An investigation of the program (which was never made public) revealed that the TA carefully screened those whose sentence might include the cleanup option, and

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 159


accepted only those offenders who were unlikely to challenge a TA manager’s oversight. This requirement effectively excluded all writers.81 Still, the newspapers dutifully reported the “lessons” being taught “graffiti scrawlers,” and the Times’s editorial staff chimed its approval. By the spring of 1981, advertising agencies willing to work for reduced rates or provide their services pro bonum were located by the Office for Economic Development, the unit in charge of putting together Koch’s antigraffiti campaign. Koch’s campaign was not connected in any way to new actions in shared public space (the 1981 proposal examined earlier in this chapter had more or less brushed aside new methods and tactics); Koch’s war, like Lindsay’s, was carried out solely within the commercial public sphere. The ad agency’s notes from an early strategy meeting with a mayoral assistant summarized the city government’s motives for undertaking the new war: “It is not economically feasible to clean all graffiti with public funds. Transit clean-up costs alone are estimated at $1 billion.” The congruency between the proposed antigraffiti campaign and the goals of service-reducing efforts are clear, reiterated in the meeting’s notes at another point: “Production monies are to be solicited from private industry.” The mayoral assistant outlined who writers were and what motivated their actions based on the city’s understandings. The ad agency, which had agreed to work pro bonum, recommended focus groups and further research about writers (to be gathered from those whom the Transit Police had arrested and convicted) in order to design the campaign. Notes from the meeting indicate that the agency would pursue a strategy of “reaching” and morally persuading the writers to quit (or never start) rather than attempting to scare them away from writing with threats of punishment. To bolster the administration’s case for another antigraffiti crusade, the Office for Economic Development began gathering information on city agencies’ graffiti removal costs and the costs to retailers from whom writers stole their paint. These are common moves in constructing a “problem.” However, a survey of retailers did not uncover losses of any real magnitude to store owners, and retailers were not particularly concerned about those that did exist. Since this survey did not uncover strong support from its target group of “victims,” its results were never publicly reported.82 The New York Board of Trade also pitched in by conducting focus-group interviews with students from four city high schools, asking about peer attitudes toward writers and writing, and soliciting proposals for prevention or ways to blunt writing’s popularity. Like the retailer surveys, the interviews

159

Austin Ch5

160

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 160


revealed nothing of value to the new campaign. The students’ attitudes toward writers and writing were mixed at best, but one of the four groups overwhelmingly supported the writers.83 Nonetheless, this sort of information was passed on to the Koch administration and was part of the ongoing staff support, pro bonum services, and ideas exchanged between the mayor and those in the business community as the campaign was being planned. The mayor’s antigraffiti campaign was formally announced from the front page of the New York Times in February 1982.84 Like earlier rhetoric during the Lindsay era, both the Times and the mayor’s office advanced cautious, if not outright pessimistic, views over the possibility of winning: It is likely to be an uphill campaign, city officials acknowledge. “There isn’t any guarantee that it will work,” said Deputy Mayor Karen N. Gerard. . . . The targeted audience—the city’s hundreds of graffiti scrawlers—is by nature assumed to respond less to appeals from people in authority. . . . “Will it work? We’ll see,” Mr. Rickman [mayoral aide] said. “It is certainly better than sitting back and accepting all of this as inevitable.”85

Rickman’s stance, which placed its hope in the efficacy of any activity over continued hopelessness and passivity, was frequently put forward by the supporters of the second war as a justification for their efforts and the expense of the campaign. This argument worked to narrow and contain criticism of the war, suspending the possibility of questioning the war itself by positing an emasculated “helplessness” as its only alternative. Valid criticisms could be made of certain tactics, but the war was beyond dispute. Despite a decade of defeats, shared public space had to be rescued. The campaign’s kickoff took place two months later and was covered on the front page of the Times’s Metro section. The article was accompanied by a group photo showing Mayor Koch, Willard Butcher, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and chair of the mayor’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force, two celebrities who acted as campaign spokesmodels (Paco Navarro, a popular local Latino deejay, and Yankees baseball star Dave Winfield), and the ad person who had designed the campaign. The Times article was relatively short, given the administration’s preparations for the event, and barely mentioned the campaign’s slogan: “Make Your Mark In Society, Not On Society.”86 The placement of this article in the second section of the paper indicates that the Times did not have much enthusiasm for the plan. It cited “sever-

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 161


al prominent sociologists [who had] expressed doubts about the efficacy of the campaign.” Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a well-known urban folklorist at New York University, was quoted as saying that the campaign would likely be ineffective since it was not based on any real understanding of the writers’ motivations. Despite the Times’s hesitancy, the article appeared to be an extension of the publicity campaign itself, consisting mostly of quotes from Koch, Butcher, and the campaign’s own ad copy. As Koch told the press, “People used to think graffiti was a harmless form of expression, even artistic—then, somewhere along the line, it got out of hand. Those who apply graffiti now in our town are mass producers of urban scrawl. We have to do something about it.” A second part of the campaign consisted of posters created by the advertising agency to be placed in subway cars, pamphlets to be distributed to citizens groups and in schools, radio and television public service announcements that repeated the campaign’s slogan, ready-to-read editorials for broadcast and print media, and interviews with members of the AntiGraffiti Task Force in various media venues. The texts created for the campaign say a great deal about its purpose and the motivations and anxieties of the second antigraffiti army.87 As noted above, in attempting to reach the writers and other young people, the antigraffiti campaign recruited popular sports and entertainment personalities as spokesmodels. But the “morally persuasive” messages conveyed through these spokesmodels could hardly be distinguished from the threats of punishment they were supposedly designed to replace. The personalities for the campaign were selected because, it was assumed, young people respected them, indicating some sensitivity to a youth audience. On the other hand, the poses and demeanor of the spokesmodels in the ads often made them appear to be angry or disgusted, and the declarative and imperative voice of the accompanying statements were condemning, belittling, and parental in tone. The posters offer a good example of these contradictions. Since they were placed in the subway trains themselves (in the advertising strips, along with the other advertising), they were the part of the campaign that writers and young people were most likely to see. Each had a similar design. The left half of the posters consisted of a photograph of one to four “stars” standing near a wall covered with writing. The right half contained a brief message written emphatically in white capital letters set against a solid black background (like the blockbuster letter designs used by writers), with

161

Austin Ch5

162

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 162


the campaign slogan (“Make Your Mark . . .” etc.) appearing in a smaller typeface underneath. For instance, one poster featured a group photo that included two popular Latino deejays, a Latino singing star, and a Latino band leader crowded into the corner of a tagged stairway leading to an elevated subway station. Three of the people in the photo have their arms crossed and all look directly out at the viewer with a cold, if not disgusted, facial expression. To the right at head height, the text reads, “you listen to our music, now listen to our advice. don’t draw on the walls.” Almost every parent tells his or her young child not to draw on the walls. The message on the poster seems calculated to shame writers by implying that their activity is a continuation of childish misbehavior in the eyes of people they respect. Another poster featured boxer Joe Frazier standing with clinched fists next to his son Marvis, whose arms are crossed, both glaring menacingly at the viewer. A concrete wall covered with writing is in the background. This poster’s message reads: “we got where we are by messing up other fighters. not by messing up our city’s walls.” Here the implication is that writing is less than manly. This was reiterated for a Latino/a audience by featuring boxers Hector Camacho and Alex Ramos. A fourth poster shows Gene Anthony Ray and Irene Cara, from the 1980 Broadway-tinged hit movie Fame, standing in the corner of a tagged-up subway car. Cara’s arms are crossed and her expression is stern and reproachful. The written text reads: “fame is seeing your name in lights. not seeing it sprayed on the subway.” Of course, many writers might have noted with some irony that certain names from their own ranks circulated more widely than the names of these two hopeful newcomers. Who were they to present themselves as authorities on the nature of “fame”? All the posters were premised on the high value that young people place on public renown, but they offered nothing in the way of making fame more accessible to young people. Nor did the messages find any value in the artistic talent already evidenced in writing. Ostensibly working to reach and persuade writers (and potential writers) that writing was a misdirection of their talents, the messages ignored the writers’ most prized and respected talent altogether. The campaign could not afford to risk recognizing the writers’ “vandalism” as a misplaced art form. Instead, writers were addressed directly with the kind of scornful expression usually found on a disapproving teacher or parent, and their work is represented as a senseless and antisocial diversion from appropriate vocational goals. The main-

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 163


stream’s success myth—especially that most devious of success myths, the one surrounding the entertainment industry!—is unquestioningly held up as an attractive alternative to the writers’ own well-maintained status hierarchy. It seems unlikely that writers, or even potential writers, could have taken these messages seriously. Considering the disjuncture between the writers’ viewpoint and the unabashedly condemnatory tone expressed in the posters, one could question whether the posters were actually intended to influence writers at all. The posters reflect a moderated version of the mayor’s own attitude toward writing, as lip-synched by media stars thought to be popular with young people. The clear message to writers is that they are bad kids, an idea that can hardly be expected to impress members of a citywide, semiautonomous culture with a long history of successfully defeating (and humiliating) adult authority. But this message would sit well with certain “common sense” adult views of urban youth culture. The posters’ banal good/bad duality divides the chaos of everyday choices into two extremely narrow but nonetheless easily understood visions of public life. As such, the posters seem primarily intended to impress ordinary citizens with the Koch administration’s seriousness about “the graffiti problem,” not to reach the writers themselves. While we might suspect that the poster campaign was simply a cynical ruse, a pamphlet produced to publicize the new antigraffiti effort is obviously directed toward adult residents and their (imagined) concerns. The simple foldover features a scaled-down version of the Joe and Marvis Frazier poster described above on the front and a listing of the members of the Anti-Graffiti Task Force on the back. The list boasts the kind of corporate sponsorship that Koch and the antigraffiti issue could muster and includes chairs, presidents, and CEOs from nationally known companies like McDonalds, Con Edison, New York Telephone, and Macy’s as well as a long list of government agencies, chambers of commerce, advertising agencies, law firms, and churches. The inside of the pamphlet contains photos and quotes from Mayor Koch and Willard Butcher, chairman of the Anti-Graffiti Task Force, and some questions and answers about the campaign. The quotes from Koch and Butcher are repeats from their prepared speeches given at the campaign’s kickoff. Koch’s quote emphasizes the impact of writing on the city’s image: “In this period of intense competition between cities and regions for corporate investment, we simply cannot allow this type of vandalism to continue to label New York City as a blighted town.”

163

Austin Ch5

164

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 164


The Q&A section is of particular interest since it exposes the city administration’s anxieties about undertaking yet another antigraffiti crusade. “This campaign is an effort to alter New Yorkers’ attitudes of resignation toward graffiti and to rekindle our pride in the appearance of the city,” the pamphlet tells its readers. To accomplish this, the campaign “challenges youth” to pursue “constructive rather than destructive methods of self-expression,” urges retailers to make spray paint and markers less accessible to theft, and calls upon citizens to join cleanup campaigns and to advise “youngsters that graffiti is no longer acceptable to local residents.” This is in line with the administration’s goal of reducing service demands on the city by having citizens do part of the work of policing the authorized visual codes. However, the campaign does not find space to offer concrete suggestions for “constructive” youthful self-expression. Are we to suppose that creating those opportunities was part of the challenge? One question in the pamphlet asks directly, isn’t graffiti a victimless crime? “Everyone suffers the cost of graffiti, financially and emotionally,” the text replies. “Our senses are affronted every day by the wanton desecration of the city.” Aside from the diminished sacredness of New York City, there is also a direct cost in taxes: the pamphlet asserts that citizens are paying $25 million per year for graffiti cleanup and prevention. More alarmist is the claim that “thousands of lost jobs and millions in lost taxes” will result from the “loss of businesses which are deterred from locating in New York or who decide to leave because of the negative impact of graffiti on public transportation and the overall city environment.” The almost amusing idea that the Fortune 500 would pack up and leave New York City because of writers is yet another cynical attempt to create a simplistic moral panic, this time drawing on anxieties over the complex postindustrial transformations then impoverishing many city residents. Aside from New York City’s own problems, the United States was itself experiencing a national economic recession during the year of the campaign. (The fact that New York City’s economy seemed undisturbed by this recession was one of the first signs of its recovery.) Finally, Ed Koch’s own incredible popularity cannot be discounted in estimating the impact of this message. But even the cult of personality that had formed around the mayor could not gloss over the first war’s legacy of defeat. The pamphlet’s final question asked, “Why Bother At All?”—to which it could only respond with the pragmatism of action over passivity: “Any decrease in the amount of vandalism will save millions [sic] . . . we

Austin Ch5

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 165


must be willing to work for it. This first phase of the campaign will not rid the city of graffiti in an instant, but it is the first vital step towards turning the tide.” And indeed, during the first month of this “first vital step,” the antigraffiti publicity campaign seems to have gone well. Posters were placed in the subways. Television commercials aired. Pamphlets were distributed to community groups. Antigraffiti war heroes were interviewed.88 But only six weeks after it began, the Koch administration’s self-assessment of the campaign was “not good.” It had slowed, then stumbled, and by June it had for all practical purposes ended, even though it had been planned to last for at least a year. No “second phase” ever materialized.89 The task force was meeting infrequently (when it met at all) and had not developed an independent organizational identity separate from the deputy mayor’s Office for Economic Development. It had raised very little money to reimburse the campaign’s service providers for their material costs, nor had it even sent letters of appreciation to those who had provided services at no cost. With no organizational impetus coming from within the task force itself, the ad agency that had designed the posters asked the mayor’s office to take charge and revive the campaign, and even offered to take up some of the slack.90 Yet no substantive action came from this offer. Within the city administration, the antigraffiti crusade took a backseat to Koch’s race against Mario Cuomo for the governorship. Koch had won an astounding 75 percent of the vote in the 1981 New York City mayor’s race against Cuomo, with endorsements from both the Democratic and the Republican parties. His gubernatorial run did not go so well. Remarks made during a widely publicized interview revealed his antipathy toward the rural and suburban parts of the state, and Koch, already seen as a partisan proponent of New York City in a deeply divided state, needed votes from these areas to be successful in a statewide race. His support even within the New York City area was much weaker than he had expected. While the majority of New Yorkers had overwhelmingly voted for Koch as mayor, they were less enthusiastic about giving him the chair in Albany. Koch put the best face on his defeat by claiming that New Yorkers voted against him so he would remain the city’s mayor.91 After Koch’s gubernatorial loss, the city’s Office for Economic Development asked task force chair and Chase Manhattan Bank president Willard Butcher to find someone within the Chase Manhattan organization to take over the antigraffiti campaign.92 Four months later, in April 1983, We Care

165

Austin Ch5

166

11/1/01

1:55 PM

Page 166


About New York, Inc., announced that it would absorb the antigraffiti effort.93 We Care, Inc., is a private, nonprofit corporation, the institutional outcome of the Sanitation Department’s “New York City Clean Streets Coalition.” We Care, Inc., was created to coordinate an ongoing antilitter campaign to reduce the service demands on the Sanitation Department. Unlike the Anti-Graffiti Task Force, We Care, Inc., quickly took on an organizational identity and impetus outside the mayor’s office, and received substantial and continued financial and staff support from the corporate community. Its existence had been publicly announced in June 1982, just as the antigraffiti campaign was fading. Although We Care, Inc., absorbed the administration’s antigraffiti efforts, it was not until after 1985 that the organization created programs that were equivalent to those undertaken in its antilitter campaign. By that time, the war on the subways had taken a decidedly new turn.94

FROM THE CITY TO THE SUBWAYS

By extraordinary means, and through significant social suffering, New York City’s finances moved toward the black in the early 1980s. In 1983 the city’s bonds were upgraded to an investment rating. The real estate market boomed as New York City prepared to reclaim its reputation as a world city.95 Of course, the economic gains enjoyed by some during the early 1980s were by no means evenly distributed, nor would they last the entire decade. However, the upswings in any number of economic and social indicators were circulated to reassure New Yorkers (as well as the rest of the nation and the world) that the city’s decade-long “crisis” was ending. As this change in the perception of the city took hold, the “subway crisis” was slowly uncoupled from its metaphoric attachment to the many other (now, former) “crises” of New York City. Although the rhetoric of a system “out of control” remained dominant in the public sphere after 1984, it referred solely to the “crisis” of the subway system. Writing retained its status as the metaphor for that particular crisis, which had no end in sight despite Koch’s publicity war.

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 167

6

WRITING HISTORIES

T

here has been no historical moment of unqualified success for writers in New York City, but neither has there been any historical moment of writing’s decided defeat. As with rock and roll’s recurring themes of struggle and redemption (“long live rock and roll,” “rock and roll will never die,” etc.), writers see themselves as part of a meaningful alternative community and an enduring cultural tradition. This chapter attempts to present a multifaceted picture of that community as it existed from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s through four (partial) reflections. The first takes up the story of writing culture and of writing’s internal development as reflected in the semiautonomous evolution of productive relations between writers. The second section considers writing’s relationship to its (imagined) city audience: what are writers trying to communicate to other New Yorkers? The next section reflects on writing’s “second coming” as art-on-canvas, as writers attempted to bring their own unique cultural traditions into some

Austin Ch6

168

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 168

WRITING HISTORIES

kind of alliance with the city’s “legal” arts community in the galleries. The last section explores the early days of hip-hop (a broad-based central-city youth movement that has become an umbrella term for several different cultural forms, including writing) in relation to writing’s longer independent history and its outlaw status, which have placed it in a unique position vis-à-vis other aesthetic forms usually included in hip-hop.

TRADITIONS: WRITING FOR OTHER WRITERS

Not all writers in New York City took the same career path or followed the same steps to writing; nor did all (or even most) of them gain widespread acceptance as a famous bomber or style master. Despite the continual stream of exceptions, a set of expectations emerged over time whose outline became evident during the second generation of writers in the early 1970s. ale one recalls that in the early 1970s a writer usually started with local buses and walls before hitting the citywide trains.1 shame one, a style master from a later generation, “used to bomb [his] fucking ’hood like crazy, buildings, elevators, movies, and school bathrooms” in the early days of his career as a writer, following a similar local-to-citywide progression.2 poem had an equally humble beginning in 1979, but elaborates on how he moved from one writing form to another. poem’s career began when I met some kid that lived in my building when I was living in the Bronx on Bruckner Blvd. We started out bombing our neighborhood, then soon moved on to the insides of the trains, then outsides. First throw-ups to practice filling in the outline. I don’t think it was until 1981–82 that I started to do halfway decent pieces.3

The subway trains were the ultimate goal for any ambitious writer seeking fame at this time, and most writers who began writing between 1972 and 1988 cite the works on the trains as a motivating force and source of inspiration. quik’s story is typical: “At the time when I would see [writers’] names pull up on a train I remember thinking these guys must have been Giants. I think that’s part of the mystic of Graffiti. It all looks larger than life. As a kid you fantasize about being larger than life and, Graffiti served as a happy medium.”4

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 169

WRITING HISTORIES

Not everyone sought fame as a style master on the outside of the trains; saturation remained an important part of a writer’s career and could be the intended endpoint. zephyr began by tagging playground equipment in a local park in the mid-1970s: “I was a tagger, and I was interested in bombing insides [of the trains] with tags. I couldn’t even give a shit about the outsides to tell you the truth. When I tried it, I was no good so it wasn’t fun, and I had this philosophy that it was all about quantity.”5 Some guys were up more than others. Some did just insides [of the trains], some just the outsides, and some a little of both. Me, I wanted to do it all. [Subway] stations like junior 161 and lsd 3, floaters [throw-ups] like in, outsides like vinny, cliff 159, blade, and others.6

IZ THE WIZ:

This wide range of name-forms, usually followed in a sequence of increasing complexity across a writer’s career, was common for many of the

FIGUR E 6. 1

iz the wiz throw-ups from the early 1980s. (Courtesy iz the wiz)

169

Austin Ch6

170

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 170

WRITING HISTORIES

most famous writers of this period. For instance, dondi (1961–1998) began in the mid-1970s as a bomber in top crew, one of the first groups to use the throw-up to take over subway lines from other writers. In 1977 he formed cia (crazy inside artists) and subsequently gained his reputation as a major style master on the outsides (see plate 2, a minor work by this artist). Later, he and zephyr would become important figures in the “graffiti art” movement in the galleries.7 As these and earlier examples have shown, writers themselves provided the major influence on each other’s work. Knowing or being around established writers was often the doorway into writing culture. web “did not start writing until I went to the school of Art and Design. . . . At the time [the school] had writers like seen [Black seen], don, foam, tack, kaze, lady pink.”8 Having decided to write, a writer would likely develop his or her career through a series of crew affiliations. By the mid-1970s, crews performed educational and cooperative functions in systematic and established ways, thereby reproducing the culture of writing for the next generation.9 Once accepted as a writer and a trusted companion, a neophyte would be declared “down” with a crew by one of its primary members. Depending on one’s individual interests and the skill level already attained, an initiate might assist in the execution of works designed by the crew’s masters (usually just by filling in the larger areas of color after the initial outlines had been drawn on the outside of the subway car but before the more detailed work began).10 Novices thereby accrued to themselves some of the status of the master as well as the reputation of the crew, gained can control, and observed the design and production techniques of skilled writers. As the sophistication and complexity of various writing styles increased over the course of the decade, some crews became organized like a medieval guild or a trade union, with self-recognized apprentices working under masters to assist them in the creation of (master)pieces. According to freedom: “[Younger writers] were training, filling in the large spots. It was a good apprenticeship. There was a real sense of passing on the tradition.”11 Since membership in most crews was not exclusive, it became increasingly common for a writer to belong to more than one.12 An aspiring apprentice could join or even create a crew in which to do his own writing (e.g., tags, throw-ups, or smaller pieces) while still “studying” with masters in another, more established crew.13 A novice might remain in this arrangement until he had acquired his own fame.14

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 171

WRITING HISTORIES

Fame gained from style was acquired slowly over time and usually required the writer to produce a certain number of pieces on the trains that were recognized by fellow writers as acceptable, worthy, and original. Studying with a respected master writer was a good way to later become a respected master in one’s own right. This is how iz the wiz learned from vinny, and skeme learned from dez.15 Some masters were known for their unselfish dedication to the teaching relationship. zephyr describes this ideal in his eulogy of dondi: dondi subscribed whole-heartedly to the apprenticeship system common in graffiti society. He was quick to provide guidance and advice to friends and cohorts. He crafted outlines for his fellow crew-members and often aided them in the execution of their pieces. Over the years he helped foster the talents of countless graffitists, many of whom made their own significant contributions to the culture.16

Although some writers gained skills from one or two primary teachers, most learned and borrowed from a long list that reads like the acknowledgments in a dissertation. Asked which writers influenced him, iz the wiz came up with fifty-seven names “and a host of others.”17 Responding to a similar question, fuzz one listed twenty-four writers as influences.18 These two are in no way unusual among their peers, and the diversity of the names in these lists of influences is significant. Chris Pape (freedom) and ket asked sixteen writers from across the history of writing to name the five most important works on the trains ever painted. Only a few writers and an even smaller number of specific works (from over eighty-five mentioned) gathered more than one vote. Various works by lee and noc 167 appeared on seven lists, and dondi was on five; a piece by sab and kase was the only individual work listed as many as three times (see plates 7 and 8 for examples of kase’s work on the trains).19 At the other end of the teaching/reproduction scale were the masters’ crews, which were much less likely to allow apprentices to be involved with their productions.20 The members of these crews had, by definition, significant fame, and membership in such a crew was severely restricted. Based on their adventurous exploits and cooperatively produced works, many of these crews have rightly become legendary in writing culture. As writing culture developed, writers gained an extremely refined sense of the design possibilities and limitations of the trains, and during the late 1970s, crews

171

Austin Ch6

172

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 172

WRITING HISTORIES

began to coordinate two or more whole-car pieces on a regular basis. Two subway cars (“married couples”) were sometimes painted to form a single work or a shared dialogue between color schemes or background motifs and scenes. Two massive collaborative works, running the length of an entire ten-car train, were also produced during this period. As described in the prologue of this book, the first whole train was painted on the eve of July 4, 1976, by caine, mad 103, and flame one. A second whole train was painted on two successive nights in 1977 by lee, doc, slave, and mono of the fabulous five crew, which is described in detail by lee in Craig Castleman’s book, Getting Up. This train did not have a unifying theme, although it contained several two-car works; mysteriously, the MTA allowed this train to run untouched for several months.21 When writers first entered the yards in the early 1970s, they approached the subway car as a solid flat surface on which to write a name in two-dimensional or shallow-space three-dimensional letters. Along with design innovations, writers continuously improved their technical control of spray paint, with letters becoming more and more precise and hard-edged as opposed to expressionistic.22 Three-dimensional lettering and the visual contrast between name and background in early works suggested a shift in the way that space could be represented on the trains. Rather than seeing the cars as a solid surface from which letters could extend out in shallow space (like the raised letters of a sign), the outside shell of the car could be treated as a more or less transparent surface (like glass) that supported a name floating in front of a deep space background.23 As a third dimension emerged within the masterpiece form, the abstract lettering trends became even wilder and set new challenges for writers interested in this direction of aesthetic innovation. The fractured alphabet became a mist of hard-edged, cracked letters: alphabetic asteroid belts with flowing boundaries and overlapping shapes. The drive toward deconstructing the letter was not always understood or appreciated by other writers, although it was never a source of real conflict or beef. duster ua remembers that he would paint with seen ua, who would do his readables [legible styles] and he was into that, but I would just go off, you know? He was older than me but he had that old-style influence; it was always like “dusty you can’t read it” and I would be like “if they can’t read it, well, tough.” That’s what the art form is about—getting wildstyle and control of the can.24

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 173

WRITING HISTORIES

vulcan describes a similar motivation for his work several years later: I can do all kinds of styles, but wildstyle is what it’s all about. There aren’t any rules or limitations. Getting complicated, doing the impossible, that’s what I like. I don’t care if anybody can read it or not. . . . Most writers limit themselves to what’s been done already. I try to come up with new things that I’ve never seen before [see plate 13 for an example of vulcan’s work].25

Artist and historian Jack Stewart saw a new sense of perspective and deep space enter masterpieces from about 1975, giving them the illusionistic depth more common to murals and landscape painting, and opening up pictorial space.26 Three-dimensional modeled figures and characters became a possibility. Characters have accompanied writers’ names from the very beginning, most noticeably in the stick figure with a halo that accompanied stay high 149’s name. This stick figure was borrowed from the introduction to the television spy thriller The Saint, and stay high sometimes put a joint in his hand (see figs. 2.1 and 2.4 for examples). Other writers added characters to their more elaborate masterpieces, usually as a mark of identification or tribute. For instance, tracy 168 added self-portraits to many of his works (see plate 6). Characters from underground or mainstream comics (Cheech Wizard, Donald Duck) were common additions to masterpieces by the more accomplished writers. In the early and mid-1970s, these figures were more or less drawn onto the “real” surface of the car and were modeled in a shallow space, as they are in comic books. As the masterpiece became more like a mural, the backgrounds contained a much deeper space and were often filled with elaborate three-dimensional pictorial representations. Although a satisfactory accounting of the plethora of images on the trains during the 1970s is well beyond my purposes here, some images and motifs in the (imagined) Writers’ City were common and frequently repeated. In this parade of images, the urban landscape was among the most prominently featured. Backgrounds commonly consisted of brick or stone walls and buildings, landmarks (e.g., the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty), or silhouettes of the Writers’ City skyline. The subways themselves were usually a central feature in these landscapes, and the image of a subway train rounding a corner on an elevated track has remained one of the major icons of writing culture. Any extended examination of the available photographic documentation of writing in New York City during this period reveals the writers’ con-

173

Austin Ch6

174

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 174

WRITING HISTORIES

tinual appropriations from popular culture’s products and practices, a second typical subject area often treated in masterpieces. These borrowings came from images and lettering styles of album covers, posters, comic books, movies, television programs, and video games. revolt comments: “I see media, my artwork reflects it. I’ve always been interested in comics and cartoons. That’s where media saturation comes in; my own interest in comics that’s where the black [out]lines come from.”27 stoney took her name from a Flintstone character; iz the wiz renamed himself by borrowing from a Broadway adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz (also produced as a movie in 1978); zephyr took his name from a brand of skateboard.28 Tributes to rock stars, movies, and music were common, in the form of portraits of movie or TV stars/characters or in quotes, phrases, or titles from a film, a song, or an album. The processes involved in these kinds of cultural appropriations differ from simple “consumption” and have been recognized by many scholars, most notably those investigating youth subcultures and everyday life in Britain, France, and the United States since World War II.29 It is important to note that most of the visual items that writers borrowed were created for (and often, by) young people. That is, writers turned first to the forms of visual culture that they enjoyed in their immediate surroundings and used these as meaningful raw materials rather than, say, the tradition of “fine art” painting that is also easily accessible in New York City. This process of selection (which is also a process of validation) speaks to the autonomy of youth culture and its ability to mine the cracks of everyday life to create alternative understandings of the status quo and the future.30 Writers borrowed the visual imagery of commercial youth culture, but in many respects these were bad consumer subjects because writers did not simply consume these images: they “poached” from them and from these thefts produced new images for circulation in their own prestige economy. Such borrowing ignores the restrictions of copyright, ownership, or use in the marketplace, and in this way writers resemble the pop artists of the early 1960s. The process also resembles similar poachings of the postwar youth cultures, such as the use of recycled clothing by hippies and punks, or the customizing culture that sprang up around hot rods, lowrider cars, and chopper motorcycles. As writers’ designs became more sophisticated and elaborate, the works on the trains developed into a unique artistic hybrid with the aspects of a comic book, an advertisement, and a mural painting.31

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 175

WRITING HISTORIES

The tactics and incursions of the MTA and other governmental authorities in the shared public spaces that writers occupied made them less secure territories during the late 1970s and early 1980s. web recalls “benching” (sitting on the platform and watching the works go by on the trains) at the famous Writers’ Bench in the 149th Street and Grand Concourse station in the Bronx in 1982, but it is unlikely that a group of writers could have lingered there for long without attracting police attention.32 Still, writers maintained some hold on most of the institutions they borrowed from the official cityscape, an occupation bolstered by the growing numbers of writers in the early 1980s. Due perhaps to the increased media exposure of “graffiti art,” hip-hop, and other forms of popular youth culture, the number of writers in New York City appears to have increased noticeably. This had several different effects. For one, it meant that writers were likely to bump into each other in unexpected places. shame one tells the story of how he met “this superhero comic book character drawin’ slim mutha fucker named Cecil” who lived next door to his cousin. Later, he discovered that Cecil was skeme of tnt (the nation’s top) crew, a rising style master painting on the No. 3 line. skeme’s bedroom served as a studio and meeting place for several of the era’s major masters, where shame one was introduced to dez tfa, karado 135, pore 1, pain, panic, and chain 3.33 Like web, revolt met writers while attending the High School of Art and Design, where the boys’ locker room “was literally a hall of fame of Graffitists.”34 tack and kaze also remember that school in the late 1970s and early 1980s as being a kind of writers’ heaven. They recall seen, mare, doze, lady pink, heart, airborn, base 2, phade, and fable as part of the “a + d Crew.” TACK: We would all chill in the cafeteria and talk about outlines, racking, painting and we’d plan out our strategies for taking over lines. KAZE: [a & d] was the place to be, especially if you were a talented writer. We would hook up at the lunch tables and check out black books, look at flicks, and make plans for racking and bombing for the weekend. It was an experience.35

web also got an excellent writers’ education at the High School of Art and Design. He cites:

175

Austin Ch6

176

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 176

WRITING HISTORIES

lady pink, erni also known as paze, nixer from the [No.] 4 line, dome, airborn was there for a short while, this kid named tab, laser, lady heart— who I thought was the best female writer ever. abbey and 2cute. There were just so many writers. seen (Black seen)36 and doze, how can I forget those guys? It’s like [Black] seen alone had all the 2s and 5s. . . . That kind of influenced me that he went to that school.37

But the increase in the size of the writers’ community also meant an expansion in the number of new writers entering the culture at a time when writing seems to have appeared trendy and popular (i.e., a fad) to those not already part of this culture. Established writers who had earned their fame during the mid-to-late 1970s, when writing did not wield a strong popular pull among the uninitiated, doubted the commitment of the neophytes belonging to newly minted crews who could claim neither spectacular productions on the trains nor members with citywide fame. Many, if not most, of these crews were in existence for a year or less.38 Establishing a successful name as a writer often required unanticipated sacrifices and a lot of hard work, and while large numbers of young people in New York City have occasionally tagged around, most do not make a more definite commitment to attaining writing fame. Per james top: “If you never wrote on the trains, stole paint, got kicked out of school, had girls laugh at you, or whatever the situation is because you write graffiti, then you ain’t no graffiti artist.”39 To which sharp adds: “You risk your life every time you bomb a train. I’ve almost been hit by a train, almost killed by electrocution and, not only do you have to be aware of those types of inconveniences, you also have to look over your shoulder to see who doesn’t like you this week, or whatever the case may be.”40 The beginnings of “beef” among writers that had first appeared after the MTA’s general repainting in 1973 had grown over time. Fighting and crossout wars became an expected part of the writing experience. pjay cites the “friction among the various writers” as a major drawback to writing during the early 1980s; sak’s and bom5’s experiences back up his observations.41 spade 127, airborn, and kaze have recounted how the fba (fast breaking art) crew beat down most “uninvited guests” in the Broadway (No. 1 line) lay-ups between 137th and 145th streets, with backup from the “Ball Busters,” a confederation of writers and street gangs that formed in 1979 to keep the local peace.

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 177

WRITING HISTORIES

If writers wanted to hit the yard that was cool, but if they talked shit or started static, they got taxed. . . . When we had problems, the Ball Busters always had our back. Everybody looked out for each other because we were all from the same hood, same train station, same junior high. We wouldn’t go around other people’s shit and try to front, so we weren’t having that shit around our way.42

rin one and the vamp squad (tvs) were deep in the beef during the early 1980s.43 Beef became part of the writing life. The influx of new writers of questionable commitment encountered the established hierarchy of writers and crews in the “outlaw” spaces of the subway system. In these encounters, toys and toy crews were frequently forced to give up their paint or face a beating. More experienced writers and crews offer any number of justifications for these threats: for instance, the “scribble scrabble” that results from the toys’ efforts, which ultimately reflects negatively on all writers in the eyes of those outside writing culture,44 or the assertion that giving up paint to more experienced writers is part of the initiation into the culture. Violence or threats of violence became common in face-to-face encounters between young men who did not know each other, and whose place in a competitive, highly stratified culture was uncertain, always local, always relative. Every time I went to lay-up, nobody could be down there but me and my partners. Unless it was somebody we knew that was down with us, or one of them real old school niggas that knew what time it was and had heart, that’s how it went down. . . . When we used to go and somebody was in the lay-up we would step to them and tell ’em to break out. The niggas that stayed got their asses kicked.

BOE:

MIN 1: People don’t understand, there’s a lot more to graffiti than just bombing. . . . To call yourself a legend or a king [in the early 1980s] you had to have respect for your knuckle game, you had to have respect as a man before you get respect for your name.45

Because space on the trains is a limited resource directly related to the creation of writing fame, some crews claimed certain yards more or less as exclusive territory.46 Usually such a crew would establish a dominant pres-

177

Austin Ch6

178

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 178

WRITING HISTORIES

ence on that line through their work, and one of its members was the king of the line. Claims to the territory were generally made by writing over trespassers. However, claims to territory were also asserted through fistfights and demands for paint to settle accounts.47 We [tat (tough ass team) and tnb (the nasty boys) crews] locked that mutha fuckin’ yard down, nobody who wasn’t down with us could enter without catchin’ a beat down to the third power . . . even if they had mad skills plus over 300 cans, it wasn’t that easy to roll with us. . . . Now don’t get the wrong idea, we were not on some gangster rha’ rha’ shit, but we had a good thing and if we would have let toy rookie ass wunnabeeze come in the yard as they please, we would not have had it so good, for so long.48 SHAME ONE:

On occasion, such clashes would occur between two well-known crews. These conflicts were usually settled in a more or less respectful way, sometimes by even offering those in the “visiting” group to use the space of the group occupying the yard, so long as they did not write over the “home” crew.49 Despite the territorial nature of some of the yards after the prestige hierarchy was in place, trusted novices and noted masters could still meet and mix in these locations to teach, experiment, learn, and think through common problems. The influx of toys, the increasing beef and competition between piecers and bombers, the rise of “famous writers” in the galleries who had never written on the trains, and the connections between writing and hip-hop’s commercial potential pushed some writers to seriously question what had happened to the ethics of writing culture in the 1980s. Such questioning has become a part of writing’s legacy. zephyr puts it plainly: “The phenomenon to all graffiti writers is: they think the period they wrote was the only important period. So when they stop they think Graffiti dies. They were telling us in ’78, Graffiti is dead.”50 Among individuals, groups, and even generations, there are always elements of embellishment in a “fame” culture, and there are also genuine disputes over “who did what back in the day.”51 Still, the combination of social conflict and aesthetic change, as well as the attacks on writing by the MTA and other governmental authorities, supported widely held views among writers and their supporters that the longed-for Writers’ City was not on the horizon but rather nearer to the grave. But, of course, the tradition lived on . . .

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 179

WRITING HISTORIES

WRITERS AND OTHER NEW YORKERS “Graffiti is an Art Movement. One that is truly an American Art thing.” —SHARP 52

Writers take great pride in the hard work required to gain the skills necessary to be successful and famous in New York City. Work is a primary mode of social connection and integration into the wider civic community for both individuals and groups. Rarely viewed as valued community members outside the intimate sphere of their own family and friends, urban youth are considered by many adults to be the source of various urban problems or, worse, even criminals—at least until some vague future date when they become “full legal citizens.”53 Although many urban young people work (or want to), they are usually relegated to the least desirable and least stable jobs in the market. At work, young people come to know their place. When the youth unemployment problem was once again “discovered” at the national policy level in the United States during 1977, the social science disciplines responded with reviews of the academic research on youth employment conducted up to that time. Labor statistics showed that unemployment disparities between African American and European American (“white”) teenagers had continued to grow since the late 1960s, and had since also moved significantly into the next higher age bracket (20–24-yearolds). But the reviews could dig up only a small and contradictory body of data that could not reliably identify the major factors that had caused the youth unemployment problem nor the factors that allowed it to continue over time. Most reviews ended with the traditional call for “more research,” reflecting the fact that youth unemployment had not been a major (i.e., funded) topic of academic research in the intervening decade.54 Nonetheless, President Jimmy Carter attempted to deal with the newly defined problem by signing the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act of 1977, a series of federal programs modeled on the previous youth employment programs of the New Deal and the War on Poverty, with a few new initiatives thrown into the mix. At the signing’s press conference, Carter tried to articulate the social costs of youth unemployment: “I think all of us realize that if a young person . . . can’t get a job in the formative years of life, there is a feeling of despair, discouragement, a loss of self-esteem, an alienation from the structure of society, a lashing out

179

Austin Ch6

180

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 180

WRITING HISTORIES

against the authorities who are responsible, which can shape that life for years to come.”55 His speech makes a pointed contrast to the 1979 Times article that laid the blame for such feelings not on youth unemployment but on vandalism.56 For young people in New York City, the labor statistics showed a catastrophic loss of jobs over time. While a gap of 12 percent divided European Americans from other ethnic groups, the employment rates for both Euroand African Americans in New York City were the worst in the nation: 74 percent of European American teenagers did not have a job compared with 86 percent of all other teenagers. Herbert Bienstock, an official with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Statistics pronounced New York City “the nonworking teenage capital”57 of the nation and described the situation using the rhetoric of disaster and crisis: “Employment as a fact of life no longer exists for most of New York City youth.”58 He placed the unemployment rate of minority youth in the fearful context of the shrinking European American population of the Naked City, noting the reported role of young people of color in 1977’s blackout riots: “Two weeks from the blackout, with all of the talk about what really went on, is it really irrelevant to look at a picture of 86 out of 100 black teen-agers not working?”59 The implication was that young people had found at least one temporary solution to the unemployment problem: looting. The social contradictions surrounding youth unemployment at this time could not have been more starkly put. On the one hand, adult fears of urban youth were reaching new levels; at the same time, it was quite reasonable “market logic” for ambitious young people to enter the Naked City’s business world through the criminal economy, given their lack of other prospects. Both trends were reinforced daily by crime reports in the newspapers. Although young people in New York City at this time (including writers) were more and more vilified through continual associations with the 1977 riots and with rising crime rates, writing still served as a “better alternative” for many. As zephyr reports: “Graffiti for me was a very positive, artistic outlet. It’s the school from which I evolved artistically. . . . We could have been into a lot of much worse things.”60 (See plate 5 for an example of zephyr’s work on the trains.) wane, a style master who began writing in 1984, has argued that writing helped to keep many young people from drug abuse, crime, and other destructive activities,61 a well-recognized fact since at least the early 1970s. It would be disingenuous to argue that writers were (or are) all little angels, of course, but I highlight the humanistic tradition

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 181

WRITING HISTORIES

within writing not only because it is so very rarely noted, but also because New Yorkers so rarely see it reiterated in the commercial public sphere. The youth employment statistics of this era reflect the fact that, in a very real sense, young people had no place in the urban social order of New York City, not even in the lowliest of legal job sectors. Teenagers become painfully and angrily aware of their positioning at the bottom of the social hierarchy, even in the best of economic times. But in the early 1980s, despite their considerable talents and energy, even the meager symbolic gesture of a minimum-wage, dead-end job was being withheld. Writing culture challenged the allotted social uselessness of youth on its own terms. Understanding themselves to be fulfilling some kind of social need by beautifying a deteriorating environment and entertaining its residents, writers tried to create a new connection between young people and the city, at least in the eyes of some writers and their admirers. There is no real way to reconstruct the “average” New Yorker’s understanding of the writing on the subways nor their common views of the writers who painted it. No systematic polling ever took place. The authorities who oversee the subways and other public properties, along with many building managers and private property owners, understood all writing to be malicious vandalism, and these groups used their privileged access to the mass-mediated public sphere to represent their view as “common sense.” As noted earlier, the letters column of the New York Times indicates that many New Yorkers agreed with this analysis. But during the 1970s this same forum also showed that many understood writing to be a great improvement in the shared public environment, and an interesting if not remarkable burst of creativity. The favorable attention writers gained in the media from recognized cultural elites demonstrated that an approving (and powerful) audience existed for their work, aside from the appreciation expressed by other young people. The sense of approval and enjoyment from at least part of their audience was strong enough to motivate writers to add elements to their works with the intention of entertaining and communicating with that audience, which existed outside the boundaries of the writing community.62 The appeal of the trains was their circulation and exposure in the city; the works on the trains offered a mediated and sometimes halting solicitation for public recognition of writers’ skills and contributions. Writers understood themselves to be humanizing and beautifying their surroundings. As lee points out: “It reminds you that there’s some life around you.”63

181

Austin Ch6

182

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 182

WRITING HISTORIES

quik adds: “I’ve done a lot of graffiti in Queens, where the neighborhood really looks beat and rundown. And once I do a piece, it makes it look a lot nicer, that one little piece of the strip”64 (see fig. 6.2). This beautification project was especially taken seriously by writers as it extended to New York City’s rattletrap subway system, a major civic icon. Just like the writers before 1981, dez and skeme were the major entertainers of Broadway [the No. 1 line] from 1981 to late 1982 and tack from 1981 to 1984 on and off. These guys influenced me with their dope styles and characters and I felt that it was our turn to entertain Broadway as our forefathers did before us.65

SAK:

In a letter to the Village Voice, zephyr argued that if given the chance, writers could “make New York’s grey and dirty subways the most exciting moving art spectacle the world’s ever seen.”66 As noted earlier, the deterioration of the subway system during the last half of the 1970s paralleled New York City’s widely perceived decline, and writers often asserted their worthiness and their right to add some needed beauty to the trains. They occasionally contextualized the MTA’s attempts to systematically destroy their FIGURE 6 .2

quik piece, 1980. (Courtesy zephyr)

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 183

WRITING HISTORIES

works on the trains as a part of the ruling elite’s failures to maintain a humane city and as part of an overall process of urban decline brought on by their neglect. After the mid-1970s, writers’ works were being produced with two separate communities in mind: the community of writers themselves (as discussed above) and the general city audience.67 This wasn’t a conscious split within writing culture itself so much as a recognition that the increasingly complex masterpieces were almost undecipherable, even to many writers.68 The evolution of writing style is quite nicely summed up through ten outlines drawn by phase 2 at various times in his career between 1971 and 1982 (see figs. 6.3 and 6.4). That is, the more abstract lettering styles are “narrowcast,” or specialized, languages created primarily for the appreciation of other writers, rather than a “broadcast” language accessible to a wider audience.69 An outsider probably rarely failed to understand that something was being communicated by the narrowcast, abstract style of writing, but many of the pieces created in these styles were completely illegible (unlike, for example, the readable type on this page). The increasingly sophisticated abstraction of works placed its “untutored” city audience at a disadvantage, much as the works of Jackson Pollock might puzzle a museum visitor unfamiliar with the developments of late-modern art in the Great Tradition.70 The importance of the “legibility” of the 3-D backgrounds becomes more clear in this context, and partially explains why the backgrounds opened up as an important area of innovation. In reaching out to the rest of the city, writers became more consciously involved with influences and issues outside their own subculture.71 The urban landscapes painted in the backgrounds of so many masterpieces often made reference to the real lives and problems of urban dwellers who actually lived in those urban landscapes. Social problems like child abuse, addiction, and poverty were themes that some writers could reference from experience as well as from a sense of concern and commitment to justice in their city. lee in particular became known for depicting these sorts of scenes in a social realist style during the late 1970s. Although messages had been written in the areas around the centralized name in masterpieces for some time, many writers began to create pieces where the message overtook the primacy of the name altogether, thus resembling something like a public service announcement or a strident political slogan.72 Electoral politics also entered the content of messages written on the trains, mico’s “hang nixon” and

183

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

FIGURES 6 .3 AND 6 .4

Page 184

The evolution of style: phase 2, 1972–1982. (Courtesy IGTimes

Aerosol Archives)

spin’s “dump koch” (with a hilarious caricature of the mayor) pieces notable among them. The politically oriented works were accompanied by other easily readable pieces that celebrated public holidays. Several different Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day whole cars appeared every year. The several single and multicar works related to the 1976 Bicentennial were created within this tradition. Dedications to lovers, friends, and family members (especially lee’s dedications to “mom”) formed part of this

184

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 185

trend.73 Writers increasingly looked to popular culture as a source of visual language in this dialogue. The use of newspaper comic strip characters, such as Snoopy and Dick Tracy, are signs that writers were consciously attempting to communicate with a larger audience through images that were common and familiar. Vaughn Bode and underground comix were more popular among writers themselves. Thus, writers were tentatively courting another audience (the public that rode or saw the subways) after the late 1970s, and shaping their works

185

Austin Ch6

186

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 186

WRITING HISTORIES

to appeal to that audience at the same time as the more internally focused, deconstructive lettering styles and the throw-up were being developed. The more accessible works were clearly meant to appeal to the (imagined) community of riders and casual observers, an attempt to create a dialogue in a common speech mode between writing culture and the city at large.74 The lack of hostility toward the city in general reveals a utopian desire for connection that in some ways contradicts the competitive aspects within the subculture noted earlier.

LOCATING “ART”: THE YARDS AND THE GALLERIED EYES OF THE GREAT TRADITION I got a scholarship to go to art school at Pratt. They had everything against me. They said, “I know where you are coming from; but this [writing] isn’t art. You are trying. Maybe one day you will get there.” I was in school to learn something and I learned my lesson quick. Pratt made a mistake in teaching me art history. They shoved Cezanne down my throat. “He has movement; he has color.” But during his day he was called an idiot. No one respected him. Now, I can relate to that. —AMRL 75

We are toys in a new yard.

