You see them everywhere – on sidewalks, on
fences, on mailboxes, wherever there is space and a chance to be seen by
passersby. On the pavement of the Union
Square greenmarket on March 23, 2016, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in
Brussels:
Pray
4
Brussels
We gon
be alright
On the Horatio Street sidewalk recently near
an entrance to Jackson Square Park, just south of West 14th Street:
I was caged
but I fought back
In white chalk, so I thought,
but it must have been white paint, since it has since survived several days of
rain. Under the words were two crudely
drawn chickens, or maybe two squawking ducks; the artist’s skills were limited.
On a mail storage box on West 13th
Street recently, squeezed in with a host of scribblings and crazy art:
FAME
KILLS
Some are problematic, as for
instance, on the sidewalk at an intersection:
TAKE CARE
Good advice, but for
whom? Similarly, on East 4th
Street:
PAY YOUR
DEBTS
And on Eighth Avenue near
Jane Street:
PROTECT
YO
HEART
PYH
And on the scaffolding
masking renovation of a building on West 4th Street:
TAKE ME TO
THE ALLEY
when there was no alley in
sight. Just as enigmatic, also on East 4th
Street:
I DON’T WANT
TO DIE
MOTHERCOW
You rarely know who the graffiti artists
are, but in some cases I assume young teen-age males, known for their blatant
candor, as in these two instances, seen by me long ago, though I don’t know
where:
If Satan gets my balls we’ll play tennis
farts are healthy
And in the Union Square
greenmarket, scrawled on the pavement in fading chalk trampled by busy New
Yorkers who paid no heed:
NEW YORK
R U
HUNG?
Some show signs of sophistication, as for
instance this one, scrawled on the wall of a men’s room on the Columbia
University campus eons ago, which was much quoted and became legendary:
God = mc2
For the knowing few, of
course, this was a take-off of Einstein’s renowned physics equation, E = mc2,
meaning that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light, squared.
But my favorite graffito (yes, that’s the
singular) was one I glimpsed, I don’t know where, back in the rebellious 1960s:
Jesus saves
but Moses invests
This post will not attempt a history of
New York graffiti, least of all their evolution from crude sidewalk scribbles to the exuberant multicolored art of
minority youth spray-painting the sides of the city’s subway cars in the 1970s,
until in the 1980s the authorities with great effort eliminated the art – and
art it was, in my opinion, however misplaced – and scrubbed the cars ruthlessly
clean. For some, the graffiti-ridden
cars symbolized the city’s moral and physical decline, which goes to show that
one man’s art is another’s vandalism.
And the debate continues today, when an alleged resurgence of graffiti
art has inspired tours in certain neighborhoods to view it, while the New York Post declares that the city
must beat the “cancer of graffiti.”
One graffiti artist who announces himself
is Hans (“Ace”) Honschar, age 42, whose colored chalk snippets appear all over
the Upper West Side, and who briefly about a year ago invaded the West Village
– my turf – and left messages on the sidewalk outside the D’Agostino
supermarket that I patronize. His
messages – at least, the ones that I have seen – are relentlessly upbeat:
the two most
joyous times
of the year
are Christmas
morning and
the end of
School
find ur talent
& fulfill your
purpose
for you are
the embodiment
of infinite
possibilities
I saw that
my life was
a vast, glowing
empty page
and I could do
anything
What he does, of course, is
fill every empty space he sees with his multicolored bits of wisdom. In the process he even makes a buck or two,
for shop owners pay him to leave an inscription in front of their shop, and
passersby pay him to take their picture for five dollars or, for double that,
to have their picture taken with him.
Fulfilling his destiny, alas, has led to a
tangle or two with the police, since graffiti are technically forbidden, but
like a good New Yorker he persists. Born
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to a strict religious family that attended a
Pentecostal church, he grew up in Florida and migrated all over Canada before
landing in New York where, like so many, he knew he had to stay, with a special
fondness for the Upper West Side.
I wake up
every morning
and I say
to myself
‘Well, I’m still
in New York,
thank you God’
No matter what the outcome of
his skirmishes with the police, he will continue to fulfill his chalky,
polychrome destiny.
Graffiti have always been with us and
always will be. They have been found in
the ruins of ancient Egypt and Pompeii and surely go back eons, probably to the
dawn of writing. I can well imagine some
enterprising young caveman sneaking a few raw squiggles onto the walls of a
cave otherwise adorned with marvelous drawings of the animals hunted by our
ancestors in prehistoric times. Graffiti
are usually anonymous, often irreverent, often bawdy, but sometimes uplifting
and inspiring. And by their very nature
subversive. No city has contributed more
to their fame and notoriety than New York.
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Coming soon: Mysteries of New York: Scavengers. Who are they and what are they up to?
©
2016 Clifford Browder
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