Book Time #11: Subway Graffiti, St. Marks
Hello everyone,
I must issue an important correction regarding last month’s email. I described an ESPN talking heads show called First Take hosted by Tony Reali. That was wrong. The show I was thinking of is called Around The Horn. First Take is the ESPN talking heads show hosted by Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless. Around The Horn is far, far more respectable than First Take. As such, I deeply regret this egregious error and issue a public apology to Tony Reali. Tony, I’m sorry.
One downside I am noticing of the starter pack system is it results in a lot of reviews about similar books. I like reading many books about a subject because it is the only way to know what historians and experts generally agree on and what they do not. But it makes for repetitive topics in this newsletter. I might have to rethink the Starter Pack system.
In the meantime, here are two more NYC books from my research. Next month I’ll finally publish the NYC Starter Pack. Then no more NYC books for a while, I promise.
Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, Craig Castleman
In early 1970s New York City mayor John Lindsay waged an irrational war on graffiti. I use the term “irrational” here not as a claim about the artistic values of graffiti but because the very basis of it was not rational. I was struck by the parallels with the Vietnam War raging at the time. Administered by technocratic liberal administrations, costs quickly spiraled out of control but more money was plowed into making the problem worse. Fake stats were created and promoted that only obfuscated the scale of the quagmire. As the costs became more and more difficult to justify, officials resorted to even more perverse logic. The “Lindsay Theory,” which the mayor named after himself, claimed graffiti writing “is related to mental health problems.”
And then there is what we read in Getting Up, such as this description by one graffiti writer: “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.”
If you’ve read much about—or lived in—New York in the 70s, you probably heard a lot more rhetoric along the Lindsay Theory line than Castleman’s careful 1982 sociological study of graffiti writers and their subculture. Castleman, by his own admission, was only out to describe the “what” of graffiti culture, not the “why.” I found this to be a feature, not a bug, although a contemporary Times review disagreed. Nevertheless, it was noteworthy on its own that entering its second decade as a topic of intense public scrutiny and after more than $150 million (roughly $1.5 billion in 2024 dollars, enough to buy at least several hundred new subway cars) spent on failing to solve the problem, seemingly so few people had tried to actually understand what graffiti culture was.
That is too bad, because it would have revealed something much more than stereotypes. Getting Up’s strength and charm lies in those revelations.
Graffiti writing was an evolved, elaborate subculture, with social hierarchies, rituals, norms, etiquette, and technological advancement. It consisted largely of poor, minority teenagers engaged in an intense, highly innovative and creative hobby that brought them excitement, joy, and in their minds, an act of public service making their depressing surroundings more colorful, more beautiful. These kids dedicated most of their waking hours to the craft, practicing their sketches, studying art history, and memorizing train routes and schedules. Then they would choreograph their acts so they could paint in the pitch black of a subway tunnel or rail yard. If nothing else, the kids were talented.
I found myself comparing their experiences trying to cultivate their talent with my own upbringing as an upper-middle-class white kid in the suburbs where every flash of minor ability was nurtured far in excess of actual talent. Yes, graffiti writers wanted the acceptance of their peers by seeing their designs on subway trains (what kid doesn’t want the recognition of their peers?). But they also wanted a place to do art. And every attempt to find them canvas, paint, and legal sanction ended up broke and defunct amidst austerity budget cuts. Kids in my school with far less artistic ability were put in special classes with a qualified instructor and any art supply they could possibly want. And I went to a public school. While our parents were squinting to find any attribute that made us special, these graffiti writers were being scolded by an entire city telling them they were talentless at best and criminals at worst.
At the time, MTA officials said clean, sparkling trains were a sign of order. These days, the MTA wraps entire trains in advertisements for the next summer blockbuster or some overhyped app. Recently, I was enjoying a speedy ride through Queens on the E train sitting next to some delightful art work that seemed graffiti-esque, in a good way.
As I sat there appreciating the art, I couldn’t help but think of one graffiti writer from Getting Up who said, “If the MTA really understood graffiti, they'd know that it's one of the best things the subways have going for them. If the city would back us up and treat us as artists instead of vandals, we could contribute a lot to the beauty of New York.”