—FRED 76

One’s love of the culture won’t pay the rent, but money and your picture in a gallery catalogue won’t make you legit. —PHASE 2 77

The efforts of adults hoping to “rechannel” writers’ productivity toward legally acceptable art-on-canvas during the 1970s had resulted in some positive but brief notices of writers’ work within the galleried art world of the Great Tradition. Despite this attention, writing had not been granted the sustained recognition due an important new art movement, nor had any individual artist gained a secure foothold in the galleried world. A second attempt at mutual respect and mutual benefit began during the early 1980s,

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 187

WRITING HISTORIES

this time with negotiations led by writers or persons from within the galleried and commercial art worlds rather than by outside intermediaries. But the major outcomes, readily evident within four years, were familiar the second time around: an embittering clash between two very different prestige systems, one institutionalized in the commercial art galleries and the other in the train yards. These two systems of prestige had been established around differing modes of evaluating very different kinds of objects: paintings on canvas and illegal masterpieces on the trains. Likewise, these differing cultural objects (canvases and subway trains) were created within two very different systems of productive social relations. The writers’ work ethic, collective cooperation, and sophisticated local knowledge of the urban social and physical landscape gave them a strategic edge in the territorial “wars” with the TA over shared public space. But the adaptive skills necessary to operate successfully within that “outlaw” space were of little use within the competitive commercial space of the “legal” galleries. The TA eventually had no choice but to begrudgingly respect writing, at least its persistence. Commercial galleries were under no such compulsion, and many of the denizens of this world regarded writing with the self-conscious and elitist condescension that renders the fine art tradition irrelevant to most of everyday contemporary life, except as living room decorations for the rich and objects of contemplation for the educated. Many, but by no means all, of the writers involved in the early-1980s gallery movement had gained their fame after 1974 and had participated in the development of the refined and sophisticated whole-car and multicar works of the late 1970s. Many had been students at the High School of Art and Design. Only a few were notable as writers during the early 1970s; the United Graffiti Artists were generally ignored during the “graffiti art” boom of the early 1980s. bama’s work was hung in one group show only after interventions and ultimatums from other writers were employed. Even then, his work was hung in the least-visible spot on the walls.78 The new gallery artists, totaling perhaps thirty writers, arrived on the scene through several different routes. Some were members of the Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA), which Jack Pelsinger had established early in 1974. Several were members of an innovative writers’ crew first established in the early 1970s, the soul artists (sa). This crew had dissolved after ali was severely burned by a massive spray-paint explosion in the One tunnel (as described in chapter 3). A misunderstanding of the events surrounding

187

Austin Ch6

188

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 188

WRITING HISTORIES

the accident led to futura 2000’s (a cofounder of soul artists) being ostracized and threatened by the writing community; he joined the military and left New York City. In 1979, ali contacted futura, asking him to come back to New York City and take part in the new art developments. The two re-formed the group as Soul Artists of Zoo York. Soul Artists partially supported itself by painting signs for city-sponsored neighborhood rehabilitation projects, although most of its work was devoted to making posters for leftist and antinuclear causes.79 Soul Artists held weekly meetings, published a xeroxed (maga)zine, and became an important meeting ground for writers from this era. Others joined the second gallery movement independently or were recruited by gallery owners or fellow writers after it began.80 fred emerged as one of the early gallery/commercial brokers among writers, and it was through his efforts (via the Village Voice) that an Italian art dealer saw photos of the large mural-like works that lee had created on the handball courts of the Lower East Side in the late 1970s.81 As a result of the dealer’s interest, fred and lee were given an exhibition at Galleria Medusa in Rome in 1979. This show was the first indication of new interest in writing as a galleried art, and it introduced “graffiti art” to a European art audience for the first time.82 In the spring of 1980, a photograph of a revolt piece on the subway trains was used on the cover of Soho Weekly News, which subsequently caught the attention of Sam Esses, a New York businessman and arts patron (see plate 4 for an example of revolt’s work). Esses’s daughter knew revolt and zephyr and arranged a meeting with her father at his request. This meeting amounted to a two-hour crash course on writing for Esses, who was not a subway rider; he was shocked that the art on the trains was routinely destroyed. He subsequently offered writers two months of free studio space and materials to produce a group of paintings on canvas, “a time capsule— a living record of New York graffiti during the spring of 1980” that would not be broken up and sold. zephyr was to get the word out. zephyr joined with futura 2000 (revolt had returned to college) to run the studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Every day at the studio turned into a colossal writer’s convention, a veritable “who’s who in graffiti.” For two straight months, futura and I excitedly greeted graffiti legends at the door—many of whom we had never met

ZEPHYR:

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 189

FIGUR E 6. 5 A day at the Esses Studio, 1980. Left to right, standing: noc 167 (in background), dondi, eddie cia, crash, nac 147, futura 2000 (holding spray can), fact (aka dr. pepper), pete cia, kid 56 (aka k-56), aeron cia (aka lovin 2), rasta cia (holding spray can), mousey 56 (aka m-56), shy 147. Kneeling: daze, zephyr, duro. (Courtesy zephyr)

before. . . . The studio stayed open all day, everyday, and sometimes late into the night. . . . Serious networking took place and countless friendships were forged. Phone numbers were exchanged and late-night soirees were planned and executed. . . . The subsequent early 80’s subway renaissance changed the state of New York graffiti forever. Prior to that summer, many of us only knew each other through each other’s work. The Graffiti 1980 Studio changed all that. It was a wake-up call. We realized the power of ourselves and the miraculous community we were a part of.

The experience was also important in that it opened the way for a large group of the best writers of the period to see themselves as galleried artists.83 “Graffiti art” by these and other writers appeared in several major shows organized by artists’ collectives during the early 1980s, which would later shape the tastes of collectors during the subsequent “boom” in New York City’s art market. Writers’ illegal borrowings from shared public spaces had already provided a new model for public works for several traditionally

189

Austin Ch6

190

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 190

WRITING HISTORIES

trained young artists, like Keith Haring, who were looking for a way to make art more relevant and accessible to everyday life. Allan Schwartzman has documented this important exchange between writers and traditionally trained artists in his book Street Art, but few others have recognized the extent of the crossover between these two groups of cultural producers.84 The exchanges between writers and traditionally trained artists opened new gates into the galleried world for writers. They were invited to show their works on canvas in several eclectic exhibitions organized during this time, and were mentioned, reviewed, and interviewed in the major art world journals alongside their more traditionally trained comrades. For instance, “graffiti art” was included in the 1980 “Times Square Show,” an often-reviewed, monthlong exhibition produced by the Colab arts group in an abandoned massage parlor in the Times Square area of Manhattan. This exhibit contained works by many of the artists who later came to be associated with the East Village scene during the art boom. lee and fred showed at the White Columns Gallery in New York City during that fall, but the work was not done on canvas—it was applied directly to the walls and then painted over after the show ended.85 Henry Chalfant’s photographs of subway masterpieces from the late 1970s were exhibited at the prestigious O.K. Harris Gallery at the same time. crash was another of the writers who served as a connecting link between the galleries and the yards. Filmmaker and artist Charlie Ahern introduced crash to Stephen Eins at Fashion Moda, a new arts exhibition space tucked away in the South Bronx.86 Eins invited crash, then nineteen, to put together a show called “gas: Graffiti Art Success for America.” The exhibition included works by lee, lady pink (one of the few women writers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the “token female” in the new gallery movement), mitch 77, dondi, disco, futura, ali, zephyr, kel, and noc 167.87 Elizabeth Hess gave the show a favorable review in the Village Voice, mentioning that the “Metropolitan Museum of Art had recently paid $2000 for a graffiti painting,” and citing Fashion Moda’s address and phone number for those readers wanting to contact the gallery to commission works by the artists.88 From the favorable publicity for this exhibition, Fashion Moda was asked to curate a show for the New Museum (located in Soho, one of the city’s central art districts) during the winter. This show included canvases by zephyr, fred, se3/haze, futura 2000, lee, ali, and lady pink. This time Richard Goldstein reviewed the show for the Village Voice, partly as a

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 191

WRITING HISTORIES

critical response to the Times’s article, “Graffiti: The Plague Years,”published a few weeks earlier (as described in chapter 5). To make the challenge obvious, Goldstein’s article was accompanied by a full page of Henry Chalfant’s photographs of writers’ train masterpieces, reproduced in color.89 Goldstein consistently used his place at the Voice to call attention to the work on the walls as well as the work on the trains.90 Other venues opened up as the art market expanded, and writers and galleried artists began to broker group shows in these spaces as well. Keith Haring, who had yet to attain the critical accolades that came his way later, curated one of the first big downtown “graffiti art” shows in a dance/music venue, the Mudd Club, which was also one of the major launching pads of the American punk movement.91 As writers’ work was accepted and welcomed into the dance clubs, writing formed a cultural alliance with rapping, djing, and break dancing, which offered other opportunities to display and sell their works. Writers painting on canvas were part of the important “New York/New Wave” show organized by Diego Rivera at P.S. 1 in New York City, which later traveled to Europe. During the fall of 1981, two new galleries opened in the first wedge of the early 1980s East Village art-gentrification expansion: Fun Gallery and 51X. Both featured “graffiti art” and had early exhibitions of works by fred, lee, futura 2000, crash, and dondi, among others.92 Mel Neulander and Joyce Towbin had already formed Graphiti Productions by that time.93 Their Greenwich Village gallery, Graffiti Above Ground, showed work by mitch 77, freedom, iz the wiz, mad, crash, wasp, cey one, caine, and lady pink and held a large group show at the end of 1982.94 Richard Flood of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery remembers that “collectors were in such a frenzy to buy graffiti . . . that it almost felt perverse.”95 Aside from the rapid-fire gallery shows mentioned here, there were numerous shows of individual writers’ works as art, as well as opportunities to show in galleries in other U.S. cities or in other countries, design window displays, paint murals in dance clubs, restaurants, and other commercial spaces, and to create other salable commodities such as T-shirts, jackets, mugs, posters, album covers, film sets, and so on.96 Interviews with writers appeared in such art world standards as Art in America, Artnews, and Arts Magazine during 1982. In the fall of 1983, the Sidney Janis Gallery hung the “Post-Graffiti” show, curated by Dolores Neumann, which included works on canvas by eighteen writers. Both the location and the curator of this show are signifi-

191

Austin Ch6

192

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 192

WRITING HISTORIES

cant. Janis was pivotal in launching both the abstract expressionist and pop art movements of the New York School in the 1950s and 1960s, which helped to establish and maintain New York City’s reputation as the global art capital. Neumann is from a world-renowned family of collectors who invested in artists from both of these movements.97 Janis’s and Neumann’s enthusiasm for the writer’s work on canvas and their partnership in the exhibition were important signs and could have been the herald of another breakthrough New York City art movement, with writers at its center. To reiterate the second coming of writing as an art movement, Twyla Tharp’s “Duece Coupe” was restaged, with daze, lady pink, zephyr, crash, se3/haze, aeron, and dondi creating the sets for this production.98 But writing’s second coming came and went. Despite good reviews, the “Post-Graffiti” show at Janis marked the decline of the mainstream New York City art world’s fascination with writers as canvas-painters.99 Gallery owners had already stopped buying new paintings before the Janis show was hung, and they had a difficult time selling those already in stock during the subsequent Christmas season of 1983. There were no other group shows for writers that attracted major art world attention during the 1980s.100 lee had joined the prestigious Barbara Gladstone Gallery during the boom, had solo shows there in the mid-1980s, and stayed in demand until he left the gallery scene in the late 1980s.101 crash, daze, and lady pink held on to their status as gallery artists, as did several others. Some had shows in the United States after this period, but they were less frequent and rarely reviewed in the major art magazines. European art collectors remained interested in “graffiti art” throughout the 1980s, which provided a small market for some New York City writers. Other writers-turnedgallery-artists moved to Europe, where their work continued to be appreciated and to sell. The rapid rise and fall of writing as galleried “graffiti art” in New York City revealed the numerous contradictions between and within the culture of writing and the culture of galleried art. Several excellent general critiques of the mainstream galleried arts have been undertaken by critics, artists, and academics during the last half-century, and it is not my intention to perform yet another one here.102 Rather, I want to show the configurations that prompted writers to think of their creations as candidates for galleried art (and simultaneously, for galleries to think of writing as an acceptable candidate for their wall space), as well as the differences that caused problems in their negotiations.

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 193

WRITING HISTORIES

First, the entrance of writing into galleried space required an affirmation of its status as “art.” Marcel Duchamp, in forcing the mainstream art world to recognize that “art” in the galleries is first and foremost a commodity to be sold, has removed the possibility of ever creating a stable definition. After Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a commercially manufactured urinal he submitted as sculpture in the New York Independents Show of 1917, the boundaries of art are difficult to maintain based on categorical classifications alone; “art” is, in essence, what will sell as art.103 As I showed earlier, writers did not begin with an understanding of their work as art. While writing has a strong connection to aesthetic and expressive commodity forms through its numerous borrowings from popular culture, it was not an object to be owned, bought, or collected until much later. If writing originally bore a strong similarity to art, it is art defined as a form of noncommodified play, as aesthetic experiment and experience, as social gifting, as dialogue, as the destruction of language, as personal expression, or in some other way that did not involve a commercial relationship. Of course, “art” is also an appreciative label applied to all sorts of creations that do not, and are not meant to, appear for sale in a gallery. Those writers who took up identities as artists did so in part because of the intellectual and cultural respect given to art, which they felt their work deserved. As phase 2 notes: “[Writing] can hold its own with any so-called artform on the planet.”104 Writing certainly shares several obvious characteristics with the galleried art of the Great Tradition, particularly painting and murals, and many outside the community of writers have been willing to recognize writing in this way. But my point is this: writing already had an established and valued status within writers’ own economy of prestige well before it was renamed/redefined/reframed as “art” in the galleries. Writers, attempting to come to some negotiation with the wider social context and economic possibilities that the galleries offered, may have been willing to allow others to reframe writing, but it is important to be aware of how radical the reinterpretation of writing as a commodified art form actually was. Once writing entered the space of the galleries, writers no longer held collective control, nor even a substantial influence, over the terms of its aesthetic evaluation. It became yet another object among many within the galleried art world, subject to the social expectations and aesthetic evaluations that already operated within that galleried space. As a new kind of object created by an unfamiliar group of producers, writing entered the

193

Austin Ch6

194

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 194

WRITING HISTORIES

galleried world at a distinct disadvantage. The culture of writing had not produced a separate group of specialists who could serve as expert interpreters of their work, analogous to mainstream collectors and critics. Each writer, as part of his socialization into writing culture, becomes at once artist, critic, and historian. As an unidentified writer told sociologist Richard Lachmann during this period, “No clerk, no . . . schoolteacher can say I got style. Only someone who’s out there . . . on the subways, in the parks can know to judge what I done.”105 The galleried world has almost always required intermediaries or “translators” to successfully negotiate an acceptable basis for understanding new styles, objects, or new artist populations.106 Without an appropriate interpretative context, writing appeared to the galleried eye to be simply another style of painting, particularly after it was transferred onto a “legal” surface and offered for show and purchase. Writing’s status as yet another style of painting (art) was taken to be commonsensical in the galleries, just as its status as “graffiti” was represented as common sense in the papers. Mel Nuelander of Graphiti Productions was explicit about these connections: “If we put their style of work into a traditionally accepted art environment . . . then it’s art. There’s no guesswork.”107 The galleried art world did not approach writing as something requiring new aesthetic criteria or a new critical vocabulary for interpretation, although they were undoubtedly aware that writers themselves used a distinctive aesthetic vocabulary and held strong views about the critical valuation of their collective works. duster recalls how all of a sudden, everyone starts jumpin’ on the bandwagon claiming they’ve been writing for years and I had never even heard of ’em! The Sidney Janis Gallery blows the whole art scene out of the water—he gets like twelve graffiti artists together and sells their work for $5000 each, ’cause he’s got a reputation. . . . Later, everyone’s thrown to the street ’cause the gallery can’t sell shit, so they turn around and find a collector on the side who’ll give ’em $1000 for a piece. Then the collector sells it. So it’s like stocks and bonds. Whatever the galleries last sale was, that’s what your paintings are now worth. . . . Collectors really didn’t know their ass from their elbows; they would go by word of mouth [rather than the writers’ aesthetic criteria and hierarchy] as to who was good and who wasn’t. . . . They would sit there and talk about who was great and who wasn’t when they never even rode a train, never even know how much dedication a writer actually had.108

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 195

WRITING HISTORIES

quik was reluctant to take part in the boom at first. “I was more of a bomber on the trains and didn’t understand why I . . . had to compete with sixteen year olds who had never bombed a train, yet they had stuff in shows.” quik was a member of the famed rtw (Rolling Thunder Writers) crew and participated in the Soul Artists meetings that led some writers into the galleries. futura eventually pushed quik to make a connection with an art dealer. He first showed work at the Mudd Club in 1981; his first solo show was in Amsterdam in 1983.109 So: writing was reframed as “graffiti art” in the galleries that were sales rooms of the latest art boom. Writers had adopted “graffiti” as the common term for their work by the mid-1970s, and so the label “graffiti art” seemed appropriate to them. But the naming of styles and movements in the galleried world is also a way of packaging—a way of guiding purchases as well as creating contexts of understanding and association. It is a way of placing several different individual styles into a common category based on what are, often, only superficial resemblances. As duster and quik point out, much of what was called “graffiti art” during the early 1980s was not writing, and many of the most famous artists associated with “graffiti art” were not writers. “Graffiti art” almost always grouped together writers’ work with the work of Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat; this was done even by some of the writers’ most sensitive and enthusiastic supporters.110 The only connections that authorized this grouping were their common use of illegal public locations (Haring’s figurative line drawings done in subway stations and Basquiat’s slogan-like conceptual samo works done on public walls) and the common use of linear drawing or words in their works. Writers had pioneered both of these developments, and it was from writers’ work that Haring and Basquiat took their inspiration. But the common label of “graffiti art” for these varied works did little to illuminate the significance of what writing might have been communicating when Haring and Basquiat first saw it. Instead, it tended to emphasize and validate the gallery tradition, which could be more usefully marshaled to contextualize Haring’s and Basquiat’s painting. The “graffiti art” label tacitly ignores writing’s semiautonomous development, which had occurred within the context of an “other” tradition, as well as ignoring the fine arts background of Haring and Basquiat. There was a stark absence of shows that might explicate writing’s own unique lineage, or respectfully investigate the crossovers and correspondences between writing’s history and the

195

Austin Ch6

196

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 196

WRITING HISTORIES

history of painting in the Great Tradition, or even shows that exhibited a significant number of works by UGA members and other writers from the early 1970s. These absences speak volumes about the ways in which writing was ripped out of its own history as it was being reframed as “art” during the boom.111 A second problem arose from the disparate ways writers and dealers marketed their productions and skills. When writers moved out from writing’s prestige economy to produce an object for sale in the marketplace, there was no consensus among writers about what it was that they might sell nor to whom they would sell it. This was not a matter of confusion but of exploitation: most writers who entered the galleries were between sixteen and twenty-two years old, surely too young to think through these matters without some guidance. In 1984, as part of a discussion published in the International Graffiti Times (see chapter 8) about whether it is possible to make art (for gallery sales) and still maintain integrity, coco 144 mentioned that Burlington Industries had offered UGA $150K to design rugs in the 1970s, but the group turned it down.112 This is not a question most writers have had to consider with any seriousness. UGA had been through the gallery encounter in the early and mid-1970s as the first writers to enter the art scene, and had come away feeling ambivalent. Some felt that there was a possible place for writing that was not exploitative. But that nonexploitative place wasn’t visible in the early 1980s scene. The problems of understanding writing as a galleried art were further complicated by the commercial uses of writing skills and styles in such things as sign painting, clothing decoration, and decorative murals, and the borrowing of writing-style typographies by commercial designers. Writing’s link to advertising was not per se damaging to its claims to be an art form, but when writing was overtly used as advertising at the same time as it was being redefined as art, the link became more problematic. What was the relationship, or more important, the difference, between these objects: fabulous five crew’s sign work for retailers such as Unique Clothing Warehouse; cey one’s designs on coffee mugs; futura 2000’s abstract works or zephyr’s “traditionalist” works on canvas; dondi’s window displays; clothing designer “Stephen Sprouse’s thousand-dollar dayglo graffiti dresses”113 or the other haute couture designers that rushed to cash in on the movement;114 and the impulse behind this collector’s request: “I love crash’s work, but I need something 7 by 7 for my loft”?115 No one stopped to ask in the boom, although many acted as if they knew the answer.116

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 197

WRITING HISTORIES

The distinction between “fine” art and “commercial” art in the Great Tradition had been transgressed and blurred by the pop artists in the 1960s, who retraced the steps that Duchamp had established earlier in the century and took a few new steps of their own. But this does not mean that the slippery boundary between art and commerce went unpoliced. Galleries are willing to accept the “commercial” into their spaces so long as it is presented with the detached irony that offers the commercial object for contemplation, distanced within a larger intellectual game of defining art and its relationship to (post)modern life. Warhol (a supporter of writing on the trains and in the galleries) had been a commercial artist before he began painting representations of commercial packaging. He created a cool (if ambiguous) distance between the art object and the purchaser: what you bought with a Warhol and other postmodern art, among other things, was the “inside joke” about the Great Tradition. Small-scale “crassness” by outsiders could not be tolerated in this rarefied space, for it spoils the illusion of the tradition’s transcendent value as a cultural and capital investment. That the mainstream art world was concerned about this issue is clear from the critics’ reviews of writing in the galleries. As might be expected, the representatives of the current avant-garde were among those most willing to do the policing; to make a place for themselves within the tradition, the avant-garde must certify the (newest) boundaries between commerce and art. Although the galleried world ignored the writers’ aesthetic standards, it did recognize writers to be different from traditionally trained artists. Poet Rene Ricard, in one of the most important articles announcing the new art of New York City in the early 1980s, voiced a common critique: The superbombers [writers] in the same show, with their egregious lack of art history, had the repellent appeal that commands self-analysis in the viewer (me). I didn’t want to miss the boat. When you first see a new picture you are very careful because you may be staring at van Gogh’s ear. Then I stopped caring about what the pictures should (and might later) look like . . . and finally the graffiti bomb style looks like what it’s about and what it’s about is packaging. Bomb style packages itself. . . . These guys should get themselves design jobs before they get ripped off.117

In this review, as in others, writers working on canvas are cued as naive “folk” artists and/or crassly commercial, and supposedly their work betrays this.118 It lacked an edge that might clue the galleried viewer that the writ-

197

Austin Ch6

198

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 198

WRITING HISTORIES

ers, too, are “in on” the postmodern joke about the Great Tradition in the late twentieth century, the ironic parody of art’s status as a commodity— perhaps due to their “egregious lack of [traditional] art history.” Lacking this validation, they could not sell the latest version of the joke, the latest style of painting. Their best bet was to get jobs as commercial designers. This lack of “insider” status in the galleried art world was reiterated in the frequent references to the writers’ “ghetto” backgrounds, their racial identities, and their (imagined) adventures in upward social mobility. In this way, the critics could justify their own ignorance of the other tradition that gave writing its meaning. futura comments: “To me, a lot of art-buying is bull. I hate people who come down here [to Fun Gallery] and say, ‘Oh, wow! The graffiti artists! Oh, they’re black!’ But I play the game because I want their money.”119 Traditionally trained artists might starve for a while in a kind of purification rite before entering the sanctified white cube of the gallery, but what did a twenty-year old from the “ghettos” have to do with art? Located by the critics in a social space outside the Great Tradition, the writers were, at best, “folk” artists.120 Their “ghetto” background and their age also conveniently explained their supposedly indiscreet hunger for cash. At the same time, attention to the writers’ (sometimes imagined) ghetto background ignored the cash-driven competition among gallery owners, critics, museums, collectors, artists, magazines, and dealers to identify the “next thing” in the art world. To want a fast car was quaint, but cheap and crass, unworthy of an association with “art”; not so, to gamble $20,000 on a stack of paintings stashed in a New Jersey warehouse, hoping to identify the next Julian Schnabel, so you can put them on the block at Sotheby’s in five years for $150,000 each. Still, writing did not go unappreciated in the art reviews of the early 1980s; it simply needed to “know its place.” In fact, the “criminality” of writing on the trains was a main source of excitement, and the presence of such work in the galleries lent the art world a more dangerous and edgy aura. The “criminal” nature of writing on the subways was mentioned in almost every article on writing in the galleries, and usually served as an introduction to a brief explication of the writing in the yards or the controversy writing had created within the city. At the same time (and often in the same article), the critics wrung their hands over the authenticity of the works on canvas. The writing that was “alive” on the trains seemed tamed and static on the walls. Such judgments, of course, hide the fact that the gal-

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 199

WRITING HISTORIES

leried art world had never stepped up to use its considerable power and money to defend writing on the trains. The galleries and their denizens continued to stand by quietly, taking no action, as masterpieces were routinely destroyed and writers were arrested by the Transit Authority. The art world was quite capable and willing, however, to pronounce the death of writing on the gallery walls and to anxiously mourn its passing, or, alternatively, present its “criminal” associations as an unfortunate and immature interlude that had now been superseded in the birth of “postgraffiti” art.121 Writers in part played along with this interpretive context of declension. Attempting to retain some control over the terms of evaluation, they often denied that the work on canvas was the real thing. “I won’t argue with them, because they’re paying me. But it’s not graffiti anymore because it’s not done illegally; it’s not done on somebody’s property; and it’s not the same environment,” fred told Print readers in 1982.122 That peculiar “environment” no longer existed in the view of many writers. “The true graffiti days . . . just can’t be repeated. I myself am a kind of burnt-out artist,” iz the wiz told the Times from the Graffiti Above Ground gallery that same year.123 Even some of the most successful writers in the galleries agreed. crash commented: “I can’t say that my art today is Graffiti. Because, once you remove it from its elements, the trains and yards, it’s not Graffiti anymore.”124 It is important to note that other aspects of writing culture were ignored at the same time that these boundaries of authenticity were being erected within the art world press. Whether writing-on-canvas is the same object as writing-on-trains is indeed a valid question, and there is no doubt that writing culture had changed significantly since the early 1970s, as IZ points out above. But these questions were never balanced by a consideration of the works themselves. The choice of particular concerns about authenticity as worthy of discussion, while other factors of greater consequence went unexplored (e.g., what does this art mean? what makes it beautiful?), cannot be understood as a simple matter of chance or the sole responsibility of writers. The mainstream critics were willing to mourn the death of writing not simply because writers were willing to cooperate, but because mourning was a much more comfortable (and respectable) approach to “graffiti art” than the admittedly considerable risk of taking it seriously on its own terms. All the better that writers voice these concerns themselves—which left no one at all to ask about the obvious failures of the Great Tradition.

199

Austin Ch6

200

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 200

WRITING HISTORIES

A few gallery critics didn’t yield even that much, and doubted the value of writing on canvas or anywhere else. Suzi Gablik suggested that the appearance of writing in the galleries was a (dangerous?) sign that modernism had failed, and questioned whether the writers had not “sauntered out onto a limb that ultimately will not support them but only breed new expectations, false hopes and disappointments.” She supplied space for two artists and a critic to argue that writing was only criminal vandalism (“crazy semi-literate messages, monkey scratches [sic] on the wall,” per the second paragraph of her Art in America article). Still, Gablik devoted the majority of the article to statements by “graffiti artists” and their supporters, which included two writers.125 Grace Glueck, writing in the Times, re-sounded the theme of criminality, but without Gablik’s measure of balance or intellectual subtlety: “The belligerent signatures . . . so offensively spray-canned across subway walls and cars are now to be found on canvas, and trendy collectors—who may or may not use the trains—are taking into their living rooms (or buying on speculation) the visual mayhem that daily assaults the eyes of those who do.”126 Of course, the MTA and the antigraffiti alliances never swayed in denying the relevance of aesthetics in their condemnations of writing in shared public space, nor was the MTA inconsistent in its policy of authoritarian aesthetic “order” in the public subways. Even when a traditional artist attempted (uninvited) to liven up the stations and repair the holes in its crumbling walls with beautiful hand-made mosaics, the MTA systematically ripped them out, preferring holes in the wall to “unauthorized” art work (or to simply repairing the holes).127 No visual mayhem would be allowed, apparently, except the drab and ugly monotony of the system’s own decades-long decay. The effects of writings’ extended encounter with the galleries in the first half of the 1980s are difficult to gauge since the “gallery” period coincides with the fencing of the yards and the first years of the Clean Car Program (see chapter 7). This was a period of complex change within writing culture. On one hand, the galleries pulled a significant number of the most skilled masters of the era away from the yards. On the other, several of the gallery participants continued to paint trains while they painted canvases. Many master writers never entered the galleries, and some of the more successful gallery artists were never major masters on the trains. Other writers were well into their twenties when they began painting on canvas, and their time in the yards would have likely begun to taper off in any case. Given these considerations, the gallery interlude may have simply opened up more space for the new generation of writers that was already developing

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 201

WRITING HISTORIES

on the trains in response to the MTA’s second war. That is, the galleries may have accelerated changes that were already in evidence. Just as Ricard had warned, many of the writers who participated in the galleried art world interlude of the early 1980s felt that they had been ripped off in some way. Exposure to the mainstream art world’s economy of prestige and its system of commercial exchanges contrasted sharply with their own system of relations in the yards. Respect for writing and for its history had been given short shift, subordinated to marketability and to the profits of dealers and galleries.128 Again, as Ricard had suggested, most writers found the purely commercial art avenues—murals, signs, posters, advertising, illustration—to be a more friendly arena for the exchange of writing skills and works for cash. tracy 168 had begun this as early as 1977, when he placed an advertisement in the paper for his services: he would paint whatever a customer wanted on the side of a train for $25.129 It is a simpler and more reliable exchange if nothing else, and it exists on a social terrain with which writers were familiar. Many of the writers that I met in the early 1990s did commercial work to supplement their incomes and to maintain a connection to the art that they enjoyed making. “Postgraffiti” art attempted a comeback in the early 1990s in the United States and in Europe, but was met, at best, with mixed reviews and sales in a weak art market.130 Whether the significance of writing will find an adequate hearing in the galleries remains an open question.

THE HIP-HOP FORMATION The so-called elements that supposedly complete the cycle that “create” Hip Hop as a whole (Writing, Breaking, Beats, MC-ing, Scratch DJ-ing), have always existed on separate, yet without a doubt, related plateaux, with neither being imperative to the life of the other and/or were birthed at different times. Upon hitting the downtown scene in New York and making the jump to mainstream publicity, they simultaneously came to be “one.” Prior to that, not many would claim this as so. —PHASE 2 131

The citywide youth culture from which writing emerged provided a number of outlets for individual expression, collective production, and communal

201

Austin Ch6

202

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 202

WRITING HISTORIES

pleasures after the mid-1970s, with various practices occupying the position of dominance and greatest popularity at different places and times. By the early 1980s, a new movement formed around a convergence of several of the major forms available in youth culture’s social mix: hip-hop. Writing took part in this convergence, which seems to have occurred “in the street” only a short time before it was recognized and promoted on the radio, on the screen, and in print. Hip-hop created another important social link between writers and other New Yorkers. In face-to-face practice, those links took place at clubs, galleries, and recording studios. The links were broadcast to others—the majority who did not take part—through other means, primarily through the commercial mass media. This had two important effects. First, the locations where hip-hop converged were places of commercial exchange and aesthetic production, like the galleries. This is an immediate hindrance to any artistic craft that is illegally practiced. On the other hand, these are also locations where youth culture, particularly youth of color, had established institutions of its own, or at least institutions that operate and perform in relative accord with youth’s social and aesthetic values. This created an environment where some writers could find appreciation for their skills on terms closer to their own choosing; the history of rock and roll is closer to home than the history of Western Art for most writers, although both are lucrative in every sense of the word. Writing has “found a place” in hip-hop, although that place is not always comfortable. The second major effect follows from the first. As a subdivision of hiphop, writing was rapidly broadcast across the nation and most of the planet. As rap began to gain market success and take shape as a new commercial music genre, it turned to writing as its recognizable iconic/design tradition, just as it turned to break dancing and b-boy fashion in other regards. Writing appeared in music videos as well as on album covers and stage backdrops. As this book demonstrates, writing has its own narrative-historical dramas, and these formed the bases for documentary and fictional films. Combined with personal appearances and performances, hip-hop came packaged as a complete cultural unit, one that fulfilled many of Richard Goldstein’s predictions about the cultural potential of writing in 1973. Hiphop was the next doo wop, but then took it several levels beyond that. Several important connections between writing and other hip-hop cultural forms are straightforward. Like writing, the other hip-hop forms offered alternatives to membership in a street gang. They opened social spaces for skillful self-expression; they opened spaces for collective engage-

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 203

WRITING HISTORIES

ment with other youths across significant geographic, class, and racial boundaries, boundaries that were otherwise difficult to cross; they created an interesting way to spend time together that involved pleasure and challenge, but rarely cost anyone their life. Stewart argues that the rapid growth of the writing community siphoned off street gang membership and thus contributed to the decline of gangs after 1972.132 Hager claims that many former gang members as well as writers attended the dances that slowly reappeared in the neighborhoods after 1973, when gang violence had begun to subside. These dances, often held in abandoned buildings, parks, or recreation centers, offered an occasion for the development of rap, “scratch,” and break dancing. Several writers were instrumental in developing these new expressive forms. kool herc and Afrika Bambaataa (aka bom 117), both godfathers of hip-hop djing, were also writers in the early 1970s.133 phase 2 designed many of the early posters advertising hip-hop music and dance events. These sorts of direct crossovers between writing, djing, rapping, break dancing, and b-boy fashion increased as time went on and rap music became popular (as the literature on rap has established).134 But as phase 2 points out, this crossover does not indicate an equivalence in their historical development: “Many Writers never listened to Rap, many Writers were more partial to headbanging than head-spinning [a break-dance move] and a huge amount of rappers, breakers and so-called Hip Hoppers couldn’t tell you the first thing about Writing.”135 The writers I interviewed had an outstanding memory for song lyrics, but only those writers who had begun their careers after the late 1970s quoted rap lyrics to illustrate their points. Even among this group, writers did not seem to be rap fans in any clear majority. revolt’s citation of “hippies” (rock) and quik’s mention of Latino influences offer connections between writing and at least two other major musical traditions, to say nothing of the considerable diversity in the popular music of this period and after.136 As phase 2 notes: “Hip Hop started getting its label around ’77. Even in ’75 ask anyone what Hip Hop was, and somebody might guess if they remembered an emcee saying it, but nobody would have labeled it ‘Oh Hip Hop is breaking, aerosol [writing].’”137 The “organic” connection between writing, rap, djing, and break dancing is at best partial, a matter of crossover and “family resemblance” rather than causation. Still, important aspects of their development were linked afterward: writing became a global youth art movement in part through its

203

Austin Ch6

204

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 204

WRITING HISTORIES

broadcast connections to hip-hop. An inner-city youth culture renaissance, a convergence of new forms and genres, was discernible in the clubs by the late 1970s: a hip-hop formation, of which writing might be seen as the initial manifestation.138 By the early 1980s, hip-hop congealed as a mass-marketed commodity, and in publicizing that commodity, the links between rap, break dancing, and writing were solidified. A complete history of the social links between writing and other hiphop forms are beyond this book’s intentions, but a brief mention of several important media productions and social spaces suggests their number and diversity. dondi was one of the connections between writing, hip-hop, and an emergent faction of New York City’s club scene. This club scene served as one of several meeting grounds for the new East Village art market, opening another avenue for crossover dynamics. He also toured Europe and Japan with the Rock Steady Crew breakdancers, painting while they danced.139 futura 2000 toured Europe with The Clash in 1981 and rapped as part of the performance, which included spray-painting a backdrop for the stage; this performance introduced many European audiences to writing and rapping for the first time.140 revolt, zephyr, and sharp painted a piece on a downtown wall that was used for the logo in the movie Wild Style (1983). This piece became the cover for the popular soundtrack album, which contained several rap songs.141 haze designed the album covers for the early Beastie Boys albums and the Tommy Boy records logo, and worked closely with Chuck D on Public Enemy’s sniper-scope image.142 seen and duster painted a rooftop used as the cover for Jellybean Benitez’s first rap album. pjay and cope 2 were involved with music videos for rapper krs one.143 ven, one of the major writers on the trains at the end of the 1980s, came to writing through a connection with hip-hop culture. His brother, who wrote bones, was up on the trains; later, as Frankie Bones, he became one of the main figures in the London “house music” scene, house music being the next step from hiphop djing.144 cope 2, a master from the same era, remembers: I used to breakdance back in the days when breakdancin’ was the bomb. My cousin . . . grew up with Mr. Freeze from Rock Steady [one of New York City’s major break-dancing crews]. They saw I was breakin’ with my little crew on my block Uptown in the Bronx and my cousin brought Rock Steady up there one time to battle us on 20/20 [ABC’s television news program]. It was phat. They burned us, but we gave them competition.145

Austin Ch6

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 205

WRITING HISTORIES

Afrika Bambaataa’s zulu nation (a multiracial youth organization) also became an important link between writing, music, and dance.146 These types of connections between cultural forms were highlighted in several popular books and movies, including an important documentarystyle movie about this formation in the early 1980s. Artist/filmmaker Charlie Ahern, a key link in bringing writing to public attention at Fashion Moda, directed a low-budget semifictional movie, Wild Style, released in 1983. The story featured several well-known writers and their associates in the gallery scene who more or less played themselves in a loose narrative about love and success. The movie prominently featured lee and pink as romantic leads, along with fred and Patty Astor (owner of the Fun Gallery, a major “graffiti art” venue and party spot), as well as a long list of other writers and hip-hop personnel. To everyone’s surprise, the movie did quite well in the theaters domestically and abroad. Writing was also part of several movies featuring rap, djing, and break dancing, such as Beat Street (1984). These were poor representations of what was happening in New York City, but they spread the word that something interesting and important was taking place. Mass-market books on hip-hop also began to appear at about the same time: Steven Hager’s Hip-Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti was published in 1984, and Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski’s Fresh: Hip-Hop Don’t Stop in 1985. Both books contained chapters on writing, rapping and djing, and break dancing. The same year, Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver produced Style Wars!, an excellent documentary on the New York City writers’ culture during the early 1980s that situated it in a hip-hop context. The film was shown on PBS and also made the rounds at art houses, universities, and film festivals across the United States and Europe. In the course of telling their stories, both Wild Style and Style Wars! provided some how-to information on writing and were filled with shots of work on the trains and walls of New York City. These connections in the mass media may have led to an increase in the number of writers in New York City, and had global effects as well. Many of the new recruits living outside the East Coast first became aware of writing as its associations with rap and “breaking” were being established. Writing maintains an important link to and position within the overall hiphop cultural formation. Still, some writers, even those who are also rap performers themselves, are still a bit weary of the connection.

205

Austin Ch6

206

11/1/01

11:09 AM

Page 206

WRITING HISTORIES

phase 2: Surely if Writing is a fundamental element of the Hip Hop culture it deserves more exposure. . . . If Hip Hop wants to claim Writing for it’s own then it must stop using it strictly for decorative purposes. . . . Writing is a movement which, despite the lack of financial gain and indeed sometimes, personal jeopardy, survives without the need for mass public appeal. Its continued existence in the face of State instigated purges pushes its profile and street credibility beyond that of Hip Hop, with its commercialized “dress like a clown for cash” mannerisms and idealism. Hence, in striving to maintain credibility, some sections of Hip Hop latch on to things like Writing, trying to leech off the energy and vitality.147

These disconnections are not ephemeral. The lack of a common hip-hop formation before the early to mid-1980s means that writing has more than a decade of history before rap broke onto the popular music scene, and their later development, while connected, is by no means determining. Still, writing usually finds a welcome at hip-hop events, and the signs of that connection in fashion, advertising, album covers, music videos, and other design venues have remained strong.148

CONCLUSION

In the first half of the 1980s, writing in New York City seemed to be moving in the direction of greater acceptance in some important mainstream institutions. But the art world more or less tossed all but a handful of New York City writers out of the galleries after 1985. This sort of “flash” in the trendy arts has occurred both before and since writing’s moment in the gallery lights and remains part of the art-making ritual now. Although writing sustains its identity as an illegally practiced art form, through hip-hop culture writing has also found ways of making itself more acceptable to the guardians of public and private property (mostly by turning itself into a valued popular culture commodity). Of course, writers remained intimately connected with each other, even as the terms of those connections became more fractious and complicated. What the rest of New York City thought about writing cannot be definitively known, but it is clear that some continued to see the shadows of the Naked City lurking nearby any writers’ name.

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 207

7

RETAKING THE TRAINS

SOMETHING MIGHT BE BETTER THAN NOTHING: TRY, TRY AGAIN

Two new significant (and costly) strategic efforts against writing on the subways were undertaken by the Transit Authority (TA) in the early 1980s, at about the same time as Koch’s “war”: a fleetwide repainting program and the construction of new security fences around every train storage yard. The fleetwide repainting began in July 1980. The outside of the trains would be coated with a paint-resistant polyurethane that would allow writing to be removed more easily. This was an expensive and long-term project, estimated to take five to six years to complete. The inside of the cars would be repainted with an inexpensive, standard (i.e., nongraffitiresistant) paint that could be applied easily and quickly, at a cost of $5.1 million. An approving New York Times editorial followed soon after this project’s announcement.1

Austin Ch7

208

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 208

RETAKING THE TRAINS

Not everyone felt as rosy as the Times about repainting the fleet. Two months into the pilot phase, the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA criticized the interior repainting program in the Daily News as a diversion from more important subway repairs, like the malfunctioning doors that opened unexpectedly while the train was in motion. Despite the significant tax dollars put into the program, 85 percent of the cars’ interiors were again covered with writing within a week.2 In October, MTA Chair Richard Ravitch ordered this part of the repainting effort to be abandoned, four months after it began. The exterior repainting continued. The initiative for the fencing program came from outside the Transit Authority. Although the subway system is beyond the direct command of the mayor, Koch’s popularity, coupled with the TA’s tarnished public image during this period, gave him more leverage with the MTA than Lindsay had enjoyed a decade earlier. Koch used that leverage to push the TA (via the press) into testing a new barrier tactic in the yards just before he began his own short-lived antigraffiti publicity campaign. In August 1980, a month after the repainting projects were first announced, Mayor Koch began to publicly criticize the TA’s reticence to implement his suggestion of using attack dogs and fences around the subway yards on a trial basis.3 The TA felt that the plan was too costly and too dangerous, since the dogs might escape and harm innocent bystanders, a not-unlikely scenario given the TA’s fence maintenance record. The TA was also unwilling to risk an attack dog’s mauling an actual writer; writing was indeed a crime, but using trained animals against human teenagers writing their names on the trains was another matter. The news media and the MTA were partners in the informal antigraffiti alliance, but the media’s incessant criticism of the subway system gave the MTA reason to suspect that photos of any maimed fifteen-year-old writer found in the yard would appear on the front pages the next day, displayed as a spectacularized public outrage, an abuse of public trust by a public authority. In any case, the TA’s police vandal squad had already undertaken a more vigorous program of arrests in the yards, and the TA was having difficulty finding operating funds to keep the trains running, much less capital improvement funds for a major fence construction program. Koch later claimed to have borrowed the fencing idea from New Jersey’s commuter train system, which had strong fences around its yards and had never been painted by writers, despite the fact that some of its trains ran to and from Manhattan. If his administration had looked into past city

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 209

RETAKING THE TRAINS

records more carefully, they would have found that similar suggestions about fencing the yards had been made throughout the Lindsay era, and that these too had been refused by the MTA. Koch enjoyed a warm relationship with the New York news media during this time, and his public criticism was meant to embarrass the MTA until it acted. He told the media that he had been trying to get the MTA to test the fencing tactic since December 1979, and that he had the support of three other elected officials on the city council. The mayor’s pressure paid off. “The Mayor is the mayor,” a TA official sheepishly told the papers. The test fence would cost $1.5 million and the dogs would cost another $18,000. The package was financed by a combination of federal, state, and city funds. The Times publicized its approval in an editorial the day after the announcement, brushing aside the cost, saying it was a worthwhile expense and “likely to reduce the extra psychic fare the subway system now routinely levies on its beleaguered riders.” Even the Daily News, which had otherwise unrelentingly condemned the TA’s management of the subways, nonetheless supported the fencing strategy, comparing it favorably to the Berlin Wall!4 By July 1981 the TA had surrounded one of the yards with two concentric 10-foot-high fences, each topped with razor wire. A narrow space between the two fences was patrolled by German shepherds trained to bark at intruders, but to attack only if attacked first. A four-month test showed that the fence and dogs combination was effective in reducing the writing on these trains. The MTA announced that it would pursue fencing the other eighteen storage yards, at a cost of $22.4 million.5 Unlike the test fence, the new fences would not have dogs in the space between them, but rather stacked bundles of razor wire. The dogs had proven too expensive and difficult to maintain. Initial testing had included painting one of the cars in the yard white as a lure. It was reported to have remained white, untouched by writers. Emboldened by the first unambiguous success in the territorial/tactical war in twelve years, the TA set about painting all of the trains held inside the fenced yard white—419 cars in all at a cost of about $900,000.6 The press labeled this—the No. 7 Line—“The Great White Fleet.” In the articles announcing the Transit Authority’s subway yard fencing program, much was made of the use of razor wire. The fences were designed to create nothing short of medium-secure prison barriers around the yards. Keep in mind that while a dog appears to be more vicious in its actions, the teeth of a trained dog are certain to be preferred by any human

209

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

FIGURE 7 .1

2:07 PM

Page 210

Security/prison fences around the subway yards. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

body ensnared and shredded by razor wire. Razor wire was originally developed for military purposes, and its proliferation in urban space signals the increasing militarization of the public square. Koch and the MTA strained to justify the use of military materials in the war on graffiti (despite the militarism of their own rhetoric), even though there were no critics pressuring them to answer for it. A TA spokesman told the Times that “the human factor didn’t count. These kids are fearless. . . . They hurl things— rocks and cans—at the police.” Clearly, such violent outrages called for the most extreme security measures. Asked about costs, Koch was forced to admit that there were more dire problems with the subways than young people painting them, but preventing graffiti would have a “positive psychological impact” on subway riders.7 Writers immediately set about exploiting the limitations of the fences and repainting the Great White Fleet. The MTA had been reluctant to undertake the expensive fencing program in part because the fences could not contain all the trains in service. Even after new capital improvement funds were secured for some yard expansion in 1981, approximately 1,200 cars would still be parked in unprotected lay-ups. Also, a substantial portion of the writing inside the trains (and plainly visible to riders) took place while the trains were in service, not parked in the yards. Detractors pointed out

210

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 211

RETAKING THE TRAINS

these shortcomings as yet more flaws in the TA’s tattered performance record, which was still under siege from all directions. Since there was no real remedy for the lack of storage space, the TA attempted to stay ahead of the writers by enlarging the car-cleaning staff. As in the past, the TA was no match for the writers’ work habits, and writers painted the Great White Fleet with relative impunity.8 cope 2 and cavs both remember the Great White Fleet with a special fondness. The white trains parked in one of the yards near cavs’s house attracted some of the best writers in the city. The location was an excellent place to meet these famed writers when they came there to paint, and this gave cavs’s career a considerable boost.9 Other New Yorkers were not so happy. City Council President Carol Bellamy, a leading critic of the TA’s execution of the “war” during the early 1980s, frequently spoke out about the TA’s frustrating inability to follow through with the plans it had made. This included painting some of the other subway lines white before the fences could be built to protect them.10 The writers were overjoyed. Nor was the TA better able to deal with the taggers inside the trains—in fact, they were not even sure how these writers went about their work. During March 1983, eleven TA employees were assigned to ride the subways in shifts during all twenty-four hours of operation for three months to observe the practices of writers who worked while the trains were in circulation. The observers were not to intervene but were to take notes, hoping to perceive patterns of behavior while gathering other information for a possible later crackdown. This amounted to another substantial investment of public funds in intelligence-gathering operations.11 Although these endeavors in the early 1980s—in combination with policing and the Buff—had some effect on the practice of writing, they were no cause for jubilation among the antigraffiti warriors. Progress was being made, but it was very slow. At this pace, one would expect to see writing on the trains for at least another decade.

