In Riverside Park, spring is an almost season. Yellow and white flowers are almost blooming. The cherry blossoms are almost pink, the sun is almost egg-yolk yellow. All the colors nature offers almost make up for the art that was lost when Amtrak painted over historic graffiti in the park’s Freedom Tunnel. But if the illegal graffiti scrawled at 125th STREET, and at the tennis court and at the tunnel at 96th STREET is anything to go by, the city’s thirst for art has not been quenched. Cyclists and pedestrians almost collide. A maybe 60-year-old man in clear spectacles almost runs around the park, which almost offers peace, save for the cars and the motorbikes revving from the roads that sandwich the park.
Instead, if you, like the 107,268 viewers confiding in wikihow on the matter, are trying to satisfy your desire for any lasting graffiti at Riverside Park’s Freedom Tunnel, worry not. The wikiHow page promises that it is “very easy to access.” You will, however, need to, among other things, “slip through the gap between the fence and the overpass,” “find yourself fenced into a sort of pen” and “Simply hop this fence using one of the overpass pillars.”
If you make it into Freedom Tunnel, so named after the graffiti artist who popularised it, then you could be arrested for trespassing. Easy enough.
Artist graffities wall on Riverside Park in spring, moments before a police van on Riverside Drive hoots at him. He picks his equipment and flees the scene and the police drives away. | Photo by Ivy Nyayieka
If it were not for the fences, you could almost get to Freedom Tunnel. Indeed, if you are looking to even catch sight of Freedom Tunnel, you will notice that Riverside Park has many ways to deny access. There is a mostly black DO NOT ENTER sign in front of a set of stairs and at another place a mostly orange DO NOT ENTER sign dug into the grass and more times than you would expect to in a park, you will see the yellow CAUTION tape barricading you’ll-never-know-what in the style of police crime scene tape.
Yet the much sought-after graffiti not just on Riverside Park but across the city raises complex questions for park cleaning staff, the city’s administration and artists.
Winston Johnson, a lover of art and trees, especially those IN Riverside Park, which he has been taking care of for more than five years, enjoys looking at his trees and making his own art by drawing or painting them.
In his role as a zone gardener at Riverside Park, he loves to plant trees and weed them. Sometimes, when he has to prune a part of a plant, he says to the plant, “I understand I am hurting you. Be favorable with me. So I could cut you and then you could grow back. Do not hold this against me.”
Winston is proud too, of playing a part in how the parks make people feel, especially during the pandemic.
“It makes people feel happy. It makes people smile. It is like therapy. It brings up your spirit. If your spirit [is] down, you come in the park, you could meditate,” he says.
Winston, who left his job teaching GED math to follow what he calls his “calling,” loves his job on most days. But on many occasions, as he works in the park, he finds graffiti which, rather than artistic like his own paintings, is rather filled with insults or racial slurs. At this point, he has to exchange his gardening tools for a painting set, to go and paint over the graffiti.
The parks gained popularity during the pandemic, and graffiti-related complaints in 2020 and 2021 diminished to about a quarter of what they were in 2019. However, last year, after the pandemic’s peak, the complaints returned.
Of the top 10 complaints, majority are about parks rather than commercial or residential areas, with Riverside topping the charts, both in 2022 and in the overall data spanning from 2010.
Most of the problematic graffiti is painted in the evening, at night and in the early morning when nobody is around or in areas that are generally more isolated, such as tunnels.
“When they put graffiti, now the workers have the task of going to have to clean it. And so at times you have to clean the wall. It takes away time from getting other things done: to garden or to clean an area. Instead you are dealing with the graffiti,” says Winston.
Indeed, more and more tasks logged by NYC park workers are related to the cleaning of graffiti, with a 40% increase in the last full year to more than 90,000 tasks. Chris Parks, a press officer for NYC Parks, said in an email that “Parks staff remove graffiti on a daily basis in parks throughout the city.”
When you see graffiti, even the artistic kind, at Riverside Park, it is either locked up or painted over, like a thing to be ashamed of. In some cases there is graffiti over the paint THAT was used to paint over the graffiti. It appears the aim is for all the colors to be predetermined. All building walls are brown or grey. Plain. No chaos except what rain offers in rot and nature offers in age. For an open public space, the strangest things in Riverside Park are barricaded, fenced or gated. There is a pair of portable toilets around which there is a fence with a RENT-A-FENCE advertisement and a pair of graffitied stationary toilets locked behind a gate.
The cost of removing graffiti varies. NYC Parks is yet to respond to queries on how much it cost them to clean graffiti in the last year, but, according to The City, “New York City Transit’s annual graffiti cleaning costs surged to $610,956 in 2018 — an increase of 364% from the $131,539 spent just two years earlier.” Airtasker, a company that connects residents to service providers, provides quotes ranging from lows of about $140 to highs of about $900 for graffiti cleaning.