Pondering that sentiment, I asked the artist of the above image, James Gulliver Hancock, for his thoughts. “You are right in making connections to the early days of street art in New York with my piece,” Hancock told me in an email. “I’ve seen some amazing photos of the subway cars back in the day that don’t look too dissimilar to what I did with the piece you attached.” Hancock was particularly influenced by artists such as Keith Haring, although Hancock described them as “more street artists than graffiti artists.”
Still, he added that it is often hard to differentiate between what people deem the good and “bad” aspects of street art. “Back in the early days of graffiti it was all put in the same basket as an element of low level crime that encourages more crime and destroys assets,” Hancock wrote to me. “However today councils around the world see street art or public art as a way of controlling graffiti and a sign of a prospering community.”
That is certainly the case here in New York. Today you can find faux-graffiti style art across the city. Luxury condos in the South Bronx adorn the walls with graffiti art to lend “authenticity.” I don’t bring this up to debate gentrification or what is authentic, but simply to say that the kid who thought the MTA didn’t know what it had going for it was vindicated. Three years after Getting Up was published, the MTA launched the Arts And Design program, which eventually commissioned Hancock’s piece among many others, and to my mind is one of the best things the MTA has ever done.
But it took the MTA far too long to get there. The most galling section of Getting Up involves the story of a grassroots community organization run by one guy that took a city-owned abandoned storefront and turned it into an art space for writers to use. They literally took kids off the street and gave them a space to paint. But they were always lacking in supplies due to a shortage of funds. The organization met with the MTA and practically begged them to form a partnership to bring art to the trains and stations for a tiny fraction of the cost it was spending to clean the trains and guard rail yards. The MTA said no. The city jacked up the rent during the fiscal crisis and evicted them. The space sat empty for years and the kids went back to the subway tunnels.
Meanwhile, the MTA spent millions of dollars inventing a special solvent that would get rid of graffiti paint and outfitted train yards with special washing facilities. The solvent made MTA workers sick and the writers quickly devised a method of painting that rendered the solvent ineffective. It was guerrilla warfare, art style, and the MTA lost just as surely as the U.S. lost Vietnam. Most politicians and MTA officials thought this was all worth it because, to them, graffiti signaled they had lost control over the system. I think they lost control, all right, but not in the way that they meant.
St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street, Ada Calhoun
A few months ago I was doing laps on my bike in Prospect Park when I got to chatting with a guy riding next to me. Despite my struggling to keep up with him, he said he was in his 60s. He has lived in Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge his entire life. After a moped buzzed by us uncomfortably close he got to complaining about e-bikes and mopeds and crime and gentrification. I was afraid the conversation was taking a dark turn. So I asked him if he preferred the New York he grew up in to New York today. Without hesitating, he said, “No, absolutely not.” He said the city is always changing and he doesn’t love all of the changes but only a fool wants to go back to the Bad Old Times.
Some grouches will have you think otherwise, that the glory days of NYC was when rent was cheap, artist colonies abounded, and you could throw a rock and hit a future famous musician. But their tales typically exclude any explanation for why the rent was so cheap to begin with.
St. Marks Is Dead is a How To Guide on not sounding like a fool when talking about New York. If you live here for any amount of time many things will change, some good and some bad. Real New Yorkers, like the guy I biked with for a few laps, reserve the right to complain but more or less take these changes as they come. Others will make it their life’s purpose to stand athwart those changes and yell “halt,” as if it is the first time anything in New York has become different. They consider it a personal affront the city was not preserved in amber at the exact time their lives were most enjoyable.
I thought of this book when I read a recent Washington Post article about how most Americans think things were best when they were a kid or young adult. St. Marks Is Dead takes the exact right approach with such people, by letting them say their piece, not arguing with them, but allowing the historical record speak for itself. There is one poignant bit when someone waxes nostalgic about the time they found a dead homeless person on the stoop of a tenement, lamenting not the circumstances of the dead person but that the tenement has now become upscale condos. Fortunately, Calhoun gives much wiser individuals the last word, but I won’t spoil it here.