CHANGING THE CAPITAL GUARDS: THE CLEAN CAR PROGRAM

While New York City’s image of itself as the New Rome had fallen into ruin during the urban crisis period, by 1983 the jeremiad of civic crisis and collapse had clearly taken a turn toward promised redemption,12 and the Cap-

211

Austin Ch7

212

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 212

RETAKING THE TRAINS

ital of the Twentieth Century once again arose like a phoenix from the ashes of the Naked City. The city’s finances were respectably balanced, and its municipal bonds had climbed back to an investment rating. The postindustrial sectors of its economy were enjoying a boom, as was the real estate market. Perhaps best of all, the national economic recession of 1982 had hardly been noticed in New York City.13 Although some in the city experienced a dramatic rebound in their life chances beginning in the early 1980s, this boost did not extend to the city’s young people. Less than one in five teenagers overall and less than one in ten African American teenagers had a job, and the city still had the lowest ratio of working teenagers (i.e., workers-to-population) of any city in the nation.14 By mid-decade, young people had attained the exalted status of “the principal casualties of the transformation from manufacturing to the worldservice center.” New jobs had been created continuously for seven years by that time, and neither ethnicity nor education could account for the poor job prospects of youth. Instead, the city’s growing economic sectors had less and less need for young workers. The only reprise was in the retail sector, wherein, as Roger Waldinger and Thomas Bailey pointed out, sufficient “training” for a job could be acquired in just a few hours. But pay was extremely low, and these jobs had become “youth ghettos” where even the supervisor was likely to be younger than twenty-four. These jobs offered very little integration into the wider community (and in fact, may have served to integrate young people more solidly into the youth peer culture) nor did they supply skills that might be used to move up the ladder. The criminal economy offered much better alternatives in the age of crack.15 Koch’s proposal for a mandatory year’s service in the military or a civilian service corps at this time might have been more warmly received as a good-faith first step had it not been so self-serving. The mayor wanted a federally funded low-paid workforce to bolster recycling, teaching in the public schools, running day care centers, assisting people with disabilities, and helping with crime victims, among other tasks. But this proposal came at the same time that the mayor was looking for all sorts of “free” labor from New Yorkers—his proposal preceded Bush’s “thousand points of light” (which were to shine on donated batteries) by several years. And this need for “free” labor came at a time when the city’s businesses were enjoying an unprecedented boom, and thus had a unique capacity, if not responsibility, to pay their own way. Instead, the city hailed meager programs that hired a few hundred teenagers to clean the subway stations during the

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 213

RETAKING THE TRAINS

summer.16 By the end of the decade, the employment situation for young people had not improved, and city fathers, searching in vain for some appropriate reaction to the youth-gang rape of the Central Park jogger, wrung their hands again at the “problem.”17 Although writing could be found throughout the city, the “sign value” of writing within the public sphere did not extend to the entire city, since New York City was, as far as the elite were concerned, very much back “under control.” To city elites, the writing on the buildings overseen by the Housing Authority, the city schools, and the Public Works department were annoying but routine matters, at least in the mid-1980s.18 However, the city’s full recovery depended on rebuilding the subway system. The subways, along with the standard of living for those below the poverty line, had approached collapse during the city’s crisis. While the poor could be (and were) simply ignored or represented as another “quality of life problem” for the city’s more prosperous citizens, the subways symbolized a key infrastructural resource that had to be maintained: the trains had to run, and preferably on time.19 In a 1981 power play, MTA chair Richard Ravitch and the New York City council president publicly declared the New York subway system to be in a “state of emergency,” and used that announcement to introduce a Five Year Capital Improvement Program into the New York state legislature, to be financed through a bond sale of $6.2 billion.20 Ravitch had already vigorously lobbied the New York state legislature and sought public support through the media for emergency measures to repair the subway system, which he characterized as being on the verge of collapse. His claims were reinforced by several other public officials of high standing—no one seriously doubted Ravitch’s analysis of the situation. By any measure, the subways were falling apart. On the other hand, studies of the Transit Authority by business leaders and government officials had revealed a level of chaos and disorganization that gave even the TA’s strongest supporters reason to pause. News reports on these studies had already shifted some public attention away from the alarming statistics documenting the number of crimes, derailments, and fires within the system, and toward criticisms of the TA as a bureaucratic abuse of the public trust. There were very real questions about the TA’s ability to effectively heal itself, even with the enormous sums that were being solicited. The legislature continued its critical scrutiny of the TA and asked for reassurances, but it ultimately conceded the necessity of the pro-

213

Austin Ch7

214

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 214

RETAKING THE TRAINS

gram. In the spring of 1981, it authorized the bond sale to go forward as part of the hastily prepared, five-year $8.6 billion rebuilding program proposal. This would provide the financial means to halt the subway’s deterioration and, hopefully, revitalize the system.21 Mario Cuomo called for the abolition of the MTA during his campaign for governor that year, although he found little legislative or popular support for this idea after election. It appears that most New York State residents felt that any significant change in this public authority would heighten the political maneuvering that already attended state transit funding. Cuomo then took a different tack, and began pressuring the state legislature for more gubernatorial control over the MTA in early 1983.22 This pressure resulted in the creation of an MTA inspector general and an independent Transit Safety Board.23 The new oversight presence, combined with the critical assaults from the press, citizen groups, state and federal politicians, the state comptroller, and independent consultants led TA president John Simpson to resign two months later. Simpson had occupied the president’s position for less than three years. Although Simpson had made some gains in subway performance during his tenure, he indicated that he was no longer willing to continue with the enormous burden of attempting to revitalize the system further, and cited the system’s “intractable” problems as a major reason for leaving. As if intending to validate his frustration and gloom, the twelfth subway train of the year jumped the track in the Bronx a few hours after the press conference announcing his resignation.24 Thirteen days later, MTA chair Richard Ravitch followed Simpson and resigned, citing similar reasons.25 Thus, the two most powerful positions within the subway system’s bureaucracy were unexpectedly vacated during a two-week span in the fall of 1983. Cuomo and the MTA’s critics were chastened by the hasty exit of the executive pair, neither of whom were being directly pressured to resign. Only Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) actually welcomed the departure, and even he limited his celebration to Simpson’s leaving. Many of the system’s critics now expressed doubts that a better management team could be found.26 Implicit in this hand-wringing was a fear that the subway system had actually decayed beyond the point of repair, and that no reasonable and/or qualified executive manager would take either of the positions. To add further injury, the TA had begun to carry out its Capital Improvement rebuilding programs only to find new and more expansive (and more expen-

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 215

RETAKING THE TRAINS

sive) problems. Cost estimates and designs submitted in the original plan bore little resemblance to the end products, and the rush to repair the system created even more snafus. Despite these and other dismal circumstances, Cuomo was able to find a replacement for the MTA chair rather quickly. Robert Kiley, director of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and a recent unsuccessful Boston mayoral candidate, took the job in early October 1983.27 In accepting the position, Kiley offered New Yorkers no bright tomorrows on the subways, at least not in the near future. He predicted that three to five years would be needed before any improvements would be noticeable, and a decade or more before the subways were in “class A railroad status.”28 Among several priorities that Kiley set in his first public statements were a reorganization of the TA’s management structure, a review of the rebuilding projects that were already under way as part of the capitalization program, an examination of the work rules and productivity of the workforce, and “an aggressive and continuing campaign against graffiti.”29 Although Cuomo found a ready replacement for the MTA chair in Kiley, Kiley had to struggle to find a new Transit Authority president to replace Simpson. Why qualified managers might be reluctant to take the position was obvious to anyone who rode the subways or read the newspapers: neither the system’s physical deterioration nor the storms of criticism by oversight agencies had been altered by a changing of the guard.30 Kiley’s top candidate, former Philadelphia Transit Authority chair David Gunn, publicly characterized the job as a “suicide mission.” “You’re talking about putting someone in charge of a system that is near complete collapse. . . . The [maintenance and repair shops have] the atmosphere of absolute neglect. There is no hope there.”31 Despite this assessment, Gunn took the job a few weeks later, calling it the “ultimate challenge” of railroad management. His forecast for the organization was no more optimistic for having stepped into its executive leadership position: “I wish I could stand here and say that in a matter of time everything will be alright but I cannot do that. . . . Success is by no means assured.”32 The first two years of the Kiley-Gunn regime were marked by conflict on almost every front, but their fights with the Transport Workers Union to reorganize the TA’s management structure and to change work rules were among the most contentious. Kiley and Gunn argued that more than 1,500 new managers were needed at the middle and upper levels to bring the organization “under control.” These new managers should not be covered by

215

Austin Ch7

216

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 216

RETAKING THE TRAINS

union representation nor selected according to civil service tests. Instead, the new regime felt that these managers should be directly accountable to President Gunn. The new guard’s first assessment reports of the Five Year Capital Improvement Program revealed, as expected, a shoddy state of planning, engineering, and design in the rebuilding projects already under way. After only three years, over half of these projects were either behind schedule or over budget. Many of the projects had been nothing more than bare bones proposals at the time the Capital Improvement Program was created and passed, and had not been sufficiently developed and coordinated within the complex, interdependent system. In some instances, new construction was being ripped down by contractors working on other projects. Construction and demolition crews were competing for simultaneous access to the same work sites. Two hundred newly purchased subway cars were too large to fit through the doors of the maintenance/repair shops. A new lighting system for a subway station in Queens required all passengers over six feet tall to walk crouched. Gunn immediately discontinued all nonessential rebuilding projects until the engineering department was reorganized, and refused to set new goals until a new management structure was in place.33 Kiley’s and Gunn’s call for a new, more accountable management structure was in part supported by the continuing stream of scandals, exposés, and critiques generated by the state comptroller, the MTA’s inspector general, and other government officials and agencies as well as citizens’ groups observing its operations. During 1984 and 1985, more than twenty scandals involving the MTA and its TA subsidiary appeared in the Times alone, dealing with such things as purchasing and accounting procedures, the productivity and quality of work performed by the transportation unions or by contractors, and the Transit Authority’s operating budget.34 Scandals sell papers, and many of the TA’s skeletons made the front page. In their own defense, both of the new executives repeated that the system they had inherited was in a state of administrative chaos and near physical collapse.35 The general consensus among elites was that this was a fair diagnosis, and Kiley and Gunn were allowed to distance themselves from responsibility for its problems for some time.36 But there was a limit on how long Koch, Cuomo, the Straphangers’ Campaign, and others were willing to wait for improvements. Riders frustrated with declining service levels were voting with their feet, not only by choosing other modes of transportation but also by spontaneous consumer strikes of an unusual sort. On several occasions,

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 217

RETAKING THE TRAINS

scores of Transit Police were called to subway stations to physically remove large crowds of riders who refused to leave trains that had broken down en route.37 Like so much else in the subway system, the consent and cooperation of its riders were nearly depleted. There were very few significant improvements that could be implemented quickly, and the system’s most important service indicators could not be positively changed for some time, even using the most optimistic projections. For instance, just rebuilding the subway fleet was a massive undertaking which included the manufacture and delivery of almost two thousand new subway cars by firms outside the TA, and the overhaul of another three thousand existing cars by transit workers. The overhaul project alone would take eight years, despite a major increase in the repair staff. The tracks, switches, and communication subsystems were technologically obsolete and in an advanced stage of decay. These too would require major construction projects to mend and replace, tasks that would take almost a decade to complete. Compounding the current problems, replacing these fundamental subsystems would itself further disrupt service by blocking tracks and causing trains to change their routes and scheduled stops. Even after the construction was completed, improvements to the system would be all but invisible to the riding public: safety and durability are difficult to signify, except by their absence. Gunn looked to short-term improvements that would be conspicuous to the straphangers, to the TA’s state and federal funding agencies, and to the media. He found one point of intervention with a long track record of public support: “cleanliness.” In October 1984, ten months after Gunn had arrived at the TA, Kiley and Gunn announced their first set of goals for improvements, the most noticeable of which involved the subway environment. In most ways, these were very modest low-priority goals, in that they did not improve essential service indicators (such as on-time performance or the average distance trains traveled between breakdowns). But the environment within the trains and the stations was hardly pleasant, and riders and their advocates frequently cited the “filthy” condition of the subways in their criticisms. Routine janitorial maintenance had been drastically cut during the financial crisis of the late 1970s, although there is little evidence that the trains and stations would have been judged to be tidy even before that time. Still, “cleanliness” was not an empty goal. One of these new cleanliness goals seemed idealistic if not arrogant in its projections: Kiley and Gunn proposed to keep one third of the subway

217

Austin Ch7

218

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 218

RETAKING THE TRAINS

trains in the system “graffiti-free” by the end of the next year.38 The choice to make the removal of writing a first goal was rooted in its visibility, its accumulated power as a negative symbol of the subway system’s status, and Gunn’s past experience in successfully “cleaning” the Philadelphia system of writing; indeed, he publicly announced his intentions to do the same in New York City soon after taking the job.39 The graffiti-free goal was one part of the larger Clean Car Program to be undertaken by the Transit Authority. Kiley and Gunn hoped that visible changes in the subway environment would placate riders and critics until more substantive service improvements would become apparent, probably no earlier than 1987. They agreed with the Koch alliance that writing was a symbol that the subways were “out of control,” and this phrase appeared in almost every public statement about writing throughout their tenure.40 Nevertheless, the goal of a graffiti-free subway in New York City, and the audacious announcement of concrete measures to evaluate that goal in public soon after Kiley’s and Gunn’s arrivals, were seen as pure folly by many. Although the TA had made a few tactical gains in the territorial war by the end of 1983, there was no apparent reason to predict a graffiti-free subway system any time in the future. New York City real estate, already overbuilt and containing some of the most expensive property on the planet, offered little hope for a yard expansion program that could contain the entire subway fleet. Writers still had access to the trains, even those that had been placed inside the newly built fences, and writers’ production still outpaced the TA’s efforts. Despite the fact that the task seemed overwhelming, Gunn received the requisite support from the Times’s editorial pages, and most newspapers again took the stance that something was better than nothing, although they expected very little to come of his efforts. The Clean Car Program served another function as well. According to Gunn and several earlier critics, the TA’s numerous departments operated as though they were autonomous fiefdoms rather than interconnected subdivisions of a unified organization. The lack of interdepartmental communication and coordination was among the reasons for several embarrassing snafus within the rebuilding program that had been exposed by the media. The Clean Car Program was designed in part to revitalize and unite the internal bureaucracy of the TA by organizing a task that required a coordinated effort between fifteen different departments. It also provided an avenue to integrate the new management structure that Kiley and Gunn had been recently granted.

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 219

RETAKING THE TRAINS

The Clean Car Program began with a single train on a single subway line and systematically incorporated new trains into the program as each train was rendered “graffiti-free.” Cleaning staff would be positioned at each end of a train’s route, so that it could be cleaned after each run rather than at the end of the day. The cleaning staff would increase in proportion to the number of trains brought into the program. The antigraffiti effort was explicitly built on a military-counterinsurgency model, and used this language to describe its activities. Small “hits” would be dealt with by the cleaning staff, who also mopped the cars and performed other routine janitorial tasks. “Major hits” required that the train be taken out of service altogether and returned to the yard, where the writing would be removed with more powerful chemical solvents. To maintain the graffiti-free condition of the trains, a more vigilant surveillance of the fences around the yards was necessary. Weaknesses in the fences were repaired or redesigned to secure “breached parameters.” When all trains on a particular subway line were brought into the program, it was considered to be “captured” and “pacified.”41 This is the language of antiterrorism and guerrilla warfare. The process of removing the writing from the trains and working out the bugs in the fencing system around the yards again revealed the counterinsurgency metaphor that guided the TA’s action. A TA official, explaining the way in which (he imaged) writers’ planning to paint the trains in the tunnels, for instance, told a reporter: “It’s like the Army. They [writers] send somebody down the night before in combat fatigues to stash the paint” (my emphasis).42 But the major change in Kiley’s and Gunn’s tactics was the reallocation of staff and resources to maintain the “graffiti-free” trains, and their understanding of the importance of circulation in writing culture. Writers had successfully outproduced and outsmarted the TA for fifteen years. The new executives worked systematically to cut off the writers’ use of the subways as a mass media, and committed themselves to whatever resources were necessary to accomplish that singular goal. This commitment extended all the way to withholding fully functional, working trains from service and delaying the schedule during the morning and afternoon rush hours in order to remove writing. Controlling the appearance of the subway, at least in regard to writing, was (and still is) held to be more important than the subways’ actual performance as transportation. “We will hold what we win,” Gunn announced to his fellow counterinsurgents. The program methodically progressed train by train, assisted by the continuous arrival of

219

Austin Ch7

220

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 220

RETAKING THE TRAINS

new and overhauled cars with graffiti-resistant coatings, which made removal easier and faster. Planning for the graffiti-free program had actually begun almost as soon as Gunn took office. Before he announced the graffiti-free target goal in October, he had repainted the (failed) Great White Fleet on the No. 7 line in traditional maroon and black colors.43 He formed an Anti-Vandalism Strike Force within the Transit Police, whose members were assigned to each train of newly purchased cars and to conduct “sting” operations to arrest writers.44 Yard expansion programs, which would allow more trains to be kept within the fences, were under way in six of the eighteen storage yards. New technologies to help secure the yards and lay-ups were studied, including the microwave alarm systems in use at Rikers’ Island Prison at the time.45 The program met with some resistance from those who questioned the emphasis on graffiti-free trains at the expense of riders. After all, writing did not affect the performance of a train, while one less train did increase the time a rider spent waiting on the platform. Even the Times, perhaps the most ardent and long-standing member of the antigraffiti war lords, questioned Gunn’s ability to actually carry out his plan.46 But these criticisms were ignored, and the necessity of the Clean Car Program was pressed as a matter of common sense by Gunn. “The need for a concerted antigraffiti program is obvious. . . . Graffiti has a debilitating psychological effect on passengers. It says to them, ‘the system is out of control and no one cares.’”47 As the date of the first goal came closer, the public criticisms of the Clean Car Program fell away. The Times announced that the TA had actually exceeded its goal in an article featuring a cartoon illustration of a shiny new subway car bursting out from its former “graffitied” shell, like water rushing out of an old garden hose. The article was used as an opportunity for Gunn (and the Times) to reiterate the association of writing and “control” in the subways: “A clean car [i.e., a car with no writing on it] is a symbol of an authority in control of its environment. . . . It is a direct communication to passengers that the system is orderly.” The achievement was reported to have almost transformed the TA as an organization. “It’s unbelievable what has happened in a year,” a maintenance shop supervisor told the Times. “The whole attitude of the men has changed.” With evangelical fervor, Gunn promised that half the fleet would be “graffiti-free” by the end of the next year. “I’m sure there are still nonbelievers, but for the most part it’s a matter of time and difficulty before it gets done. . . . It’s no

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 221

RETAKING THE TRAINS

longer impossible.”48 The public space under Gunn’s supervision would not produce fear, sadness, or cynicism, but confidence in the TA’s (centralized) authority.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING “GRAFFITI-FREE” IN NEW YORK CITY: RETAKING THE TRAINS, 1986–1990

Kiley and Gunn had solemnly predicted that there would be few if any indications of a “recovery” within the subway system during the first two years of their regime. These predictions were confirmed in a report by the MTA’s inspector general, which found that, at best, the Kiley-Gunn regime had managed to halt the subway system’s decline in service. In 1986 the system was operating at 1983 service levels, “a year in which service was exceptionally poor.” Late trains due to car fires had increased 202 percent during one period in the interim, and the number of trains abandoned en route increased significantly as well.49 But by the end of 1986 the TA had turned the corner on rebuilding the subways, and Kiley’s and Gunn’s efforts were finally paying off, at least on a few counts.50 The distance an average train traveled between breakdowns was still less than half that of the pre-1974 period, but it was improving. The number of car fires was cut in half. Most of the rebuilding projects were on schedule.51 These slow but steady gains characterized the progress of the subway rebuilding program between 1986 and 1990. The slow progress charted in the statistics still reflected a poorly performing system (as most riders would attest), which added new significance to the first concrete victory for the TA in its fifteen-year “war.” The successes of the Clean Car Program were represented as a landmark and hailed as a sign that the Transit Authority, despite its inability to meet other goals, was “in control” of its territory. For instance, a Times evaluation of the system published a month after the MTA inspector general’s 1986 report devoted approximately twice the column space in the article to reporting on the Clean Car Program; the article could barely contain its celebration of the program’s singular efficiency.52 In the fall of 1986, Gunn, Kiley, Mayor Koch, and Governor Cuomo met at the Brooklyn Bridge subway station for a staged celebration of the 3,000th “graffiti-free” car. In actuality, the point of the media event was to promote public support for the passage of a Second Capital Improvement

221

Austin Ch7

222

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 222

RETAKING THE TRAINS

Program for the TA in the New York state legislature. The event represented the success of the Clean Car Program as a miracle wrought from Gunn’s determination and managerial skills, and the achievement was offered as evidence that the TA would be able to spend another $8 billion of the taxpayers’ money responsibly. The TA’s press release quoted Kiley as saying that, “People laughed when Dave Gunn said he could eliminate graffiti from the subways. . . . But given the necessary management resources and by building a strong management team, the TA is achieving this goal, as well as many others.” Gunn’s quote later in the release ties further success in the “war” to the $8 billion program and seems to offer “graffiti-free” cars as the most important outcome to be gained from it.53 A Times editorial a few days later again applauded Gunn for his achievements in the “war”: “To most straphangers, graffiti symbolize the transit system’s decline and contribute to an atmosphere of fear and disorder, suggesting that the whole system is out of control. For waging this successful war, give Mr. Gunn a well-scrubbed apple.”54 The efforts to keep the trains graffiti-free were cited as perhaps the major accomplishment of the KileyGunn regime, in part attributed to Gunn’s “back-to-basics” approach.55 The Second (five-year) Capital Improvement Program ($8.6 billion in all) passed the New York state legislature in April 1987.56 The subway system also enjoyed a momentary ridership increase during mid-1987, when it again reached 1974 levels. Although previous fluctuations in the number of subway riders had been attributed primarily to the city’s economy, this 1987 surge was attributed to the rebuilding program and graffiti-free trains.57 Other newspapers considered the new graffiti-free status of the trains to be “a miracle.”58 After 1986 the Times carefully charted the TA’s progress, assuming that a 100 percent graffiti-free fleet was on the horizon.59 In May 1988, with 80 percent of the subway fleet “graffiti-free,” the New York City Transit Museum opened a yearlong exhibition celebrating the TA’s accomplishments in fighting the “war” and anticipating its final victory.60 The TA rolled out the red carpet for the exhibition, retaining Rathe Productions (the company that had also designed the Statue of Liberty Museum and the Ellis Island Museum) to do the exhibition.61 The status of this exhibit reflects the stature of the problem whose solution it sought to celebrate. The Transit Authority’s triumphant moment arrived on schedule one year later, memorialized in every city newspaper and several others across the country and the globe. The ways in which this memorialization was

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 223

RETAKING THE TRAINS

constructed, and the reactions to the celebrations, reveal a great deal about the importance of being “graffiti-free” in New York City. The military metaphors that characterized most representations of the effort to “wipe out graffiti” since the early 1970s predominated in all accounts. A few examples showcase some of the common themes. Almost all news reports represented the retaking of the trains within the framework first constructed by the Times and Nathan Glazer in 1979. The Gannett papers held fast to this line, characterizing writing as “the most visible symbol of urban blight during the city’s fiscal plague,” and quoted a TA official: “Graffiti said to the public, ‘no one cares.’ . . . Riders lost confidence. They stayed away.”62 The Times allowed Gunn to do the talking on the front page: “When you are sitting in a graffiti-covered car, you don’t feel safe,” said the president of the Transit Authority, David L. Gunn. When the trains were covered with names, codes, and epithets, “there was a sense that the system was out of control,” he added.63

The Washington Post told the tale of the TA’s victory in a more explicit way: The New York City subway system, once a sort of worst-case scenario on wheels for all the problems of urban life, proclaimed last Friday that it has won the war. . . . So powerful a symbol had [graffiti] become—recognized internationally as evidence of everything from chaos and breakdown of authority to the anguished self-expression of the voiceless—that the successful end of a fierce five-year struggle to eradicate it creeps over the line from symbolism toward substance.64

The Times had long seen Gunn’s commitment to the “war” as the sign of his commitment to rebuild the subways, and translated success in the war into success generally.65 The Times reiterated this theme during the celebration and was joined by other local news vendors.66 The TA highlighted this view in its press release for the occasion, quoting Kiley: “Graffiti was a symbol of anarchy in our system. At a time when it was rare for a week to pass without a major subway fire or derailment, the mindless scrawls that covered our vehicles told riders that no one was in charge. . . . The

223

Austin Ch7

224

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 224

RETAKING THE TRAINS

almost weekly front page headlines about major fires and derailments have, along with graffiti, become part of our past and not our future.”67

Note how Kiley locates the importance of this “shining achievement” explicitly within the (front-page) representations of the mass-mediated public sphere. Also, note the way in which subway fires and derailments are rhetorically linked to “mindless scrawls.” Given the state of the subway system in the first half of the decade, are we to assume that these are akin to the “mindless scrawls” of technocratic memoranda that had allowed the system to reach the brink of collapse? A few critical voices did emerge during the celebration. These skeptics sought to look beneath the surface and ask questions about the costs incurred or the lack of significant change on other, more important accounts. The most dramatic of these appeared in Newsday, which rained on the parade of huzzahs by remembering the transportation workers who had been injured or died from chemical exposure in the “war.”68 A New York City weekly news magazine pointedly asked if it “wasn’t time to acknowledge— at least in retrospect—graffiti as folk art?”69 Even the faithful Times included critiques by a state senator (“I wish that much effort had gone into more important issues such as safety, like the doors that drag people to their death . . .”), the safety director of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 (“Big deal. . . . You can’t get to work on time and you [still] don’t feel safe”), and the Urban Mass Transit administrator in Washington (“Nobody was ever raped by a graffito. . . . People need to see not only that the trains are clean, but that criminals are removed from the transit system”). Gunn, however, was given the last word on each charge.70 The importance of being “graffiti-free” in New York City was once again punctuated later that year. A TA official vacationing in Florida saw a New York City subway train covered with writing used in a set at the MGM Theme Park in Disney World and reported his finding to Gunn. Gunn immediately fired off a letter to Disney chairman Michael Eisner, asking him to remove or “clean” the train on the set. Otherwise, Gunn wrote, the representation would give visitors “a false impression of our transit system as dirty and unsafe.”71 All during the 1980s, the sense of safety was what the “war” was supposed to accomplish. But as a Daily News article covering Disney’s offense and some of the TA’s critics had pointed out earlier, there was very little persuasive power in arguing that writing was the primary cause of fear in the subways, nor were the face-

Austin Ch7

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 225

RETAKING THE TRAINS

tious correlations between ridership and writing taken seriously by the general public. One news editor wrote, tongue-in-check: “Maybe [now] we could all get back to the real issues—rising crime, the frequent breakdowns, safety and the seemingly inevitable fare hike. Indeed, it could have been worse: Disney might have chosen to feature a gleamingly clean car with a mugger lurking in the background.”72

CONCLUSION

The visible progress of the Clean Car Program was interpreted as encoding important political and social meanings for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Transit Authority, and for New York City as a whole, meanings that extended far beyond a more “controlled” aesthetic environment for the city’s subway riders. Writers had visibly humiliated and repeatedly defeated the TA during the first fifteen years of writing history. The “retaking” of the trains after 1985 was understood to be a sign that the TA (and, by extension, New York City) could predictably and properly function on a day-to-day level, an understanding that had been bolstered by the city’s surging financial recovery. The New Rome was being rebuilt. In this context, the second “war on graffiti” and the revitalization of the subways had a much more widespread impact than simply getting New Yorkers to work at a more predictable time: it revived the city’s national and international image more generally. The effect was not unlike the image of civic unity and consensus created around the project of cleaning the Statue of Liberty for the Bicentennial. It was assumed by the authorities that, once writing was removed from the system and some measure of predictable scheduling could be reestablished, the subway riders would return to the system. They did for a few months—and then ridership took a nosedive toward the record low, even though the system’s performance had significantly improved. Subway crime hit an all-time record within a year of the subways’ becoming graffiti-free, a circumstance that many found best explained by a traditional cause: the city’s deepening economic recession.73 Polling the ridership, the TA found that their fear of crime on the subways had not abated at all, even though the trains, a large percentage of which were new, were all graffitifree. Gunn hired a consulting firm in which one of the authors of the “broken windows” thesis was a partner to advise him on methods of dealing

225

Austin Ch7

226

10/26/01

2:07 PM

Page 226

RETAKING THE TRAINS

with the continuing problem of low ridership levels. A new target of “disorder” in the subways was held up as an important cause of crime and loss of riders despite the economic recession after 1988: the homeless. Now the sight of the homeless in the subways created the impression that no one was in control. Removing the homeless (along with a list of other “undesirables” in the system) became the new crusade after 1989.74 And so the New Rome initiated another all-out war—this time on the homeless. And that story is perhaps even more significant than this one.75

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 227

8

THE WALLS AND THE WORLD

WRITING CULTURE, 1982–1990

F

our dramatic and interrelated developments restructured writing culture between the mid1980s and the early 1990s. The first of these reflect two different strategies by which writers responded to the Transit Authority’s successful tactics in the “war” on the subways after 1984. Both involved a return to the city’s walls as a medium of mass circulation. By the late 1980s, writers were more or less split into two overlapping communities of practice: one based on the production of masterpieces in areas of the city that are not under tight surveillance, and a second based on bombing the most visible of shared public spaces with throw-ups. This return to the city walls “localized” and segmented writing culture, so that the structured coherence of the pres-

It’s amazing how an indigenous art form developed in such a reactionary city. NYC—the big cultural capital city of the world. The Big capital K— Kaptives of Kulture and Kapital. NYC rules—your ass, that is . . . ” —Standard Bearer, International Get-Hip Times1

Austin Ch8

228

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 228

THE WALLS AND THE W0RLD

tige system that writers had developed on the subways began to fall apart; at the same time, it pushed writers to adapt to a new environment and to create new writing forms and locations. These conflictual shifts mark the second of the major developments. The third development was the establishment of “legal” alternative media to circulate (mostly illegal) works—independently produced writers’ “zines” and videos. These new media added yet another layer to the complex and fragmenting prestige system in New York City as the writers lost the subways, but simultaneously opened the way for discussions about shared issues of concern among writers around the nation and across the globe, including a more overt discussion of the cultural politics of writing. The zines and videos thus contributed to and built upon the fourth major development of this period, the globalization of writing. By the early 1990s, writers’ zines contained photos of works from all over the world, allowing innovations created in localized (neighborhood, city, or national) scenes to circulate on an international scale. Worldwide fame was now possible. In this expanded geographic context, New York City took on a new identity among writers from all over the planet: New York City is the Writers’ Homeland. These developments are not inherently constrained by the artificial endpoint that I have inscribed here in the early 1990s. My choice in ending this story in those years is made simply to maintain the earlier parallels I have drawn between the history of writing and the history of the “graffiti problem” on the subway trains. The contemporary period (since the early 1990s) is another story altogether, and will require another history. But it would be a mistake to take my endpoint as an implication that writing culture has in some way died or diminished since them. As this chapter will argue, writing culture continues to develop on a scale that julio 204 and taki 183 could not have imagined three decades earlier. I direct my reader to the appendix for more information on the contemporary period.

THE TWO WAYS TO FAME: THE RETURN TO THE WALLS [Due to the MTA’s success in the “war” on graffiti,] writers are now confronted with a change of exposure or presentation. This will be the hardest change the sub-culture has ever been subject to, because it means taking aerosol art off the

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 229


trains, where it has traditionally belonged. The capacity for writers to leave a meaningful mark by expressing themselves is still there: but the focus has to be shifted to maintain the driving force. —SMITH and SANE2

The early to mid-1980s was a period of significant transition and transformation within writing culture, a period in which its social, cultural, and spatial configurations changed dramatically. A widening gap developed between bombers and piecers which reflected an emerging dual geographic orientation for writing in response to the MTA’s successes on the trains. The shift opened up the already-existing differences between the ways in which some bombers and piecers understood their audiences and the city at large. Since the early 1970s, writing culture had balanced the means of obtaining fame along two axes: productivity and style. The former was manifest in “getting up” or bombing (saturating public space with one’s name), and the latter was manifest in the aesthetic presentation of the name in piecing. In most cases, balance was created by way of the educational sequence that the individual writer passed through in gaining the necessary skills (i.e., a writer’s “career path”). Most writers began by concentrating on getting up and establishing his or her fame through tagging the inside of the trains, and then moving on to painting throw-ups on the outside. Piecing style developed more slowly, as skill increased with practice. This conventional sequence in the evolution of a writer began to show signs of breaking down on the trains in the late 1970s, most noticeably in the careers of two important writers who both achieved citywide fame during that period, in and lee. Both hold an exalted place in the history of writing but for opposite reasons. in (whose career was noted earlier in chapter 4) is reputed to be the most productive writer in the history of New York City. But in’s throw-ups would never be mistaken as masterpieces (see fig. 4.7); without his incredible productivity, his work would not likely be remembered except by fellow top crew members and the writers he wrote over. On the other hand, lee’s productivity is rarely the primary issue in discussing his career (although he did paint 150 whole cars, a considerable body of work); but he is still considered to be among the major style masters of the train era, and his career is often cited as an important turning point in writing’s aesthetic development. These two careers indicate that writers could see productivity and skill as separate pathways to

229

Austin Ch8

230

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 230


fame in the late 1970s. The throw-up form opened the doors to those who did not have the patience, skill, or desire to pursue style, but who were willing to work hard at getting up, offering a new, second career path that did not terminate in becoming a style master. Writers who began in New York City in the second half of the 1980s often experienced this split personally. As SK notes: “I was in between two worlds because I like to piece, but the bombers didn’t like the piecers and the piecers didn’t like the bombers. I was confused. I was 12 when I started to piecing, but my friends never wanted to piece. In 1986, I got tired of it.”3 My characterization of the split between bombers and piecers must be understood as a process that took several years and the careers of many writers to solidify into the neat categories used here, and these ideal types are not meant to be reflective of the experience of all writers. Many were involved in both practices, and for a significant number the career path from tagger to piecer remains intact even today. WEST ONE: A tag itself is art, in terms of its meaning, graphically, the whole shit. As far as bombing goes, that’s the essence of graf . . . Fame. Bombing is how you get seen and heard. If you ask most graffiti legends they’ll tell you that before they knew how to paint [masterpieces], or while they were painting, they were bombing shit.4

A lot of people think pieces are better than throw-ups. I mean, pieces look better than throw-ups, but it’s still the same thing. Throw-ups gets you up and pieces gets you up. It’s the same type of thing.5

COPE 2:

. . . bombing, hitting, styling, piecing—all need to be respected and addressed as different, yet unified forms of writing.6

cavs, who began his career in the early 1980s, followed a more or less traditional pathway to fame. cavs had three brothers who wrote, and there were several active taggers in his neighborhood. More important were the two yards nearby. One of these, the yard for the No. 2 line, had a long history as a favored location for famous writers. Painted white in the early 1980s as part of a “Great White Fleet” experiment to test the fencing program, the No. 2 line remained one of the major writers’ “studios” of its day. cavs also had the benefit of great teachers. His first train piece was done with seen ua, raz, and pjay in 1985; his first partner was sent, another

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 231


major writer of the period. The list of writers that he painted with reads like a Who’s Who of the best writers in New York City in the mid-1980s and after.7 cope 2’s illustrious career as both a bomber and a style master demonstrates a similar continuity.8 But whereas bombers and piecers had shared the spaces of the subway system (though not always peacefully) until the early to mid-1980s, afterwards they were progressively pulled apart into different spaces. A return to the public walls offered an alternative to the trains (although this alternative only became attractive to large numbers of writers after it was clear that the TA would win the territorial war and retake the subway trains). Writing had first begun on local neighborhood walls, and the city’s walls remained the primary arena for neophytes and toys long after the masters had taken the trains in the early 1970s. Even for masters, the subway tunnel walls and the walls around the elevated tracks were respectable, and in some cases prestigious, writing sites, but never the primary site for gaining fame after the early 1970s.9 They could supplement the reputation a writer made for himself on the trains, but the walls could neither establish nor sustain such a reputation until later. Writers did not relinquish the trains without a struggle. As noted in chapter 6, the number of writers may have increased in the early 1980s, as writing was once again constructed as a “problem” by city government even as it was taken up as “art” by the galleries, noticed by the press, and circulated through popular culture in album cover art and the sets for popular movies and videos.10 Still, the Buff systematically destroyed works on the trains after 1977. MIN 1: in and jester bombed and were in my league but, it was different back then ’cause they didn’t buff the trains the way they buffed the trains when I bombed. When I took king of the E and F [subway lines], it was like beat the buff, keep up with the buff and bomb more than the buff.11

The Buff simultaneously created more space for new works. Even after the fences were constructed in 1982 and 1983, writers found ways of entering the yards, as cavs’s and cope 2’s careers (among a long list of others) demonstrate. Still, the fences presented a good reason to think twice about entering the yards, even though they were not always absolutely secure. revolt saw an upsurge in the number of writers bombing walls and tagging buses in 1983, which he attributes to fewer writers going to the yards. But the change

231

Austin Ch8

232

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 232


was unevenly paced. In 1984, revolt comments, “You [could] go to some places, same as it ever was, no dogs, no fences—Other places they’ve changed the yards around—they put big fences you can’t get on, heavy-double fences. [The] #7 yard has dogs. No-one writes on the 7’s anymore.”12 The lay-ups could not be fenced, and were only protected by police surveillance. As writers’ works constantly reminded the Transit Police, not every lay-up could be watched all the time. Writers continued to enter the yards and lay-ups even after the Clean Car Program was initiated in 1984, and the trains remained a mode of mass communication until the last painted train was removed from circulation.13 (Subway trains were still being bombed regularly while I was doing my research throughout the 1990s.) Despite these acts of resistance, the TA’s steady gains in the territorial war—from the vandal squad to the Buff to the fences around the yards to the Clean Car Program—forced writers to migrate to new spaces.

BOMBERS TAKE THE STREETS

As chapter 6 notes, the proliferation of throw-ups were already causing conflicts among writers over the available space on the outside of the trains as early as the mid-1970s.14 The TA’s efforts in the territorial war on the subways after the Buff was developed (1977) had the unintended consequence of promoting the separate career paths for bombers and piecers, to the primary advantage of the bombers. The Buff worked to discourage writers from pursuing their careers beyond an elementary stage of masterpiece development, since it prevented most works from predictably circulating through the system for long periods of time. The hours, skills, and risks that went into a whole-car piece were wasted if it ran for only a few days. These effects were magnified by the increasing pressure on the yards from the Transit Police, who were able to staff relatively large antigraffiti squads after the late 1970s. The increase in surveillance and arrests again favored the quickness of throw-ups, which could be executed in a matter of minutes rather than the hours it took to finish a piece. If a writer was spotted and chased while painting a throw-up, little was lost and all the previous work of the evening would still be up and completed. On the other hand, if a writer were interrupted in the middle of a piece, a significant amount of paint, effort, and time were lost, and nothing was gained; partially finished masterpieces did not contribute to one’s fame. For many new

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 233


writers, it was no longer clear that the risk and effort of piecing would actually pay off in fame, particularly in comparison with the more certain fame gained from bombing. As a result, bombing the trains became more common and would eventually challenge pieces for control of the subways in the early 1980s. I guess that’s how I got my style. I did it fast and quick, not really caring how they came out. My thing was getting over and anyway, I didn’t have the patience to sit around for twelve hours a day to perfect a letter. . . . I just like doing it, getting done and moving on.15

GHOST:

Even before the trains were retaken by the TA, bombers were looking to other spaces, particular those with a large volume of vehicular or pedestrian traffic, which might enhance their fame. In the early 1980s, bombers and taggers began to spill out onto the streets in a noticeable way. “Streetbombing” (saturation) was already widely practiced by writers in the cities surrounding New York City, where trains were not available as a medium. The Times reported on the “wars” in these communities throughout the 1980s, as if to reassure New Yorkers that they were not alone nor was the city government’s failure to win the war unusual.16 New York City bombers upped the ante in the cat-and-mouse game with police and began bombing the major retail avenues of Manhattan and Brooklyn, particularly the metal gates that businesses roll down over their storefronts to protect windows and doors after they close. In this space, writers were much more likely to be seen than in the yards—police could drive by at any moment, and pedestrians, residents, and property owners could easily observe and report them. Thus, gaining fame in this location of necessity emphasized daring and stealth in new ways. (See plate 19.) Street-bombing was an important part of the career path for most writers who began after the mid-1980s. vfr (veefer) hit the streets hard with his three-letter throw-ups during the first year after the successful process of retaking the trains had begun (1985), and beat most writers to the punch. “The more fame I had the more I wanted to perfect what I was doing, rather than keep the fame that I had. Being the perfect vandal machine.”17 The culmination of the bombing scene during the 1980s came in 1989. New York City woke up to a huge sane-smith work on both sides of the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, visible for miles. This writing act was represented by city officials as an overt attack on the city itself.

233

Austin Ch8

234

11/13/01

1:00 PM

Page 234


The irony of trying to press the spectacular name as a major crime in Manhattan was lost on the city elite, and Mayor Koch set in motion new strategies (civil suits against parents) to discipline those that were thought to be responsible. Bombers took almost every public surface of the city in their desire for fame, including a wide variety of new walls and vehicles. Street-bombers borrow the space around commercial or retail areas where daily pedestrian traffic is high. Again, being seen by police is a danger, but if the bombing run is carefully planned (via timing and scouting out routes of escape as well as using lookouts and, sometimes, get-away vehicles), bombers can minimize this vulnerability. Other public walls also proved useful as writing surfaces. Some writers bombed rooftops around the elevated lines, where some of the piecers were relocating as well (see plate 11). But the difficulty of gaining access to rooftops, and the limited wall space they afforded, prevented rooftops from ever becoming a significant replacement for the subway trains. Highway retaining walls were much more popular during the late 1980s, offering a great deal of exposure with relatively easy access, although writers were vulnerable to police cars passing by.18 Occasionally, billboards and highway signs were pressed into the writers’ service as a broadcast medium. The city’s buses and sanitation trucks were appropriated in much the same way that taki 183 had “borrowed” the sides of ice cream trucks in 1969. Since the city’s sanitation trucks were stored unprotected on the streets in some areas, a few pieces have been painted on them as well.19 Commercial delivery vans and trucks are stored all over the city, and while these storage areas are usually fenced, the fences are a relatively ineffective barrier to determined writers. Most of the delivery trucks in New York City, unless they are constantly guarded or kept within a building, have been bombed and tagged at one time or another. The increase in antigraffiti policing activity after the late 1970s changed the dynamics between writers and the Transit Police. Earlier, writers had been able to execute large works with relative ease, often adding taunts to the police in the margins of their masterpieces. As the vandal squad was being built up, the confrontation between cops and writers became more frequent and direct. The number of arrests rose, undercover tactics sharpened, beatings and threats of violence from police increased, writers became police informants against other writers, and the police began crossing out pieces in hopes of raising suspicions and conflicts between crews.20

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

F I GUR E 8 .1

1:01 PM

Page 235

Highway wall, early 1990s. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

These “dirty war” tactics did not end in the 1970s. During a bust in 1986, a Transit Police officer drew his gun on web and threatened to “blow [his] head off”; such stories were commonplace among the writers I interviewed.21 bad rtd indicates that the vandal squad had even developed its own throw-up by the late 1980s. The vandal squad spray-painted “large V’s [or V.S.] on the best of the finished artwork of the artist they were potentially after.” He remembers that the vandal squad would hang around the train stations all the time. Ask info on other writers and sometimes try to set them up. They were pretty knowledgeable though— they would do their homework on the who’s who of graf. . . . The Vandal Squad even had a collection of black books confiscated along with any other graf materials. They also had a computer with the names of the writers and info on them.22

Of course, writers had their own methods of deflecting the effectiveness of official information-gathering. For instance, when sharp was arrested during this period, he told the cops he wrote snorp as a way of dodging his reputation with the police. As a piecer who often worked in a near-illegible style, he was set to be mistaken for a new toy that was not yet on the van-

235

Austin Ch8

236

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 236


dal squad’s wanted list, a writer of no consequence in the war (at least not yet). Unfortunately for sharp, he bumped into another writer who was also being arrested in a station, who inadvertently revealed sharp’s true name to his captors.23 Such “raid stories” have remained a central part of the oral culture of writing.24 The relations between writers and cops were not always hostile. There is a mutual respect that sometimes develops between the quick-witted mouse and the patient cat. In many ways, the daring of the writers and their skills in negotiating the urban physical and social geography match those of detective work. Those who plan and execute surveillance and those who plan and execute stealth have much in common, and those who watch public space are of necessity fascinated with those whose stealth eludes them. Writers certainly saw the conflict as a game—a very serious game, but nonetheless a matter of skill, chance, and measured risk. This mutual respect was perhaps most visibly demonstrated during 1986. The two bestknown members of the TA’s vandal squad were about to retire. A temporary “truce” was arranged and seen, a longtime style master, painted a whole-car tribute to the two retirees. Both of the retiring cops were moving to Florida, and seen’s piece shows Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble dressed as stone-age detectives, standing in the middle of a very small tropical sandy island with palm trees around them. The names of the two retirees, hicki and ski (as they were known to writers), are painted/written beside each figure in a readable script, with a dramatic sunset over blue water in the background. “Dedicated to Hickey and Ski of the T.P.D.” occupies one far end of the car, “UA Production—seen” the other.25 A photograph of seen by the finished work has since been used as a postcard image in New York City. But this was not typical operating procedure, obviously. Given that the Transit Authority was making progress on the subways for the first time in fifteen years, it seems unlikely that higher-ups in the TA knew about this event. After the fences around the yards were built and the TA initiated its Clean Car Program in 1984, the game shifted and many writers became more engaged in a kind of counting coup with the police—quickly “touching the enemy” rather than using the walls as a mass media. That is, as the police became a more formidable constraint, some writers placed their antagonistic relationship with the police at the center of their activities. As street-bombing became a more important part of writing culture (in many cases constituting the last phase in a writer’s career), the alliance’s representations of

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 237


writers as vandals, urban guerrillas, and outlaws became more attractive to writers themselves as an identity. Although some piecers had begun to buy their own paint (like traditional artists) after they migrated to the walls, vfr, a major street-bomber, held the line: “Buying your paint totally goes against the rules [of writing]. It defies the whole idea of vandalism to pay for it. You’re going against the system not trying to cooperate with it.”26 Crews have often adopted hypermasculine, aggressive, or threatening names, but during the last half of the 1980s, many crews were explicitly calling themselves criminals and vandals and adopting a new, overtly menacing stance toward the city (see plate 10). For instance, I was once introduced to one of the major bombers of Manhattan and Brooklyn while I was doing my fieldwork in the early 1990s. Before I could explain what I was researching or who I was, he pointed a finger in my face and told me, “I caused your city taxes to go up in the last three years more than anybody else outside of Ed Koch.” After he found out I was not a reporter, a cop, or an antigraffiti warrior, he shyly laughed about his abrupt introduction and apologized, introduced me to another writer, and then took me on an extended bombers’ tour of the surrounding area. His momentary brashness was atypical in meetings with people outside writing culture, but this encounter does reflect the hostile context in which some bombers saw themselves operating. This hostility is not, of course, a product of a pathological tendency in writing culture, but rather the logical outcome of the conflictual relations between writers, the police, the city government, and, since the mid-1980s, neighborhood residents and property owners. After the trains were retaken, writers bombed in a much wider geographic area in the shared public spaces of the city, and with an intensity that had not occurred since the early 1970s. Almost every antigraffiti warrior I interviewed indicated that the amount of writing in New York City public space had increased dramatically during the last half of the 1980s. Local antigraffiti campaigns at the neighborhood and borough level sprung up all over the city in response. These included such activities as paint-over campaigns (with the paint supplied free from manufacturers), graffiti hot-line numbers, cash bounties posted on the identification and arrest of graffiti writers, hidden video cameras aimed at frequently bombed walls, antigraffiti parades, summer youth programs, and all sorts of efforts in the schools ranging from essay contests to civics lessons.27 We Care About New York, Inc., the private nonprofit organization established during Koch’s “war” (see chapter 5), helped to fund, solicit the

237

Austin Ch8

238

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 238


paint, and organize many of these efforts, as well as sponsor some its own. We Care, Inc., acts as a support group for smaller neighborhood and borough-level “cleanup” programs of various sorts that draw on unpaid citizen labor. It coordinates efforts between smaller organizations and the city, enlists the financial and material resources of corporations, assists with publicity, and occasionally undertakes citywide programs. It inherited an already-existing network of civic groups, local chambers of commerce, block associations, and the few established antilitter programs that the Sanitation Department had maintained, and built upon these. We Care, Inc., is one of the major actors in the effort to rehabilitate New York City’s image as a business and tourist center after the financial crisis, often through appeals concerning the “quality of life” first begun during Koch’s era and maintained since. Most of the organization’s antigraffiti programs are, like it’s other cleanup efforts, local in scope. The newspapers also carefully documented the public “reform” of writers who had been caught and punished, or those who had turned to legal (commercial) uses of their talents.28 Whereas writers had felt at least some approval for their work on the trains in the 1970s, writers in the last half of the 1980s encountered only hostility and increasingly draconian prevention-and-capture measures. This animosity increased as bombers hit locations that were previously off-limits to all but the most uninformed toys, including churches and private houses. This stems in part from the erosion of citywide cultural norms among writers, signaled by the proliferation of fragmented localized scenes (see below). In this environment, the local scenes often developed when writers embraced their constructed identity as outlaws and demonstrated their superior knowledge of urban space by looking for new and ever-more-visible ways to count coup against a “public enemy” that was literally everywhere (i.e., an enemy public).