Frustrated by graffiti, some NYC residents have raised money privately to clean it themselves. Michael Perlman, a Forest Hills resident, put together a fundraiser that saw him raise more than $2,000 from residents and businesses to clean graffiti in his QUEENS neighborhood, working with volunteers to paint, scrub or power wash graffitied properties, cleaning the neighbourhood even on weeknights, a prime time for those posting the graffiti. To clean, Perlman bought bottles of Eco Pro Graffiti Remover, a natural plant-based solution, at up to $20 each on average, and a standard size CAN OF acrylic paint, at about $60 each, saying, “If graffiti and other quality of life issues are not addressed in a timely manner, it often multiplies, but we are committed.”
The official website of The City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) harbours a warning in its depths: if you are a property owner who has been given notice to remove graffiti, failure to comply could attract fines worth up to $300.
“Things could have been very different”
When young artists first debuted graffiti in New York City in the 1970s, a group of artists tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with Ed Koch, then mayor, to allow them to graffiti the outsides of trains and, in exchange, collaborate with authorities in enforcing restraint from tagging the insides of the trains.
Jake Jacobs, a middle-school art teacher in the Bronx, whose research is based on the history of graffiti in New York City, says, “It was just such a great opportunity, if they would have sanctioned it, and if they would have embraced it, things could have been very different.”
“That could have been amazing. And so you imagine if the kids or the artists had more time to do it because it was legal, it could have been even better. And it could have been a real tourist attraction. People would say, ‘Oh, let's go to New York City, for beautiful subways, for all the colorful art on the side of the subway,’ ” says Jacobs.
Today, Jacobs still hopes that the city WILL set aside space for artists dedicated to graffiti to put together their art so that the vandalism the city is trying to quell is managed.
“Let's have some designated graffiti zones, and then we'll make the fines and the penalties harder. If somebody just was spraying spray paint on a brand new building that was just painted, and the person [building owner] doesn't want any graffiti, we'll make those penalties tougher. Those kinds of compromises would be a win-win,’ says Jacobs.
“This is the same exact problem that we've been having for decades, ever since I was in, like, seventh grade. It's the same thing: if they catch a kid in the act, they'll probably bust them and arrest them. It could be very different. We could have parks and skate ramps, and all of these areas, which are designated graffiti zones. And kids can take their time or artists… can take their time and do their best work and take photos of it and then get famous and be in books.”
In Philadelphia, for instance, a program allowed artists caught doing graffiti to do community service, by connecting them WITH property owners who wanted graffiti on their walls.
The tension between hate speech graffiti and art graffiti mirrors the tension between artists and authorities.
Jacobs says, “This is kind of like in the eye of the beholder. One kid might think, ‘Oh, I'm making this beautiful.’ And the owner of the property says, ‘Hey, this was a brand new paint job and this is gonna cost me a lot of money!’ “
“There's a lot of property owners that are like, ‘I just let neighborhood kids, or adults just put their art on there. And it's a fresh coat, it's a free coat of paint. I don't have to worry about it.’ And it's part of the aesthetic of the neighborhood,” says Jacobs.
“They want like a specific color scheme. And it has to be as abstract shapes, not recognizable, you know, just sounds very boring. And I think what's gonna happen again, is those people are gonna do that mural, and then kids are gonna come, or adults, and they're just gonna hit it up again, with graffiti,” says Jacobs.
“Maybe at some point, there'll be a mayor, or some politicians in office that really understand the potential of graffiti art to make New York City money, and then they'll capitalize on that,” says Jacobs.
In fact, some of NYC’s graffiti volume is from tourism, because, by Jacobs’ account, “artists want their artwork to be in a place where a lot of people will see it. So if you're like, the best street artist in Cleveland, or Pittsburgh or a smaller city, you want to come to New York City, and you want to say ‘I did something there.’ ”
For Jacobs’ middle school students, the graffiti they might have found at Riverside Park could have been inspirational. He hopes the stigma against graffiti could diminish, saying, “This is the only art form that we know of that we study that was developed by young kids, by young teens and teenagers.”
“My middle school kids are not always perfect angels. But a lot of them see the artwork in the books, and sometimes I put the book in front of a particular kid, because I see them interested in graffiti. And I want them to know, like, you can be famous, you can be in a book, you can have your own page and an art book, this is art,” says Jacobs who hopes that some day people who start out as graffiti artists can make enough money to become fine artists.
“I just hope that there was a way someday, where people can just make money, and then support themselves, if they're fine artists, and they do paintings and galleries, that would be fantastic,” he says.
“New York City is still not accepting what it gave birth to. It's like, it won't accept this beautiful little child: graffiti art,” says Jacobs.