An Iconic Graffiti Work Goes Gray in New York

NEW YORK (April 12) -- For nearly a decade it blazed above a stretch of sidewalk on New York's Lower East Side -- an exuberant 60-foot-long, 10-foot-tall mural celebrating street life, female beauty, tropical sunsets, the Puerto Rican flag and Al Sharpton. The mural was signed in large squiggly letters by the three artists who created it: Doves, Jedi and Mek.

On April Fool's Day, a lone workman began rolling battleship-gray paint over the technicolor marvel at the corner of Avenue D and East Fifth Street. John Lora, owner of Lora Deli & Supermarket, says he was bowing to pressure from city officials to eradicate the artwork, which went up in 2001, four years before Lora took over the building.

Within hours the mural was gone.

Depending on your point of view, New York City's "quality of life" had just improved a notch, or the city had become a little bit more faceless and bland.

"There's a real value to public art that comes up organically," Emily Rubenstein, a senior adviser in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office of operations, told AOL News. "But it's the city's stance that the property owner should decide what he or she wants to retain on their property."

The eradication of the Lora Deli mural was merely the latest salvo in an anti-graffiti campaign that has been raging in New York for decades. One red-letter date is May 12, 1989, when then-Mayor Ed Koch crowed that the city's entire public transit fleet was graffiti-free for the first time in years.

That victory merely pushed the more talented graffiti crews -- and many decidedly untalented wannabes -- to start painting on highway overpasses, railroad sidings and subway tunnels.

Eventually their work moved to exterior building walls and rooftops, sometimes with and sometimes without permission of the building owners. Since 1999, when the Graffiti Free NYC program was initiated, the city has eradicated more than 27,000 works of graffiti. A new law that went into effect April 7 further streamlines the process for city crews to get approval to eradicate graffiti on buildings.

"With the new law," Rubenstein says, "we think we'll be able to move more quickly and efficiently."

Today, Bloomberg follows the mantra of his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, who said, "Graffiti is one of the visible signs of a city out of control."

Under this relentless pressure, graffiti is on the move again, this time into the legit worlds of art galleries, advertising and trendy architectural decoration. The wildly talented Tats Cru from the Bronx has done ads for Coca-Cola. D'Face has stopped painting on buildings and started showing his work in galleries. And, in a quest for edginess, the up-scale Cooper Square Hotel recently commissioned a two-tone graffiti mural by its front entrance.

This trend moved blogger Jeremiah Moss to ask: "Is graffiti still graffiti when it's not defacing public property? Sometimes, walking the streets, it's hard to tell if you're looking at gallery art, graffiti or advertising."

This loss of the art form's renegade status is no surprise to James and Karla Murray. The husband-and-wife photographers have just re-issued an expanded version of "Broken Windows," their lavish chronicle of New York graffiti from 1996 to 2001. (They'll present a slideshow and lecture on the book at the mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library at 6:30 p.m. today.)

The Murrays, who photographed the now-vanished Lora Deli mural when it first went up in 2001, insist that not all graffiti is created equal. They contend that the murals they lovingly and painstakingly photographed for "Broken Windows" are not to be confused with the squabbling of "tags" (quick signatures) or "throw-ups" (fat, two-tone tags), stuff any kid with a can of spray paint can do. The trouble, as the Murrays see it, is that the city regards all graffiti as vandalism, a crime. So the good must go, along with the bad.

"It's a climate of controlling," James Murray says. "The police don't want that expression by graffiti artists. The community loves the murals and the artists, but for the police a gray wall or a brown wall is a sign of order."

"And that's awful," Karla adds. "That wall (on the Lora Deli) beautified the neighborhood. It's free art in a neighborhood where a lot of people can't afford to go to a museum. You're taking away the flavor of the neighborhood and putting up a gray wall. And it'll probably get covered over with tags -- the kind of graffiti nobody wants."