THE RETREAT TO THE WALLS UNDERGROUND: THE NEW SPACE OF THE STYLE MASTERS

If bombers literally “took the streets,” the piecers literally “went into hiding” after the mid-1980s. Bombers reclaimed the older tradition of borrowing high-visibility public spaces other than the subway system that had been established during the first generation of writers. Piecers were unable to follow this lead, and looked for other kinds of spaces where they could work with-

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 239


out the constant threat of arrest. The major new geographic trend among piecers was toward “invisible” spaces that were only known to writers and the denizens of the city’s marginal areas. These would include spaces like those under highway bridges and around abandoned buildings (see plate 18). Such spaces have always been important to youth cultures as sites for activities that are not otherwise allowed. These are, in short, “hiding places.”29 lee’s large-scale mural works on handball courts in city parks during the late 1970s set an important historical precedent for the style masters’ return to the walls later. The considerable fame lee gained from the handball court works pushed other writers to reconsider the walls as a medium. A second important precedent came in the early 1980s, when a Harlem antidrug program secured permission to use the walls surrounding a local junior high school as a “Graffiti Hall of Fame.”30 Several of the major masters of the period created large works in this school yard. These were subsequently painted over with new works; the school yard resembled a rotating museum exhibition in that it allowed several works to be viewed together, but like the trains, it was outdoors in a space that was easily accessible to the (local) public. The works by vulcan and dome (plates 13 and 15) were painted in the Harlem Hall of Fame. Following this lead, a number of writers adopted the walls as a primary media in the early 1980s and devoted little or no time to the trains.31 The move to the walls was, in some ways, a logical extension of the trend toward larger, more pictorial and mural-like compositions developed by some of the whole-car piecers. A wall allowed the writer to work without the considerable design limitations of the yard and the train, and if a wall could be located in an unwatched or “legal” area, the dangers of the police could be avoided as well. For instance, freedom, who was also active as a gallery artist in the early 1980s, began to paint a series of works on the walls of an abandoned railway tunnel on the west side of Manhattan. The “Freedom Tunnels” became a choice piecing spot and eventually contained several magnificent but rarely seen (until recently) works.32 Handball courts, maintained by the Parks Department, became popular painting sites for large pieces as well, and some were still being painted in the early 1990s. But as the city recovered from its financial troubles and could fund a renewal of the parks and their staff after 1985, the Parks Department joined the “war” against writing. Like the TA, it created a cleanup program (although nowhere near the size and scope of the TA’s), and the Parks Police began to engage in stakeouts and surveillance in order to catch writers.33

239

Austin Ch8

240

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 240


But the number of “pocket parks” and recreation areas in New York City is immense—they are located all over the city—and this makes them quite difficult to keep under watch, particularly at night. After the first “hall of fame” was established in the Harlem school yard, writers appropriated other school yards, although the writers’ ability to maintain these as secure territories varied from location to location, depending on the building principal’s viewpoint. The works in plates 16 and 17 were painted in a Brooklyn schoolyard; figure 8.2 is located in a Bronx schoolyard. Piecers also found space on the walls surrounding parking lots (Manhattan’s Soho district became a favored area), which were usually empty at night and sometimes on weekends. And occasionally, writers simply painted the walls of neighborhood buildings, particularly the back walls of warehouses and buildings in commercial and industrial areas. These relatively “empty” spaces of the city were rarely patrolled as thoroughly as other locations. These hidden spaces eventually held only slightly less status than the “hall of fames” established in school yards. Competition for this space is particularly strong, since there are fewer risks of encountering the authorities there. Unfortunately, this competition has increased the level of conflict among writers. Fighting skills became more necessary after the mid-

F I GURE 8.2

nic 1 at work on a schoolyard wall, early 1990s. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 241


1980s in order to achieve a high level of distinction—defense of one’s reputation and work from other writers is now an expected part of the culture. Older writers are more likely to take an adaptive stance, feeling that their work need only exist long enough for them to photograph it so that it can be documented, remembered, and shown to friends and admirers. In general, the walls have been a space of retreat for the style masters. Their audience was almost exclusively other writers, and their relationship to the rest of the city, which was also an important part of writing culture, has changed. Many New Yorkers think that masterpieces are no longer being produced at all, since they are now located in unseen or “dangerous” areas of the city, where their appreciative audience and the countercultural media (such as it is) is unlikely to travel. Mayor Koch and those that followed him have since turned their sites on making a “war on graffiti” on the walls.34 New Yorkers these days may occasionally come across a group of pieces in a parking lot in Soho (see plate 14), or a rare “legal” wall, or a piece done on a rooftop structure along the elevated subway lines, but unless someone intentionally seeks out one of the “hall of fames” (difficult without some connection to writing culture) and is willing to do the hiking necessary to get there, they would seem to have disappeared.35 Their only trace is in the commercial signs that writers are hired to do.36

EXCENTRIPITAL FORCES: WRITING CULTURE WITHOUT THE TRAINS Has the scene in NYC degenerated? Piecing and bombing are no longer hand in hand. The heavy repression isn’t the only thing that has killed the art of piecing. Have the inheritors of the “sgwaffity” title become the very label which the system has always called them—vandals? “Damage to the system” has become but a front, a cry for “Props for the system.” IGTimes (editorial) 37

The growing split between bombing and piecing had a strong influence on the second major change in writing culture. Before the early to mid1980s, the subway system had served as the central institutional location that tied writers from each borough together into a common writing culture. After the TA began to successfully retake the trains, writing culture

241

Austin Ch8

242

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 242


was more fragmented and segmented as new writers entering the practice had only the localized neighborhood or borough scenes to orient their work. This resulted in a decline of writing culture’s citywide cohesion and continuity. New writers, who would have known the names of most of the major citywide masters if they had begun their careers ten years earlier, were now less likely to be aware of most writers beyond a limited geographic area since the trains did not circulate their works. Like the return to the walls, this change ultimately promoted the cause of bombers over that of piecers. The subway system served as a centralized and shared institution for writing culture until about 1983. Of course, not all writers had written on the trains and, in fact, the vast majority of young people who wrote their names in the shared public spaces of New York City (toys) did not write on the subways. But even those who were never more than toy taggers in their own neighborhood had, in earlier times, been directly influenced by the culture that centered on the trains, if only through the examples of local peers who did paint there. After the trains were retaken by the TA, no other centralizing institution (i.e., no shared public meeting ground) took the place of the yards. The numerous hall of fames where the piecers retreated are scattered all over the city, have less space overall than the trains, and with a few exceptions, cannot be considered citywide venues. The practice of street-bombing emphasized geographic range rather than centralization; bombers never stayed in one place long enough to chat, certainly not while they worked. The daring and stealth needed to be a successful throw-up artist lent itself to a more intense and sometimes vicious style of competition. Bombers were now likely to have “beef” with several writers or crews that they had never met, or whom they knew only indirectly. While “beef” was not a major cause of writing culture’s fragmentation (in fact, this sort of ritualized conflict may have helped hold some parts of it together), it nonetheless contributed to a less cohesive social scene overall, as several writers of the time pointed out. BIO, thinking back, remembers the situation being a little rougher. . . . Then that whole vampin’ shit was always around. Ya know, the weaker ones are gonna lose out, and the stronger are just gonna do whatever gotta be done. That’s the way we took it, ’cause when we first started as a crew [tat—tough ass team aka the art team], we caught mad problems!38

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 243


Similarly, flite cites the more intense level of fighting among writers in the mid- to late 1980s, and cope 2 repeatedly mentions fighting and “vamping” (confrontations between writers in which one usually was forced to give up his paint) in the yards in interviews.39 The local institutions which writers have always borrowed, such as schools, coffee shops, and other commercial or public meeting grounds, still worked as locations where writers could meet and new writers might be attracted to the practice. The gallery shows that went up on occasion, as well as hip-hop events, provided some new alternatives. But these remain isolated from the rest of the city in a way that the trains do not; they rely on the viewer’s knowledge of urban space, a knowledge that was beyond the vast majority of New Yorkers. Except for the most ambitious writers, these spaces and events did little to challenge the trend toward fragmented, local scenes. Many of the standard practices and predominant values evidenced in writing culture during the 1970s were changed, discarded, or replaced within the social insularity of the local scenes. In these locations, writing might become attached to other youth culture activities—vandalism proper, crime, gangs, or local school yard rivalries, for instance. In 1987, sharp spoke on the loss of tradition among writers: The dismal level of the creative and the technical in urban art is at an all time low. The reason for this tragic setback is due to one simple fact—No Respect. The writers don’t work in harmony: they work against each other. If everyone pooled their egos and kept their attitudes and drug intake to a reasonable level, then this shit wouldn’t be going on. So, let’s get it together. Realize that you are a part of the movement that is the greatest and most influential art form to date. . . . Respect your Art and your fellow artist and we will all benefit from the yield.40

phase 2 has long placed this erosion of writing’s customary rules in the context of a larger social loss, commenting in 1984: “No one is telling [young people] how to get down being Black, Puerto Rican, Asian, African. There is no pride. That is why they cross out each other’s names.”41 And in 1997: “[Writing is] an extension of my roots. . . . It’s a part of what we’ve done since we got off of the boat and became negroes, and a part of our extensive heritage.”42 The pressures of the prestige economy could not be effectively mobilized to sanction offenders or ostracize toys, except at this local level, where writers may not have been the most effective of the competing forces

243

Austin Ch8

244

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 244


involved. Many writers were unaware of the contemporary masters from other boroughs, and the multiracial nature of writing culture declined as the localized culture did not push large numbers of writers into other areas of the city which might be occupied by different races or classes. I do not want to draw an overly gloomy picture here. The more ambitious and talented among both piecers and bombers continued to form citywide, multiracial, transclass crews and confederations, and meetings at local hall of fames continued to be points of contact across long distances. The most respected masters often did not have, or refused, to fight. For instance, doc-tc5, who began writing in 1979, rejected beef as a part of writing culture. “Contrary to media’s belief, I’m an artist. And I’m as great as Michelangelo, and Picasso, so why would I destroy someone else’s art work?”43 Masters who had painted the trains in the past were staging “comebacks” on the walls in the later years of the decade, and they provided important historical links to the writing culture of past years. Still, by the time I began to meet writers in the early 1990s, many felt their culture had split along bombing/piecing lines. Those producing masterpieces often explicitly rejected throw-up artists as the two forms competed for the same space. Asked “Who do you think has the most fillin throw-ups [sic: “fill-in” is the technical term used to distinguish this form from “outline” throw-ups] in N.Y. right now?” doc-tc5 replied: “Who cares? That’s not art. The point of throw-ups was to get up and make a name for yourself. It was to learn to do pieces. But you don’t need to do that anymore. Practicing and doing pieces is better than doing a million throw-ups.”44 Style masters frequently perceived the bombers who constantly wrote over their work as jealous of their fame, or perhaps as attempting to gain fame by writing over the name of a famous writer.45 SHO: When we started hitting the 5 line in late 1985, early 1986, the trains really looked like shit. If you remember the 5s, them shits were bombed. There weren’t many pieces running; everyone was bombing. We knew we had the paint. So we was out to take over shit. At one point we had 50 whole cars [masterpieces] running. . . . To too many writers, we were a threat. . . . A lot of writers got jealous and took the easy way out. They ragged our shit to catch fame. So that people would go, Oh look so and so went over SHO and them’s shit.46

The process of inducting new writers into the culture had also reoriented toward a series of local scenes that were less connected to a citywide phe-

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 245


nomenon. For instance, I interviewed several new writers who had entered writing practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had not participated in writing on the trains. These writers would have been judged “toys” by their better-known colleagues, since most had been writing for less than two years, and none was a devoted bomber. I found that I was much better informed about the history of writing and its current state than they were.47 Most had entered writing through their peer group and had had little contact with writers outside a bounded area. One of these new writers was unaware that the name he was writing belonged to a well-known master who was still very active on the trains just five years before. Had he ventured into an area where this ethical violation was recognized, it is quite likely he would have been forced to give up all his paint, fight (or run away), and give up his use of the name. But since he stayed within rather narrow social and geographic boundaries, and did not get up a great deal (both of which contributed to his lack of awareness), such confrontation was unlikely. He was considered to be talented within his local peer group. The TA’s tactics in the war promoted quickly executed forms that veered farther away from a family resemblance to art and more toward the signature. Like throw-ups, this situation favored tagging, which took place on the inside of the trains and in the stations and, later, in the streets. Given the narrowing possibilities for creating exterior pieces in the yards, the insides became a more attractive space for writers, and some inside taggers who gained fame never moved to the outside surfaces. The TA was almost completely ineffectual in its attempts to constrain the writing on the inside of the trains until the Clean Car Program began in 1984, since there was no equivalent to the Buff for the interiors. The number of writers appears to have increased in the late 1970s and early 1980s and, as a result, more taggers were competing for space on the insides. The congestion on the insides of the trains became so heavy that many writers began to remove the writing on the insides themselves, just to create new spaces to work. Practices that had formerly been taboo, such as writing over other taggers’ work, or covering the subway maps and interior advertisements, became commonplace. Many straphangers who had been indifferent to writing up until then were now outraged that most maps were covered over. Even Richard Goldstein, who remained the most vocal and enthusiastic supporter of both “graffiti art” in the galleries and the writing on the trains during the early 1980s, spoke of the bombing on the outsides and the tagging on the insides as indicative of decline and

245

Austin Ch8

246

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 246


“decadence” in writing culture. After about 1983, New Yorkers are much more likely to understand “graffiti” to consist almost solely of throw-ups and tags. Again, the actions of the TA (unintentionally) favored these forms over the more aesthetically elaborate pieces. The TA’s attempt to repaint the insides of the trains in the early 1980s was a response to the tagging, but this move was abandoned after four months, when less than five hundred cars had been finished; they were being retagged almost as quickly as they were being repainted (see chapter 7). The insides thus remained a relatively “free” space for some time, constrained only by the policing efforts in the yards. Writers could still tag the insides while the trains were in use without too much trouble in later years, although increased police surveillance within the cars made this more risky, the newly manufactured cars coming into the system had paint-resistant surfaces, and the Clean Car Program prevented the tag from traveling further than a single run to the end of the line. As the culture of writing had done several times before, new forms were developed that could be adapted to the conditions of increasing surveillance and the high level of conflict between writers. These alternative writing forms have not been able to overtake the more traditional forms in New York City, but they were integrated as an important stage in the career of many contemporary writers. Two alternative forms gesture toward a wide field of formal variations and innovations that have continued into the 1990s. As it became more dangerous to carry paint and markers in public, to say nothing of actually putting these materials to use, writers created a new form that separated the act of tagging from the act of placing it on a wall: the sticker. Writers already stole markers from office supply stores, so the common “Hello, My Name Is____” sticker-labels were handy. The U.S. Postal Service also had very high-quality stickers (used to label overnight packages) available “for free” in the post office; like other materials, writers “borrowed” these stickers and put them to new purposes. Stickers allowed a writer to make large numbers of tags in a safe place (like a bedroom at home), and then distribute them in public as he or she traveled around in their normal routines. They had the added virtue of being quickly and almost invisibly applied. A crafty writer could easily slap a sticker on a surface without the person next to him even being aware. No ink smell, no fuss! This meant that a writer could put a sticker in places or at times when he could never put a tag: on a relatively small-diameter

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 247


pole, for instance, or on the side of truck in a traffic jam, or on a magazine stand while making a purchase (see plate 12). A stack of a hundred small stickers wasn’t much bigger than a deck of cards. Because stickers were created in safe places, they could be quite elaborate in their design, could be made from unorthodox materials, and could use copier and computer technologies to borrow images or print them in very large numbers. AIR, also known for his street-bombing, became a master at producing unique stickers. In a second development, writers turned to other modes of transportation as a writing media. Of these, commercial freight trains are the closest kin to the subways. Before Robert Moses and his allies transferred most of the port’s functions to New Jersey, New York City was one of the nation’s most important railroad transportation hubs. Although the centrality of the railroads in the city’s economy has declined since that time, the system still constitutes an important and dispersed infrastructure. Rail yards and lay-ups have some clear advantages over the subways. There are no electrified rails. These spaces are seldom patrolled by authorities. A freight train is an icon of nothing much more than motion itself; freight trains certainly carry symbolic value in the United States, but anonymous “hobo graffi-

F I GUR E 8 .3

Two of AIR’s stickers from the early 1990s. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

247

Austin Ch8

248

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 248


ti,” rust, flaking or discolored paint, and spilled chemicals are expected on their sides. Thus, there are no highly motivated individuals or groups who seek to “protect” their exteriors, so long as their identification codes are left untouched. There are rarely fences around railroad yards. The sides of the cars are flat. And, as a bonus, they travel not just across the city but across the continent. What more could one ask? Asked when freight painting began in New York City, key one replied, “All I know is that between ’86–87 we were rockin’ them, but to make it clear: sien 5, cavs, vism, sento, and myself.”48 cavs also dates the first New York City freights at about the same time. The freights offered a much larger space to paint, but they do not circulate locally, like the subways. The freight tracks are not visible in the common urban landscape of most New Yorkers; many of the tracks are in tunnels or run through more or less deserted parts of the older industrial areas of the city. The old prestige system of the subways could not be exactly replicated, although it could be approximated. Unexpectedly, freights have since become a national and worldwide phenomenon; even young people living in remote rural areas have access to these trains, and plenty of time and space to paint them. The freights thus became a new mass media for writers and have contributed to

F I GURE 8.4

hush freight car, 1990s. (Courtesy hush)

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 249


the rise of writing as a global phenomenon, the last two major developments in 1980s writing culture that I will consider.

THE CIRCLES OF CIRCULATION: WRITERS’ ZINES AND VIDEOS Graffiti is an exercise of global citizenship. As an anarcho-architectural manifestation of free speech, graffiti bucks the bondage of propriety. An armed elite has controlled and manipulated the word plus image from parchment to the associated press, leaving the prophets the walls to write on. In some places, like Latin America, graffiti is an informational weapon in surviving omnipresent disappearance of citizens. This publication will put forth an international perspective on graffiti. —Yankee Junkie, International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984)

The subway system had been a centralizing institution for writers, providing not only a common face-to-face meeting ground that served a number of productive and reproductive functions but also a citywide mass media that acted as a centripetal force that held writing culture together. The migration of writing to the walls and the streets was in part an attempt to replace the name moving swiftly through urban space on a subway train with a stationary name on a wall observed by a moving audience that passed by. Some locations were better replacements than others, but even the most successful did not allow the name itself to circulate much in New York City, nor did it provide a shared social space for writers to congregate. Writing culture did not collapse or disappear after the trains were retaken, of course, but the collective-cultural structures supporting the older system of circulation were significantly altered. The localizing/fragmenting trends within writing culture identified above were cross-cut by two new trends toward a shared, common culture of writing at the national and global level near the end of the decade. The first of these was the appearance of new writers’ print and video media after 1984. As these new modes of circulation appeared, they, like the freight trains, took on some of the functions that the subways had served previously. Photographer and artist David Schmidlapp had been an observer and participant of the Soho art scene since the 1970s, and had watched the rise

249

Austin Ch8

250

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 250


of “graffiti art” in the galleries and art magazines during the early 1980s with interest. He was a longtime straphanger himself and had an appreciative awareness of the writing on the trains. Schmidlapp knew there was something seriously amiss in the representations of writing in both the mass-mediated public sphere of news reporting and in the art world press. During 1983, Schmidlapp found an opportunity to put out a small printed magazine, and he took these misrepresentations as the topic for his new publishing project, calling it the International Graffiti Times. The International Graffiti Times was the first writers’ “zine” to be published in the 1980s.49 By the early 1990s, there were several other writers’ zines in print, and more were appearing each year. These zines opened up a new network for circulating writing and reinforcing a shared culture by publishing photographs as well as interviews, criticism, and related news items. Zines offered an avenue to tie local scenes to citywide, regional/national, and global writing cultures. However, writers’ zines are not a replacement for the New York City subway system; nor do they operate in the same way: they must be understood as a new development in the history of writing. In this section, I want to first situate the appearance of the International Graffiti Times in its appropriate historical context, then sketch out the development of writers’ zines and videos, and end with an analysis of their role in the new writing culture of the 1990s. The International Graffiti Times is part of a larger cultural trend, usually termed the “zine revolution,” that has for the most part gone unnoticed by the popular press and the academy. “Zines” (originally, “fanzines”) are small-run, cheaply produced publications that first began to appear in the United States during the 1930s and expanded in quantity, quality, and range of topics in the late 1950s and early 1960s when lower-cost and more efficient copying and printing technologies became available in the burgeoning service sectors. The number of zines produced in the United States exploded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as photocopying machines and desktop publishing became a regular, expected fixture in most offices, and commercial shops offering these services to the public grew in number. These offices and copy shops were often staffed by young people working at low wages, who saw their access to this equipment as an “employee benefit.” Work time, particularly on overnight shifts, was used to produce zines. Zines are usually the product of a single person or a small group, circulated through friendship networks, word of mouth, or through mentions in other zines, and are not primarily profit-oriented. Zines barely break

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 251


even, despite using “borrowed” materials. Although many cover a wide variety of topics, most zines are thematically oriented, covering some aspect of comics, music, fiction, poetry, sexuality, politics, technology, or some other matter of concern to the publisher and her readership. A second important context for understanding the development of writers’ zines is the documentary photographs of writers themselves. Even before the Buff was developed, writers understood their work to be an increasingly ephemeral form. As the space on the trains grew more congested and the larger scale required covering over the work that had been produced before, photography became an important means of “remembering” past works and marking the history of an individual’s (and writing’s) development. The Buff and the return to the walls in the 1980s reasserted the need to document one’s work. The competition for prime painting space on the walls became increasingly intense during the 1980s, and the photograph became a necessary adjunct to the work itself, since many pieces were not “up” on the walls for more than a few days. Among many writers, having a work destroyed after a few days was so common as to arouse little animosity—so long as the writer got the “flix” before it was covered over. Photo collections were not uncommon during the 1970s, but by the mid-1980s a much higher percentage of writers were involved in trading photos and creating large personal collections. It was from these collections of documentary photos that writers’ zines drew their resources; Schmidlapp’s first issue put out the call for writers to “send in documentation of your work.” Although its publication runs were small, the International Graffiti Times nonetheless created an alternative (mediated) public sphere where New York City writers could read about issues of common importance. The first issue was a simple 17-inch by 22-inch sheet folded twice, with typed and collaged texts (much like the punk zines of the time), accompanied by Schmidlapp’s photocollages in black and white. It contained a short piece of surrealistic fiction, “Gout and Graffiti,” mocking the Koch regime and the antigraffiti alliance, accompanied by a photocollaged representation of an overbloated Koch covered with tags. Issue 1 also covered Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver’s 1983 documentary film, Wild Style, and its reception in London, and commented on the death of Michael Stewart, an African American youth who died “mysteriously” while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging in a subway station. Schmidlapp later recalled that he really knew very little about writing when he first

251

Austin Ch8

252

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 252


began the magazine. Writers educated him as they became involved with the publication, and it quickly became a writer-centered zine.50 Half of the first issue was devoted to interviews with four writers—revolt, rize, quik, and sak—on a variety of topics, but mostly related to the issues surrounding writing as a gallery art and the recent changes in writing culture. It offered an unattributed warning: Beware of ambition; it wears character. It’s dandy if graffitists grow weary of making T-shirts and want to check out the gallery scene; but warning. The art world is full of pimps, babbitteens, and grave diggers.

A few more photocollages and a letters section were added to the second issue, and the sheet was folded four times (like the subway maps the TA provides free to subway riders). More writers became involved. The second issue’s interviewees included amrl, coco 144, phase 2, wicked gary, teebee, and stan 153; five of these six had been active on the trains in 1971 and had remained active until the late 1970s. Their presence marked the history and continuity of writing tradition in a way that even the constantly changing surfaces of the subways and the stratified writer’s hierarchy could not. These were accompanied by interviews with three gallery owners. The relationship between writing and the galleried art world was a consistent topic in the early issues of the zine, usually presenting “corrections” to the galleried art magazines and the New York Times on the history of writing, while asserting a more artist-centered (as opposed to market-centered) analysis and critique. The zine provided an important forum for renegotiating the status of writing on canvas and on the streets and trains after the trains were retaken. The third issue contained (for the first time) a large number of blackand-white photos of writing on trains, canvases, and walls, an important addition that would set the trend for all writers’ zines that followed. Published photos allowed writing to circulate in a new way and potentially reach a much wider audience (geographically) than the New York City subways had, although the total number of people who might see a work in a zine is quite small by comparison to the trains. The zine allowed works to circulate much longer than the subway system had and, in fact, many of the photos of trains that were published at this time were new works. Photos also allowed several works to be juxtaposed and viewed simultaneously, inviting comparison and critique.

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 253

F I GUR E 8 .5 International Graffiti Times: issues 2, 3, 4 (not shown), 5, and 6 (not shown) were designed in a folded “subway map” format. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

Finally, photos allowed older works to circulate alongside newer works, providing a sense of history and development as well as an education for new writers. In this issue, bama re-created a Hall of Fame by reproducing the names and styles of about fifty writers who were important contributors to the early 1970s, along with the photographs of nine cars running during the last week of June 1984. Schmidlapp’s previous creative work reflected a left/critical stance toward politics and culture, and his zine provided a grounds whereby writing could be related to other kinds of cultural struggle. Half of the third issue was devoted to interviews with an El Salvadoran political refugee and a Chilean artist who had supported Salvador Allende; the fourth issue contained an interview with a member of the African National Congress; the fifth issue reported on the death of Eleanor Bumpers, a sixty-seven-yearold unarmed African American woman who was shot to death when she resisted six police officers attempting to evict her; the sixth issue updated the trial of Michael Stewart’s killers. Issue 9, published in 1987, stated that,

253

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 254

FI G U RE 8 . 6 International Graffiti Times: issue 8, in the “Subway Sun” format.


“You know something is happening in international financing when a vial [of crack] is cheaper than a joint. . . . Anti-crack is a lie; contra crack is closer to the truth” (one of a series of references tying U.S. intervention in Nicaragua to the streets of New York City). These editorials, news reports, and interviews were mixed in with Schmidlapp’s photocollages and a growing number of photos of works on the trains and walls, interviews with writers, and on occasion, short news items related to writing, zine reviews, and letters. The International Graffiti Times also advertised some of the shows that continued to appear in galleries after the East Village “graffiti art boom” of the early 1980s had faded. After the seventh issue in 1986, the production values of the zine became more sophisticated, and the zine was published less regularly (issue 12 came out in 1990). Writers became more involved in the zine and took over major portions of its production. phase 2 and vulcan, among other writers, began to create their own photocollages within its pages, which were typically dense works using photos of writing on the trains and walls, along with

254

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 255


bits from other sources. The zine was, by this issue, a work of art itself— photocollage no longer served as illustrations but had become the major text. phase 2 became the zine’s art director and also began to write part of the editorial text on a regular basis. The zine thereafter reflected his analyses of writing culture. In issue 8 the zine was renamed the International Get-Hip Times (or, IGTimes) in line with phase 2’s (and others’) analysis of the negative tone that the label “graffiti” had when applied to writing. The label “Graffiti” is an obsolete, inadequate, and irrelevant term conceived and conducted by the media in a feeble “attempt” to describe an historical and cultural movement originated and created in the ghettos of New York City. It in no way explains the essence or internal dynamics of its existence, nor does it characterize the personage of the artist as an artist per se, or does it relate to the evolution of the art itself, rooting back 17 years of existence.51

Schmidlapp’s zine had become more and more writer-centered over time, but phase 2’s influence brought a more militant stance in defense of writing as an important and autonomous cultural movement. Adopting a universalistic definition of art, he saw no reason for writers to seek legitimation for their work from the galleries. Instead, phase 2 understood the galleries to be a space for educating the public, a place for nonwriters to develop their sense of seeing the writing on the walls. phase 2 imagined galleries that were free spaces of intellectual discussion, devoted to understanding the intentions and appreciating the innovations of writers. Commercial success was always welcomed, but was never the primary goal. Having established a respected media institution within the writing community, the IGTimes and other writers associated with the paper could push outward for a broader hearing. In August 1986 the alternative paper the East Village Eye published a discussion on “The Graffiti Question.”52 An archive of writers’ photographs and other materials was established, and this became the basis for subsequent photocollages and illustrations in other publications, including some of the photographs used in this book. The Limelight, a popular Manhattan dance club, held a fundraiser for IGTimes in May 1988. Artists associated with the IGTimes received invitations to speak on university campuses, including the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1988 and the University of Minnesota, Reed College, and San Francisco State in 1991.53 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, other zine publishers interested in writing began to follow IGTimes’s lead. Most of those that originated in

255

Austin Ch8

256

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 256


New York City before 1992 were xerox-copy zines, and many were oneissue publications, usually created clandestinely and sometimes at the urging of the local storeowners, who sold them at inflated prices. Typically, these consisted of several pages of xerox-copied photographs, often of very poor quality, along with the name of the writer who did the work and his crew affiliation. A few exceptions are worth noting, however. Sasha Jenkins began publishing Graphic Scenes and X-plicit Language (GSEL) in 1989. Like most of the zines that were produced after IGTimes, it consisted mostly of photographs and interviews. Aside from being more carefully designed and produced than most, the zine was notable for maintaining (like IGTimes) an explicitly political viewpoint in its editorials. Jenkins’s writing also reflected a poet’s attention to language, and several of his poems appeared in the zine.

FI G URE 8 . 7

International Get-Hip Times: the name changed with issue 10, and the zine changed to a newspaper/collage format. Issue 11 is shown here. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 257

F I GUR E 8 .8 Three of the next generation of writers’ zines in New York City: Graf News, Flashbacks, and Graphic Scenes and X-plicit Language. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

A Manhattan writer produced Styles for Miles (SFM) in 1990, and later Move. SFM was unusual in that it was primarily a teaching tool. This xeroxed zine contained outline drawings by skilled writers that were intended to be recopied, drawn, and/or borrowed by new writers seeking style, while encouraging new writers to be productive and to take their art seriously. SFM took a populist stance toward writing. The first issue quoted eks saying, “With graffiti, anyone who has a hand on a can, can purchase the right to express themselves. Graffiti is for those who can’t afford to buy the space on a billboard. . . . It’s an advertisement for the people.”54 J. Edwards came out with Flashbacks in 1991 (notably, the first issue contained a raid story by poem). This zine focused primarily on the masters of the late 1970s and early 1980s but remained friendly to new writers. Flashbacks began to publish full-color photos in a regular magazine format in its second issue (1991) and remained one of the most consistent of the New York City writers’ zines throughout the 1990s. Plates 16 and 17 are in part “advertisements” for Flashbacks and the German writers’ zine On the Run. A second mode of circulation appeared in 1989—the video magazine. Created by Colin Turner and Carl Weston, and assisted by nic 1 and Sasha Jenkins (of GSEL), VideoGraf was a half hour of “live” interviews, often taped while the writers were (illegally) painting, along with still shots from photographs, all set to music. Its form combined the music video with the television magazine program, but in the service of writers, where the music and the video’s quick cuts mimicked the motion of the subways. The first issue contained an interview with phase 2 about the origins and history of

257

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

F I GURE 8.9

1:01 PM

Page 258

Outlines from the pages of Styles for Miles. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

writing in the early 1970s and an interview with artist and documentary filmmaker Henry Chalfant about the uniqueness of writing as an art form, as well as footage of several writers (illegally) painting a commuter train (most likely the Long Island Railroad). VideoGraf embodied perhaps the perfect realization of “fame.”55 It approached writers in the same way that MTV might approach an international rock and roll star. The video magazine could circulate photos and “live action” painting, but it could also record writers entering the TA’s fenced yards and painting the “clean” trains. In this way, even though the TA could maintain the public appearance of “graffiti-free” trains, writers could still gain fame for their works there, even if these works never circulated through the system. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was widespread joy (among writers) and panic (for the Transit Police) that the videos would allow writing to make a strong comeback on the subways, simply by, once again, out-producing the TA in a time of tight budgets. As BAD noted: “Whoever suggested that after the trains were so-called graffree, that graf would end is probably pulling their hair out right now. . . . Graf is pandemic!” And Can Control reported more than 45,000 hits on the trains in 1990, and that the number of “serious pieces” had doubled since

258

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 259


the year before.56 The general public would never see the work, but this audience had already been (of necessity) relegated to secondary importance during the late 1980s. Of much greater importance, other writers could see the work on the trains (at least on the TV screen), no matter how ephemeral it was in the yards. The third issue of VideoGraf showed an extended sequence in which several writers from sports and gz crews entered the No. 3 yard to bomb “clean” trains. The words “Yankee Stadium,” written in red lights, served as the opening establishment shot for the segment. Later issues showed writers painting pieces on “clean” trains in several other yards, tagging police cars, and street-bombing. The increase in hitting trains during the early 1990s alarmed the TA, and many feared that writers would again gain the upper hand, although this has yet to happen. By the early 1990s, writers’ videos and zines were supplanting some of the functions previously performed by the subway trains and yards. These new venues not only circulated new work, but spread the word about new trends in writing practice. For instance, the zines and videos interviewed writers who were bombing and piecing on the sides of railroad freight

F I GUR E 8 .1 0

VEN piece on a clean train from the early 1990s. (Courtesy VEN)

259

Austin Ch8

260

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 260


trains. These interviews (and the works produced on the freights) encouraged others locally and across the country to try working in the freight yards, showing the ease with which one could work and the wide circulation that could be gained, which extended potentially to the entire nation. The zines reported on writers’ stickers, circulating designs that would have otherwise required a trip across the country (and the local knowledge of where to look).57 Thus, the zines and videos provided a new teaching mechanism to writers. This teaching process differed from the face-to-face contact between apprentices and masters, but it was no less collective. Finally, the new media transformed the prestige system of writing culture during the 1990s, particularly after color photos became common in the zines. The zines have generally emphasized piecers over bombers, since the pieces make better photos. But the videos have placed the two nameforms on relatively equal footing, and if anything, have enhanced the excitement of bombing and made it more appealing (particularly when it is accompanied by hip-hop or rock music). Bombers represented themselves as stylish outlaws, not unlike some rappers, backed up by the evidence of their prowess, daring, and stealth on tape. The new media could also point to the established masters or the new rising stars of writing culture. The prestige system of writing has always been a site of contestation between individuals, but the subway trains had allowed a more or less citywide, decentralized, and collective evaluation of a writer’s work. By looking through several zines, a reader might be able to see enough work by a writer to gain an equivalent sense of his talent and style; but it is more likely that a reader would see only two or three works by any particular writer. This placed the zine and video editors in a powerful new role as arbiter. When I was doing fieldwork in New York City, the relative power of this role was being negotiated. What did it mean to “get up” in one of the color zines? What did it mean to have one’s work appear (or fail to appear) in the next issue of VideoGraf? One possibility is that, by modeling the new system of circulation on the commercial mass media, writers have reproduced the galleried art world’s prestige system—fame may be more dependent on who a writer knows than on his or her talent. This view was expressed several times in my conversations with writers, although it was rarely heard from those who actually “got up” consistently in these venues. On the other hand, editors are not chosen by the community, and they perform their work for little or no pay, often risking their own money in the process, to say nothing of the

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 261


time spent on producing zines and videos, which could be spent painting. Are editors responsible for seeking out the work of writers who do not send in photos? If so, how could this be accomplished? What standards are appropriate for judging a photographed work for publication? Are they the same as the ones operative on the trains? Are editors under obligation to select only the best works for publication? While these questions are still being answered, it is clear that the zines and videos do construct a new common writing culture, providing local scenes with some sense of connection to a larger collective practice. Every writer I met knew of at least one zine, and almost all had seen a couple of issues of VideoGraf. Several had taken elements of style from what they had seen in the zines, and the majority had also incorporated elements of the bomber-outlaw mode into their personal presentation. Was this caused solely by the new writers’ media? No, the loss of the trains did not mean a complete fragmentation of writing culture, nor did it mean that writers were alienated from each other; nor did it mean that the zines and videos provided the only common ground for writing culture. During my fieldwork, I was frequently directed to a couple of T-shirt shops and a newsstand where writers were known to hang out. These locations clearly serve some of the same functions that the writers’ benches and the yards had earlier. Facilitated by the greater accessibility and lower costs of print and video technology in the world/information city, the writers’ zines and videos have allowed them to capture a small corner of the mediated public sphere for themselves.

NEW YORK CITY: THE GLOBAL WRITING CAPITAL Undercover [writers’ zine]: What do you think of the scene today as opposed to that of years ago? BIO: It’s real different. I never even thought it would be to this point today. Like world-wide. Everywhere. You fuckin’ learn about geography now through graffiti . . .58

Writing was practiced in Philadelphia before it appeared in New York City, and thus has always had a history in other cities. But the writing scenes in other cities were much smaller and newer in comparison, and tended to draw on the styles and practices developed in New York City throughout the 1970s. But by the mid-1980s, one could properly speak of a global network of writ-

261

Austin Ch8

262

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 262


ing cultures, with relatively independent centers of development in major cities across the United States as well as Western Europe, Canada, Scandinavia, and Australia. In the 1990s, this network expanded to include Latin America, eastern and southern Europe, and the Caribbean as well—and at the turn of the twenty-first century, it shows signs of continued growth. The national and international transmission of writing occurred through several different channels during the 1970s and early 1980s. Norman Mailer’s The Faith of Graffiti appeared in 1974, and Craig Castleman’s Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York in 1982, but the early date of the former and the more narrow circulation of the latter (through academic outlets) probably means that they had less impact on the formation of writing cultures in other cities. Informal channels of circulation—that is, the unstructured movement of young people and photographs back and forth between New York City and other cities—probably played a bigger role. Some writers in other cities first learned of the practice through new friends they met after enlisting in the army; others grew up in New York City and then moved with their families to other cities, taking their writing practices with them; visitors to New York City took photos of the trains and then showed these to friends at home. Many cities already had strong traditions of wall-writing based on ethnic or gang cultures. In these locations, like Los Angeles or San Francisco, the styles from New York City were incorporated into their existing practices.59 Art galleries were another important channel of circulation. As I mentioned earlier, European art dealers took a much greater interest in writing as an art form than their counterparts in the United States. Writers had a large number of shows in major European cities during the early 1980s, and their appearance in these galleries coincided with the first rap records. A few of the gallery artists (fred, futura, and ramellzee, for instance) were also rappers, and thus writing has become strongly associated with the international circulation of hip-hop culture. Writers were often flown out for the openings of their European shows, and did (illegal) pieces on that city’s walls during the visits. But the most important early channels of international transmission were the hip-hop films and Style Wars! (see chapter 6). fume, a German writer, remembers writing entering Europe in the backgrounds of breakdance videos, and through Style Wars!60 Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper’s Subway Art (1984) is a basic primer on writing culture, containing hundreds of color photographs of work on the New York City trains, plus some history of writing and other useful information. The book sold quite well

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 263


in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Later interviews with writers in other cities revealed that Subway Art had a major impact on the spread of writing culture across the globe. zephyr, who was active on the trains and in the galleries when the book came out, recalls that “because [writing] was happening here, [Subway Art] didn’t have that impact, there was so much media attention on us at that period this was just another notch.”61 While its aesthetic influence was negligible in New York City, where the works could be viewed “live,” both Style Wars! and Subway Art still had a significant influence on the local scene. They pushed several writers active on the trains in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the forefront of an international movement. New York City became the international “Graffiti Mecca,” and those whose work appeared in the book or the documentary became internationally known and were sought out when writers from other cities or nations visited. The formation of an international writing movement was confirmed in 1987, when Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff published Spraycan Art, which documented the new writing on walls all over the world in much the same way that Subway Art had documented the New York City trains. Spraycan Art reproduced works from six cities in the United States outside the New York City area, eleven cities in Europe and Scandinavia, plus the major cities of Australia and New Zealand. Writer’s zines also documented the new writing cultures forming around the United States and Europe. The IGTimes published photos of work by California writers as early as 1984, and writers in Venice and London by 1986. In 1987 a group of writers in Los Angeles began publishing the zine Ghetto Art (later renamed Can Control). Can Control is important in part because it helped to establish a second center of stylistic innovation and critique outside New York City. By the early 1990s, California’s writing cultures had successfully promoted a different set of aesthetic criteria, which emphasized figurative work more than the letters that had defined New York City’s dominant writing style. Can Control was also the first writers’ zine to use full-color photographs, like the gallery art magazines. Whereas IGTimes was important as the first of the writer’s zines, as a source for maintaining the historical perspective on writing culture, and as a strong voice emphasizing the cultural politics of writing, Can Control first opened up the zine format as a primary means of circulating new styles on an international scale. After Can Control, full-color photographs became the production standard against which all writers’ zines were measured.

263

Austin Ch8

264

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 264


New York City writers could bask in the international recognition that their work gained through the several circuits described above. Writers from all over the world traveled to New York City to meet famous writers, to do pieces on New York City walls, and to bomb New York City trains. This is, of course, a “problem” for New York City officials.62 During the summer of 1992, for instance, I met writers from Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Australia who came to New York City to hook up with local writers to bomb and piece. That year, a Swiss writer dropped by rope into one of the yards, James Bond–style, painted a whole car, photographed it, and then climbed back up the rope to escape. There are now regular circuits of exchange between New Yorkers and writers from other nations. For instance, poem regularly travels to Germany, and the German writer loomit regularly visits New York City, which is still regarded as a major node in the international scene.63 (See plates 16 and 17.) New York City writers were either interviewed or photos of their work appeared in fifteen issues from six randomly selected non-U.S. zines published between 1991 and 1994. The first issue (March 1991) of the writers’ zine On The Run, published in Munich, Germany, promised that New York City would be the focus of its second issue, billed as “the truth about the Graffiti-Mekka and exclusive interviews with all the stars.” Photos of work on New York City subways from the 1970s and 1980s are still regularly published and highly valued.64 The number of international writers’ zines exploded during the 1990s. In 1991, Move listed addresses for three writers’ zines in New York City, one in England, two in California, and one in the Netherlands.65 By 1997 the Writers Resource Guide (edited by geck one in Philadelphia) listed sixty-six zines and video magazines arriving from Switzerland, France, Germany, Puerto Rico, Norway, England, Australia, Canada, Holland, and nineteen U.S. states.66 This listing leaves out writers’ media from Spain, Denmark, Finland, and South Africa that are found in other listings during the 1990s. The proliferation of zines has opened up a worldwide dialogue among writers through published interviews, photographs, and letters. In interviews, ale one and pjay have discussed the relative qualities of various U.S. brands of paints available during the 1970s, many of which are no longer manufactured. By 1996, cope 2 was comparing the spray paint made in the United States with the brands available in Germany and Norway.67 The IGTimes criticized an international writers’ competition held in Bridlington, England, for being a front by which the organizers acquired canvases at reduced prices, since writers could not take them home. In response, the zine

Austin Ch8

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 265

F I GUR E 8 .1 1 New York City’s scene in the global context: The Graffiti Mecca. An advertisement for issue 2 (1991) of On the Run (Munich), a German writers’ zine. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

called for writers all over the world to send in their works. The next issue contained the “Aerosol Art Rockathon,” five full pages of photos showing the results.68 Here, IGTimes acted as an international writers’ institution and asserted aesthetic standards and codes of behavior developed within writers’ own communities. For most of writing’s history, the sheer size of the New York City writers’ community, its elaborate internal development as a semiautonomous culture, and its levels of aesthetic sophistication remained unmatched. But by the late 1980s, writing cultures in other cities, some of which were outside the United States, began to challenge New York City’s aesthetic dominance. The representations of New York City in the international zines became in some ways nostalgic. Train-painting moved to Europe, where whole-car works on commuter and railway trains were produced on a regular basis. New York City writers were among the first to paint freight trains in the United States, but they have no special claim on that development otherwise. Many New

265

Austin Ch8

266

11/13/01

1:01 PM

Page 266


York City writers I spoke with in the early 1990s felt that the scenes in California and Germany had overtaken theirs in terms of new innovations, and that the New York City scene was running its last laps. This sense of writing’s decline has been voiced regularly since at least the late 1970s. Impressive work from other cities simply provides a new, powerful impetus to reiterate that old story of declension, which New Yorkers love so well. On the other hand, many writers’ assert that New Yorkers have retained the only “authentic” claim to writing since New Yorkers have maintained the emphasis on the letter and the name. And with at least two color zines published within the city, both emphasizing the connections between writing history and new developments on the international scene, a writer could as easily find support for the view emphasizing that the future possibilities of writing in New York City have become dependent on maintaining a connection to its past, rather than a nostalgia for the golden days gone by.

CONCLUSION: THE GUERRILLA WAR FOREVER?

Writing culture has always maintained an “odd couple” relationship with commercial culture while carefully keeping itself separate. By the late 1980s, it became clear that some of the same forces (the global capitalist market, in particular) that had prompted Koch and his allies to be concerned about the “business image” and “quality of life” in New York City had also worked to transplant writing culture around the globe. By attempting to transform writing into a gallery art, dealers had facilitated its diffusion to other nations. The rising service-sector economy, which replaced better-paying manufacturing jobs with low-wage, temporary employment and allowed New York City to retain its status as a global hub, had also created a means to “democratize” print and visual reproduction technology—and writers implemented this into their cultural formation as well. The example of writing calls us to reexamine the fissures and ruptures that are produced in periods of society’s structural transformation. Does writing provide useful examples of cultural resistance? Does the almostparasitic relationship between writing and commercial culture present a way to maintain resistance to dominant forms by “hiding in the light”?

Austin Conclu

10/26/01

2:26 PM

Page 267

CONCLUSION: A SPOT ON THE WALL

I

n 1985 Michael Stewart, a teenage graffiti artist was beaten to death by the cops on a Manhattan subway platform. The cops said he was copping a tag and resisting arrest. . . . I was twelve years old when I saw this on TV. Back then I didn’t really think of it as an attack on Hip Hop. But at twenty four years of age, I now know this: loud music, sheepskins, eightball jackets, door-knocker earrings, and suede Pumas seem to be consistent police evidence, even when they arrest white kids jockeying our shit. Do you recall what music they were playing at that party in Howard Beach back in ’86?2 With the help of journals which cater to upper middle class like the New York Times, they have

Michael Stewart will, along with other ghosts, haunt the captives of this citadel til they emerge as citizens of a city.1

Austin Conclu

268

10/26/01

2:26 PM

Page 268

CONCLUSION

succeeded in giving our art the “vandalistic blight” image. . . . The New York Times fails to mention pieces, thus effectively keeping the public image of our art to tags. . . . Not only would the MTA have been able to reap the benefits of having a beautiful subway system, had they accepted our art, but they also would have been able to contain it. What writer, if given the option of painting trains without the fear of getting caught or buffed, could refuse? But now the artists have been rejected by the system, which makes them revenge their art works by ink-bombing, vandalizing trains, or completely giving up. Some writers have turned to the streets to paint. The streets are about as out of control as you can be. . . . In this way our art can survive.3

A final story: In 1996, artist Martin Wong gave the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) his collection of writing-on-canvas, black books, and other writing artifacts. The gift was substantial, totaling several hundred artifacts. The black books in the collection in particular have historical value, dating as far back as 1974 and containing drawings from many of the best writers in New York City history, some of whom have now passed away. The museum, learning that I was a graduate student writing a dissertation on the topic, contacted me and, after several conversations, asked that I propose a symposium on the topic of writing’s place in New York City as a way of highlighting the new collection and drawing attention to its public and scholarly value. After several months of careful planning, the date for the symposium was set and the speakers invited and confirmed. Hugo Martinez played a major role in the planning and arranged for several writers from the early 1970s to appear on panels, as well as several other well-known masters of later years. I, for one, was very proud of the diversity in the lineup, which contained academics, gallery owners, policymakers, writers, and writers’ zine editors. I reasoned that since writing had not been publicly visible on the subways for seven years, and since all the works in the museum’s new collection were “legal,” the symposium might be a place to start a new conversation about writing, perhaps addressing some of the issues I have raised in this book. It rained by the bucketfuls on the October Saturday the symposium was held, and yet the turnout was larger that day than for any previous MCNY symposium in memory. The crowd, as diverse as the panels, included a Bay Ridge antigraffiti group, complete with antigraffiti T-shirts; several armed, uniformed police officers and several plainclothes detectives; writers of all

Austin Conclu

10/26/01

2:26 PM

Page 269

CONCLUSION

ages and from all generations; a wide assortment of other New Yorkers who defied easy categorization; and the media. As the symposium began, my only regret was that Richard Goldstein had not come. The keynote speaker for the event was Dr. Tricia Rose of New York University, author of the well-received book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Her presentation was balanced in that she let neither the antigraffiti warriors nor the writers and their allies sit easy—nobody got off the hook. The crowd listened respectfully as she asked some important and challenging questions that set up a good place for the symposium to begin. The first panel was to follow Dr. Rose, but instead Parks Commissioner Hubert Stern took the podium. I later learned Stern had showed up that morning demanding that museum officials put him first on the list of speakers. The museum had bravely held its ground out of respect for Dr. Rose’s role as the keynote, but Hubert Stern’s political weight in the city government was too great for a city-financed museum to restrict him further. The armed and uniformed cops in the back of the room had already given me a bad feeling, and now this fellow had forced his way into the gathering. Still, the crowd respected his right to speak, at least for a while. Stern presented himself as an unwavering and commonsense foe of “graffiti vandalism,” although he clearly was not well-informed on writing. He had somehow failed to understand that the symposium was primarily intended to put Martin Wong’s gift to the MCNY into context. Instead, Stern accosted those who had traveled in the rain that morning by equating the crime of writing with the crime of rape. I state the obvious: a rape victim would be very unlikely to make such a comparison, which horrendously trivializes a brutal and often life-altering hate crime that many victims do not survive. (Recall also the federal Urban Mass Transit administrator’s comment about the “graffiti free” subways as reported in 1989: “Nobody was ever raped by a graffito.”)4 At Stern’s remark, the crowd could no longer hold its tongue. Who wouldn’t be provoked to at least choke on their morning coffee at such an outrageous and ill-considered statement? Writers began shouting at Stern, and the antigraffiti warriors cheered or yelled back at the writers. And so the day went. The symposium calmed down for brief periods of time later on, but it always teetered on the edge of becoming a fiasco, with frequent loud and rude confrontations. Only occasionally did the dialogue between panelists and audience (and audience members with each other)

269

Austin Conclu

270

10/26/01

2:26 PM

Page 270

CONCLUSION

become anything like the discussion I had imagined or the MCNY had anticipated. During the last panel, MCNY officials had to call a “time out” to calm everyone down before continuing. The people who attended the symposium got to hear, between the hecklers, some of the opposing sides to the issue and to see an incredible slide show on the history of writing. But I for one lost any illusions that New York City might be willing to reflect on what has happened in their city—at least as far as some of the most powerful officials in the city government and their allies were concerned. Whether writers will ever get a fair hearing on their cultural contributions to the city remains an open question. The entangled history of writing in New York City provides an important case study of the contradictory social identities of urban youth at the end of the twentieth century, and the ways in which those identities are shaped and negotiated through the creation of new expressive forms. Writing’s development follows one of several pathways by which young people’s political education became transformed (and transformed itself) after the late 1960s, demonstrating some of the ways that youth cultures have continued to create and appropriate cultural and physical spaces of relative autonomy. The coevolution between writing and the “graffiti problem” was in no way inevitable or unavoidable, nor is its future outcome predestined. Alternatives to the “graffiti wars” have appeared at several junctions in the history of New York City, although the long history of lost opportunities makes each new chance more difficult to identify and embrace. In explaining some of what has happened over time, I have also attempted to account for some of what did not happen, and why those alternatives were never given serious consideration. What has been lost and what has been gained for New York City, as a human community, in this “war”? There are several alternative courses of action possible at any particular moment in history. And yet a single approach—the “graffiti problem”— has dominated the public discussion of writing, despite the fact that this approach showed no signs of being effective (much less the best alternative) for more than twenty years. The alliance’s hysterical investment in the eradication of what it called “graffiti,” and its campaign to represent writers as a major cause of psychological malaise in the city, has prevented the public consideration of writing as a worthy aspect of the city’s cultural life, even though European art dealers and tourists have come to New York each year to buy writing on canvases or to photograph the walls and trains.

Austin Conclu

10/26/01

2:26 PM

Page 271

CONCLUSION

We might stage the central issues between the writers and their opposition among city authorities as being about differing visions of what the city is and who it exists for. I have argued that the alliance’s vision was primarily informed by a legitimation crisis of the centralized authorities and by its plan to institute a neoconservative regime of social discipline to remedy the contradictions in the social system over which it had jurisdiction. I remain convinced that writing manifests the greatest art of the late twentieth century. But that argument will have to wait for another book. Meanwhile, the visionary question remains: “What would a wildly decorated city look like?” To which the overriding response must be: “What kind of city do people want to live in?”5

271

Austin Conclu

10/26/01

2:26 PM

Page 272


Austin Append

10/26/01

2:31 PM

Page 273

APPENDIX SOURCES FROM WRITERS ON THE HISTORY OF WRITING

T

he Art Crimes Web site is the best place to begin any search for further information about writing history and individual writers. The site also reviews magazines, books, and videos (and offers a few for sale). See www.artcrimes.com for additional details. Stress magazine has a mail-order branch that carries lots of writers’ zines, videos, books, and other useful items, in addition to being one of the best sources for hip-hop and issues of concern to central-city youths overall. Ask for Stress at your newsstand or write them at: Stress Magazine 89–16 182nd Place Hollis, N.Y. 11423 (Or call in the U.S. at 1–800–286–5216)

Austin Append

274

10/26/01

2:31 PM

Page 274

APPENDIX

Mass Appeal magazine does a great job of covering the writing scene and also has a mail-order branch. Subscriptions, writers’ zines, and other items of interest can be found at: Mass Appeal Magazine 341 Lafayette Street, Suite 4042 New York, N.Y. 10012 (Or call in the U.S. at 1–718–623–2421) The IGTimes has subscriptions and also distributes Style: Writing from the Underground, the first writer-produced book to be published. For further information, contact: IGTimes P.O. Box 299 Prince Street Station New York, N.Y. 10012 Photographer and artist Laurence R. Mabie can be contacted at: 332 Bleecker Street, #G45 New York, NY 10014

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 275

NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. 2.

3.

Jamie Bryan, “Ganja Graffiti: The Legacy of stay high 149,” High Times (August 1996): 52. The terms for describing the art form in this book are contentiously debated. Of the several options, I have chosen to use the term writing (hence, writers) since it is the original term—the term in use the longest, the most inclusive term, and the least-contested of the alternatives. The New York City Transit Authority (customarily abbreviated TA) is a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Both are public authorities created by the State of New York and accountable to the New York State legislature (see chapters 1 and 3). The Transit Police are a branch of the TA, and during the time covered by this book (roughly 1970–1990), were not connected to the New York City Police Department. At no time during my research did I discover conflicts between the MTA, the TA, and/or the Transit Police; they

Austin Notes

276

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 276

NOTES

presented a monolithically unified face to the public and to other governmental and private organizations. As a result, I use the terms TA and MTA interchangeably in this book, except where such distinctions are otherwise important. 4. My account of the Freedom Train is drawn from Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, 36; and Jack Stewart, “Subway Graffiti: An Aesthetic Study of Graffiti on the Subway System of New York City, 1970–1978” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1989), 465–70. Stewart does not mention MAD 103’s participation nor the arrest of the writers, but notes that there were several other individual bicentennial cars painted during the summer of 1976. 5. Maureen Dowd, “Visiting Hoteliers Savor New York,” New York Times (hereafter, NYT), February 20, 1984, B3. 6. “Dear Deprived Hoteliers” (editorial), NYT, February 21, 1984, 22. 7. I am borrowing the spirit of this phrase from Henri Lefebvre’s “The Rights to the City,” contained in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 147–59. 8. The mural movement of the 1970s is covered in Eva Cockcroft, John Weber, and James Cockcroft, Towards a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), and Alan Barnett, Community Murals: The People’s Art (New York: Cornwall Books, 1984). I do not mean to imply by this juxtaposition that the community mural movement would have supported writers as fellow artists. 9. This written history, like all histories written before, is partial, flawed, full of gaps. To paraphrase Brian Eno: energy always fools the magician. 10. For the recent (and ongoing) histories of writing in New York City and the world, see the sources listed in the appendix and the recently published sources cited in the selected bibliography. 11. As with all academic work, I owe a considerable debt to those scholars who have researched this topic before me. In particular, I am indebted to Jack Stewart, Ivor Miller, Craig Castleman, Martha Cooper, and Henry Chalfant.

1. A TALE OF TWO CITIES

1.

2.

From Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City (1961), quoted in Michael A. Pagano and Ann Bowman, Cityscapes and Capital: The Politics of Urban Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 46. From Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960), quoted in Pagano and Bowman, Cityscapes and Capital, 46 (emphasis mine).

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 277

NOTES

3.

4.

5.

6.

At specific historical periods, certain framing stories are institutionalized and frozen in time through regulations, governmental policies, laws, buildings, and organizations. Others are raised or discussed in public forums, but do not result in significant action or change. Others are ignored altogether in public forums for periods of time, although they may remain active within weaker, smaller, or more ephemeral social circles that value one or the other of these versions of the city. There has been no systematic “mapping” of New York City as “the Capital of the Twentieth Century.” From various period studies, there seems to be general agreement that New York City was represented as “the Capital” from at least the early 1940s until the mid-1960s. Most see a return to this idea after the late 1970s. It is important to keep the focus on representation; for all practical purposes, New York City has exercised a more or less continuous cultural and economic dominance within the urban hierarchy of the United States for most of the twentieth century. Three anthologies were particularly useful for my thinking. See Martin Shefter, ed., Capital of the American Century: The National and International Influence of New York City; Leonard Wallock, ed., New York: Culture Capital of the World, 1940–1965 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1988); and Susanne MacGregor and Authur Lipow, eds., The Other City: People and Politics in New York and London (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995). In this regard, I also found the following sources useful: Thomas Grant, “Mythologizing Manhattan: The New Yorker’s New York,” American Studies 28.1 (Spring 1987): 31–46; Rosemary Scanlon, “New York City as Global Capital in the 1980s,” in Richard V. Knight and Gary Gappert, eds., Cities in a Global Context: Urban Affairs Annual Reviews 35 (special issue: 1989): 83–95; Robert Beauregard, “If Only the City Could Speak: The Politics of Representation,” in Liggett and Perry, eds., Spatial Practices: Critical Explorations in Social/Spatial Theory, 59–80; and Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of New York City, New York, World City (Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn, and Hain, 1980), particularly the first three chapters. For an overview of New York City’s cultural dominance after the World War II, see Shefter, ed., Capital of the American Century, and Wallock, ed., New York. In terms of architecture, see Carol Herselle Krinsky, “Architecture in New York City,” in Wallock, ibid., 89–120. Annmarie Hauck Walsh, “Public Authorities and the Shape of Decision Making,” in Jewel Bellush and Dick Netzer, eds., Urban Politics New York Style, 188–219.

277

Austin Notes

278

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 278

NOTES

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

Norman I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein, “Governing Regimes and the Political Economy of Development in New York City, 1946–1984,” in Mollenkopf, ed., Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City, 161–99; Walsh, “Public Authorities,” 188–219. Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993). In particular, see the first four chapters. Fainstein and Fainstein, “Governing Regimes,” 161–99. Ibid., 161–99. This trend has continued up to the present time. See Richard Harris, “The Geography of Employment and Residence in New York Since 1950,” in John Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., Dual City: Restructuring New York, 129–52. Robert Fitch, “Explaining New York City’s Aberrant Economy,” New Left Review 207 (September 1994): 17–48; John H. Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York Politics, ch. 3; Fainstein and Fainstein, “Governing Regimes,” 161–99; Mathew P. Drennan, “The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy,” 25–42, Thomas Bailey and Roger Waldinger, “The Changing Ethnic/Racial Division of Labor,” 43–78 and Saskia Sassen, “The Informal Economy,” 79–103, all in Mollenkopf and Castells, eds., Dual City. Emanuel Tobier, The Changing Face of Poverty: Trends in New York City’s Population in Poverty, 1960–1990 (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1984), 35–65; U.S. Census, New York City, Public Census for 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980; Harris, “The Geography of Employment,” 129–52; George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, “Metropolitan Decline and Inter-Regional Job Shifts,” in Roger E. Alcaly and David Mermelstein, eds., The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities: Essays on the Political Economy of Urban America with Special Reference to New York City (New York: Random House, 1977), 145–64. Fitch, “Explaining New York City’s Aberrant Economy,” 17–48. Fainstein and Fainstein, “Governing Regimes,” 167–99; Edward F. Bergman and Thomas W. Pohl, A Geography of the New York City Metropolitan Region (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1975), 55–76; Michael N. Danielson and Jameson W. Doig, New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 177–204. Quoted from Robert Moses’ memoir, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, as cited in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 290 and 368n1. Berman, All That Is Solid, 290–312; Jill Jonnes, We’re Still Here: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the South Bronx (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 119–26.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 279

NOTES

17. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), 30. 18. See Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Renewal in America, 1940–1985, and Kenneth Fox, Metropolitan America: Urban Life and Urban Policy in the United States, 1940–1980 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 79–106. Robert Beauregard treats the early stages of the urban crisis in Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, 83–157. Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 109–26, provides a very concise account of urban renewal. 19. Urban geographer and historian Robert Beauregard has tracked these changing representations of the urban crisis in the commercial mass media at midcentury in Voices of Decline. I draw from his work in this section. 20. Fox, Metropolitan America, 163–89; Teaford, Rough Road, chs. 3 and 4; Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 161–216. Nathan Glazer, ed., Cities in Trouble, is a useful source for assessing the thinking at the time. 21. Fox, Metropolitan America, 137–62. 22. Fainstein and Fainstein, “Governing Regimes,” 171–99. Also, see Stephen M. David, “Welfare: The Community-Action Program Controversy,” in Jewel Bellush and Stephen M. David, eds., Race and Politics in New York City: Five Studies in Policy Making, 25–58. 23. For those interested in the history of youth, see Joe Austin and Mike Willard, “Angels of History, Demons of Culture,” in Austin and Willard, eds., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 1–21. The following section in the main text summarizes several works, including Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Neil K. Smelser and Sydney Halpern, “The Historical Triangulation of Family, Economy, and Education,” 288–315, and Anne Foner, “Age Stratification and the Changing Family,” 340–65, in John Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock, eds., Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); David Nasaw, Children in the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 24. Daniel Tanner, Secondary Education: Perspectives and Prospects (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 37 (table 2.1).

279

Austin Notes

280

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 280

NOTES

25. These practices sometimes mimicked similar practices among the “parent cultures” and among adults in general, and at other times were major innovations or new creations. As with all traditions, continuity across time is accompanied by transformation and rupture, and in the case of the constantly emerging cultures of youth, the instability of these traditions is heightened owing to the limitations of their social autonomy, the transience of “youth” as but one part of an entire life cycle, changes in the laws, and changes in the institutions of mass socialization and discipline that manage young people. Techniques are circulated, transformed, and deleted at an uneven pace. Nonetheless, realms of semiautonomy have been produced and maintained over time. 26. See C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951; rev. ed., 1956); Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990). 27. Tanner, Secondary Education, 37–38 (tables 2.1 and 2.2). 28. These cultural anxieties are effectively illustrated in two popular nonfiction books of the era: Harrison Salisbury’s The Shook-Up Generation (New York: Fawcett, 1958) and Grace and Fred Hechinger’s Teen-Age Tyranny (New York: Fawcett, 1963) 29. This idea is suggested but never directly stated in Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage (esp. chs. 1 through 4), but it is made explicit in William Graebner, “The ‘Containment’ of Juvenile Delinquency: Social Engineering and American Youth Culture in the Postwar Era,” American Studies 27.1 (Spring 1986): 81–97. The sociology of moral panics is neatly summarized in Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), chs. 1–9. British scholarship is in many ways more developed on this topic. The classic articulation of youth, anxiety, and class is in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976). For an overview of academic studies on the “youth problem,” see Christine Griffin, Representations of Youth: The Study of Youth and Adolescence in Britain and America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 1–26. Angela McRobbie’s “The Moral Panic in the Age of the Postmodern Mass Media,” in McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 198–219, offers a research agenda that recognizes the continued (but transformed) importance of this subject in the late twentieth century.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 281

NOTES

30. This topic is covered in James Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage; also, see Graebner, “The ‘Containment’ of Juvenile Delinquency,” 81–97. 31. Kett, Rites of Passage, 245. 32. Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. 33. Albert Reiss and Albert Rhodes, “The Distribution of Juvenile Delinquency in the Social Class Structure,” American Sociological Review 26.5 (October 1961): 720–32; Salisbury, The Shook-Up Generation; “Juvenile Delinquency,” Life magazine, April 8, 1946, 83–92; and Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 11–78. In 1988 the Library of Congress set up a National Film Registry to preserve “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” films. West Side Story entered the registry in 1997. 34. Michael W. Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York, 194. 35. Brooks, Subway City, ch. 8 (the newspaper headlines are mentioned on page 194). 36. Ibid., chs. 2 and 5. The different constituent systems—the IRT, BMT, and IND subway lines—were brought together as a consolidated city-owned utility in 1940. 37. Most of these problems are covered in a short sociology textbook from the time: Charles R. Ramsey, Problems of Youth: A Social Problems Perspective (Belmont, Calif.: Dickenson, 1967). 38. George Lipsitz, “Who’ll Stop the Rain? Youth Culture, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Social Crises,” in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 206–34; William Hedgepeth and Dennis Stock, The Alternative: Communal Life in New America (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Mitchell Goodman, ed., The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1970). 39. Marc Libarle and Tom Seligson, The High School Revolutionaries (New York: Random House, 1970). 40. U.S. Census figures for New York City from the 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980 public census. 41. Susan Mitchell, The Official Guide to the Generations: Who They Are, How They Live, What They Think (Ithaca, N.Y.: New Strategist, 1995), 223. 42. Steven Seninger, “Postwar Trends in Youth Unemployment,” in Arvil Adams and Garth L. Mangum, eds. The Lingering Crisis of Youth Unemployment (Kalamazoo, Mich.: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1978), 31–34. 43. Seninger, “Postwar Trends,” 24 and 29 (figs. 2–4). 44. Robert D. Mare and Christopher Winship, “Changes in the Relative Labor Force Status of Black and White Youths: A Review of the Literature,” paper

281

Austin Notes

282

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 282

NOTES

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

prepared for the National Commission for Employment Policy (January 1980), 1. John H. Mollenkopf, “Political Inequality,” in Mollenkopf and Castells, eds., Dual City, 333–58; Mash Sinnreich, “Changing Demographics,” New York, World City (Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn, and Hain, 1980), 61–78; Bergman and Pohl, A Geography, 77–86. Neil Smith has argued that these demographic changes are important in explaining the increasingly hostile stance toward people of color by middle- and upper-class whites and their political allies. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, ch. 10. This topic deserves an entire book, along the lines of Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Stuart Hall et al. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978). For starters, see the “Teacher Is Terror in Brooklyn” series by Joseph Alvarez, Gene Gleason, Alex Benson, and Thomas Maccabe in the New York World Telegram, starting on February 2, 1958; Jack D. Fox, “City Planning ‘Youth Corps’ to Fight JD,” New York Post, February 5, 1962; Donald Singleton, “The Violent Children—A Shock Report,” New York Daily News (hereafter, Daily News), January 30, 1973. Articles obtained from the vertical files of the Municipal Reference Center (now called the Municipal Reference and Research Center), Surrogate’s Court Bldg., 31 Chambers Street, New York City. Jonnes, We’re Still Here, 129, 237. Martin Tolchin, “Gangs Spread Terror in the South Bronx,” NYT, January 16, 1973, 1. Steven Hager, Hip-Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti, 11; Jonnes, We’re Still Here, 250.

2. TAKING THE TRAINS: THE FORMATION AND STRUCTURE OF “WRITING CULTURE” IN THE EARLY 1970s

1. 2.

See, for instance, Sally Henderson and Robert Landau, Billboard Art (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989). This is clear from the work of any number of urban photographers. See, for instance, Bernice Abbott’s photographs published in New York in the Thirties (New York: Dover, 1973), particularly the signs and posters in plates 32, 33, and 88. The commonplace of naming-in-public is affirmed in the New Yorker’s cover art for May 31, 1999, a nostalgic cityscape of the Times Square area, c. 1940, titled “Lost Times Square.”

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 283

NOTES

3.

taki 183’s observations about the repetitiveness of subway advertising revealed a part of the way he located his own production. See Hager, Hip-Hop, 13. 4. Author interview with iz the wiz and twoill, August 31, 1993, in New York City. shy 147, quoted in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant (Subway Art, 39), has expressed a similar sentiment. 5. See Rychard Fink’s introduction to the Collier edition of Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 5–33. 6. See Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 7. See Mollenkopf’s description and analysis of the postindustrial transformation of New York City’s economy in Phoenix in the Ashes, ch. 3. James L. Baughman’s “Take Me Away from Manhattan: New York City and American Mass Culture, 1930–1990,” in Shefter, ed., Capital of the American Century, 117–43, covers the processes and events whereby New York City lost the cultural hegemony it enjoyed before the 1950s. However, as Baughman points out, even “if New York no longer dominates mass culture, it is not about to become a Carthage of the popular arts” (131). In any case, the city’s actual productive capacity cannot be directly correlated with its enduring success myth. 8. Baughman, “Take Me Away from Manhattan,” 129–32. 9. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America; David Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop (London: South End Press, 1984); Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages (New York: Summit, 1986). For New York’s role in the film industry, see Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975). 10. The serious intellectual and political problems involved with defining “culture” in terms of “continuous traditions” have been widely noted and discussed. Here, I am not attempting to reassert the necessity of claiming continuity to validate the existence of youth culture, but rather noting that such “continuities” do exist within the processes of innovation and practice. For a study of continuity and change in youth culture traditions, see Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 11. Aaron Sheon has argued that urban youth graffiti were important texts in the emergence of a European romantic aesthetic; photographer Helen Levitt recorded the chalk drawings of New York youth during the 1940s; and the use of wallwriting by territorial gangs during the early 1970s has been explored by David Ley and Roman Cybriwsky. Other sources indicate that gang graffiti existed several

283

Austin Notes

284

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 284

NOTES

decades before. Aaron Sheon, “The Discovery of Graffiti,” Art Journal 36.1 (Fall 1976): 16–22; Helen Levitt, In the Street (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); David Ley and Roman Cybriwsky, “Urban Graffiti as Territorial Markers,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 64 (December 1974): 491–505. Also, see Hager, Hip-Hop, 13. 12. Jack Stewart’s research on this history is a good starting point, and Stephen Powers has recently taken it up and pushed it further. See Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” ch. 5; and Stephen Powers, The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). Also, see “Philly” by nope, esher, and edited by espo in While You Were Sleeping (writer’s magazine; Bethesda, Md.), no. 2 (c. 1997): n.p. 13. The academic and popular knowledge created about writing frequently traces its origins through the long history of graffiti practices. But while it is true that humans have been writing names on public walls for centuries, and that there is some validity in understanding writing to be part of that history, to frame writing as merely a new chapter in the history of graffiti mystifies more than it clarifies. Drawing a continuous line between a long and discrete series of events, such a view ignores the contemporary historical specificity of writing (i.e., it cannot answer the question, “Why now?”), thus implying some universal or innate human impulse to write on public walls. Painting pictures on the walls of European caves or scratching names in the stones of Pompeii may bear some comparison to writing, but what does this comparison reveal? Such universalist and innate frameworks leave out the important connections between writing and other cultural and historical practices. Art historian Jack Stewart’s important work argues that writing constitutes a major rupture in the history of graffiti, and that by 1972 writing had developed into an entirely new phenomenon in the history of humankind (see “Subway Graffiti,” chs. 4 and 5). 14. The desire to maintain connections to writing’s origins is strong throughout writing culture, despite internal disputes and generational differences. David Schmidlapp and phase 2’s book, Style: Writing from the Underground, carefully tracks the careers of some of the earliest writers, as does Stephen Powers in The Art of Getting Over. zephyr made certain that the reporters interviewing him in the early 1980s took note of that tradition. See Jonathan Dobkin, “Talking with Zephyr,” Brooklyn Paper, February 6, 1980, 8. crash also made certain that the accomplishments of his predecessors were known in Bill Moseley, “Graffiti,” Omni (February 1982), 26. These two articles were obtained from zephyr’s personal archives.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 285

NOTES

15. Herbert Kohl, with photos by James Hinton, Golden Boy as Anthony Cool, ch. 1. Johnny told Kohl that his gang often wrote messages and drew their gang’s symbol in the turf of another gang when issuing a challenge. 16. Kohl, Golden Boy, 10. 17. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, ch. 5. 18. Here again, Norman Mailer’s ghostly “White Negro” haunts us all. (Mailer’s famous essay first appeared in The White Negro [San Francisco: City Lights, 1957]). 19. I first became aware of the links between the “crisis of the subject” and the “crisis of representation” through George Marcus and Michael Fisher’s collaborative work, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 20. Kohl, Golden Boy, ch. 3. 21. Conversation between phase 2, amrl, and wicked gary published in International Graffiti Times 2 (February 1984): n.p. 22. lee 163D! quoted in Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 16. 23. See Tricia Rose’s important Black Noise, ch. 2; Ivor Miller, “Aerosol Kingdom: The Indigenous Culture of New York Subway Painters” (master’s thesis, Yale University, 1990); and Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style. 24. See Juan Flores’s essay, “Puerto Rican and Proud, Boyee!: Rap Roots and Amnesia,“ in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 89–98. 25. zephyr quoted in Bryan, “Ganja Graffiti,” 53, 62 (lsd om also cites countercultural influences in this article; article from zephyr’s personal archives). See the descriptions of daze and team in Rickey Powell, “Celebrated Outlaws,” The Source (November 1993): 19, 22, and the article by zephyr, “How I Straying into ‘Graffiti’ and the Early Days of rtw [Rolling Thunder Writers crew],” as well as his interview with Tommy Tee, “Upper West Side: The Gates of the Ghetto,” FatCap Magazine (Oslo, Norway) (1997): n.p. Finally, see revolt’s comments in International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. 26. Kohl, Golden Boy, ch 1. A photograph in the “East Harlem” section of Fred W. McDarrah’s New York, NY: A Photographic Tour of Manhattan Island from Battery Park to Spuyten Duyvil (New York: Corinth, 1964), n.p., shows wall-writing of this sort, which would date the “[name] as [other name]” form from at least the early 1960s. In the late 1970s, Jean Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz deployed a similar sort of equivalence in some of their “samo” slogans on the public wall (e.g., samo as an alternative to Joe Normal and the Bourgeois fan-

285

Austin Notes

286

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 286

NOTES

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

tasy). See Glenn O’Brien, “Graffiti ’80: The State of the Outlaw Art,” High Times (June 1980): 53–54. The cultural connection extends further: many actors change their birth names upon entering their profession and perform under a name designed and selected to match an intended persona. Kohl, Golden Boy, ch. 1. Erving Goffman, cited in Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 37–38. I am referring here to the body of work that follows from W. E. B. Du Bois’s conceptualization of this term in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), including Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952; New York: Vintage Books, 1972). I found Richard B. Gregg’s article to be useful in my thinking about the impact of writing in public spaces: “The Ego-Function of the Rhetoric of Protest,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 4.2 (Spring 1977): 71–91 Kohl, Golden Boy, 6, 12. Schneider, Vampires, 217–27. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 165–66. Jessica Green, “It’s Not Where You’re At, It’s Where You’re From,” Stress 20 (1999): 9. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 163–66. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 23. midg quoted in Moseley, “Graffiti,” 26. Singer/songwriter Laurie Anderson and cult novelist William Burroughs would likely disagree with this point: according to Burroughs, “Language is a virus from outer space./I’d rather read your name than see your face.” Burrough’s line is quoted by Anderson in United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), n.p. taki 183 quoted in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 165. phase 2 quoted in Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 22 (I recommend the discussion in this book for those interested in the topic further). Also, see phase 2’s explanation of early “fame” in my article, “Re-Writing New York City,” in George E. Marcus, ed., Connected: Engagements with Media at Century’s End, 292–98. Hager indicates that this approach to fame was common (Hip-Hop, 16). The trend toward monikers that did not resemble personal names was much more evident after the “boom” in the number of writers in 1971. First-generation writers were more likely to use the names on their birth certificates (for instance, Michael Tracy, one of the first writers from the Bronx, wrote tracy 168). C. J. Sullivan, “Bronx Bomber,” New York Press, September 2, 1998, 12. My thanks to Niko Pfund for bringing this article to my attention. Using one’s

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 287

NOTES

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

“real” name has continued throughout the history of writing, but it has never been a common practice. The article appeared in Esquire’s May 1974 issue (81:77–88) with the same title as the book: The Faith of Graffiti, text by Norman Mailer, photographs by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky, n.p. tracy 168 interviewed by chino byi in Stress 13 (1998): 54; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 162–63; Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 13. tracy 168 quoted in Sullivan, “Bronx Bomber,” 12. taki 183 in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 163–66; also, see Hager, Hip-Hop, 14. tracy 168 told Sullivan (“Bronx Bomber,” 12) that he and other Bronx writers had already begun to tag buses and the interiors of trains, but these went unnoticed by media professionals for much longer. lsd om, as reported in Ivor Miller, “Piecing: The Dynamics of Style,” Calligraphy Review 11.1 (1994): 22. Stewart (“Subway Graffiti,” 234) and Hager (HipHop, 16) make the same point. “‘taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” NYT, July 21, 1971, 37. The photo that accompanied the article is reproduced in Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 14. Castleman, Getting Up, 79–81; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 232–35. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) (rpt., New York: Zone Books, 1995; trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Guy Debord, the most influential of the Situationists, proposed that the culture of consumption in capitalist nations had overtaken everyday urban experience and transformed it into an alienating spectacle. For overviews of the Situationist movement, see Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 (Cambridge, Mass., and Boston: MIT Press and the Institute of Contemporary Art, c. 1989), and Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (New York: Routledge, 1992). Consider the quote from an unidentified writer in Cooper and Chalfant (Subway Art, 28) on this matter: “The more places you get your name up, the better your chance of getting fame. Suppose there’s a robbery on the train and the photographers and TV crews come, your name might come out in the evening news!” taki 183 in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 230. iz the wiz, interviewed in Flashbacks (New York City), no. 5 (1992): n.p. This train originated in a yard where tracy 168 frequently painted, and he introduced the three writers to this location. It was jester’s, p nut’s, and diablo’s first work on this line. tracy had work on almost every car in the

287

Austin Notes

288

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 288

NOTES

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

yard, including two on the other side of the car that appeared in the show. Author’s phone conversation with tracy 168, August 11, 2000. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 234–35. Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 38. Castleman, Getting Up, 19; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 209–11. Castleman, Getting Up, 20. See lsd om as quoted in Miller, “Piecing,” 28. kase 2, interviewed in “kase 2: King of What? King of Style!” FatCap Magazine (1996): n.p. See Castleman, Getting Up, 19–21, 24, and 81, for the relationships between “toys” (neophytes) and more experienced writers in the status hierarchy. See comments by early writers’ organizer Hugo Martinez and lee in Castleman, Getting Up, 19; also, see the comments by japan 1 in Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti, n.p. This odd recapitulation of the liberal-meritocratic work ethic among writers deserves a book in itself. For historical context, see Paul J. Andrisani et al., eds., The Work Ethic: A Critical Analysis (Madison, Wis.: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1983); Patrick Joyce, “The Historical Meanings of Work: An Introduction,” 1–30, and H. F. Moorhouse, “The ‘Work’ Ethic and ‘Leisure’ Activity: The Hot Rod In Post-War America,” 237–57, in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), ch. 20. lsd om quoted in Bryan, “Ganja Graffiti,” 66. Castleman, Getting Up, 81; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 184. Stewart notes that the “crown” emblem placed over the writer’s name, which signifies kingship, was developed independently in Philadelphia as early as 1966, about four or five years before New York City writers did it. Stephen Powers attributes the crown in writing to cornbread, one of the original writers in Philadelphia (The Art of Getting Over, 10). rize interviewed by Cristina Veran, “Tunnel Vision,” Vibe (May 1996): 80 (the documentary photos in this article are of historic significance); haze is cited in Chris Pape (aka freedom), “The One Tunnel,” Stress 9 (December 1997): 60. During my fieldwork in the early 1990s, I met several young writers who extolled their fame as kings of various tiny domains; when pushed, several of the older writers admitted to having claimed kingship of some small territory early in their careers.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 289

NOTES

67. taki 183’s prewriting memories indicate that the practice of writing your name in an “inaccessible” place may be partially grounded in gang initiations (see Hager, Hip-Hop, 13); also, see junior 161’s comments in Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti, n.p. However, the connection to gang culture will not stand as a full explanation (O’Brien, “Graffiti ’80,” 52). 68. tracy 168 quoted in Sullivan, “Bronx Bomber,” 12. 69. Castleman, Getting Up, 53; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 209–10. This feat was often accomplished by building “human ladders” out of buddies, with writers standing on each other’s shoulders (see Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti, n.p.). 70. This event is noted in “‘taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” NYT, July 21, 1971, 37. 71. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 229. 72. See wasp 1’s story of being caught in the “wrong neighborhood” in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 176. It seems quite clear that there was considerable racial animosity within New York City’s youth culture generally during this period, and it was not confined to white-against-black conflicts; see Hager’s descriptions of gang conflicts along racial lines in his introduction to Hip-Hop. Writing culture is in part remarkable for its lack of racialized conflict, although there are a couple of notable exceptions to this (see Hager, ibid., 25–26). 73. Castleman, Getting Up, 43; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 211–13; Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 29. 74. This is a common view among the first and second generation of writers; see, for instance, lsd om in Miller, “Piecing,” 28. 75. amrl and wicked gary quoted in International Graffiti Times 2 (February 1984): n.p. 76. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 161–62. However, one cannot assume that the number that followed a writer’s name always served that function. Numbers were attached for a variety of reasons. For instance, phase 2 was the first writer to use the name phase. 77. See the retelling of the conflict between snake 1 and snake 1–131 in Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 35. 78. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 246. 79. tracy 168 quoted in Bryan, “Ganja Graffiti,” 52. 80. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 245–46, 263–65; Hager, Hip-Hop, 17. 81. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 248. Keys to trains became an item of trade among writers. Also, see Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 33. 82. Castleman (Getting Up, 48–51) contains a good description of the yards and the kinds of skills necessary to negotiate this contested terrain successfully.

289

Austin Notes

290

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 290

NOTES

83. Castleman (ibid.) reports that cool herc was known to write while others were in the car, even asking some passengers to move so he could reach a particular spot. 84. Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 42, 109; Castleman, Getting Up, 56; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 265; Hager, Hip-Hop, 19. 85. daze quoted in Miller, “Piecing,” 22. 86. Powers, The Art of Getting Over, 10. 87. Castleman notes the elaborate names for these typographies, which most of the better-known writers invented at one time or another during the 1970s. However, with a few exceptions, other writers did not learn or adhere to these names. blade offers a list of originators in an interview in Quality of Life 1 (Hackettstown, N.J.) (n.d.): n.p. Also, see Castleman, Getting Up, 25; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 291–97. The creative hegemony of a single writer on a line did not end with topcat 126 and phase 2 but continued throughout the 1970s up to 1986. See Cooper and Chalfant’s discussion of seen ua’s influence on the No. 6 line (Subway Art, 67–71). 88. Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 27–29. 89. Author’s phone interview with stoney, August 11, 1999. 90. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 306–14. 91. Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 40; Castleman, Getting Up, 55; Hager, HipHop, 18. 92. Castleman, Getting Up, 67; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 162–69; Hager (citing Hugo Martinez), Hip-Hop, 26; and Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 16. Also, see the New York City Transit Authority’s “Profile of a Common Offender,” issued by the Transit Police in the late 1970s and reproduced in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 203. 93. Hager, Hip-Hop, 26. Hugo Martinez claimed that the best writers did not come from the most marginalized communities and families, but from working-class backgrounds where at least one member of the family was employed. 94. zephyr lists the “pioneering white boys” he met when he began writing in the mid-1970s in Dobkin’s “Talking with Zephyr,” 8. 95. Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 24; also, see Castleman (Getting Up, 68) for a brief discussion of female writers. Stewart discusses some of the early female writers (“Subway Graffiti,” 227–30) and also mentions a couple of female writers who were up on the trains (396). 96. zephyr mentions monk, drag, and chi-193 in Dobkin, “Talking with Zephyr,” 8. 97. stoney was made to feel “unwelcome” by some involved with the United Graf-

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 291

NOTES

fiti Artists. On the other hand, bama “went all out” to include her in UGA. Author’s phone conversation with stoney, August 11, 1999. 98. Castleman simply claims that “many female writers appear to avoid the yards by choice,” but also notes the active exclusion of female writers from important crews and writers groups (Getting Up, 68, 121). Also, see wicked gary’s description of female writers in the ex-vandals (ibid., 100–103). 99. See the interview with dona and diva in Mass Appeal 5 (1999): 48; and jakee’s article in Stress 21 (1999): 42. 100. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 229–30. 101. lady pink quoted in Ellen Mediati, “Hot Pink,” Siren 2 (1997): 21. 102. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 254–55. ale one recalled a police officer threatening to shoot him in an encounter during 1974. ale one and cope 2, “Raid Stories,” Flashbacks 10 (1996): 34. 103. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 266. zephyr says that he wrote most of the chi193’s that appeared on the trains (Dobkin, “Talking with Zephyr,” 8). 104. vandal quoted in Dobkin, “Talking with Zephyr,” 8. 105. For a tongue-in-cheek treatment of writing among women writers, I recommend dona and icon’s “Top 10 List of Why Chicks Don’t Write Graffiti,” Stress 13 (1998): 48. 106. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 17. 107. The analysis by Miller in “Piecing,” as well as the quotes from writers in this article, demonstrate this point with grace and beauty. 108. iz the wiz, interviewed in Stress 9 (October 1997): n.p. 109. Hager, Hip-Hop, 16. 110. See the interview with lee in Castleman (Getting Up, ch. 1) as well as bama’s quote (51). These show the same kind of collective, antiauthoritarian sociality that informs “hanging out and doing something” among young people in most neighborhoods. See Paul Corrigan, “Doing Nothing,” in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), 103–105. 111. Castleman, Getting Up, 21–24; Miller, “Piecing,” 20–33. Almost any extensive interview with a well-known writer will include some mention of those writers who helped with or influenced his or her work. See zephyr’s nod to lsd om, tracy 168, and team in Dobkin, “Talking with Zephyr,” 8. 112. Castleman, Getting Up, 84–85 (also, see bama quote on 51); Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 186. 113. Castleman, Getting Up, 106; Hager makes several indirect references to this influence (Hip-Hop, 21, 59). For a detailed description of the history of gangs and

291

Austin Notes

292

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 292

NOTES

writers during the 1970s, see Castleman (ibid., ch. 5). Hager also places emphasis on the legacy of gangs (Hip-Hop, introduction and ch. 1). 114. Frank Lombardi, “Street Gang Incidents Zoom 100% in a Year,” Daily News, February 28, 1974, 5. 115. Castleman (Getting Up, ch. 5) describes the negotiations between writers and gangs, drawing much of his information from bama. smith affirms that gangs didn’t have problems with writers. See “whiteboy interviews smith and natz,” Hype (pn.d.): 18 (from the personal archives of R. Smith). 116. blade quoted in Flashbacks 9 (1995): 8–9. 117. Author’s phone interview with stoney, August 11, 1999. 118. See Stewart’s discussion of the role of gangs and their interaction with writers (“Subway Graffiti,” 163–78). 119. Castleman, Getting Up, 95. 120. Ibid., 96–104. Castleman makes a distinction between the ex-vandals (as a “true writing gang”) and the others that emerged during this period (vanguards, the last survivors) because the latter often engaged in fighting other gangs and defending turf. However, as the experience of the ex-vandals shows, the division between “true” writing gangs and the others was difficult to sustain and seems to be more a matter of principle than practice. 121. Hager notes that the ex-vandals adopted jean jackets adorned with emblems on the back, in the manner of street gangs of the day (Hip-Hop, 20). 122. See wicked gary’s description of the ex-vandals’ organization and productivity in Castleman (Getting Up, 96–100). 123. wicked gary in ibid., 104. Stewart only briefly mentions the ex-vandals (“Subway Graffiti,” 106–187), but he consistently points toward the influence of gangs on writing culture. 124. Castleman, Getting Up, 107. See t-kid’s definition of a crew in Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 50. 125. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 187; Hager, Hip-Hop, 20. 126. Castleman, Getting Up, 84; Hager, Hip-Hop, 20. 127. See Stewart’s brief discussion of crews (“Subway Graffiti,” 187–90); see also the comment by blade (ibid., 447). 128. tracy 168 mentions several of these early crews in tracy 168, interview by chino byi in Stress 13 (1998): 54; phase 2 mentions the early crews he started in Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 28. 129. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 50. 130. kase 2, interviewed in Stress 10 (December 1997): 72. 131. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 178, 249. Miller makes a similar point in “Piecing,”

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 293

NOTES

backed up with some insightful quotes from writers. Tales of learning from another writer or through participation in a crew are common when writers tell about their individual development, particularly if they were close with a famous writer. 132. Robert E. Tomasson, “Graffiti Cleanups a ‘Lark’ for the Young,” NYT, April 21, 1974, sec. 8, p. 1; Castleman, Getting Up, 107–110. Hager notes that phase 2’s influence on the development of style was transmitted not only by his own works but through designs and sketches on paper that he gave other writers, who then executed them on the trains (Hip-Hop, 22). The point is reiterated by bama in Miller, “Piecing,” 22. Also, see tracy 168’s explanation of his assistance to tkid, and the discussion of seen ua’s influence on other writers in Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 67–71. Tales of the ways in which the alliance’s muchproclaimed “cleanup” sentence assisted the development of writing are legion. Two of these are in Moseley, “Graffiti,” 115, and Bryan, “Ganja Graffiti,” 62. 133. Hager provides a useful description of this type of knowledge, along with photos (Hip-Hop, 22–23). 134. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 20, 23. 135. Stewart examines the “petty lawlessness” of writers in several places in “Subway Graffiti” (on the theft of paint, see 196–98). phase 2 claims that super kool 223 was the first to rack up really large quantities of paint, facilitated in part by his stylish fashion sensibility. His clothes did not alert store owners that he and his girlfriend were there to steal. The oral history of writing is filled with stories about paint-stealing escapades, most involving a play on the store owner’s race, class, or gender stereotypes. Also, see the photograph of lady pink’s paint stash and the accompanying discussion in Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 32. 136. Castleman, Getting Up, 26–29, 46–51; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 194. See ale one’s discussion of the quality of the spray paint writers used in comparison with the available chemical solvents for its removal in the early and mid-1970s. ale one, interviewed in Quality of Life 2 (n.d.): n.p. 137. From Styles for Miles (New York City), no. 3 (Summer 1991): 4. No author is attributed. 138. See tracy 168’s thinking on this matter in Hager, Hip-Hop, 18. 139. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 39. 140. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 245–56; Hager, Hip-Hop, 15–18. For the view from the South Bronx, in which there was no need to “discover” the yards, see Hager, ibid., 17. In an interview in Flashbacks 4 (n.d., n.p.), stay high 149 claimed that stations and the insides of trains were still the predominant and prestigious places to write in 1971; but there was doubt among some senior

293

Austin Notes

294

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 294

NOTES

members of the community about whether this person was the “real” stay high 149 (see their questions in International Get-Hip Times [hereafter, IGTimes], vol. 12 [n.d.], n.p.). 141. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 213. 142. Castleman, Getting Up, 85–89; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 246. 143. Moseley, “Graffiti,” 114. 144. John Maizels, “Writer of the Storm” (interview with phase 2), Raw Vision 21 (Winter 1997–98): 44–48. 145. phase 2 quoted in ibid., 45–46. 146. Castleman, Getting Up, 49; Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 23. 147. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 247. However, writers frequently came earlier and sometimes stayed until sunup to extend their work time or to take pictures. See lee’s story in Castleman (Getting Up, 4–10) and the description of painting in the yards (49). 148. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 245–46. 149. ale one, interviewed in Quality of Life 2 (n.d.): n.p. 150. See Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. chs. 2 and 5. 151. See lsd om’s mention of the writers’ corner in Miller, “Piecing,” 22. 152. coco 144 and wicked gary quoted in International Graffiti Times 2 (February 1984): n.p. 153. Castleman, Getting Up, 84; Hager, Hip-Hop, 20; freedom mentions the “SA wall where the Soul Artists met on weekends to hang out and paint.” See freedom, “NOGA [Nation of Graffiti Artists],” Stress 5 (1996): 90. 154. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 213–19. The subways are a common mode of transportation for youth. 155. Castleman has an excellent description of the writers’ benches (Getting Up, 85–89); the quotes by stan 153, wicked gary, and bama are particularly revealing about the information network that writers shared. Also, see the remembrances of freedom, jayson, and haze in Pape, “The One Tunnel,” 60– 61. See Stewart’s discussion of the writers’ benches and their use as a meeting place (“Subway Graffiti,” 215–20). stoney was part of the group that established the Brooklyn Writers’ Bench (author’s phone interview with stoney, August 11, 1999). 156. Stewart,“Subway Graffiti,” 178. 157. Ibid., 198–99, 251–58; Hager, Hip-Hop, 19. 158. seen ua, interviewed in Flashbacks 2 (c. 1991), n.p. seen also recounts two chase stories, one a false alarm from 1973, when he first began.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 295

NOTES

159. See the frequent mentions of police by writers throughout Castleman in Getting Up, esp. ch. 9. Stewart discusses the role of the Transit Police in writing culture in several places; in particular, see “Subway Graffiti,” 252–58, for descriptions of early encounters in the yards. Hager pays less attention to police influence but notes that they were a major topic of discussion and strategy at writers’ corners and benches (Hip-Hop, 20). For another example in the writers’ zines, see the story told by spade 127 in 12 Ounce Prophet (Miami, Fla.), vol. 6 (1998): n.p. 160. tracy 168 quoted in Sullivan, “Bronx Bomber,” 12. 161. See quote by stan 153 in Castleman, Getting Up, 107; also, see Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 252–53. 162. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 251. 163. Ibid., 322. 164. Tamara Plakins Thornton’s Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) offers a basis for contextualizing the cultural links between the history of writing and the history of handwriting. 165. Castleman, Getting Up, 117–26; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 322–41; Amy Goldin, “United Graffiti Artists 1975 at Artists Space,” Art in America 63 (November– December 1975): 101–102. 166. For an account of the UGA as well as the influence of Mailer’s essay “The Faith of Graffiti,” and two articles by Richard Goldstein (“The Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade” and “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand”) in New York, March 26, 1973, 32–39, see Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” ch. 10. In the main, my interpretation here follows his; however, I am ambivalent about Stewart’s assertions of aesthetic judgment. Hager also sees Martinez and the UGA as a major force in writing’s transition to “art” (Hip-Hop, 25–27). phase 2 credits Martinez with promoting a political awareness among the UGA’s writers; see phase 2, quoted in International Graffiti Times 2 (February 1984): n.p. 167. Peter Schjeldahl, “Graffiti Goes Legit—But the ‘Show-Off Ebullience’ Remains,” NYT, September 16, 1973, B25; S. K. Oberbeck, “Underground Artists,” Newsweek, October 1, 1973, 70. 168. Castleman, Getting Up, 126–33; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 340–41. See also these articles obtained from zephyr’s personal archives: Steven Greenhouse, “Graffiti Finally Gets Welcomed Home,” The Westsider, July 24, 1975; James Duddy, “Subway Graffiti Artists on Right Track in Exhibition,” Daily News, July 9, 1976; Sandy Satterwhite, “For Them Graffiti Is No Longer an Underground Movement,” New York Post, December 24, 1974. Also, see “Some Artful Dodgers Find a Different Line,” NYT, March 13, 1976, 29. freedom’s story

295

Austin Notes

296

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 296

NOTES

of his joining noga is an excellent source for understanding the dynamics between writers and other artists in this space (freedom, “noga,” 89–93). 169. See Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 325n1. 170. The few exhibition reviews that noga did receive generally were positive. This group’s exhibitions were much more likely to be written about in a news report within a context of “reforming” writers or “giving youth something more productive to do.” For the former, see “Graffiti Wars,” Horizon 24.2 (February 1981): 5–6; for the latter, see preceding note. 171. See Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” ch. 10; and Goldstein, “The Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade” and “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” 32–39. 172. Patricia Conway (photos by Marshall Swerman), “Subway Graffiti: The Message from Underground,” Print 28.3 (May 1973): 25–32 (quote from 27). 173. Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti. Stewart discusses the effects of this publication in “Subway Graffiti,” 419–21. 174. Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti, n.p. 175. In fairness, Kurlansky and Naar did not intend the book to be a document of the most advanced works as judged by writers. Within art photography, there was already a precedent for using spray-painted walls as a subject and relating this to an abstract expressionist aesthetic, like that of Pollock and Kline. See the photos of Bill Troy that accompany the unsigned article “Where Are They Hanging?” New York, June 3, 1968, 44. 176. I take this phrase from Dick Hebdige’s famous essay and book of the same name. See “Hiding in the Light: Youth Surveillance and Display,” in Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge, 1988). However, writers are a “spectacular” subculture in a very different sense than those in Britain that Hebdige is concerned with. It is equally important to follow Michel de Certeau’s lead in The Practice of Everday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and note the new and less visible spaces that urban youth appropriate in creating organized communities.

3. WRITING “GRAFFITI” IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF WRITING AS AN URBAN PROBLEM

1. 2.

Barry Gottehrer, ed., New York City in Crisis: A Study in Depth of Urban Sickness (New York: McKay, 1965). See Edwin Diamond and Piera Paine, “The Media in the Game of Politics,” 339–56, and David R. Eichenthal, “Changing Styles and Strategies of the Mayor,”

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 297

NOTES

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

63–85, in Bellush and Netzer, eds., Urban Politics New York Style; Richard Reeves, “Lindsay Tries to Stay in There,” in Glazer, ed., Cities in Trouble, 254–68; Fainstein and Fainstein, “Governing Regimes,” 161–99. The “City in Crisis” series was not a journalistic aberration; see, for instance, the white-hysteria-inspiring “New York City in Trouble: Story of a Rising Fear,” U.S. News and World Report, June 8, 1964, 72–78. Stephen David, “The Community-Action Program Controversy,” in Bellush and David, eds., Race and Politics in New York City, 49–51. George L. Lankevich, American Metropolis: A History of New York City (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 199–201. Ashar Arian, Arthur S. Goldberg, John H. Mollenkopf, and Edward T. Rogowsky, Changing New York City Politics, 12–16; Chris McNickle, To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 216–36. Bellush and David, eds., Race and Politics in New York City, offer excellent case studies of this period in New York City’s history; in particular, see Edward T. Rogowsky, Louis H. Gold, and David W. Abbott, “Police: The Civilian Review Board Controversy,” 59–97. Also, see Smith, The New Urban Frontier. Eichenthal, “Changing Styles,” 63–85; McNickle, To Be Mayor, 237–39. Annmarie Hauck Walsh, “Public Authorities and the Shape of Decision Making,” in Bellush and Netzer, eds., Urban Politics New York Style, 188–219 (see the charts on 190–95); Lankevich, American Metropolis, 208. “Lindsay Urges Halt to ‘Highway Building Binge’; Wants Grants to Localities for Mass Transit Needs,” press release from the 1972 Lindsay campaign, and transcript of a campaign speech delivered at St. Stephen’s Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 21, 1971; “Lindsay Says Excessive Corporate Power Is Root Problem of Economy,” press release from the 1972 Lindsay campaign, March 9, 1972. From Lindsay Papers, Office of the Mayor, subject files A-W, location #110068, files marked “Transportation” and “Corporate Power,” respectively (NYC Municipal Archives, Surrogate’s Court Bldg., 31 Chambers Street, New York City). Herbert Kohl, with photos by James Hinton, Golden Boy as Anthony Cool. Jack Stewart (“Subway Graffiti”) notes the writings on the walls near Columbia University during this period. Also, see Carol Warren, “Appendix III: Chronology of Events at Columbia, May 1965–June 1969,” in Jack D. Douglas, ed., Youth in Turmoil: America’s Changing Youth Cultures and Student Protest Movements (Chevy Chase, Md.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1970), 225–30.

297

Austin Notes

298

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 298

NOTES

10. Keith D. Mano, “New Graffiti on the Old IRT,” NYT, May 1, 1971, p.33. 11. Herbert Kohl and James Hinton, “Names, Graffiti, and Culture,” Urban Review 3 (April 1969): 24–37; Kohl and Hinton, Golden Boy. The former work has been missed in most other academic studies of writing, but provides an excellent context, both culturally and historically, for the phenomenon. The neighborhood-based writing culture that taki 183 inherited and innovated from is also covered in Stewart (“Subway Graffiti,” 159–90). 12. Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” 35. 13. See Norman Mailer’s interview with John Lindsay, just as the latter was leaving office, in The Faith of Graffiti, n.p. 14. Frank J. Prial, “Subway Graffiti Here Called Epidemic,” NYT, February 11, 1972, 39ff. 15. See the analysis by Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B. L. Chan of the way the state acts as a news source in Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989). 16. “Archaeologists’ Delight” (editorial), NYT, February 28, 1972, 30. 17. Alfred E. Clark, “Court Orders 2 Graffiti Vandals to Scrub Walls of IRT Station,” NYT, April 21, 1972, 43. The fact that one of the writers was using the name “Hitler II” without being aware, allegedly, of the name’s infamous forebearer probably did nothing for his cause. 18. “Coming Clean” (editorial), NYT, May 1, 1972, 32. 19. Ronald Gross, letter to the editor (“Our ‘Beautiful’ Graffiti”), NYT, March 28, 1972, 42. 20. Allen E. Burns, letter to the editor (“Subway Bylines”), NYT, June 5, 1972, 32. 21. Peter Paterson, letter to the editor (“Cathartic Graffiti”), NYT, December 14, 1972, 46. 22. “Garelik Calls for War on Graffiti,” NYT, May 21, 1972, 66. 23. “Nuisance in Technicolor” (editorial), NYT, May 26, 1972, 34. 24. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its Transit Authority subsidiary are semiautonomous public corporations accountable to the state of New York and together have separate legal jurisdiction, including a separate body of laws (enforced by the Transit Police), over the properties they hold. See William Farrell, “Controller’s Report on Public Authorities Points Up Their Hazy Legal Status,” NYT, December 27, 1972 (article obtained from the vertical files of the Municipal Reference and Research Center, New York City). 25. Emanuel Perlmutter, “Fines and Jail for Graffiti Will Be Asked by Lindsay,” NYT, June 26, 1972, 66. Also, see the letters from the mayor to Dr. Harvey Scribner, chancellor of the Board of Education and Chancellor Robert Kibbee

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 299

NOTES

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

of the Board of Higher Education dated June 26, 1972. Letters from the Lindsay Papers, Department Files, box 25, folder 351, and box 44, folder 579 (NYC Municipal Archives). Lindsay’s relationship with the MTA and with Ronan may have been strained, due in part to the emphasis Lindsay put on increased funding for mass transportation during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Although Lindsay was a strong supporter of subways in general, he was not pleased with the MTA’s performance. See the letter dated August 19, 1971, from Lindsay to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and MTA chairman Ronan (Lindsay Papers, Department Files, box 99, folder 1253); see also the campaign press releases dated March 21, 1972, in the Lindsay Papers, Office of the Mayor, subject files A-W, file labeled “Transportation” (documents from NYC Municipal Archives). These letters were found in the Lindsay Papers, Department Files, Transit Authority, box 99, folder 1254; Office of the Secretary, Confidential Subject Files 1966–73, “Transit Authority” folder; Robert Heller, Assistant to the Mayor, Subject Files, Transportation, “Transportation—MTA” file. The press releases are numbers 436–72 and 440–72, both dated August 28, 1972. All documents from NYC Municipal Archives. See also Edward Ranzal, “Ronan Backs Lindsay Antigraffiti Plan, Including Cleanup Duty,” NYT, August 29, 1972, 66. “Stiff Antigraffiti Measure Passes Council Committee,” NYT, September 15, 1972, 41; “Scratch the Graffiti” (editorial), NYT, September 16, 1972, 28. “Antigraffiti Bill Is One of 4 Gaining Council Approval,” NYT, October 11, 1972, 47. Letter dated September 28, 1972, to William J. Ronan, dictated by Robert M. Heller, and signed by John Lindsay (from the Lindsay Papers, Department Files, Transit Authority, box 99, folder 1254). Press Release 531–72, dated October 4, 1972 (from the Lindsay Papers, Office of the Mayor, Press Releases, box A4460). This would appear to be a reference to the Times’s editorial staff’s apparent “conversion” experience in which they too embraced writing as an “epidemic.” “Scratch the Graffiti” (editorial), NYT, September 16, 1972, 28. One of Lindsay’s letters to CUNY’s chancellor mentioned the possibility of setting up a university-based research project to develop these. Letter dated September 28, 1972, to Chancellor Robert J. Kibbee, dictated by Robert M. Heller, and signed by John Lindsay (from the Lindsay Papers, Department Files, Higher Education, box 44, folder 579).

299

Austin Notes

300

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 300

NOTES

34. “Nuisance in Technicolor” (editorial), NYT, May 26, 1972, 34. 35. Letter dated October 18, 1972, to David E. Price, director of the Pencil Markers Association, drafted by Robert M. Heller and signed by John Lindsay (from Lindsay Papers, Office of the Secretary, Confidential Subject Files, box 4326, folder marked “Graffiti, 1972”). The sales restrictions in Washington Heights were reported in Carter B. Horsley, NYT, December 17, 1972, sec. 8, p. 1. 36. Bulletin of the Paint and Wallpaper Dealers Association of Greater New York, undated (from Lindsay Papers, Office of the Secretary, Confidential Subject Files, box 4326, folder marked “Graffiti, 1972”). 37. This relationship can be documented through the antigraffiti campaigns in the borough of Queens, New York City, in the late 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the activities (mostly contributions of paint in discontinued colors) of the National Paint and Coatings Association and its New York City branches and affiliates are significant. 38. “Graffiti Epidemic Strikes 7000 Cars in Subway System,” NYT, October 21, 1972, 37. 39. John Sibley, “30 in Bronx Gangs Scrub Graffiti from IRT,” NYT, October 19, 1972, 51; Robert Williams, “S.I. Students Attack Graffiti,” NYT, November 12, 1972, 104; Michael Kaufman, “Boy Scouts Scrub Graffiti Off Walls of Subway Cars,” NYT, February 26, 1973, 35. 40. Murray Schumach, “City Hall Notes,” NYT, April 23, 1973, 66. 41. Ronan quoted in David Bird, “Noise, Graffiti, and Air Grate on Riders of City Subways,” NYT, October 11, 1973, 1, 90. 42. To be more specific about how letters to the Times during the 1970s were selected and edited would require a detailed organizational history of the newspaper in that period, which is beyond the scope of this book. My analysis is concerned only with those letters that were published and is meant to suggest some of the alternative ideas then in circulation. In Ericson et al., Negotiating Control (part of an exhaustive 3-volume study of a major Toronto newspaper), the authors found that situational factors specific to the newspaper under study accounted for most of the letters accepted for publication (see 338–76). 43. Murray Rubenstein, letter to the editor, NYT, March 9, 1972, 40. 44. Paul Seligman, letter to the editor, NYT, September 28, 1972, 46. Seligman’s slippery slope would reappear in the early 1980s, legitimized by academic criminologists under the guise of the “broken window thesis” (see chapter 5). 45. George Jochnowitz, letter to the editor, NYT, April 19, 1973, 42. 46. Ronald Gross, letter to the editor, NYT, March 28, 1972, 42.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 301

NOTES

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Carl R. Baldwin, letter to the editor, NYT, April 11, 1973, 46. Carol Morse Ginsberg, letter to the editor, NYT, April 15, 1973, sec. 10, pp. 4, 10. “1562 Youths Seized in ’72 for Their Graffiti Work,” NYT, January 14, 1973, 14. “Fight Against Subway Graffiti Progresses from Frying Pan to Fire,” NYT, January 26, 1973, 39. Christopher Jonas and Allan Weintraub, “Cost of Graffiti to the City of New York,” Bureau of the Budget, City of New York, March 14, 1973, 3–4. Since a strict accounting of costs was impossible, the report estimated the material and administrative costs as a percentage of labor costs. Document from the vertical files of the Municipal Reference and Research Center, New York City. Memorandum from Steven Isenberg to John Lindsay, March 23, 1973 (from the Lindsay Papers, Subject Files, 1966–1973, GA-GU, in a folder marked “Graffiti”). Murray Schumach, “At $10-Million, City Calls It a Losing Graffiti Fight,” NYT, March 28, 1973, 51. Alfred Miele, “Graffiti Makes City Scribble $10 Million Check,” Daily News, March 28, 1973, 28. Goldstein, “The Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade” and “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” 32–39. Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” 39. The continuity with the 1950s’ “J.D. style” was echoed earlier when Dr. Fredric Wertham’s views on writing were quoted a few pages before (“Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade,” 35): “It is part of the widespread vandalism, the mood to destroy, the brutalism that is everywhere.” Wertham was the author of Seduction of the Innocents (New York: Rinehart, 1954), a very influential book in the 1950s juvenile delinquency panic, which argued that horror comics were causing children to commit crimes. Lindsay quoted in Schumach, “At $10-Million, City Calls It a Losing Graffiti Fight,” 51 (emphasis added). Oldenburg quoted in Goldstein, “The Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade,” 35. J. Roger Guilfoyle, “The Handwriting Is . . . ,” Industrial Design 19 (May 1972): 29. Margaret Donaldson, letter to the editor, NYT, October 27, 1973, 30. Isenberg quoted in Schumach, “At $10-Million, City Calls It a Losing Graffiti Fight,” 51. Paul Korshin, letter to the editor, NYT, August 16, 1973, 34. John Canaday, “Bearden, Graffiti, and Life All Over the Place,” NYT, August 13, 1972, B18.

301

Austin Notes

302

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 302

NOTES

64. Mitzi Cunliffe, “The Writing on the Wall,” NYT, July 29, 1973, sec. 4, p. 13. 65. David L. Shirey, “Semi-Retired Graffiti Scrawlers Paint Mural at C.C.N.Y. 133,” NYT, December 8, 1972, 49. 66. Lindsay Van Gelder, “Graffiti 73,” New York Post, September 8, 1973, 5 (magazine section). 67. Schjeldahl, “Graffiti Goes Legit—But the ‘Show-Off Ebullience’ Remains,” NYT, September 16, 1973, B25. 68. S. K. Oberbeck, “Underground Artists,” Newsweek, October 1, 1973, 70. For a sturdy, hard-line approach, see “An Identity Thing,” Time, March 13, 1972, 44, and “Up Against the Wall,” Newsweek, May 8, 1972, 81. 69. P. R. Harper, letter to the editor, NYT, March 28, 1973, 46. 70. Blandinia B. Ijams, letter to the editor, NYT, April 3, 1973, 42. 71. Sheldon Pitterman, letter to the editor, NYT, April 5, 1973, 44; Kate M. Freese, letter to the editor, NYT, April 11, 1973, 46. 72. The report showed that the MTA was spending about $1 million per year less than the Board of Education at the time the report was released. However, when projected costs of reducing the writing to 10 percent surface coverage are considered, the MTA’s bill is $3 million more. See “Exhibit 1” in Jonas and Weintraub, “Cost of Graffiti to the City of New York..” 73. Long and Steinlieb quoted in Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 180. 74. For an analysis of Lindsay’s 1969 election and his situation in 1973, see McNickle, To Be Mayor, 216–42. 75. Memorandums dated April 19 and April 27, 1973, from Ted Dreyfus to Edward K. Hamilton. Notes from the meeting were handwritten on the April 27 memo. Found in the Lindsay Papers, Robert Heller, Assistant to the Mayor, Subject Files, Transportation, G-M, file marked “Transportation—MTA,” box A4630. 76. See Mailer’s interview with Lindsay in Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti, n.p. 77. Lindsay quoted in Alfred E. Clark, “Persistent Graffiti Anger Lindsay on Subway Tour,” NYT, October 11, 1973, 47. 78. Bird, “Noise, Graffiti, and Air Grate on Riders of City Subways,” NYT, October 11, 1973, 1, 90. 79. Carter B. Horsley, “Graffiti’s Foes United by Hope,” NYT, November 26, 1972, sec. 8, p. 1. 80. lsd om quoted in Bryan, “Ganja Graffiti,” 62. 81. Unnamed writer quoted in O’Brien, “Graffiti ’80,” 50–51. 82. Horsley, “Graffiti’s Foes United by Hope,” 1. 83. “In Queens, a ‘Graffiti Good-By Party,’ ” NYT, June 30, 1974, 15.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 303

NOTES

84. “Going to the Dogs” (editorial), NYT, August 5, 1974, 22. 85. Horsley, “Graffiti’s Foes United by Hope,” 1. 86. See Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), ch. 9. 87. Among political scientists, this framework would be related to “stakeholder theory” and refers to the ways that citizens affectively invest themselves in the social order through a shared system of property ownership (or at least the possibility and promise of property ownership). 88. Of course, there is a complex web of “stakes” involved in any individual’s attachment to the social order; the question of whether writers were actually renouncing their allegiance to the status quo system of property relations by writing their names on the walls does not answer the larger question of their stake in the social order as a whole. 89. Pitterman, letter to the editor, NYT, April 5, 1973, 44. 90. Ijams, letter to the editor, NYT, April 3, 1973, 42. 91. Ranzal, “Ronan Backs Lindsay Antigraffiti Plan, Including Cleanup Duty,” NYT, August 29, 1972, 66. 92. City Council majority leader Thomas Cuite quoted in “Antigraffiti Bill Is One of 4 Gaining Council Approval,” NYT, October 11, 1972, 47. 93. ali quoted in Michael T. Kaufman, “An Underground Graffitist Pleads from Hospital: Stop the Spraying,” NYT, October 18, 1973, 49. 94. ali quoted in Kaufman, ibid., 49.

4. REPAINTING THE TRAINS: THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF THE 1970s

1. 2.

Repairing and replacing the fences around the yards contributed to the MTA’s success a decade later. The Times did not mention the repainting plan during the time of its execution, an odd omission given the cost and magnitude of the undertaking and the Times’s interest in the issue. It is possible that the MTA sources that acted as links to the media had asked that the effort not be publicized, hoping to catch the writers off guard. The Times did, however, repeatedly mention the failure of the attempt in articles and follow-up columns during the next several years, a further sign that the Lindsay alliance had collapsed. See Robert E. Tomasson, “Graffiti Cleanups a ‘Lark’ for the Young,” NYT, April 21, 1974, sec. 8, p. 1.; Richard Haitch, “Follow-Up on the News: Graffiti Struggle,”

303

Austin Notes

304

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 304

NOTES

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

NYT, July 13, 1975, 25; “Follow-Up on the News: Subway Graffiti,” NYT, March 20, 1977, 45. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 210–11. Ibid., 343, 347–49. Moseley claims there was another, similar attempt to “clean” the cars in 1975, but I found no evidence of this attempt. However, he does note that the first “golden age” followed the first general repainting effort. Bill Moseley, “Graffiti,” Omni (February 1982), 26 (article from zephyr’s personal archives). See Castleman, Getting Up, 20–21, 31–35. pjay, “pjay: Raid Story,” FatCap Magazine (Oslo, Norway) (1996): n.p. The origins of some letter designs may date from a year or two before the MTA’s repainting. blade offers a list of originators in an interview in Quality of Life 1 (Hackettstown, N.J.) (n.d.): n.p. He himself invented the blockbuster lettering style in 1977. See the elaborate discussion of lettering philosophy and the communication of meaning by phase 2 in John Maizels, “Writer of the Storm” (interview with phase 2), Raw Vision 21 (Winter 1997–98): 47–48. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 357. Unsigned [phase 2], International Get-Hip Times (hereafter, IGTimes), vol. 10 (n.d.): n.p. phase 2 quoted in Maizels, “Writer of the Storm,” 44–48. phase 2, IGTimes 11 (n.d.): n.p. Castleman, Getting Up, 60; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 306. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 458. quik, “New York: The Mecca,” True Colorz 6 (Amsterdam) (1995): 5. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 457–58. Ibid., 438, 458–62. ale one, interviewed in Quality of Life 2 (n.d.): n.p. See the interview with james top and other members of the top crew in IGTimes 6 (1985): n.p. Also, author’s conversation with james top and hush, August 22, 1999, New York City. james top in james top and Freddie Mack, “The ‘top’ Story: The Revolution Within the Revolution,” Mass Appeal 5 (1999): 52–56. See Castleman, Getting Up, 29–31, 61–64; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 436–38, 460–62. iz the wiz, interviewed in While You Were Sleeping (Bethesda, Md.), no. 7 (1999): n.p.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 305

NOTES

24. IGTimes 11 (n.d.): n.p. (no attribution for this quote is cited in the article). 25. duster interviewed by tempt one, “duster UA Takes It Back to the Essentials,” Big Time 1.3 (1998): 24. 26. blade interviewed in Quality of Life 1 (n.d.): n.p. 27. quik, “New York: The Mecca,” 5. 28. cap interviewed by cope 2 in FatCap Magazine (Norway) (1997): n.p. 29. cope 2, interviewed in “Cope 2: ‘Keepin’ Shit Real in the Boogie Down,’ ” FatCap Magazine (1996): n.p. 30. Castleman, Getting Up, 112. 31. The same goes for most of the language and names that writers have invented; see Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 27. 32. See Kohl and Hinton, Golden Boy, ch. 1. 33. lee 163D! quoted in David Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 33. 34. ale one, interviewed in Flashbacks (New York City), no. 9 (1995): n.p. 35. comet interviewed by Rosemarie Maldonado in Flashbacks 8 (1994): 11. 36. lsd om quoted in Ivor Miller, “Piecing,” 28. 37. zephyr, interviewed by Timothy Treacy in Can Control (California), vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1994): n.p. stoney also recalls the multicolored tags of the earlier era (phone conversation with author, August 11, 1999). The interviews with writers from this period often mention tags that were written with tricolor Uniwide markers, which were created by writers. 38. blade quoted in Flashbacks 9 (1995): 8–9. 39. Edward Hudson, “Yunich Says the Transit Payroll Is Down and Will Fall Further,” NYT, April 20, 1975, 32. 40. Ibid., 32. 41. “Subway Graffiti Campaign Given Lower Priority,” NYT, August 7, 1975, 29. 42. Haitch, “Graffiti Struggle,” 25. 43. Hudson, “Yunich Says . . . ,” 32; Haitch, “Graffiti Struggle,” 25; “Subway Graffiti Campaign,” 29. 44. Hager, Hip-Hop, 17. Also, see the photos in Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 32. 45. Castleman, Getting Up, 85. 46. Ibid., 21, 84; Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 32; Chris Pape, “Graffiti Lit 101: The Black Book,” Stress 13 (1998): 14. 47. The Martin Wong Graffiti Art Collection at the Museum of the City of New York contains several piece books dating back to 1974. 48. These aspects of writers’ lives are partially revealed in the photographs of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant (Subway Art, 32–33).

305

Austin Notes

306

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 306

NOTES

49. Gus Dallas, “Critic-Cops Go Underground to Catch a Running Art Show,” Daily News, November 20, 1977, 10. 50. “Subway Graffiti Campaign,” 29; Gus Dallas, “Critic-Cops Go Underground,” 10. 51. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 253–55; Mailer, interviewing cay 161 and junior 161, in The Faith of Graffiti, n.p. 52. See, for instance, pjay, “Raid Story”; iz the wiz and fuzz one, “Raid Stories,” Flashbacks 9 (1995): 24; and comet in Maldonado interview, 11. 53. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 99. 54. Cooper and Chalfant have several photos of these taunts (see Subway Art, 27, 50, 89, 98–99, 101; the work mentioned is on 98). Also, see blade’s quotes in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 452–55. 55. Castleman, Getting Up, 46; Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 463. 56. See Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art. 57. “Follow-Up on the News: Subway Graffiti,” 45. 58. See, for instance, “Graffiti Removal,” NYT, May 28, 1976, B3; “Follow-Up on the News: Subway Graffiti,” 45; “Graffiti and Roaches Holding Their Own,” NYT, August 11, 1979, 23. 59. David Chidakel, “Fighting People’s Art in N.Y.C.,” Science for the People (November 1976): 19; “Fume Fear Halts Graffiti Work,” NYT, November 1, 1977, 64; Patrick W. Sullivan, “Anti-Graffiti Chemical Called Health Hazard,” New York Post, November 24, 1977. 60. Jim Dwyer, “Graffiti-Free Era Comes at a Cost,” New York Newsday, May 11, 1989, 6. 61. The condition of the subways after they were “washed” can be seen around the edges of some of the works photographed by Cooper and Chalfant in Subway Art. 62. lee quoted in O’Brien, “Graffiti ’80,” 53. 63. See Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 100. 64. Castleman (Getting Up, 61–64) reports that both lee and blade, each one a highly respected master, felt this way about throw-ups. Stewart’s quotes from coco 144 indicate the same concern (see Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 236–38). Cooper and Chalfant reported that competition for space between “piecers” and “bombers” was a major issue in the early 1980s (Subway Art, 6). 65. lee quoted in Miller, “Piecing,” 30. 66. See the Transit Police’s “Profile of a Common Offender,” reprinted in Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 203. 67. Castleman, Getting Up, 87–89.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 307

NOTES

5. THE STATE OF THE SUBWAYS: THE TRANSIT CRISIS, THE AESTHETICS OF FEAR, AND THE SECOND “WAR ON GRAFFITI”

1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Stan Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders: Why the MTA Doesn’t Work,” Village Voice, March 17, 1980, 25; Brian J. Cudahy, Under the Sidewalks of New York (Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Green, 1979), 117, 137–40. Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders,” 25; Cudahy, Under the Sidewalks, 117, 137–40. Steven R. Weisman, “Beame Asks M.T.A. to Cut Its Budget,” NYT, December 8, 1974, 28. Beame is cited in the article as saying that the city contributes 40 percent of the TA’s operating budget. It seems more likely that the amount of the city’s contribution fluctuates from year to year. See Theodore W. Kheel, “A Transit Balance Sheet,” NYT, March 17, 1974, sec. 4, p. 5; “City Transit Deficit Put at $119 Million in Last Half of ’73,” NYT, August 24, 1974, 29. The number of scheduled runs and the toll booth staff were reduced on certain lines during off-peak hours, but this did not create the kinds of cost reductions that the city needed. Ruth Fredericks, “Facts and Figures, 1979–1980,” report published by New York City Transit Authority (c. 1981), 20–21. Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders,” 26; David A. Andelman, “Subway Failures Last Year Called Worst in Decade,” NYT, January 31, 1980, B1; Fredericks, “Facts and Figures,” 20–21. To reinforce this budget cut, the Emergency Financial Control Board, one of the public authorities created to oversee New York City through the financial crisis, again asked the TA for a lower payment from the city. Cudahy, Under the Sidewalks, 138–39; Grace Lichtenstein, “New Funds Unlikely to Alter New York’s View on Subway,” NYT, May 8, 1978, 1; Ron Hollander, “Rush-Hour Roulette,” Soho Weekly News, March 12, 1980, 16–17; Fredericks, “Facts and Figures,” n.p. Andelman, “Subway Failures Last Year Called Worst in Decade,” B1. Brian Kates, Arthur Browne, and Bob Herbert, “Doomsday Express: All the Vital Signs Point to Death” (7-part series), Daily News, October 4, 1981, 3, 63. Most of the newspaper stories dealing with the subways during the period 1979–1983 demonstrate this “crisis” approach (see, for instance, Hollander, “Rush-Hour Roulette,” 16). Among the flood of newspaper articles documenting the subway’s deterioration during this period, see Richard Johnson, “More Derailments Feared from TA Safety Cutbacks,” New York Post, February 24, 1979, 3; Richard Edmonds, “Subway Breakdowns, Not Fare Hike, Forcing Riders to Flee: Panel,” Daily News, February 26, 1981, 37. Kates, Browne, and Herbert, “Doomsday Express” (October 4, 1981), 3, 63. Compare the statistics in this article with those in Marilyn Webb, “Paradise

307

Austin Notes

308

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 308

NOTES

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Postponed—Are the Subways Improving Fast Enough?” New York, November 17, 1986, 49. For the year from April 1983 to March 1984, the TA reported that approximately 19 percent of the trains contained cars with broken door panels (reported in Richard Sisk, “Outlining Sins of the Subway,” Daily News, November 15, 1984). In 1986 the average speed of the subway was reported to be 18 mph (“A Hardening of the Arteries,” Daily News, March 23, 1986, magazine section, 22). Kates, Browne, and Herbert, “Doomsday Express” (October 4, 1981), 61–63. David L. Gunn, “New York’s Transit Rebound,” Progressive Railroading (August 1989): 79. Lichtenstein, “New Funds Unlikely to Alter New York’s View on Subway,” 1; Josh Barbanel, “Governor Proposes a State-Financed Force to Rid the Subways of Habitual Criminals,” NYT, January 7, 1982, B5. David A. Andelman, “Subway Crimes Rising Sharply; Cutbacks Cited,” NYT, September 5, 1980, B1. “New York Will Spend More Money to Fight Rise in Subway Crime,” NYT, October 22, 1980, 1. Andelman, “Subway Crimes Rising Sharply,” B1; Ari L. Goldman, “Police Resume Night Patrols on Subway Trains Tonight,” NYT, April 19, 1982, B1; Frank Mazza, “Garelik Warns of Subway Crime Rise,” Daily News, February 16, 1977, 2. Vincent Cosgrove, Michael Daly, and Richard Edmonds, “Send Subway Shock Troops into War,” Daily News, March 20, 1979, 3; Richard Edmonds, “Subway Battle: More Troops Set,” Daily News, February 9, 1982, 5; Selwyn Raab, “New Drive on Subway Crime Set,” NYT, May 29, 1984, B9. Cosgrove, Daly, and Edmonds, “Send Subway Shock Troops into War,” 3; Edmonds, “Subway Battle,” 5; Raab, “New Drive on Subway Crime Set,” B9. Joseph B. Treaster, “Felonies in Subway Fall for First Time in 4 Years,” NYT, February 3, 1984, B3. Ibid., B3. Carl J. Pelleck, “TA Calls Its Underworld Safer Than Streets,” New York Post, February 18, 1977. The assertion that the subways were safer than the streets continued throughout the 1980s (see, for instance, “Subway Study: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself,” New York Newsday, August 11, 1988, 26). In 1988 a citizen’s subway watchdog group refuted this claim, showing that it was true only if the rush-hour crush of passengers were averaged throughout the day; aside from rush hour, the subways were not safer than the average New York City street. See Kirk Johnson, “Battling Subway Crime, Both Real and Perceived,” NYT, October 2, 1988, 38.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 309

NOTES

21. D’Amato quoted in Alton Slagle, “We’ll Make Transit Safe, Say Al & Ed,” Daily News, January 19, 1984. 22. Reported in “A Hardening of the Arteries,” Daily News, March 23, 1986, 21 (magazine section); also, see the chart on page 30 showing an incredible rate of increase in subway felonies between 1970 and 1982 as compared to the city overall. 23. For a listing and description of these groups in the mid-1980s, see “More Than Token Watchdogs,” Newsday, May 6, 1986, 3. The Straphangers’ Campaign was created as a part of the New York Public Interest Research Group. 24. Daniel D. Chall, “The Economic Costs of Subway Deterioration,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Quarterly Review (Spring 1981): 8–14. The report entered the mass-mediated public sphere through newspaper articles (e.g., Peter Kihss, “Cost of Subway Erosion Put at $165 Million a Year,” NYT, April 15, 1981, B1). 25. Edward Koch with William Rauch, Mayor: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984; pbk., New York: Warner Books, 1985), 62. 26. Arian, Goldberg, Mollenkopf, and Rogowsky, Changing New York City Politics, 22–23; Martin Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 176–78. 27. Koch, Mayor, 115, 200–203. 28. Leslie Maitland, “Replacement Voted for Undercarriages on 754 Subway Cars,” NYT, September 15, 1979, 1. 29. Leslie Maitland, “Subway Inspections Cut for Redecoration, Report Says,” NYT, June 27, 1979. 30. Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders,” 25. 31. Ibid.; Kates, Browne, and Herbert, “Doomsday Express” (October 4, 1981), 3, and October 7, 1981, 19; Ari L. Goldman, “MTA Report: Trains Up, but Riders Down” NYT, December 1, 1981, 1; Michael Goodwin, “Regan Cites Delay in Subway Repairs,” NYT, July 16, 1982, B4; Suzanne Daley, “Transit Authority Still Fights Problems Cited in 1981 Study,” NYT, May 27, 1985, 1; Suzanne Daley, “Transit System Fighting Flaws in 5-Year Plan,” NYT, May 28, 1985, 1. 32. Patrick W. Sullivan, “W. Side IRT Still Running Despite Peril of Derailment,” New York Post, November 15, 1977, 3; Frank Mazza, “He Cops Out on Mother,” Daily News, February 16, 1977, 2. 33. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance, 192–99; Beauregard, Voices of Decline, chs. 7 and 8. 34. Ironically, Beame had served as city comptroller before becoming mayor. 35. Mollenkopf, Phoenix in the Ashes, chs. 5 and 6. 36. Koch, Mayor, 67–68.

309

Austin Notes

310

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 310

NOTES

37. Lynn Langway and Susan Agrest, “Wonderful Town?” Newsweek, August 21, 1978, 74. 38. Marcia Kramer, “Selling New York Is Big Business, Too,” Daily News, January 30, 1981. 39. Most studies, however, showed that that enthusiasm was more properly located in New Yorkers’ pride in their own residential neighborhoods rather than in the city as a whole. 40. “New York Bounces Back,” Time, August 21, 1978, 20–23. 41. Robin Herman, “Vandals Take Psychological Toll,” NYT, May 21, 1971, 1. A similar line of thinking had occasionally appeared in letters to the editor and MTA announcements earlier, but did not form a coherent frame articulated to the general public until 1979. 42. Here I intentionally use the terminology of the sociology of social problems and moral panics. For a discussion of atrocity tales, see Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 63. 43. Herman, “Vandals Take Psychological Toll,” 1. 44. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “New York Is Lowest in Youth Employment,” NYT, August 2, 1977, 30. A U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey in June 1977, which compared eleven major U.S. cities, is the source. The survey placed the unemployment rate for white youth in this age group at 74 percent and at 86 percent for youth of color. 45. Herbert E. Meyer, “How Government Helped Ruin the South Bronx,” Fortune 92 (November 1975): 140. The statistic is an average for the years 1970–1975. 46. Koch, Mayor, ch. 9. 47. Ibid., 220–21. 48. Anne Campbell, The Girls in the Gang, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 33. The statistics are for the year 1980. 49. Ibid., 34. The dropout statistics were 73 percent for African Americans and 80 percent for Hispanics in 1983. 50. Herman, “Vandals Take Psychological Toll,” 1. My thinking on writings’ relationships to illegality, visual disruption, and the sanctioned social order have been deeply influenced by Susan Stewart’s excellent article on writing, “Ceci Tuera Cela: Graffiti as Crime and Art,” in John Fekete, ed., Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 161–80. 51. Nathan Glazer, “On Subway Graffiti in New York,” The Public Interest 54 (Winter 1979): 3–11.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 311

NOTES

52. Glazer, “On Subway Graffiti,” 3–11. 53. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic Monthly 249 (March 1982): 29–38. See also George L. Kelling, “Reclaiming the Subway,” NY: The City Journal 1.2 (Winter 1991): 17–28; Wesley G. Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods (New York: Free Press). 54. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Hall et al., eds., Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–38. 55. Richard Edmonds, “The City Subways: Crime Marches On,” Daily News, September 9, 1979, 37; E. J. Dionne, Jr., “Withdrawal of City Police from Subways Assailed,” NYT, December 31, 1979; Treaster, “Felonies in Subway Fall,” B3. Koch ended the first “war on subway crime” in December 1979, claiming that it had been expensive and ineffective. 56. Dennis Jay Kenney, Crime, Fear, and the New York City Subways: The Role of Citizen Action (New York: Praeger, 1987); Brooks, Subway City (chs. 9 and 10 in Brooks are particularly relevant to my argument). 57. Marion Oppehnheimer, Department of Sanitation, “Proposal for New York City Clean Streets Coalition,” December 1, 1981, 1–3. 58. Koch, Mayor, 67; Oppehnheimer, “Proposal” (1981), 1–3. 59. The role of folk devils in moral panics is explained in detail in Goode and BenYehuda, Moral Panics (see ch. 2 for an examination of Stanley Cohen’s formulation, which is among the founding texts on youth and the social construction of deviance). Angela McRobbie takes up the current state of moral panics in “The Moral Panic in the Age of the Postmodern Mass Media,” in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 198–219. 60. As I mentioned earlier, and unlike the first antigraffiti alliance, some business organizations also took a strong interest, although they remained in the background. 61. “Graffiti . . . the blight of New York City,” 2. The preface to this proposal claims that Frank Macchiarola, chancellor of the Board of Education, suggested in a letter to Mayor Koch in May 1980 that a citywide effort be initiated. I am not contesting this chain of events by suggesting that an important and causal link exists between the earlier City Planning Commission study and this proposal. Clearly Koch, who set the proposal in motion, had access to both documents and agreed with their viewpoints. 62. A TA official admitted this to Jack Stewart in a 1978 interview. See Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 236.

311

Austin Notes

312

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 312

NOTES

63. The study does mention experiments with laser technology as an alternative removal technique for use on public monuments and on subway trains. However, I have found no evidence that lasers were ever put to this use. An umbrella organization was to be housed in the New York City Department of General Services to oversee funding, purchase of materials, and act as a central information source as part of the proposal, but this is the only avenue of citywide coordination put forward. It is unclear what advantages might have been gained from an agency’s participation in such an umbrella organization; I found no references in later documents to indicate that any such organization in the Department of General Services was ever created. “Graffiti . . . the blight of New York City,” 7, 10. 64. What sort of action this might entail is never spelled out. “Graffiti . . . the blight of New York City,” 12. 65. According to web: “It would be nice to have another transit strike like in 1980, 3 or 4 day strike that gave room for a lot of writers to pull out some Dope stuff.” web interviewed by Alba Perilla in Flashbacks (New York City), no. 4 (n.d.): n.p. 66. “Suzy and Red vs. the Graffiti Painters” (editorial), NYT, September 16, 1981, 26. 67. This letter was written by two officials of the Transport Workers Union and cheered renewed antigraffiti efforts. Of the eleven letters mentioning subway writing that the Times published between 1979 and 1989, five of these were printed during 1979 and four more in 1980. 68. Charles Bigelow, letter to the editor, NYT, November 23, 1980, sec. 6, p. 174. 69. David C. Levy, letter to the editor, NYT, April 10, 1980, 26. 70. This covert support could be found in various news brief sections such as “The City” and “Day by Day”—sections containing short items related to the daily affairs of the national, state, and city government. These often contained mentions of recent arrests or the arrest statistics for some set period of time. 71. The relationship between “news,” the powerful, and the press is well documented. See, for instance, Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978); Peter Golding, Graham Murdock, and Philip Schlesinger, eds., Communicating Politics: Mass Communications and the Political Process (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986). 72. Caryl S. Stern and Robert W. Stock, “Graffiti: The Plague Years,” New York Times Magazine, October 19, 1980, 44–60. 73. Stern and Stock, “Graffiti,” 44. 74. A much more glaring example might have been made of the New York City Police Department. Hearings on racially motivated police crime in New York City

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 313

NOTES

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

were held several times during the 1980s. See the reference in “No Indictment in ‘Brutality’ Case,” NYT, November 8, 1983, B3. Stern and Stock, “Graffiti,” 44–60. Thomas Raftery and Don Gentile, “Subway Graffiti Artist Has Brush with the Law,” Daily News, April 19, 1981, sec. 4, p. 1. In the early 1980s, fines were typically rather small ($25 to $60), but increased over the course of the decade, reaching into the thousands of dollars by decade’s end. Kates, Herbert, and Browne, “Doomsday Express” (October 8, 1981), 44; “Subway Vandalism Brings 265 Arrests,” NYT, January 8, 1981, B3. “2 Get 15 Days in Jail for Subway Graffiti,” NYT, March 14, 1981, 28. “20 Are Sentenced to Graffiti Cleanup,” NYT, May 15, 1982, 31; James Harney and Paul Meskil, “Train Scrawlers Get Message,” Daily News, August 14, 1983, 51. Joseph P. Fried, “Drive on Subway Vandals Is Widened,” NYT, August 13, 1982, B3. Three-page report by “R. Schumacher” dated August 1982. The purpose and audience for this report is never made explicit and is unclear from the context, although it did not originate within the TA or the courts. It may be notes from a newspaper reporter passed on to the mayor’s office. Document from Mayoral Papers of Edward Koch (hereafter, Koch Papers), the files of Herbert Rickman, Special Assistant to the Mayor (NYC Municipal Archives, Surrogate’s Court Bldg., 31 Chambers Street, New York City). Memo (and attachments) dated April 17, 1981, from Bruce Ratter, commissioner, Department of Consumer Affairs, to Edward Koch. Of the twenty-eight stores with “easy access” to spray paint that responded to the survey, 64 percent indicated that shoplifting of markers and spray paint was not a special problem. Document from Koch Papers, files of Herbert Rickman, Special Assistant to the Mayor, Subject Files (NYC Municipal Archives). Letter and attached minutes from committee meetings of the Transportation Section of the New York Board of Trade. Letter dated April 21, 1982, from Terry Clark, section coordinator to Chris Ann Goddard, assistant to the deputy mayor. Document from Koch Papers, files of Herbert Rickman, Special Assistant to the Mayor, Subject Files (NYC Municipal Archives). The “positive” thrust of these campaigns was reported to be part of a paradigm shift in the way cities made public appeals to their citizens. Traditionally, such appeals were presented in terms of punishment for noncompliance; the goal of the new appeals was to “reduce service demands” and were based on courting consensus and city/neighborhood cooperation.

313

Austin Notes

314

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 314

NOTES

85. Clyde Harebrain, “New York Plans Graffiti Drive,” NYT, February 5, 1982, 1. Significantly, no mention was made of the mayor’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force in the announcement. 86. Leslie Bennett, “Celebrities Join Mayor in New Battle Against Graffiti Writers,” NYT, April 30, 1982, B1. 87. The posters, pamphlets, and other documents mentioned in this section were obtained from the Koch Papers, files of Herbert Rickman, Special Assistant to the Mayor, Subject Files (NYC Municipal Archives). 88. See the memo (and attachment) dated June 11, 1982, from Richard Woods (of the public relations firm Ruder, Finn & Roman) to Chris Goddard, assistant to the deputy mayor. The attachment is a status report on the antigraffiti campaign and lists contacts with four television stations, four radio stations, two newspapers, and fourteen television/radio talk shows that could be contacted. 89. The ad agency that was to provide the media contacts for interviews did not work on the campaign long before it withdrew its support, although it did provide news editorials and contacts to several radio and TV talk shows (see preceding note). The agency may have been primarily motivated by its desire for a favorable hearing with Koch for another (paying) client on an issue related to the associated antilitter campaign; when this hope evaporated, the company may have lost interest altogether. See the letter dated March 10, 1982, from Caroline Goldsmith, senior vice president (Ruder, Finn & Roman), to Ronny Menschel, executive administrator, City Hall. The letter proposes a meeting between Mayor Koch and the New York Council for Total Litter Control and Recycling, which was opposed to a bottle-recycling bill then under consideration. The meeting is framed within the larger context of Koch’s antilitter and antigraffiti initiatives, and was to discuss what the council “could do to support his goal” in the effort. 90. The first sign of trouble came in early June, when the campaign had not paid most of its service providers. See the letter dated June 3, 1982, from Harold Levine, chairman of the advertising firm Levine, Huntley, Schmidt, Plapler & Beaver, to William Butcher, chair of the Anti-Graffiti Task Force. Levine’s letter of September 8, 1982, to Deputy Mayor Karen Gerard, contains the offer to help keep the campaign moving. 91. Mollenkopf, Phoenix in the Ashes, 112–14. 92. Letter dated December 7, 1982, from Karen Gerard, deputy mayor, to William Butcher. 93. R. O’Sullivan, “We Care Summary,” June 16, 1983. Koch Papers (NYC Municipal Archives).

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 315

NOTES

94. See “Plan for Kick-Off Day: June 29, 1982,” which lists the media activities that publicly announced the formation of We Care, Inc. The background and history of this organization are covered in “We Care About New York, Inc., Community Activation Plan” (c. 1984), 2–7. We Care, Inc., “Report on Graffiti,” appeared on March 5, 1985. Documents from the Koch Papers, files of Herbert Rickman, Special Assistant to the Mayor, Subject Files (NYC Municipal Archives). 95. See Mathew P. Drennan, “The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy,” in Mollenkopf and Castells, eds., Dual City, 25–42; Fainstein and Fainstein, “Governing Regimes,” 184–86; Mollenkopf, Phoenix in the Ashes, ch. 3; Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis, 196–220.

6. WRITING HISTORIES

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

ale one, interviewed in Flashbacks (New York City), no. 9 (1995): 23. shame one, interviewed in Backjumps (Berlin), no. 14 (n.d.): n.p. poem, interviewed in Aerosoul (Switzerland), no. 1.5 (n.d.): n.p. quik, interviewed by Alba Perilla in “quik rtw: Out from 1972–1992,” Flashbacks 5 (1992): n.p. zephyr, interviewed in “Zephyr: Broader Than Broadway,” Undercover 5 (Spring 1995): 18. iz the wiz, interviewed in Stress 9 (October 1997): n.p. zephyr, “Dedicated to Dondi White, the Style Master General, 1961–1998,” Stress 16 (October 8, 1998): n.p. web lists 50 panel pieces, 10 “top to bottoms,” 5 whole cars, plus inside tagging during his career from 1979 to 1987. web, interviewed by Alba Perilla in Flashbacks 4 (n.d.): n.p. (On “Black seen” see note 36, this chapter.) Because of the wide variations among specific crews, I caution the reader against seeing the patterns I describe as rigid or homogeneous; they are more akin to “ideal types.” Castleman, Getting Up, 110. Hager’s description of the early group wanted, led by tracy 168, fits this pattern; wanted had as many as seventy members at one time (Hager, Hip-Hop, 21). freedom quoted in Ivor Miller, “Piecing,” 23. Castleman, Getting Up, 114; Hager, Hip-Hop, 22. Castleman, Getting Up, 109–14. Ibid. Also see Richard Lachmann’s excellent article, “Graffiti as Career and Ide-

315

Austin Notes

316

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 316

NOTES

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

ology,” American Journal of Sociology 94.2 (September 1988): 229–50, for another account of the career path of writers during this period. dez, interviewed by vulcan in IGTimes 12 (n.d.): n.p. zephyr, “Dedicated to Dondi White,” Stress 16 (October 8, 1998): n.p. iz the wiz, interviewed in Flashbacks 5 (1992): n.p. fuzz one, interviewed in Flashbacks 9 (1995): 21. Chris Pape [freedom] and ket, “Stress Presents: The Greatest Trains Ever!” Stress 19 (n.d.): 52–56. Castleman, Getting Up, 110–15; Hager, Hip-Hop, 59. See Castleman’s description of multicar works (Getting Up, 36–40) and the long interview with lee about the whole train that he helped to paint in 1977 (ibid., ch. 1). Also, see Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 467–72. For instance, most committed writers had gained sufficient control of spray paint as a medium to prevent the paint from dripping down the sides of the cars. phase 2 then began to paint enlarged representations of drips on his letters, using them as an iconic design device. This device was quickly adopted by others, and “drips” became part of the writers’ design repertoire. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 448. Stewart credits blade for this development. duster, interviewed by tempt one, “duster UA Takes It Back to the Essentials,” 24. vulcan, quoted in IGTimes 9 (1987): n.p. Stewart deals with these later developments in “Subway Graffiti,” ch. 13. revolt, interviewed in International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. zephyr, interviewed in “Zephyr: Broader Than Broadway,” Undercover 5 (Spring 1995): 18. See, for example, Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Mike Brake, The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subculture (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals (London: Hutchinson, 1975); Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Feminism and Youth Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). An examination of the photographs in Cooper and Chalfant’s Subway Art, which stretch across the 1970s and early 1980s, shows elements borrowed from, among other sources, TV programs, movies, album covers, video games, and comic books.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 317

NOTES

31. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 407; Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 18, 80 (this point is borne out repeatedly in their photos). 32. web, interviewed by Perilla in Flashbacks 4 (n.d.): n.p. 33. shame one, interviewed in Backjumps 14 (n.d.): n.p. 34. revolt, interviewed in International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. 35. tack and kaze interviewed in “Writers Corner: FBAction,” Stress 6 (1997): 80–81. 36. There are two famous New York City writers that wrote seen, usually differentiated among writers as “Black seen” (an African American) and “White seen” or seen ua (United Artists crew). Black seen was primarily known for his inside tagging, seen ua for his pieces and bombing on the outsides. 37. web, interviewed by ket in Stress 20 (1999): n.p. 38. Castleman, Getting Up, 114–15. 39. james top and other members of top crew interviewed in International Graffiti Times 6 (1985): n.p. 40. sharp, “sharp’s Tribute to Graffiti,” Flashbacks 5 (1992): n.p. 41. pjay interviewed in On the Run (Munich, Germany), no. 3 (July 1992): n.p. sak interviewed in Stress 18 (1999): 63–69. bom5 cites racial conflicts beginning to emerge on a small scale in the late 1970s and 1980s. His example is a shift toward racist attitudes in a very influential and controversial bomber from the early 1980s, after his contact with a motorcycle gang. bom 5, “The Bench: Racism in Writing,” Elementary (New York City), no. 2 (Spring 1997): 45. 42. spade 127, airborn, tack, and kaze interviwed in “Writers Corner: FBAction” Stress 6 (1997): 78–81. 43. See “Writers Corner: rin one of The Vamp Squad,” Stress 16 (1998): 76–81. 44. Castleman, Getting Up, 29 (see also, on 78, bama’s concern about the trouble toys cause other writers). 45. boe and min 1, interviewed by ket in Stress 4 (1996): 71. 46. Castleman, Getting Up, 111–12. 47. sak tells of a paint-taking by a more physically powerful (but less talented) enemy claiming territory in a yard (as with many writers’ rivalries, he refused to mention the writer’s name in print). There is ample evidence of the violence that one might experience. sak, interviewed in Stress 18 (1999): 63–69. 48. shame one, interviewed in Backjumps 14 (n.d.): n.p. In the same article, he recalls an encounter with a group of writers “known for takin’ other writers paint” and tells a story of how paint was taken from him and his crew in another encounter. 49. Castleman, Getting Up, 111.

317

Austin Notes

318

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 318

NOTES

50. zephyr, interviewed by Timothy Treacy in Can Control (California), vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1994): n.p. 51. iz the wiz notes these differences of opinion in the interview in Stress 9 (October 1997): n.p. 52. sharp, “sharp’s Tribute to Graffiti,” n.p. 53. See Virgina Caputo, “Anthropology’s Silent ‘Others’ ” in Youth Cultures: A CrossCultural Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1995), 19–42. 54. See Arvil Adams, Garth L. Mangum, and Stephen F. Seninger, “The Nature of Youth Unemployment,” 1–17, and Stephen F. Seninger, “Postwar Trends in Youth Unemployment,” 19–49, both in Adams and Mangum, eds., The Lingering Crisis of Youth Unemployment (Kalamazoo, Mich.: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1978); Norman Bowers, “Young and Marginal: An Overview of Youth Employment,” 4–18, and Morris J. Newman, “The Labor Market Experience of Black Youth, 1954–78,” 19–27, both in Monthly Labor Review 102.10 (October 1979); Robert D. Mare and Christopher Winship, “Changes in the Relative Labor Force Status of Black and White Youths: A Review of the Literature,” paper prepared for the National Commission for Employment Policy (January 1980). 55. Carter quoted in Jerome Cahill, “The Urban Time Bomb: Youths Without Jobs,” Daily News, October 6, 1977, 61. A subsequent federal report on national youth unemployment issued in 1980 questioned the validity of the statistics that the 1977 “problem” was based upon, arguing that overall youth unemployment was much higher, and the racial gap much wider. See Philip Shabecoff, “U.S. Study Finds Big Jobless Rate in Youth Ranks,” NYT, February 29, 1980, A1. 56. Robin Herman, “Vandals Take Psychological Toll,” NYT, May 21, 1979, 1. 57. Bienstock quoted in Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “New York Is Lowest in Youth Employment,” NYT, August 2, 1977, 30. Also, see Trude W. Lash and Heidi Sigal, State of the Child: New York City (New York: Foundation for Child Development, 1976). 58. Bienstock quoted in Cahill, “The Urban Time Bomb,” 61. 59. Bienstock quoted in Hunter-Gault, “New York Is Lowest in Youth Employment,” 30. 60. zephyr, interviewed by Treacy in Can Control 3.2 (Summer 1994): n.p. 61. wane, interviewed in On the Run 2 (May 1991): 9. 62. Castleman, Getting Up, 60. 63. lee quoted in O’Brien, “Graffiti ’80,” 52.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 319

NOTES

64. quik, interviewed in International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. 65. sak, interviewed in Stress 18 (1999): 63–69; Castleman, Getting Up, 71. Also, see bama’s quote in Castleman, Getting Up, 51; and Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 458. The photographic evidence from the period is undeniable on this account. One might argue that the tags, throw-ups, and cross-outs are ugly. One might also argue that the MTA was not concerned with beauty in any case and often smeared the best works in an effort to “clean” the subways. But many of the pieces are without doubt a more beautiful contribution to urban aesthetics than the subway cars alone. 66. zephyr, “Underground Expression,” letter to the editor, Village Voice, November 26–December 2, 1980 (from zephyr’s personal archives). 67. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 430. 68. See Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 67–71. 69. See John Fiske’s discussion of coding and audiences in Introduction to Communication Studies (New York: Routledge, 1988), ch. 4, and daze’s quote about “wildstyle” (“this was for writers, not for the public”) in Miller, “Piecing,” 23. 70. My use of Jackson Pollock as the example here was not chosen at random. See Richard Goldstein, “New York (Old) School,” Village Voice, November 17, 1998, 159, in which Goldstein refers to case 2 as “one of Pollock’s unacknowledged heirs. . . . When it comes to the strategies of action painting—not to mention the persona of the American artist as a self-creating individual—the real carriers of Pollock’s legacy are the hiphop legions of graffiti.” 71. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 416. 72. Castleman, Getting Up, 40–43; Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 91, and the photos on 94–97. 73. Cooper and Chalfant, Subway Art, 91. 74. Stewart’s description of the two audiences and the dialogue between them can be found scattered throughout “Subway Graffiti,” esp. 416–44. 75. amrl, interviewed in International Graffiti Times 2 (February 1984): n.p. 76. fred, quoted in Bill Moseley, “Graffiti,” Omni (February 1982): 115. 77. John Maizels, “Writer of the Storm” (interview with phase 2), Raw Vision 21 (Winter 1997–98): 44–48. 78. Author’s conversation with bama, Brooklyn, New York, June 17, 1999. 79. Rickey Powell, “Celebrated Outlaws,” The Source 50 (November 1993): 20; Steven Hager, “Subways Are for Writing” (1982?; original source unknown); Johnathan Dobkin, “Talking with Zephyr,” Brooklyn Paper, February 6, 1980, 8 (last two documents from zephyr’s personal archives).

319

Austin Notes

320

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 320

NOTES

80. Richard Goldstein, “In Praise of Graffiti: The Fire Down Below,” Village Voice, December 24, 1980, 58. Also see Keith Haring’s interview in Peter Belsito, Notes from the Pop Underground (Berkeley: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1985), 101. 81. On the Unique Clothing Warehouse’s commercial murals that fred arranged, see Katherine Schaffer, “ ‘Graffitist’ [sic] Art Judged by More Than Deface Value,” Daily News, May 14, 1979, K1. 82. Marilyn Mizrahi’s “Want to See Your Name in Lights?” Artworkers News 11.1 (September 1981): 11, provides a good overview of the early gallery action for writers. Also, see Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff, Spraycan Art, 7. 83. Quote from zephyr’s “Graffiti Studio 1980,” While You Were Sleeping (Bethesda, Md.), no. 6 (c. 1998?): 28–31, the best source on this group. Also, see Dan Coleman, “Aerosol Evolution,” N.Y.C. Metro 1.5 (November 1987): 23; and futura 2000 as quoted in Suzi Gablik, “Report from New York: The Graffiti Question,” Art in America 70 (October 1982): 36. zephyr and Henry Chalfant say that the work produced in Esses’s workshop has never been shown in New York City (author’s phone conversation with Henry Chalfant, April 27, 1996), and I can find no written records to indicate otherwise. Where is this group of paintings? I would hope they might be publicly exhibited somewhere, during the writers’ lifetimes. For revolt’s cover photo, see Soho Weekly News, March 12, 1980. 84. Allan Schwartzman, Street Art (Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985). The lack of attention to this crossover factor is yet another way in which writers’ contributions to contemporary culture have been ignored. For an examination of the “art boom” in the early 1980s, see Liza Kirwin, “The Rise and Demise of a Baby-Boom Bohemia: The East Village Art Scene in the Popular Press, 1982– 1986.” Paper delivered at the American Studies Association’s conference, November 2, 1996. 85. Atlanta and Alexander, “Wild Style: Graffiti Painting,” ZG 2 (1981), reprinted in Angela McRobbie, ed., Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music (London: Macmillan, 1989), 156–68. 86. crash, interviewed by C. Chaluisan in “crash: Looking Back Towards Today,” Flashbacks 4 (n.d.): n.p.; also, see futura 2000 as quoted in Gablik, “Report from New York,” 36. Fashion Moda was itself part of a larger movement to provide an alternative to the “alternative art spaces” that had begun to appear earlier in New York City and had since calcified into an art world niche. See “Enter the Anti Space” (1980; original source unknown), and Carey Lovelace, “S. Bronx Art: There Goes the Neighborhood,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1984 (both articles from zephyr’s personal archives).

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 321

NOTES

87. See pink’s comments on her career as a writer and in the galleries in her interviews, “Pink: A Legend for All Ladies,” Stress 4 (1996): 59–62, and in Ellen Mediati, “Hot Pink,” Siren 2 (1997): 20–23. In a 1981 article in Artworker News, there is mention of pink’s forming a female crew, lota (Ladies of the Arts), but this crew is not mentioned in her later interviews (Mizrahi, “Want to See Your Name in Lights?” 12). 88. Elizabeth Hess, “Take the A Train,” Village Voice, November 12–18, 1980 (article from zephyr’s personal archives). The Metropolitan’s purchase appears to have been controversial among the city’s art world elite. For instance, John Engstrom reported that “one sworn enemy [of writing], MOMA junior council co-chairperson Kathleen Westin, recently declared that graffiti writers ‘ought to be shot at dawn’ ” (Engstrom, “Outlaw Artists of the Night,” Art Express 2.1 [1982]: 36). 89. Goldstein, “In Praise of Graffiti,” 55–58 (Henry Chalfant’s photos are on 57). 90. Richard Goldstein, “Fit to Buff,” Village Voice, October 7–13, 1981, 32, and “Reflections on the Great White Fleet,” Village Voice, December 9–15, 1981 (both articles from zephyr’s personal archives). 91. See Haring interview in Belsito, Notes from the Pop Underground, 102. 92. Mizrahi, “Want to See Your Name in Lights?” 11; Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick, “Report from the East Village: Slouching Toward Avenue D,” Art in America 72 (Summer 1984): 136–38. 93. Their first exhibition was held at the Stuart Neill Gallery, before relocating. 94. Anna Quindlen, “About New York: The M.T.A.’s Poison Becomes a Gallery’s Art,” NYT, February 6, 1982, 27; Mel Neulander interviewed in Gablik, “Report from New York,” 36–37. See also Suzi Gablik’s brief chronology of the rise of “graffiti art” in the early 1980s in “Graffiti in Well-Lighted Rooms” (a revision of the earlier article), Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 103–106. 95. Flood quoted in Elizabeth Hess, “Graffiti R.I.P.,” Village Voice, December 22, 1987, 37. 96. For examples of shows in other U.S. cities, see Julia Keller, “Graffiti: Art or Crime,” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, February 2, 1984, sec. D, p. 1, and Aleta Watson, “With Graffiti, Transit Bus May Travel,” San Jose (California) Mercury, February 24, 1982 (articles from zephyr’s personal archives). 97. Author’s conversation with Dolores Neumann in Manhattan, August 29, 1991; Grace Glueck, “On Canvas, Yes, but Still Eyesores,” NYT, December 25, 1983, B22; Carol Diehl, “Sidney Janis Goes Graffiti and Crash, Daze and A-1 Go to Switzerland,” Art and Antiques 1 (September 1984): 31.

321

Austin Notes

322

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 322

NOTES

98. “daze (N.Y.C.),” Backjumps 6 (1996): n.p. The event took place in September 1981 (program notes on the performance from zephyr’s personal archives). 99. For a review, see Richard Goldstein, “The Future of Graffiti,” Village Voice, December 13, 1983, 56. 100. Lachmann, “Graffiti as Career,” 246–47; Glueck, “On Canvas, Yes, but . . . ,” 22. 101. Robinson and McCormick, “Report from the East Village,” 161; author’s phone conversation with Henry Chalfant, April 27, 1996. 102. These are, of course, too numerous to list. The following have been among the most important in my thinking: Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981) and Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2d ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Corinne Robins, The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968–1981 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); the work of Hans Haacke and the essays in the exhibition catalogue Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in Limited Inc. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 103. Calvin Thomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Holt, 1996), 179–86. 104. phase 2, quoted in Maizels, “Writer of the Storm,” 48. 105. Unidentified writer quoted in Lachmann, “Graffiti as Career,” 241. 106. Becker deals with these issues in Art Worlds, chs. 1, 2, and 5. 107. Nuelander, quoted in Engstrom, “Outlaw Artists,” 36. Also see Lachmann, “Graffiti as Career,” 229–50, for a discussion of clashes between these art worlds. 108. duster, interviewed by tempt one, “duster ua Takes It Back to the Essentials,” 24. 109. quik, interviewed by Perilla in “quik rtw: Out from 1972–1992,” Flashbacks 5 (1992): n.p. 110. Even Richard Goldstein, who may be the most perceptive critic of writing in New York City, could not avoid putting Haring and Basquiat in the tub with the writers. See Goldstein, “In Praise of Graffiti,” 58. 111. Oddly enough, Rene Ricard, whose article in Artforum is hardly kind to writers, seems to be calling for an “other tradition” context: “Perhaps it is the critic’s job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated it (where is Taki) and to bring them to public attention.” But nothing of this sort occurred. Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child,” Artforum 20 (December 1981): 35. See also the long screed against “art” in Schmidlapp and phase 2, Style, 97.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 323

NOTES

112. See the discussion by writers in the gallery scene in International Graffiti Times 2 (February 1984): n.p. 113. Schwartzman, Street Art, 8. For the appropriation of writing and “graffiti” by commercial designers, see Claudia Hart, “The Annals of Crime: Hallowed Be Thy Name,” Industrial Design 31.2 (March-April 1984): 50–53; Jee Kim, “Don’t Call It a Comeback: It’s Just Corporate America Biting from Graffiti,” Stress 13 (1998): 64–68. 114. See the quotes by designers Whittall and Javits in France-Michele Adler, “Graffiti as Art,” New York Post, September 14, 1983, 47, and the photographs of supermodel Christie Brinkley and the mention of “graffiti-inspired spring fashions” in the Post for January 30, 1984 (documents from zephyr’s personal archives). 115. Quoted in Quindlen, “About New York,” 27. 116. To the reader looking for a concise summary of the gallery/writing encounter, I recommend Elizabeth Hess’s “Graffiti R.I.P.,” which contains an excellent and extended discussion of these questions in context. 117. Ricard, “The Radiant Child,” 40 (emphasis added). 118. For examples of writing being called “folk art,” see Whitney Museum curator Barbara Haskell’s quote in Mizrahi, “Want to See Your Name in Lights?” 10; David Patrick Stearns, “Graffiti: From Low Life to High Art,” USA Today, June 2, 1983, 6D; Edith Schloss, review of the fabulous five’s exhibition at Rome’s Galleria Medusa, International Herald Tribune, December 16, 1979 (last two documents from zephyr’s personal archives). 119. futura quoted in Michael Small, “Arts,” People, August 22, 1983, 52. Small’s articles in both People and American Arts demonstrate the qualities I am describing here. See Michael Small, “Graffiti Hits the Galleries,” American Arts (November 1983): 28–29. 120. Quindlen, “About New York,” 27; Mel Neulander in Gablik, “Report from New York,” 37; Janis in Diehl, “Sidney Janis Goes Graffiti,” 33; Cynthia Nadelman, “ ‘Graffiti is a thing that’s kind of hard to explain,’ ” Artnews 81 (October 1982): 76–78; Hart, “Annals of Crime,” 52; “School for Graffiti: Urban Artists Mop Up,” New York Post, March 13, 1982, 27. 121. Quindlen, “About New York,” 27; Mel Neulander in Gablik, “Report from New York,” 37 (see also 33–35); Janis in Diehl, “Sidney Janis Goes Graffiti,” 31–33; Hart, “Annals of Crime,” 51–53; Yaki Kornblitt, interviewed in “Graffiti Artists in the Netherlands: An Interview with Amsterdam Dealer Yaki Kornblitt,” Flash Art (March 1984): 116; William Greenfield, “New York Spraycan School,” Print 36 (January-February 1982): 36; Engstrom, “Outlaw Artists,” 36–39. Mizrahi’s “Want to See Your Name in Lights?” is a rare exception.

323

Austin Notes

324

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 324

NOTES

122. Greenfield, “New York Spraycan School,” 34; also, see Mizrahi, “Want to See Your Name in Lights?” 11. 123. iz the wiz quoted in Quindlen, “About New York,” 27. 124. crash, interviewed by C. Chaluisan in “crash,” Flashbacks 4 (n.d.): n.p. He reaffirms this opinion in crash, “Tales from the Underground, part 3,” Backjumps 12 (May-June 1997): n.p. 125. Gablik, “Report from New York,” 33–39. 126. Glueck, “On Canvas, Yes, but . . . ,” 22. Glueck seemed even more outraged that “graffiti art” was being shown at the Janis Gallery. 127. Jim Dwyer, “Guerrilla Artist,” New York Newsday, September 20, 1987, 15. The MTA did not deny the value of art work per se, but its selection of works for the subways, initiated in late 1989 in some of the rehabilitated stations, recapitulates the themes of easily identifiable “order.” See “Transit Agency Creates Art Havens in Subways,” NYT, November 6, 1989, B3. 128. See zephyr’s comments on this interpretation in his interview by Tommy Tee in “Upper West Side: The Gates of the Ghetto,” FatCap Magazine (Oslo, Norway) (1997): n.p. 129. See “Graffiti Is His Biz,” Daily News, April 5, 1977 (document from zephyr’s personal archives). 130. The “Post-Graffiti/Fine Art” exhibition at the Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington, D.C., June 18–August 23, 1991, is one instance of this renewed interest. See also Elizabeth Hess’s review of the “Graffiti” exhibition at the Klarfeld Perry Gallery in New York City, “Pillow to Post (Graffiti),” Village Voice, November 17, 1992, 109. 131. phase 2, in germ pfb and phase 2, “In Full Effect: Hip Hop Please Stop,” Graphotism (England), no. 11 (Summer 1998): 68–71. 132. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 176, 226. 133. Afrika Bambaataa, interviewed by Jens Peter de Pedro and TBL in “The Godfather of Hip Hop,” Underground Production (Sweden), no. 11 (1997): 30. 134. Hager, Hip-Hop, 32. 135. germ pfb and phase 2, “In Full Effect,” 68–71. 136. revolt and quik, interviewed in International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. 137. phase 2, “phase 2: The Legend Speaks Out,” Graphotism 7 (1995): n.p. 138. This overall hip-hop formation is the main subject of Hager’s work. 139. zephyr, “Dedicated to Dondi White,” Stress 16 (October 8, 1998), n.p.; Powell, “Celebrated Outlaws,” 22. 140. Jeremy Relph, “futura 2000,” Stress 15 (1998): 48.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 325

NOTES

141. Powell, “Celebrated Outlaws,” 19. 142. Chris Pape, “Which Side of the Tracks: haze,” Stress 10 (1997): 56. 143. See interviews in On the Run 3 (July 1992): n.p. 144. ven, interviewed in Can Control 1.1 (1990): n.p. 145. cope 2, interviewed in “Cope 2: ‘Keepin’ Shit Real in the Boogie Down,’ ” FatCap Magazine (1996): n.p. 146. Jens Peter de Pedro and tbl, “The Godfather of Hip Hop,” 30. 147. phase 2, quoted in germ pfb and phase 2, “In Full Effect,” 68–71. 148. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Cleveland State University Black Studies Program organized a conference, “Hip-Hop: A Cultural Expression” in Cleveland during September 1999 that once again drew out these connections. The conference was commendable in successfully bringing together many of the various art forms’ founders and key historical players.

7. RETAKING THE TRAINS

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

“Subway Car Interiors to Be Painted,” NYT, July 21, 1980, B3; “Expunging Graffiti, and More” (editorial), NYT, July 30, 1980, A20. Ernest Tollerson, “Says TA’s Painting a Losing Battle,” Daily News, September 22, 1980, 11. Ronald Smothers, “Koch Calls for Dogs in Fight on Graffiti,” NYT, August 27, 1980, B3. The Times’s editorial staff had carefully suggested that dogs be considered in an editorial a month before, but also noted their possible drawbacks (see “Expunging Graffiti, and More,” NYT, July 30, 1980). Ari L. Goldman, “Dogs to Patrol Subway Yards,” NYT, September 15, 1981, 1; “Suzy and Red vs. the Graffiti Painters,” NYT, September 16, 1981, A26; Brian Kates, Bob Herbert, and Arthur Browne, “Doomsday Express—Vandals: Hound ’em Down!” Daily News, October 8, 1981, 8. These costs would be covered under the TA’s new $6.2 billion Five Year Capital Improvement Program, which had passed the state legislature during the spring of 1981 (to be discussed later in this chapter). “Guard Dogs Cut Subway Graffiti,” NYT, October 20, 1981, B3; David W. Dunlap, “ ‘Great White Fleet’ of the City Subway No Longer Unscathed,” NYT, December 2, 1981, B1; Ari L. Goldman, “City to Use Pits of Barbed Wire in Graffiti War,” NYT, December 15, 1981, B1. The “Great White Fleet” was later expanded to include the 42nd Street Shuttle line as well. See Richard Edmonds, “TA Puts 42d St. Shuttle on White Track,” Daily News, Feburary 8, 1982.

325

Austin Notes

326

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 326

NOTES

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Dunlap, “ ‘Great White Fleet’ of the City Subway No Longer Unscathed,” 3; Goldman, “City to Use Pits of Barbed Wire in White Fleet.” Ari L. Goldman, “City Is Losing Another Battle in Graffiti War,” NYT, April 8, 1983, B1. cav, interviewed in Quality of Life 3 (Hackettstown, N.J.) (n.d.): n.p.; cope 2 recalls painting the white trains in 1983 (cope 2, interviewed in Flashbacks, no. 7 [1994]: 21). Michael Shain and Joanne Wasserman, “Carol Calls That Bright White Paint Job a Dim Idea,” New York Post, October 22, 1982; “Bellamy Takes Pot Shot at IRT ‘White Elephants,’ ” (newspaper source unknown; both articles from zephyr’s personal archives). “Subway Cloak and Dagger?” NYT, March 26, 1983, 26. See Joyce Purnick, “Koch, in State of the City Speech, Promises More Police for Subway,” NYT, January 31, 1985, 1 (for the text of Koch’s “rosy” State of the City speech, see B4). See Mollenkopf, Phoenix in the Ashes, ch. 3. Rick Hampson, “City’s Chronic Teen-age Jobless Called a Lost Generation by Labor Officials,” Staten Island Advance, August 1, 1983. Roger Waldinger and Thomas Bailey, “The Youth Employment Problem in the World City,” Social Policy 16 (Summer 1985): 55–58; Michel Marriott, “More Jobs, but Not Careers, for Youth,” NYT, March 19, 1988, 29. Steven Marcus, “Ed: Teens Should Give a Year to Uncle Sam,” New York Post, March 9, 1983; David Medina, “Koch Drafts a Plan,” Daily News, March 9, 1983; Ricki Fulman, “Subways Are for Sweeping,” Daily News, July 3, 1986, M3. Richard Levine, “Fewer New York Teen-Agers Have Their First Job,” NYT, April 1, 1990, 1; Paul La Rosa, “Teens Get Kid Stuff, State Says,” Daily News, April 13, 1990, MJ-1. There has never been a public announcement that the Housing Authority’s or the public school’s buildings were “graffiti-free,” for instance, nor was there much news reporting on these locations for the “problem.” Mollenkopf argues that infrastructural renewal (at public expense) was one of the primary political goals for real estate interests and their corporate allies during the 1980s, hoping thereby to promote new investment. These political actors were important in Koch’s political coalition. See Mollenkopf, Phoenix in the Ashes, ch. 3, with particular attention to 63–65. Also, see the Times editorial in support of this agenda: “The Next New York’s Underpinnings,” NYT, August 28, 1985, 22. The subway’s renewal would require an enormous public expenditure, costing

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 327

NOTES

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

over $15 billion during the 1980s, with an estimated $24 billion more needed to complete the task after 1990. Richard Levine, “Huge Rebuilding Effort Awaits Kiley’s Successor,” NYT, November 27, 1990, B7. The actual amount proposed in the MTA’s overall twenty-year plan was $37 billion, but this included $13 billion in new projects such as new subway lines and tunnels. In 1991 the MTA asked for $11.5 billion to be spent during the following first five years. Calvin Sims, “Ending 10 Years of Rebuilding, MTA Wants 5 More,” NYT, August 26, 1991, B1. The Five-Year Capital Improvement Program, passed in 1981, provided the funds for the extended fencing program. Michael Oreskes, “Cuomo Asks Study of MTA in a Move for More Control,” NYT, January 5, 1983, 1; Josh Barbanel, “Cuomo’s View of the MTA,” NYT, September 1, 1983, B9; Edward A. Gargan, “Cuomo Thinks Better of Trying to Control MTA,” NYT, September 4, 1983, sec. 4, p. 7. Susan Chira, “Board on Safety in Public Transit Voted in Albany,” NYT, June 1, 1983, B3; Michael Oreskes, “Leaders in Albany Agree to Institute Overseer of MTA,” NYT, June 27, 1983, 1. Ari L. Goldman, “Simpson Quits Transit Post, Citing ‘Intractable’ Problems,” NYT, August 17, 1983, 1; Ari L. Goldman, “The City’s Subway Chief Decides to Take a Walk,” NYT, August 21, 1983, sec. 4, p. 6. For examples of the criticisms of the subway system and its management at the time, see Ari L. Goldman, “Ailing Workers’ Role at Transit Authority Faulted by Auditors,” NYT, March 27, 1983, 48; “Regan Cites Waste in Transit Unit,” NYT, July 1, 1983, B3; Ari L. Goldman, “New Subway Questions,” NYT, August 15, 1983, B3. Ari L. Goldman, “Ravitch Leaving MTA to Return to Private Sector,” NYT, August 30, 1983, 1. Ari L. Goldman, “Simpson Quits Transit Post, Citing ‘Intractable’ Problems”; Goldman, “The City’s Subway Chief Decides to Take a Walk”; Goldman, “Ravitch Leaving MTA to Return to Private Sector”; Edward A. Gargan, “Cuomo Thinks Better of Trying to Control MTA”; Sam Roberts, “Ravitch Era: Debate and Innovation,” NYT, August 30, 1983, B4; “The Transit Burden Passes,” NYT, August 18, 1983, 26. Edward A. Gargan, “Ex-Head of Boston Transit Agency Picked by Cuomo to Lead MTA,” NYT, October 6, 1983, 1; Fox Butterfield, “Tough Transit Manager,” NYT, October 6, 1983, B6. Edward A. Gargan, “Kiley Thinks MTA Needs $10 Billion in New Rebuilding,” NYT, October 18, 1983, 1. Edward A. Gargan, “2 Troubled Years on Subway Seen by MTA Nominee,” NYT, October 10, 1983, 1.

327

Austin Notes

328

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 328

NOTES

30. Ari L. Goldman, “A Host of Problems Await Robert Kiley at the MTA,” NYT, October 7, 1983, B1; Suzanne Daley, “Report Criticizes Transit Authority on Productivity,” NYT, December 25, 1983, 36; “Derailment on IRT,” NYT, December 27, 1983, B4. 31. Gunn quoted in Edward A. Gargan, “Wanted: An Overlord for the Underground,” NYT, January 1, 1984, sec. 4, p. 7. 32. Gunn quoted in Suzanne Daley, “Kiley Appoints a Philadelphian to Transit Post,” NYT, January 12, 1984, 1. 33. Suzanne Daley, “Koch and Kiley: Honeymoon Is Over,” NYT, April 6, 1984, B3; Suzanne Daley, “Personnel Shift to Delay Parts of Transit Plan,” NYT, April 20, 1984, B1; Suzanne Daley, “Transit Authority Plans Major Spending Shift,” NYT, November 27, 1984, 1. For Kiley’s early analysis of the TA’s management structure, see Edward A. Gargan, “Kiley Thinks MTA Needs $10 Billion in New Rebuilding” and “2 Troubled Years on Subway Seen by MTA Nominee.” Gunn’s early concerns about the executive’s lack of “control” and critique of current management were made public in Gargan, “Wanted: An Overlord for the Underground.” The first rounds of the ensuing struggle can be found in Suzanne Daley, “Kiley Urges Hiring Managers Without Civil Service,” NYT, March 27, 1984, B4; Suzanne Daley, “Gunn Needs Some Links for His Chain of Command,” May 6, 1984, sec. 4, p. 6; Edward A. Gargan, “Transit Union Head Says Labor Relations Have Deteriorated,” NYT, May 7, 1984, B2; Suzanne Daley, “Transit Unit to Hire 700 Supervisors,” NYT, May 17, 1984, B9; Josh Barbanel, “MTA Is Urged to Seek Talks to Change Managers’ Status,” NYT, June 2, 1984, 10; letter to the editor signed John E. Lawe, President, Local 100 Transport Workers’ Union, NYT, August 25, 1984, 22; “Mayor Is Critical of Transit Unions,” NYT, October 2, 1984, B3; Suzanne Daley, “MTA and Union Hold Talks on Supervisors,” NYT, October 26, 1984, B4; Suzanne Daley, “MTA and Union Reach Repair Pact,” NYT, October 30, 1984, B1; Suzanne Daley, “After a Year of Guiding Transit, Kiley Is a Little Off Schedule,” NYT, December 9, 1984, sec. 4, p. 6; Jeffrey Schmalz, “Transit Authority Wins More Leeway in Hiring of 1,189,” NYT, January 9, 1985, 1; Suzanne Daley, “More Transit Supervisors to Join Management Ranks,” NYT, January 31, 1985, B1; Larry Rohter, “MTA Seeks Modifications in Work Rules,” NYT, April 8, 1985, B1. 34. See, for instance, Ralph Blumenthal, “New Rail Welds Found Cracked in the Subways,” NYT, January 2, 1984, B27; Suzanne Daley, “State Finds Short Workdays at Subway Shops,” NYT, January 17, 1984, 1; Josh Barbanel, “MTA Inspector Sees Peril in Bad Repairs for New Cars,” NYT, February 1, 1984, B3; “MTA Gets a Tip on Saving Millions,” NYT, February 13, 1984, B2; “U.S. to Inspect

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 329

NOTES

City Subway Rails,” NYT, March 2, 1984, B4; Suzanne Daley, “U.S. Report on Subways Cites Flaws,” NYT, June 12, 1984, B1; Suzanne Daley, “State Faults Conductors Sent to Subway Stations,” NYT, June 19, 1984, B3; Joseph P. Fried, “Study Assails Transit Purchasing,” NYT, June 28, 1984, sec. 4, p. 27; “Study Faults MTA on Shops,” NYT, July 26, 1984, B3; M. A. Farber, “Greater Woes Lie Ahead for City’s Transit Riders,” NYT, July 30, 1984, 1; M. A. Farber, “Inefficient Ways of the Past Still Hamper Transit System,” NYT, July 31, 1984, 1; M. A. Farber, “Transit System Is Facing a Troubled Future,” NYT, August 1, 1984, 1; “The Dark at the Tunnel’s End,” NYT, August 5, 1984, sec. 4, p. 20; Suzanne Daley, “Lax Repairs Cited in Subway Blazes,” NYT, August 14, 1984, 1; Suzanne Daley, “MTA Refuses to Give Notes to Inspector General,” NYT, September 22, 1984, 26; Philip Shenson, “Donovan Submits a Not-Guilty Plea to Bronx Charges,” NYT, October 3, 1984, 1; Suzanne Daley, “Transit Authority Proposes Budget with 90-cent Fare,” NYT, November 13, 1984, 1; Suzanne Daley, “Federal Officials Cite Fire Hazards and Track Problems in Subways,” NYT, December 18, 1984, B3; Suzanne Daley, “Koch Asks for Inquiry into Subway Fires,” NYT, December 28, 1984, 1; Suzanne Daley, “Rohatyn Sees Big Transit Deficit; Predicts ‘Catastrophe’ for System,” NYT, February 13, 1985, B3; Suzanne Daley, “Many Transit Engineers Found Weak in English,” NYT, February 15, 1985, B3; Suzanne Daley, “Costs of Moving M.T.A.’s Aides Called Too High,” NYT, February 23, 1985, 27; “Subway-Car Work Is Called a Failure,” NYT, May 10, 1985, B5; Suzanne Daley, “Transit System Fighting Flaws in 5-Year Plan,” NYT, May 28, 1985, 1; Suzanne Daley, “Billing Errors Cost Transit Authority Millions,” NYT, June 20, 1985, 1; Suzanne Daley, “63d St. Subway Tunnel Flawed; Opening Delayed,” NYT, June 28, 1985, 1; Suzanne Daley, “U.S. Halts Funds for 63d St. Subway Tunnel,” NYT, July 23, 1985, 1; Suzanne Daley, “Transit Aide Suspended in Inquiry on Expenses,” NYT, August 7, 1985, B3; Jeffrey Schmalz, “U.S. Holds Up Aid for Subway Work,” NYT, August 18, 1985, 1; Joyce Purnick, “Auditors Fault Transit Authority,” NYT, September 19, 1985, B6; “MTA Managers Faulted by Regan,” NYT, October 14, 1985, B3; Richard J. Meislin, “Transit Authority Is Facing Deficits Despite Fare Rise,” NYT, December 26, 1985, 1. 35. See, for instance, M. A. Farber’s front-page series subtitled “The Decline of the Subways” in the NYT, July 30 through August 1, 1984. 36. “The Dark at the Tunnel’s End,” NYT, August 5, 1984, sec. 4, p. 20; Sydney H. Schanberg, “Give Kiley and Gunn Some Time,” NYT, February 16, 1985, 23. 37. Michael Goodwin, “Mayor Criticizes M.T.A.’s Capital Plan,” NYT, April 3, 1984, B3; Daley, “Koch and Kiley: Honeymoon Is Over”; Suzanne Daley, “Transit Notes: Subways Given an ‘S,’ for Stalled,” NYT, July 20, 1984, B3; Maurice

329

Austin Notes

330

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 330

NOTES

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

Carroll, “A New Inspector General Set for MTA by the Governor,” NYT, October 15, 1984, 26; Suzanne Daley, “Lipper Challenges MTA to Set Service Goals,” NYT, November 3, 1984, 1; “Hundreds Balk at Leaving Train,” NYT, November 21, 1984, B4; Daley, “After a Year of Guiding Transit, Kiley Is a Little Off Schedule.” Suzanne Daley, “Kiley Sets Goal of 1985 for a Cleaner Subway,” NYT, October 4, 1984, B4. Suzanne Daley, “Transit ’84: Can Even Modest Hopes Be Fulfilled?” NYT, February 12, sec. 4, p. 6. I note that the typeface used in the article’s title mimics that of some writers’ styles. See M. A. Farber’s second article in the “Decline of the Subways” series, NYT, July 31, 1984, 1. The counterinsurgency metaphors in the MTA’s plan were noted in James Brooke, “Subways Are Cleaner, Transit Authority Says,” NYT, June 14, 1986, 30, and Marilyn Webb, “Paradise Postponed,” New York, November 17, 1986, 49. Also, see the rhetoric used in the script for “T.A. Expands Anti-Graffiti Program,” a fully written “feature-type story” sent to weekly newspapers in Manhattan and the Bronx on June 10, 1985, for publication. Letter attached by John Cunningham, Director, Print Media Services on New York City Transit Authority letterhead. Document obtained from the Koch Papers (NYC Municipal Archives). Joe Fitzgerald, aide to the TA’s general superintendant, quoted in Caryl S. Stern and Robert W. Stock, “Graffiti: The Plague Years,” New York Times Magazine, October 19, 1980, 44–60. Barbara Ross, “Gunning for Graffiti!” New York Post, March 28, 1984. This was one more in a series of antigraffiti/vandalism tactical units dating from 1977. Barbara Ross, “TA Hopes to Wave Away Graffiti Artists,” New York Post, July 16, 1984; Richard Sisk, “Graffiti Write-Off?” Daily News, July 17, 1984. It is unclear whether the alarm systems were ever deployed. fuzz one claims that the MTA had this type of alarm in the No. 1 line tunnels during the Koch wars (fuzz one, interviewed in Flashbacks 9 [1995]: 21). Other writers told similar stories. It is worth noting that the consulting company placed on retainer for a more recent proposal to evaluate the needs of the yard protection program specializes in preventing international industrial espionage. Jerry Rosa, “Andy Paints TA Plan Flop,” Daily News, July 23, 1984; Barbara Ross, “TA’s Graffiti War Gets the Bronx Cheer,” New York Post, October 22,

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 331

NOTES

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

1984; Suzanne Daley, “Vandals Mar Debut of New IRT Cars,” NYT, June 7, 1985, B1; “Underground: Not-So-Stainless Steel,” NYT, June 15, 1985, 22. New York City Transit Authority press release, “T.A. Expands Anti-Graffiti Program,” dated June 10, 1985. This “release” is in fact a fully prepared article made available to “Manhattan and Bronx Weeklies” to announce the intended “pacification” of the No. 1 line, which runs between these two boroughs. The Clean Car Program went by several different names, depending on the audience to which it was being presented. The TA had gone through four years of scathing public criticism concerning its lack of internal organization, so the program was sometimes referred to as the Car Appearance and Security Task Force (CAST) to emphasize the integrated, multidepartmental nature of the effort. Jillian Mincer, “Is the Transit Authority Winning the War on Grime?” NYT, November 24, 1985, sec. 4, p. 1. “Kiley and Gunn Seen as Slowing Transit Decline,” NYT, May 7, 1986, B3. James Brooke, “Transit System Repairs Produce Mixed Results,” NYT, November 23, 1986, 51; Richard Levine, “Transit Agency Sets Goals, and Even Meets Some,” NYT, January 11, 1987, 32. Richard Levine, “MTA Is Spreading News of Progress,” NYT, December 27, 1986, 25. James Brooke, “Subways Are Cleaner, Transit Authority Says,” 30. New York City Transit Authority press release, “TA Announces Half Its Subway Fleet Is Graffiti-Free,” dated October 6, 1986. Like most of the TA’s releases, this is a fully developed article. “Gaining on Graffiti” (editorial), NYT, October 23, 1986, 26. “Myths About the Metropolis: Transit,” NYT, October 11, 1987, sec. 4, p. 26. Also, see the way that the antigraffiti effort is held up as a major accomplishment of the Transit Police as well in the “New York City Transit Police Annual Report of 1986.” This is part of the larger circulation of the subway’s graffitifree status as an indication that both the subways and the Transit Authority as an organization are “under control.” Jeffrey Schmalz, “$8.6 Billion Mass-Transit Bill Wins Final Approval in Albany,” NYT, April 1, 1987, 1. Richard Levine, “Subways’ Ridership Rises to 3.6 Million, Highest Since 1974,” NYT, July 18, 1987, 1. Nina Berman, “A Miracle Beneath the Streets,” The Record (Northern New Jersey), February 16, 1987, 1.

331

Austin Notes

332

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 332

NOTES

59. See, for instance, “Battle Line on Graffiti Is Shifting,” NYT, April 19, 1987, 40; Richard Levine, “MTA Is Still Seeking an Ideal Grime Grabber,” NYT, May 8, 1987, B3; Fox Butterfield, “On New York Walls, the Fading of Graffiti,” NYT, May 6, 1988, B1. 60. “An Exhibition Notes Graffiti Experience,” New York Newsday, May 12, 1988, B31. 61. New York City Transit Authority press release, “TA’s Wipe-Out-Graffiti Exhibition at the Transit Exhibit Opens to the Public May 13,” dated May 5, 1988. 62. Marc Brown, “NYC Transit Workers Are Winning the War on Grime,” Gannett Westchester Papers, January 19, 1989, sec. 3, p. 1. 63. Constance L. Hays, “Transit Agency Says New York Subways Are Free of Graffiti,” NYT, May 10, 1989, 1. 64. “Next to Godliness” (editorial), Washington Post, May 14, 1989 (emphasis added). 65. See “Myths About the Metropolis: Transit,” NYT, October 11, 1987, sec. 4, p. 26. 66. Martha A. Miles, “In the Subway, A Measure of Control,” NYT, May 14, 1989, sec. 4, p. 24; “David Gunn Makes His Mark,” New York Post, May 3, 1989. 67. New York City Transit Authority press release, “A Shining Achievement: 100% Graffiti-Free,” dated May 12, 1989. 68. Jim Dwyer, “Graffiti-Free Era Comes at a Cost,” New York Newsday, May 11, 1989, 6. 69. Paul Schneider, “Graffiti? What Graffiti?,” 7 Days, May 31, 1989, 9. 70. Constance L. Hays, “Transit Agency Says New York Subways Are Free of Graffiti,” 1. See the editorial retort to these criticisms published in the Reporter Dispatch and Herald Statesman for May 17, 1989 (articles obtained from Koch Papers, NYC Municipal Archives): “Take a Bow, Transit Authority, Clean Cars Are Worth the Expense.” The sums spent on the “cleaning” efforts of the war from 1985 to 1989 are in the $200+ million range. 71. Joel Siegal, “Cut the Mickey Mouse Stuff!” Daily News, November 23, 1989, 2. The Times also wrote an editorial condemning Disney for representing the days of fear gone by. See “Graffiti Memory,” NYT, November 27, 1989, 18. 72. “Gunn Smoke: Flawed Disney Production” (quote from unidentified and undated newspaper source; article from zephyr’s personal archives). 73. Calvin Sims, “New York Subways Run into Another Round of Trouble,” NYT, April 29, 1990, sec. 4, p. 6; Stephanie Strom, “Subway Ridership Drops 4.3%; Fare Rise Could Come in Spring,” NYT, February 16, 1991, 1. 74. For the “broken windows” thesis, see Wilson and Kelling, “The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” 29–38. For the application of this thesis to the “home-

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 333

NOTES

less problem” in the New York City subways and its relationship to the (former) “graffiti problem,” see George L. Kelling, “Reclaiming the Subway,” NY: The City Journal 1.2 (Winter 1991): 17–28. 75. See Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier, 218–27. Also, see the articles in Brian Wallis, ed., If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Action (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), which appeared soon after the war on the homeless began in New York City.

8. THE WALLS AND THE WORLD: WRITING CULTURE, 1982–1990

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Standard Bearer, “Dragon’s Breath,” International Get-Hip Times (hereafter, IGTimes), vol. 11 (n.d.): n.p. smith and sane, “The Death of an Art,” IGTimes 10 (n.d.): n.p. sk quoted in ket, “The J Train Never Ran Through the Bronx: The Story of the Js by the Writers Who Made the Line,” Stress 13 (1998): 32. I recommend this article as a source for others wanting to know more about this aspect of the history of writing. Lachmann’s work on writers’ career paths is key in my understanding on this point (Lachmann, “Graffiti as Career,” 229–50). west one, interviewed in Crazy Kings Magazine (Paterson, N.J.), no. 4 (n.d.): n.p. cope 2, interviewed in “Cope 2: ‘Keepin’ Shit Real in the Boogie Down,’ ” FatCap Magazine (Oslo, Norway) (1996): n.p. IGTimes 13 (n.d.): n.p. cav, interviewed in Quality of Life 3 (Hackettstown, N.J.) (n.d.): n.p. cope 2’s career may be the best documented in the world of writing. See the writers’ video COPE 2: Kings Destroy (Abstract Video Inc., 1999), and “cope 2: The Bronx Bomber,” Stress 14 (1998): 51–53, and the notes below. Chalfant and Prigoff, Spraycan Art, 8, 13. Writers did the album cover art for several of the early rap/hip-hop compilations; futura 2000 did the art for one of the Clash’s albums. min 1, interviewed by ket in Stress 4 (1996): 73. revolt, interviewed in International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. Also, see comments by quik in the same issue. cope 2 recalls the end of writing on the No. 4 line in 1987 in an interview in Flashbacks (New York City), no. 7 (1994): 21. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 438, 458–62.

333

Austin Notes

334

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 334

NOTES

15. ghost, “Writers Corner,” Stress 9 (October 1997): n.p. 16. These reports reflect the same militaristic rhetoric used in the New York City “war” of the same period, and speak to the widespread use of military metaphors in official descriptions of conflicts between city government and urban youths. See Albert J. Parisi, “Municipalities Battling Graffiti,” NYT, August 29, 1982, sec. 11, p. 1; Lena Williams, “New Rochelle Is Cracking Down on Graffiti,” NYT, July 9, 1984, B2; “Graffiti Struggle,” NYT, March 10, 1985, 41; Marcia Saft, “Bridgeport Tries to Tame Graffiti,” NYT, July 28, 1985, sec. 23, 1; Lena Williams, “Westchester Weighs New Assault on Graffiti,” NYT, September 8, 1985, 55; Sharon L. Bass, “Craggy Landmarks Getting Face Lifts,” NYT, November 24, 1985, sec. 23, p. 6; Isabel M. DeLuccia, “Another Graffiti Battle Lost,” NYT, January 12, 1986, sec. 11, p. 28; Michael Winerip, “A City’s Walls Are Defaced with Graffiti,” NYT, April 8, 1986, B2; Barbara Gilford, “Writers of Graffiti, in Turnaround, Vow a Cleaner Paterson,” NYT, July 6, 1986, sec. 11, p. 1; Sharon L. Bass, “For Graffiti Artists, Tough Critics and a Counteroffensive,” NYT, August 24, 1986, sec. 23, p. 2. 17. vfr, interviewed by stren in Mass Appeal 3 (n.d.): n.p. 18. This vulnerability increased significantly after the massive effort to “clean up” the walls leading from La Guardia Airport when New York City hosted the 1989 Democratic Convention. The increasing number of cell phones in cars (to alert police) also made these locations less attractive after the early 1990s, although there are always (still) a few throw-ups on the retaining walls. 19. For newspaper reports about writing on the buses and sanitation trucks, see Ari L. Goldman, “Graffiti Problem on the Increase on City’s Buses,” NYT, May 5, 1983, B12; “Trashed Trucks” (editorial), NYT, November 28, 1986; Charles Seaton, “Graffitists Are Trashing Trash Trucks,” Daily News, June 16, 1989. 20. Stewart, “Subway Graffiti,” 463. 21. web, interviewed by Alba Perilla in Flashbacks 4 (n.d.): n.p. Also, see ket’s experiences of police harassment from the vandal squad in the late 1980s (ket, “From the Editor,” Stress 13 [1998]: 9). 22. bad rtd, “Graf News Special Story: Vandal Squad,” Graffnews 9 (1993): 20–21. 23. sharp, “sharp’s Tribute to Graffiti,” Flashbacks 5 (1992): n.p. sharp began in 1978 and was active on the trains through the mid-1980s. 24. As examples, see dero’s 1986 chase story in “dero’s Near Capture,” Flashbacks 2 (c. 1991): n.p., and cope 2’S raid story in “Cope 2: ‘Keepin’ Shit Real. . . ,’ ” n.p. 25. A photograph (by Henry Chalfant) of the HICKI and SKI whole car appears in On the Run Magazine Blackbooks (Germany), vol. 3 (c. 1999): n.p.

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 335

NOTES

26. vfr, interviewed by stren in Mass Appeal 3 (n.d.): n.p. 27. The Times frequently provided evidence that New Yorkers cared about their community in the 1980s through photos and short articles about neighborhood cleanup efforts, which included antigraffiti campaigns as well. This was part of a broader project of image renewal after the fiscal crisis and the concern for “quality of life” issues that the Times and Ed Koch shared (as covered in chapter 7). For news reporting on neighborhood-level antigraffiti campaigns, see “Elbow Grease and Water Win War Against Grime,” NYT, August 30, 1980, 23; Jared McCallister, “Borough to Brush Up with Donated Paint,” Daily News, February 9, 1983, K3; “Volunteers Clean Subway Cars,” NYT, March 7, 1983, B10; Susan Heller Anderson and Maurice Carroll, “Graffiti Wars,” NYT, November 8, 1983, B3; Charles Seaton, “Graffiti-free Train a Sight for Kids’ Eyes,” Daily News, June 20, 1984, K3; Charles Seaton, “Bay Ridge Is Erasing Graffiti,” Daily News, July 31, 1984, K3; Jared McCallister, “Kids Take Up Pens Against Graffiti,” Daily News, August 20, 1985, K30; “Park Slope Neighborhood Goes Up Against the Scrawl,” Newsday, May 14, 1986, 27; Larry Celona, “War on Graffiti Declared,” Daily News, May 23, 1986, K3; “It Makes ’em Climb Walls,” Daily News, June 4, 1986, K1; “Graffiti Busters Go at It,” Daily News, September 17, 1986, K3; “Calling Mr. Clean,” Daily News, October 16, 1986, K3; Scott Achelpohl, “Officials Testify at Padavan Graffiti Hearing,” Queens Times/Ledger, November 1, 1990, 4; Gene D. Palmer, “Queens Closeup: Hearing Held to Rub Out Graffiti,” Newsday, November 5, 1990, 25; Joseph P. Fried, “Watch Out, Scrawlers, You’re on Graffiti Camera,” NYT, April 6, 1992, B3. In the early 1990s, the borough of Queens was the center of antigraffiti activity. See “Operation Clean Queens: A Blueprint for a Graffiti Free Borough,” proposal/report issued October 1991 by the Work Study Group, President/Borough of Queens, Claire Shulman. 28. Ernest Tollerson, “Maturing Artists See Writing on Wall,” Daily News, October 31, 1980, 7; Michael Fressola, “Graffiti ‘Artists’ Legitimize Talents at Harbor,” Staten Island Advance, August 31, 1982, B3; Mary Engels, “Hey Look, Ma, No Cans!” Daily News, August 31, 1982; Tracy Harden, “Graffiti Kid Comes Clean,” Daily News, March 21, 1985, 43; “From Subway Graffiti to Canvas: Bronx Program Transforms Vandals,” NYT, November 22, 1987. 29. After the mid-1980s, piecers chose spaces that earlier writers would probably have used for practice. 30. Chalfant and Prigoff, Spraycan Art, 24. 31. Ibid., 13, 16. Chalfant and Prigoff argue that many of these writers were located in Manhattan, because the trains are underground in this borough. However,

335

Austin Notes

336

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 336

NOTES

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

as they point out, wall-oriented writers were appearing in other boroughs as well in the early 1980s. These kinds of “invisible” spaces were shared with the growing number of homeless people in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s. Photographers and journalists chronicling this group are also among the best documentarians of the writing in these spaces. freedom’s work is mentioned throughout Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1993). K. D. Cook’s interview with freedom provides a brief overview of his move to the tunnels and some of the works he created there. K. D. Cook, “Freedom at Last!” New York Live, August 1, 1993, 8. The “war” in the parks is important as a model for some of the more localized wars led by chambers of commerce, block associations, and other neighborhood groups that began a few years later. News reports of this war can be found in Deirdre Carmody and Laurie Johnston, “A Question of ‘Territory,’ ” NYT, December 4, 1982, 30; Joseph Berger, “Battle to Rid Monuments of Graffiti Is Hard to Win,” NYT, October 15, 1984, B2; Owen Fitzgerald, “Vandals Come Clean,” Daily News, July 2, 1985, 8; Deirdre Carmody, “Staking Out Parks to Stop Graffiti,” NYT, February 18, 1985, B3; “Kids to Become Graffiti Fighters,” Newsday, October 29, 1985, 38. The outline of the Parks Department’s war is contained in “Riverside Park Declares War on Graffiti,” Daily Plant (NYC Department of Parks and Recreation newsletter), April 9, 1985, 382. The following Parks Department documents are also helpful in tracking the war in the parks: “Department of Parks and Recreation Anti-Graffiti Program-Status Report” (n.d.); memo titled “Parks and Recreation Anti-Graffiti Program” from William F. Dalton, Chief of City-Wide Services, to Henry J. Stern, Commissioner, dated June 19, 1989. My thanks to Jill Manelli, Paula Tripodi, and Elisa Bozzi. Rita Deliner, “Mayor’s Plan: Make Graffiti Vandals Blue,” New York Post, August 1, 1989; Marcia Kramer, “Inmates and Cops Battle Graffiti,” Daily News, August 1, 1989; Linda Massarella, “It’s War on Graffiti!” New York Post, April 6, 1994, 5. See the list of walls in Stress 13 (1998): 77. Legal walls and paid commissions are more important now than in the early 1990s, when this study ends. Since that time, tat (tough ass team) crew has established itself as a major commercial advertising company, with contracts with Coca-Cola, Reebok, Chivas Regal, and offers from others, as well as a long list of local companies. See Tony Marcano, “tat Cru Wins Coca-Cola Account,” NYT Current Events Edition, April 16, 1995, CY4; Elizabeth Bernstein,

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 337

NOTES

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

“Let Us Spray,” New York, February 23, 1998, 38ff. (copies of these articles were obtained from smith’s personal archives). FX crew has created a documentary about its own multinational crew, which has painted both self-designed works, commercial signs, and combinations of both, mostly in the Bronx (FX: The Video, Abstract Video Inc., 1998). “I.G.T. Talkin’ ” (editorial), IGTimes 13 (n.d.): n.p. bio began writing on the trains in 1981–82. See “bio: A Bronx Tale” (interview), Undercover 4 (Winter 1994–95): 17. flite, interviewed in Blitzkrieg (Australia), no. 4 (Winter 1997): 10–11; cope 2, interviewed in “Cope 2: ‘Keepin’ Shit Real . . . ,’ ” n.p.; cope 2, interviewed in Flashbacks 7 (1994): 21. sharp, interviewed in IGTimes 9 (1987): n.p. phase 2, quoted in IGTimes 2 (February 1984): n.p. phase 2, “Nigga’ What Choo Talkin’ Bout??” Elementary (New York City), no. 2 (Spring 1997): 32–33. doc tc5, interviewed in Crazy Kings Magazine 3 (1994): n.p. Ibid. See IGTimes 9 (1987): n.p. sho, interviewed in “Writers Corner: sho,” Stress 21 (1999): 39. In a 1996 article for FatCap Magazine, kase 2 complains that young writers do not give him and his crew their due for their contributions to the history of style (“kase 2: King of What? King of Style!” FatCap Magazine [1996]: n.p.). While this sort of complaint, which implies that the speaker occupies a central position in writing’s history, is sometimes just a form of grandstanding, kase 2’s claim to being one of the major style masters is unquestionable. See Chris Pape [freedom] and ket, “Stress Presents: The Greatest Trains Ever!” Stress 19 (n.d.): 52–56, where a kase piece is the only one to receive more than two votes as best piece. key one, interviewed in Crazy Kings Magazine 4 (n.d.): n.p. ali (aka J. Walter Negro) published Zoo York Magazine in May 1979. Although hand-drawn and illustrated by a writer, and with a major style master as its editor, the first issue of this zine was political and protest-oriented and did not mention writing directly. However, Zoo York promised an “in-depth look at the graffiti subculture from the point of view of the vandals behind the Krylon Konspiracy” in the next issue. zephyr could not recall if a second issue had ever been produced (copy of Zoo York 1 [May 1979] from zephyr’s personal archives). See Joe Austin, “Re-Writing New York City,” in Marcus, ed., Connected, 292–

337

Austin Notes

338

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 338

NOTES

51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

98, in which Schmidlapp and phase 2 recount the evolution of the IG Times. phase 2, “Look at the Myth,” IGTimes 8 (n.d.): n.p. phase 2 is not alone in renaming writing. See, for instance, “per one, fx Crew,” interview in Flashbacks 10 (1996): 9 (per one: “To me Graffiti has gone to a level where I choose not to even call it Graffiti. I’d rather refer to it as Aerosol Art”); and blade, interviewed in Quality of Life 1 (n.d.): n.p. (blade: “Alot of people call it Graffiti. I call it writing”). phase 2 has reiterated these views himself several times since then. See phase 2, “Nigga’ What Choo Talkin’ Bout??” 32–33 (“Get hip to the facts and kill the ‘g’ word. It’s a dis to your culture and your intelligence. Graffiti is a minimal reference for an existence that has no maximum. It is the perfect example of other people appropriating your atmosphere and its content. Wake up and see it for what it is worth. Take control”); and “phase 2: The Legend Speaks Out,” Graphotism (England), no. 7 (1995): n.p. (“People have written on walls for thousands of years but what we do . . . you can’t say has been [done] before”). And On the Run (Munich, Germany), no. 3 (July 1992): n.p., published a demanded retraction for having misprinted a past article-interview with phase 2 in which he was quoted using the term “graf.” “The Graffiti Question,” East Village Eye (August 1986): 30. This information was taken from fliers in the Aerosol Archives (a subdivision of IGTimes, New York City) and from conversations with David Schmidlapp. See Austin, “Re-Writing New York City,” in Marcus, ed., Connected, which contains a partial transcript of the presentations made at the University of Minnesota. eks, quoted in Styles for Miles 1 (October 1990): 4. Many writers would disagree with my interpretation here, not the least being some of the writers who publish IGTimes, who occasionally referred to the video magazine as “VideoGrave.” bad rtd, “Graf News Special Story: Vandal Squad,” GRAFFNews (New York), n.d.: 20–21; “Clean Trains,” Can Control (California), no. 2 (1991): n.p. For instance, see the short article on the sticker form, “Sticka’s,” in Move 3 (Summer 1991): 12. The first issue of Stikem Up (Bellmore, N.Y.), a xerox zine about stickers, was available in New York City during the summer of 1993. I have never seen another issue of this zine. Stickers are often featured in photographic illustrations accompanying interviews or articles about writing. “bio: A Bronx Tale” (interview), 17. The gang/cholo writing tradition in California is probably the most striking ex-

Austin Notes

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 339

NOTES

60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

ample of an existing tradition that readily saw a “family resemblance” in New York writing. See Susan Phillips, Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Space, Power, and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–1978,” in Brenda Jo Bright and Liza Bakewell, eds., Looking High and Looking Low: Art and Cultural Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 55–88. fume, cited in “Euro Walls,” Move 3 (Summer 1991): 25. In “A Brief History of Munichsteel Wheelgraf” (On the Run 2 [May 1991]: 11–12), the writer claims that New York–style subway graffiti entered Germany through films like Style Wars! and Wild Style, and that the first German trains were painted in Munich in 1985. pulse remembers having seen Wild Style in the summer of 1983, and being motivated by it to begin writing (interview in Flashbacks 8 [1994]: 24). zephyr, interviewed by Timothy Treacy in Can Control 3.2 (Summer 1994): n.p. See Chuck Sudetic, “Two Whose Art Wasn’t Appreciated,” NYT Current Events Edition, June 2, 1995, B3; David Kirkpatrick, “American Graffiti: These Tourists Visit and Vandalize,” Wall Street Journal, August 22, 1996, B1; “The Invasion of the Euro-Taggers,” NYT Magazine, January 19, 1997, 12. Copies of these articles were obtained from smith’s personal archives. fx crew is a perfect example. See FX: The Video (n. 36, above), which contains footage of crew members from Puerto Rico, Germany, California, New York City, and England painting together. As I began gathering photographs for this book, I discovered that a sort of underground system of distributing photographs of trains had developed between some writers and wealthy teenager collectors on the Upper East Side, who could offer more money for them than I could pay! See Move 3 (Summer 1991). Move 5 (Spring 1993) lists addresses for two zines in Norway, two from England, one each from Australia, Denmark, Holland, and Sweden, and thirteen from five different American states. Writers Resource Guide (Philadelphia), no. 7 (May 1997). For another contemporary listing, see 12 Ounce Prophet (Miami, Fla.), vol. 5 (1997), which cites twenty-eight writer-produced videos, including several multi-issue video magazines as well as four videos from England, two from Germany, four from Holland, and one each from Denmark and Australia. Undercover 5 (Spring 1995) lists twenty-four print and video magazines, including two from Spain, two from France, one each from Canada, Norway, South Africa, and the rest scattered over twelve different states within the United States.

339

Austin Notes

340

10/26/01

2:41 PM

Page 340

NOTES

67. cope 2, interviewed in “Cope 2: ‘Keepin’ Shit Real . . . ,’ ” n.p. pjay interviewed in On the Run (Germany), no. 3 (July 1992): n.p.; ale interviewed by tlone in “ale Takes Us Back to the ’70s,” Quality of Life (c. 1997): n.p. 68. The criticism of the competition appeared in IGTimes 10 (n.d.): n.p. The “Rockathon” appeared in IGTimes 11 (n.d.): n.p.

CONCLUSION: A SPOT ON THE WALL

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

International Graffiti Times 1 (January 1984): n.p. Vee Bravo, “Under the Influence,” Stress 10 (1997): n.p. smith and sane (of tds, tfp, otb crews), “The Death of An Art?” IGTimes 10 (n.d.): n.p. Constance L. Hays, “Transit Agency Says New York Subways Are Free of Graffiti,” NYT, May 10, 1989, 1. These questions were first asked by Jamie Bryan in “Ganga Graffiti: The Legacy of stay high 149,” High Times (August 1996): 52.

Austin Biblio

10/26/01

2:55 PM

Page 341

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arian, Ashar, Arthur S. Goldberg, John H. Mollenkopf, and Edward T. Rogowsky. Changing New York City Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991. Beauregard, Robert. “If Only the City Could Speak: The Politics of Representation.” In Helen Liggett and David Perry, eds., Spatial Practices: Critical Explorations in Social/Spatial Theory, 59–80. London: Sage, 1995. ——. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993. Bellush, Jewel and Dick Netzer, eds. Urban Politics New York Style. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. Bellush, Jewel and Stephen M. David, eds. Race and Politics in New York City: Five Studies in Policy Making. New York: Praeger, 1971. Brooks, Michael W. Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Bryan, Jamie. “Ganja Graffiti: The Legacy of Stay High 149.” High Times (August 1996): 48–66.

Austin Biblio

342

10/26/01

2:55 PM

Page 342


Castleman, Craig. Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982. Chalfant, Henry and James Prigoff. Spraycan Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Cooper, Martha and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. Fainstein, Norman I. and Susan S. Fainstein. “Governing Regimes and the Political Economy of Development in New York City, 1946–1984.” In Mollenkopf, ed., Power, Culture, and Place, 161–99. George, Nelson, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski. Fresh: Hip-Hop Don’t Stop. New York: Random House, 1985. Glazer, Nathan, ed. Cities in Trouble. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970. Goldstein, Richard. “Fit to Buff.” Village Voice, October 7–13, 1981, 32. ——. “The Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade.” New York, March 26, 1973, 34–39. ——. “In Praise of Graffiti: The Fire Down Below.” Village Voice, December 24, 1980, 58. ——. “New York (Old) School.” Village Voice, November 17, 1998, 159. ——. “Reflections on the Great White Fleet.” Village Voice, December 9–15, 1981, 49. ——. “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand.” New York, March 26, 1973, 32–33. Hager, Steven. Hip-Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984. Hess, Elizabeth. “Graffiti R.I.P.,” Village Voice, December 22, 1987, 37. Kohl, Herbert, with photographs by James Hinton. Golden Boy as Anthony Cool. New York: Dial Press, 1972. Lachmann, Richard. “Graffiti as Career and Ideology.” American Journal of Sociology 94.2 (September 1988): 229–50. Mailer, Norman. “The Faith of Graffiti.” Esquire 81 (May 1974): 77–88. Also published in Mailer (text), photographs by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky. The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger, 1974. Marcus, George, ed. Connected: Engagements with Media at Century’s End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Miller, Ivor. “Aerosol Kingdom: The Indigenous Culture of New York Subway Painters.” Master’s thesis, Yale University, 1990. ——. “Piecing: The Dynamics of Style.” Calligraphy Review 11.1 (1994): 20–33. Mollenkopf, John H. A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Austin Biblio

10/26/01

2:55 PM

Page 343


——, ed. Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988. Mollenkopf, John H. and Manuel Castells, eds. Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991. O’Brien, Glenn. “Graffiti ’80: The State of the Outlaw Art.” High Times (June 1980): 48–54 (article obtained from zephyr’s personal archives). Ong, Walter J. “Subway Graffiti and the Design of the Self.” In Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, eds., The State of Language, 400–407. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Schmidlapp, David and phase 2. Style: Writing from the Underground. Terni, Italy: Stampa Alternativa, 1996. Schneider, Eric C. Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Shefter, Martin, ed. Capital of the American Century: The National and International Influence of New York City. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1996. Stewart, Jack. “Subway Graffiti: An Aesthetic Study of Graffiti on the Subway System of New York City, 1970–1978.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1989. Stewart, Susan. “Ceci Tuera Cela: Graffiti as Crime and Art.” In John Fekete, ed., Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture, 161–80. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Teaford, Jon C. The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Wilson, James Q. and George L. Kelling. “The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” Atlantic Monthly 249 (March 1982): 29–38.

343

Austin Biblio

10/26/01

2:55 PM

Page 344


Austin Acknow

10/26/01

3:01 PM

Page 345

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

B

ook acknowledgments, though written last, recognize what came first. In finishing this book, I owe my first debt to a long line of public school teachers throughout the South who encouraged me to think that I could become a scholar and write a book. An eighth-grade history teacher in Booneville, Arkansas, a tenth-grade creative writing teacher in Calhoun, Georgia, and a summer adjunct teaching the American history survey at Texas A&M University (their faces are vivid, but their names I cannot remember) prodded me to think that what has happened in the past has influence on what is happening now, and that my life, and the lives of those I love, are part of American history. Otherwise, the study of history would have passed me by, and would have seemed like a subdiscipline of accounting. My fellow students, comrades, and troublemakers were no less important in shaping my thinking and writing. I met Chris Powell in the first grade in Lockesburg, Arkansas, and he is still my standard-bearer for a passionate commitment to the absurdities that make a meaningful life possi-

Austin Acknow

346

10/26/01

3:01 PM

Page 346

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ble. I attended the ninth and tenth grades in Calhoun, Georgia, with Rhonda Carter. She was the first person in my life to insist that reading, talking, and writing about Karl Marx (and the blues) was more fun than any other pranksterism available and, ultimately, would cause more trouble. My undergraduate mentor, Bruce Palmer, at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, introduced me to the pleasures of critical cultural analysis and rigorous argument, and he pushed me to confront (understand?) the ambiguity of thinking like a historian in the postmodern era. I have returned to his example again and again. George Lipsitz’s social history class helped me to turn the corner. As I was finishing undergraduate school, comrade Scott Marler helped me to learn how to argue with Marx without denying him. Kim Laughlin offered a way of acknowledging the uncertainties that are underneath all claims to know, without being immobilized by them. On my first trip outside the South, I moved to Minneapolis to go to graduate school. I fell in love with Rachel Buff (one of the smart kids in Lipsitz’s theory class in American Studies at the University of Minnesota) during the first winter, and have loved her ever since. Frieda Knobloch arrived during the next year and gracefully challenged the way I think about almost everything. Mike Willard and Jason Loviglio became friends and intellectual fellow travels a bit later. These and other comrades in the American Studies Program formed a remarkable intellectual community, slighted by my inability to recognize everyone. Steve Peterson’s friendship got me through some difficult times and helped me imagine alternatives to the stultifying professional masculinity that seemed like my only destiny for so long. Richard Kees is the world’s greatest Un-traditional historian, and he generously shared his unique understanding of this continent and its present course at innumerable Minneapolis dinners and gatherings. I had the privilege of being taught by some of the finest scholars of our time. My graduate school transcript shows the traces of an incredible faculty gathering at the University of Minnesota during the 1980s and 1990s. George Lipsitz directed my stumbling attempts to put the dialogic, socially situated act of creating knowledge into practice. David Noble, Paula Rabinowitz, Lary May, Roger Miller, Janet Wolff, Bruce Lincoln, Roger Buffalohead, Prabhakara Jha, Lynn Tennehouse, Nancy Armstrong, Sara Evans, Vlad Godzich, John Wittenhall, Elaine May, Riv-Ellen Prell, Betty Agee, Gracia Lee, and Judy Martin were all important teachers and mentors. Many, many others provided an atmosphere of exciting intellectual engagement, and together attracted hundreds of interesting students. I cannot imagine a better environment in which to learn.

Austin Acknow

10/26/01

3:01 PM

Page 347

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I had the great good fortune of finding a position in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University soon after graduating. My colleagues in the department have created a very welcoming, supportive, and exciting environment in which to work, and an interesting milieu for the scholarly life. Thanks to Vicki Patraka, director of the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green, for organizing the New Faculty Writing Group, and for creating the research cluster possibilities for collaborative work with other scholars interested in youth and cultural studies. Vicki’s efforts through the ICS have been a key resource in seeing this book project to its closure. Ann Miller, my editor at Columbia University Press, offered continual encouragement and boundless patience as well as lots of great comments on early drafts. Thanks to David Nasaw, who read two full drafts and provided very helpful comments. The ties of kinship and family have been unfailing supports and a deep well, a welcome imaginative resource in writing this book. Grandparents Ellie Austin, Othar Austin, and Jewel Callaway, brothers Lee Austin and Jon Austin, stepkin Mike Callahan and Amy Callahan, Tonya Amos and Tina Nowlin, Carroll Nowlin and Doylene Austin all helped to ground me in this world, and showed me that compassion and love for fellow humans is the basis for any politics worth living. Barbara Buff and Jerome Buff went the extra distance of generosity for me as a son-in-law. My father, Joe Austin, has been an unending source of support for my education, a model for rational approaches to complex problems, and instilled the important insight that there might be an interesting life available outside of small, rural southern towns. My mother, Tommi Callaway, is the baseline for my thinking and writing. She created a remarkable household that encouraged free thinking, critical inquiry, and lifelong learning. Her constant search for what was interesting in the fractures of small town life directed my attention to similar fractures elsewhere. Much respect to my kin. During research in New York City, the kindness of strangers and friends allowed me to live and learn in a strange environment, until I too loved New York City. Thanks to Ken Cobb at the Municipal Archives and the staffs of the Municipal Reference Center and the Brooklyn Public Library. Robert Danberg, Mary Biggs, Lisa Levine, Michelle Adams, and Laura Nelson have been valuable friends and allies. The entire enterprise would have been insufferable without Rachel Buff, my best friend, my lifelong traveling companion. Rachel knew all along that humor, tolerance, and perspective were needed to bring the book to closure. She kindly critiqued my work, discussed politics and culture end-

347

Austin Acknow

348

10/26/01

3:01 PM

Page 348

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

lessly and insightfully, provided a model of the activist-scholar-in-process, and created a meaningful context to call home. Her support and generosity are magnificent. I did not learn about writing in any degree-granting school. To learn about writing, I enrolled in an “other academy.” I owe the biggest debts for this book to writers, their allies, and their enemies in New York City. I learned from the NYPD, from former Mayor Edward Koch, from former New York City Transit Authority President David Gunn, from the Transit Police Vandal Squad, from the Queens Borough Anti-Graffiti Task Force, from We Care About New York, Incorporated, and from the New York Times. Henry Chalfant and Martin Wong provided important information, contacts, and support at key moments in my learning. Jack Stewart’s help and his early work on the topic of writing cannot be praised enough. But I learned most from talking to writers, and from reading the things they have written and watching what they have videoed and photographed. I hung out with writers at all levels of commitment to the practice, from godfathers like PHASE 2 to toys who tagged a bit during the summer that I knew them and then moved on to something else in their lives. I photographed their work all over the city. IGTimes founder David Schmidlapp, phase 2, poem, air, hush, zephyr, smith, death, iz the wiz, and scholar Greg Snyder were especially patient and generous with their help. Each gave me a new perspective and steered me away from the worst of the mistakes and excesses to which I was inclined. per, dil, nomad, serve, silo, jerms, swing, eko, twoill, sar, cavs, ket, wane, lex, sevo, kist, duro, id, ca, cash, dash, beware, rebel, nox, sor, mex, nic 1, ga, rated, vfr, stac, wen, lee, crash, bama, wicked gary, stan 153, futura 2000, daze, vulcan, Sasha Jenkins, Carl Weston, Colin Turner, Tom Szabo, and Lowell Henry all took the time to answer questions and talk to me, a stranger, about their lives and their love of painting. smith, hush, and zephyr read early drafts and offered detailed feedback. Although I have used some of the material from the various formal interviews I did with writers, I have leaned much more heavily on writers’ own published works or accounts. Although writers are an “underground” group, they are not, nor do they intend to be, “silenced.” Writing has now lasted three decades. With all this help I was able to sort out and write about the first two, but the mistakes are my own. Blessed be my readers, and those who write after me.

Austin Index

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 349

INDEX

2cute (writer), 176 3yb (three yard boys crew), 121 abbey (writer), 176 aeron cia (aka lovin 2, writer), 189 (fig. 6.5), 192 Ahern, Charlie, 190, 205 air (writer), 53, 54 (fig. 2.2), 247 (fig. 8.3), 348 airborn (writer), 175, 176 ajax (writer), 110 (fig. 4.2) ale one (writer), 67, 122, 168, 264 ali (writer), 105–106, 187–88, 190 alphabets, 110–14, 183 amrl (aka bama, writer), 44, 55, 62, 186, 187, 252, 253, 348

antigraffiti alliance, 4–7, 80–85, 96, 123– 24, 149–66 Anti-Graffiti Task Force: (Lindsay era) 86–88, 91–92, 97, 102, 107; (Kochera) 160–66 art magazines, 73, 94–96, 191–92, 197– 201, 252 a-train (aka at31, writer), 51 (fig. 2.1) bad rtd (writer), 235, 258 barbara 62 (writer), 59 barmaid 36 (writer), 59 base 2 (writer), 175 Basquiat, Jean Michel, 195 Beame, Abraham, 123–24, 134–35 Beat Street (film, 1984), 205

Austin Index

350

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 350

INDEX

“beef” (conflict among writers), 119–22, 176–78, 240–41, 242–45 Bicentennial Train. See Freedom Train big bird 107 (writer), 59 bio (writer), 242, 261 black books, 127, 268 blade (writer), 63, 118, 119, 123, 169 boe (writer), 177 bom 115 (writer, aka Afrika Bambaataa, dj), 203 bom5 (writer), 176 “bombing,” 51–53, 118–19, 168–70, 232–38 bones (writer, aka Frankie Bones, dj), 204 “broken windows” thesis, 146 Brooks, Michael, 32 Buff (subway car wash), 130–32 caine (writer), 1–2, 172, 191 Can Control (formerly Ghetto Art, writers’ zine), 250, 263 cap (writer), 119 Castleman, Craig, 262, 276n11 cavs (writer), 211, 230, 231, 248, 348 cay 161 (writer), 48 cey one (writer), 191, 196 chain 3 (writer), 175 Chalfant, Henry, 129, 190, 191, 205, 258, 262–63, 276n11, 348 charmin 65 (writer), 59 cia (crazy inside artists crew), 170 clean trains, 258–59 clean-up sentence, 65, 82–83, 91, 98–99, 158–59 cliff 159 (writer), 169 clyde (writer), 53 coco 144 (writer), 68, 196, 252 com 161 (writer), 59 (fig. 2.5)

comet (writer), 118, 119, 122, 123 Cooper, Martha, 129, 262–63, 276n11 cope 2 (writer), 119, 204, 211, 230, 231, 243, 264 crash (writer), 128 (fig. 4.12), 189 (fig. 6.5), 190, 191, 192, 196, 199, 348 crew, 64–65, 119–23, 170–72, 176–78, 237 “crossing out” tactic, 54–55, 117, 122–23, 129 dash (writer), 348 daze (writer), 56, 189 (fig. 6.5), 192, 348 death (writer), 118, 348 devilish doug (writer), 67 dez (writer), 127 (fig. 4.11), 171, 175, 182 diablo (writer), 50 dino nod (writer), 67 disco (writer), 190 Disneyland, 12 doc (writer), 172 doc tc5 (writer), 244 dome (writer), 239 don (writer), 171 dondi (writer), 170, 171, 189 (fig. 6.5), 190, 191, 192, 196, 204 doze (writer), 175, 176 duro (writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) duster (writer), 118, 172, 194, 195, 204 eddie cia (writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) Edwards, J., 257 Eins, Stephen, 190 eks (writer), 257 erni (aka paze, writer), 176 Esses, Sam, 188–89 eva 62 (writer), 59 evil eric (writer), 67 ex-vandals (crew), 64

Austin Index

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 351

INDEX

fable (writer), 175 fabulous five (crew), 125 (fig. 4.9), 172, 196 fact (aka dr pepper, writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) Faith of Graffiti (1974), 73–74, 262 fame, 39–41, 47–57, 67, 104, 162, 171, 178, 233, 258, 260–61 “fat cap,” 58 fba (fast breaking artists crew), 176 Fitch, Robert, 15, 17 flame one (writer), 1–2, 172 Flashbacks (writers’ zine), 257 (fig. 8.8) flite (writer), 243 foam (writer), 170 framing stories, 3, 6, 10–14, 83, 88–89, 137, 143, 147–51, 181, 270–71 fred (aka fab 5 freddy, writer), 186, 188, 190, 191, 199, 262 freedom (writer), 53, 170, 171, 191, 239 Freedom Train, 25, 184 freight trains, 247–49 Fresh: Hip-Hop Don’t Stop (1985), 205 fume (writer), 262 futura 2000 (writer), 188, 189 (fig. 6.5), 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 204, 262, 348 fuzz one (writer), 171 ga (writer), 348 galleries and museums, 71–72, 94–96, 170, 188–201, 222, 243, 252, 255, 262, 268–70 gangs, 31–32, 34, 36, 42, 46, 58, 63–64, 202–203 geck one (writer), 264 “getting up.” See “bombing” Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (1982), 262

ghost (writer), 233 Glazer, Nathan, 145, 150 Goffman, Erving, 45–46 Goldstein, Richard, 72–73, 92–93, 95, 190–91, 245–46, 269 Grafnews (writers’ zine), 257 (fig. 8.8) grape 1 (writer), 59 Graphic Scenes and X-plicit Language (gsel, writers’ zine), 256, 257 (fig. 8.8) Great White Fleet, 209–11, 220, 230 Gunn, David, 202, 215–19, 348 Hall of Fame (Harlem), 239–40 Haring, Keith, 190, 191, 195 haze (aka se3, writer), 53, 190, 192, 204 heart (writer), 175, 176 High School of Art and Design, 170, 175, 187 hip-hop, 201–206, 262 Hip-Hop: The Illustrated History (1984), 205 holiday trains, 1–2, 184 hondo (writer), 118 hurst (aka oi, writer), 118 hush (writer), 248 (fig. 8.4), 348 id (writer), 348 IGTimes (IGT, writers’ zine), 241, 254–55, 256 (fig. 8.7), 263, 264–65 immigration/immigrants/migrants, 16, 26 in (aka kill 3, writer), 48, 55, 118 (fig. 4.7), 229, 231 inds (independents crew), 64 International Graffiti Times (writers’ zine), 196, 249–54, 253 (fig. 8.5), 254 (fig. 8.6)

351

Austin Index

352

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 352

INDEX

irene 159 (writer), 59 iz the wiz (writer), 39–40, 50, 61, 117 (aka ike: fig. 4.8), 118, 119, 169 (fig. 6.1), 171, 174, 191, 199, 348 ja (writer), 53 james top (aka jee2, writer), 117–18, 176 Janis Gallery, 191–92, 194, 199 Jenkins, Sasha, 256, 257, 348 jester (writer), 50, 112 (fig. 4.4), 231 joe 182 (writer), 48 johnny of 93, 42–46, 63 julio 204 (writer), 42, 46, 63, 71, 228 junior 161 (writer), 169 karado 135 (writer), 175 kase 2 (writer), 52, 64, 171 kaze (writer), 170, 175, 176 kel (writer), 190 ket (writer), 171, 348 key one (writer), 248 kid 56 (aka k-56, writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) Kiley, Robert, 215–19 “king” (as status), 52–53, 118 kist (writer), 348 Koch, Edward, 77, 138–39, 141–43, 149, 160–61, 163–66, 184, 207, 208–209, 212, 234, 251, 348 Kohl, Herbert, 42–46 kool herc (writer, dj), 203 lady pink (writer), 60, 170, 175, 176, 190, 191, 192 laser (writer), 176 lava 1 (writer), 59 (fig. 2.5) lay-ups. See yards (subway) la-zar (writer), 67

lee (writer), 131, 132, 171, 172, 181, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191, 192, 229, 239, 348 lee 163d! (writer), 44, 122 legibility, 11–112, 172–73, 183–86 Lindsay, John, 36, 63, 75–79, 84–87, 93, 97–98, 104 line 149 (writer), 59 loomit (writer), 264 lsd om (writer), 49, 52, 99, 113 (fig. 4.5), 123, 169 mad (writer), 191 mad 103 (writer), 1–2 Mailer, Norman, 49, 73, 100, 262 Martinez, Hugo, 71–72, 94–95, 268 masterpiece, 56, 91, 109, 114, 126–27, 170–74, 238–41 meritocracy, 20, 22, 29, 40–41, 52 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), 2, 4, 51, 78, 80–83, 85–89, 97–100, 107–108, 121, 124–25, 127–33, 134–39, 156, 172, 200, 207–26; Clean Car Program, 201, 217–21; fencing program (1981), 208–11, 232; Five Year Capital Improvement Program (1981), 213– 22; Five Year Capital Improvement Program (1987), 221–22; repainting of subway fleet (1973), 107–108, 115–18; repainting of subway fleet (1980), 207–11 mg (mission graffiti crew), 121 michelle 62 (writer), 59 mickey (aka to, writer), 117–18 mico (writer), 183 midg (writer), 47 migration. See immigration/immigrants/migrants

Austin Index

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 353

INDEX

Miller, Ivor, 276n11 min 1 (writer), 177, 231 mitch 77 (writer), 190, 191 mono (writer), 172 moses 147 (writer), 53, 118 Moses, Robert, 15, 20, 23, 247 mousey 56 (aka M-56, writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) Move (writers’ zine), 257, 264 mta (mad transit artists crew), 121 Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), 268–70 museum(s). See galleries and museums nac 147 (writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) New York City: as art capital, 6, 95; compared to other cities, 3, 35–36, 81, 82, 94, 140, 233; employment, 18–20; in film and television, 13, 31, 40, 50, 140, 150; financial crisis, 92, 124, 141–43; highway construction, 19–20; as image, 9–13, 32, 35, 137, 142, 148–49, 153, 163–65; as “Naked City,” 9, 12–13, 16, 21–25, 30–32, 76, 96, 101, 140–45, 180, 206, 267; as “New Rome,” 9, 12–14, 16, 35, 211– 12; poverty, 19, 24–25, 143–44; public authorities, 15, 78, 138–39; racial conflict, 24–25, 31, 34–35, 77, 97, 141; racialized identities, 16, 19–20, 24, 31, 34–35, 77, 97, 141, 179–80, 212; tourism and visitors, 2–3, 5, 95, 137, 142, 262; as Writers’ City, 74, 173; as Writers’ Homeland, 27; as world city, 3, 5, 12, 18, 141, 153 New York City Transit Authority (TA). See Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)

New York Times, 3–4, 29–50, 79–106, 130, 143–45, 153–61, 207, 211, 216, 218, 220–24, 252, 267–68, 348 Newmann, Delores, 191–92 nic 1 (writer), 240 (fig. 8.2), 257, 348 nixer (writer), 176 noc 167 (writer), 56, 167, 171, 190 NOGA (Nation of Graffiti Artists), 72, 187 On the Run (writers’ zine), 257, 264, 265 (fig. 8.11) pain (writer), 175 panic (writer), 175 Pelsinger, Jack, 72, 187 per (writer), 348 pete cia (writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) phade (writer), 175 phase 2 (writer), 44, 48, 57 (fig. 2.3), 67, 96, 111, 114, 184 (fig. 6.3), 185 (fig. 6.4), 186, 193, 201, 203, 206, 243, 252, 254, 255, 257, 348 Philadelphia, 40–42 photographs (“flix”), 127, 133, 251 pistol 1 (writer), 55 pjay (writer), 110, 204, 230, 264 p nut (writer), 50, 111 (fig. 4.3) poem (writer), 168, 264, 348 pore 1 (writer), 175 post-industrialism, 16–25, 164, 212, 266 prestige economy, 39–41, 47–55 , 67–68, 131–32, 170–72, 177–78, 187, 193–95, 201, 243–44, 248–49, 259–61 Prigoff, James, 263 pro-soul (writer), 115 (fig. 4.6) psychedelia, 44–45 public murals, 6

353

Austin Index

354

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 354

INDEX

public space (public square): and private property, 88–89, 102–105, 143–46, 148, 153, 177–78; as spectacle, 49–50; as territory, 3, 63, 102–103. See also public sphere public sphere, 10–14, 30, 36, 45, 49, 137, 151, 159, 222–25; as public square, 4, 33, 36–37, 39–40, 46, 49–50, 66, 80, 102–103, 124, 137, 144–46, 151–53, 209–10, 221 quik (writer), 115, 119, 168, 182 (fig. 6.2), 195 rammelzee (writer), 262 rasta cia (writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) rated (writer), 348 ray-b 954 (writer), 95 raz (writer), 230 Regional Planning Board, 15 respect (as status), 47, 54, 109, 118, 123, 243 revolt (writer), 174, 175, 188, 203, 204, 231–32, 252 Ricard, Rene, 197, 201 riff 170 (aka CASH 2, writer), 109 (fig. 4.1) rin one (writer), 177 Rivera, Diego, 191 rize (writer), 53 rtw (rolling thunder writers crew), 195 sa (soul artists crew), 106, 187–88, 195 sab (writer), 171 sak (writer), 176, 182 samo. See Basquiat, Jean Michel

sane (writer), 227, 233 sar (writer), 348 saturation. See “bombing” Schmidlapp, David, 249–55, 348 Schneider, Eric, 31 seen (“Black” seen, writer), 170, 176 seen ua (writer, united artists crew), 69, 110, 126 (fig. 4.10), 129, 172, 204, 230, 236 sent (writer), 230–31 sento (writer), 248 shame one (writer), 168, 175, 178 sharp (writer), 176, 179, 204, 235–36, 243 sho (writer), 244 shoplifting, 52, 65 shy 147 (writer), 189 (fig. 6.5) sien 5 (writer), 248 sk (writer), 230 skeme (writer), 171, 175, 182 slave (writer), 125 (fig. 4.9), 172 smith (writer), 227, 233, 348 spade 127 (writer), 176 s.pat 169 (writer), 59 spin (writer), 184 Spraycan Art (1987), 263 stag (writer), 348 stan 153 (writer), 252, 348 stay high 149 (writer), 51 (fig. 2.1), 173 Stewart, Jack, 56–57, 60, 73, 81, 111, 173, 203, 276n11, 284n13, 296n166, 348 Stewart, Michael, 251, 253, 267 stickers, 246–47 stoney (writer), 53, 57, 59, 63, 174 style, 56–57, 110–14, 172, 183–86; and popular culture, 173–74, 185–86; and modeled figures, 173. See also legibility; masterpiece

Austin Index

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 355

INDEX

Style Wars! (documentary film, 1983), 119, 205, 262 Styles for Miles (SFW, writers’ zine), 257 (fig. 8.9) Subway Art (1984), 129, 262–63 subways: and crime, 31–34, 136–37, 145– 46; crises, 25, 31–34, 134–41, 213–26; as icon, 32–34, 139–40, 182–83, 211– 13, 222–26 super kool 223 (writer), 50, 58 (fig. 2.5), 58, 95 super strut (writer), 51 (fig. 2.1) tab (writer), 176 tack (writer), 170, 175, 182 “tag(s),” 45, 56, 210–11, 245–46 taki 183 (writer), 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 80, 81, 105, 228, 234 tash 2 (writer), 59 tass (writer), 51 (fig. 2.1) tat (tough ass team crew), 178, 242 tco (the cross outs crew), 129 tds (the death squad crew), 121 technological solution (to graffiti “problem”), 86–87, 91–92, 102, 152 teebee (writer), 252 tfp (the fabulous partners crew), 64 Tharp, Twyla, Dance Company, 72, 192 “throw-up(s),” 108, 115–19, 131–32 tk (the killers crew), 121 tmb (the master blasters crew), 121 tnb (the nasty boys crew), 175 tnt (the nation’s top crew), 175 top (the odd partners crew), 118, 170 topcat 126 (writer), 42, 57 “toy,” 53, 177

Transit Authority (TA). See Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) tracy 168 (writer), 48, 53, 55, 69, 70, 115 (fig. 4.6), 173, 201 t.t.smokin 182 (writer), 59 tuc ii (writer), 59 (fig. 2.5) Turner, Colin, 257, 348 tvs (the vamp squad crew), 121, 177 twoill (writer), 39–40, 348 UGA (United Graffiti Artists), 71–72, 94–96, 105, 187, 196 Undercover (writers’ zine), 261 urban crisis, 13–14, 16, 21–25, 34–37, 75–78, 97, 139, 143–48 urban renewal, 14–20, 23 vandal (writer), 60 vandal squad, 128–30, 157–58, 220, 232, 348 vanguards (crew), 64 ven (writer), 204, 259 (fig. 8.10) vfr (aka veefer, writer), 233, 237, 348 Videograf (writers’ video magazine), 257–61 videos, 249, 257–61 vinny (writer), 169, 171 vism (writer), 248 vulcan (writer), 173, 348 wane (writer), 180, 348 wanted (crew), 64, 121 war (writers already respected crew), 64, 121 “war on graffiti,” 7, 37, 83–84, 96, 100, 123–25, 128, 133, 149–66, 215, 217, 219, 221–22

355

Austin Index

356

10/26/01

3:08 PM

Page 356

INDEX

wasp (writer), 191 We Care About New York, Inc., 165– 66, 237–38, 348 web (writer), 170, 175, 235 west one (writer), 230 Weston, Carl, 257, 348 wicked gary (writer), 44, 55, 68, 348 Wildstyle (film, 1983), 204, 205 Wong, Martin, 268, 348 writers, 4, 42–47; “bombers” vs. piecers, 116–19, 227–31, 244; education and career, 61–65, 109, 168–78, 186, 229–38, 241–49, 257; names and naming, 55–56, 121; racial identities, 42–45, 58, 143–44, 162, 243; racial conflict and cooperation, 44, 52–53, 68, 121, 152, 157, 176, 267; and the Transit Police, 60, 68–70, 128–30, 132–33, 234–37; young women, 53–54, 59–60. See also “beef” writers’ benches, 65, 68, 132–33, 175 writers’ corner, 68 Writers Resource Guide (writers’ zine), 264 writing: as crime/vandalism, 5, 69, 84– 86, 96–98, 142–66, 198–201, 236–38, 268; as global cultural phenomenon,

249, 261–66; and the graffiti problem, 6–7, 34, 38, 79–106, 147– 66, 264, 270; and the history of graffiti, 41–42, 71, 79–81, 101, 255; as mass media, 66–67, 131–33, 181–86, 233–34, 249; origins of, 38–47, 49; as public art, 1–7, 70–74, 83, 90, 93–94, 154–56, 161, 179, 181–86, 193–201, 255; as urban problem, 7, 51, 80, 104, 115 yards (subway), 55–56, 66–67 youth, 26–32, 34–37; as consumers, 29–30, 41, 174; as criminals, 25, 29– 30, 32–37, 104, 148, 150–51, 156–57, 180, 213; culture, 40–46, 62–66, 80, 92–93, 174, 191, 201–206, 270–71; and cultural tradition, 41; and peer culture, 27–28; and “place” in society, 4, 6, 30–31, 41, 202; problems, 24–25, 28–29, 34–37, 103–104, 125; subculture of, 74; unemployment, 27, 35, 179–80, 212 zephyr (writer), 123, 169, 170, 171, 174, 178, 180, 182, 188, 189 (fig. 6.5), 190, 192, 196, 204, 263, 348 zines, 249–57, 259–61

11/13/01

(Courtesy IGTimes Aerosol Archives)

Austin Insert (new)

PLATE 1 oh and mad 103 train, mid-1970s.

1:07 PM

Page 1

PLATE 2

asia by dondi train, 1981. (Courtesy zephyr)

dime 2 train, mid-1970s.


Austin Insert (new)

PLATE 3

11/13/01

1:07 PM

Page 2

PLATE 4

revolt and rasta cia train, 1979. (Courtesy zephyr)

tracy 168 train, 1980. (Courtesy tracy 168)

Austin Insert (new)

PLATE 5

11/13/01

1:07 PM

Page 3

PLATE 6

zephyr train, 1980. (Courtesy zephyr)

Austin Insert (new)

11/13/01

1:07 PM

Page 4

PLATE 7

kase train, early 1980s. (Courtesy zephyr)

Austin Insert (new)

PLATE 8

case (kase) train, early 1980s. (Courtesy zephyr)

11/13/01

[Detail]

1:07 PM

PLATE 8

Page 5

Austin Insert (new)

11/13/01

1:07 PM

sane and smith whole car, 1986. (Courtesy R. Smith) PLATE 10

subway vandals whole car by cavs, 1989. (Courtesy cavs)

Page 6

PLATE 9

Austin Insert (new)

11/13/01

1:07 PM

Page 7

PLATE 11

sane rooftop, 1986. (Courtesy R. Smith)

PLATE 12

Various stickers and tags, 1992. (Courtesy Joe Austin)


11/13/01

vulcan wall, Harlem Hall of Fame, mid-1980s.

Austin Insert (new)

PLATE 13

1:08 PM

Page 8

11/13/01


Austin Insert (new)

PLATE 14 Various tags and throw-ups, surrounding wall pieces by nest and gaze, painted in a Soho parking lot in the early 1990s.

1:08 PM

Page 9

PLATE 15 dome wall, Harlem Hall of Fame, mid-1990s.


Austin Insert (new)

11/13/01

1:08 PM

Page 10

Detail of the 1991 Halloween Wall (approximately 200 feet in length, painted in a Brooklyn schoolyard), a themed collaboration between several writers. This section was painted by loomit (a German writer). The figures are reading issues of Flashbacks (New York City) and On the Run (Munich, Germany), writers’ zines. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

PLATE 16

Austin Insert (new)


1:08 PM

[Detail] This section was painted by loomit and poem. The scroll makes note of Flashbacks and On the Run.

11/13/01

PLATE 17

Page 11

Austin Insert (new)

11/13/01

Various pieces under a highway bridge in the Bronx, 1989. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

Various throw-ups and tags on the streets, early 1990s. (Courtesy Joe Austin)

Page 12

PLATE 19

1:08 PM

PLATE 18

Taking the Train

Taking the Train

Fast Train, Slow Train

The Train

Fast Train, Slow Train

Train

Train

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The London Train

The Christmas train

The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery

The Christmas Train

The Christmas train

The Excursion Train

The Great Train Robbery

The Christmas Train

Scaring the Train

Scaring the Train

[ss] The Train

The Erie Train Boy

The Christmas Train

The Christmas train

The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery

Taking the Train

Taking the Train

Fast Train, Slow Train

The Train

Fast Train, Slow Train

Train

Train

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The Taking

The London Train

The Christmas train

The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery

The Christmas Train

The Christmas train

The Excursion Train

The Great Train Robbery

The Christmas Train

Scaring the Train

Scaring the Train

[ss] The Train

The Erie Train Boy

The Christmas Train

The Christmas train

The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery

Recommend Documents