America’s Most Policed Art Form: Subway Graffiti, NYC’s Visual Criminal

The policing of the art form has been so thorough and enduring that it’s become possible to see hip-hop as just that: an agent, or better, a target, that has a life over and above the individuals that practice it.

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“I been a threat
Since Benetton, Gazelles, and Bally’s
The icon in graffiti in the Brooklyn alley”
—Hell Razah a.k.a. Renaissance Child, “Renaissance”

Some 30 years after it emerged from the burned-out apartment blocks of the Bronx, hip-hop has a rap sheet that would make even the “realest” of the genre’s hardcore gangstas envious. While Mos Def would warn us against treating any phenomenon, including hip-hop, as an agent or a subject in its own right (“Some giant in the hills”), the policing of the art form over the past three decades has been so thorough and enduring that it’s become possible to see hip-hop as just that: an agent, or better, a target, that has a life over and above the individuals that practice it.

We’re not concerned here with the transgressions of a few gun-toting or weed-smoking rappers – we can leave it up to Bill O’Reilly and crew to confuse the art form with the people. What’s at issue is the status of hip-hop—and here I take hip-hop as a loose configuration of artistic practices including rapping, musical production, graffiti, and DJing—as a repeated target for disciplining and control. Throughout its history, hip-hop’s been “policed” in every sense of the word: police officers have arrested graffiti artists and mixtape salesmen; city ordinances have banned spraypaint sales and boomboxes; lawyers have sued producers, labels, and performers over intellectual property issues; parents groups and religious leaders have launched national anti-hip-hop campaigns and agitated for Congressional investigations into hip-hop’s lyrical content.

A few of the reasons for hip-hop’s policing are, no doubt, straightforward. While hip-hop, in all its forms, presents a broad variety of perspectives, ethics, and aesthetics, the stuff that’s pumped through our homes and radios is heavy on misogyny, violence, and homophobia; meanwhile, in the past, graffiti art and loud music made life unpleasant for many. That said, hip-hop policing has always been about more than maintaining a Ten Commandments-style moral order within the good ol’ US of A. In its many, changing forms, policing has figured prominently in attempts to protect money-making and capital-accumulating interests. In a slice of American life where money is riding shotgun with morality and immorality, this makes for tangled, complex affairs. As Part I suggested, when it comes to hip-hop, it’s always bigger than hip-hop (America’s Most Policed Art Form: The Rise of the Informal Mixtape Economy).
With all this in mind, let’s turn the clock back and get into the deep history of “America’s Most Policed Art Form”. In one of the earliest examples of hip-hop policing, New York’s City Hall established a legal and policing apparatus over the course of the ‘80s and ‘90s that was designed specifically to contain the spread of graffiti throughout the City. While targeted at the new styles of painting that matured alongside rap music, the City’s anti-graffiti measures set an early precedent for the policing of hip-hop as a whole.

Subway Graffiti: Getting-Up and Getting-Out
Although rap music is the most popular, longest-lasting legacy of New York’s hip-hop explosion, graffiti was the first hip-hop “element” to break-out of the City’s underinvested, arson-ridden outer boroughs. Leading graffiti’s spread were writers like TAKI-183, EVIL ED, CLIFF 159, and BARBARA who scrawled their tags on seemingly every available surface in the City. For writers interested in “getting-up,” or having their work seen around town, however, the subway cars that snaked their way along New York’s labyrinthine rail system became the most coveted of all the City’s canvases.

Writers, competing with each other for visibility and pushing the formal boundaries of graffiti, rapidly expanded their stylistic arsenal from “tags” (small, often single-colored names like those that made TAKI a household name) to “throw-ups” and “pieces” (which presented the writer’s name in varying degrees of size and complexity) to increasingly abstract, colorful designs that covered large portions of the subway cars (“top-to-bottoms,” “end-to-ends,” and “whole cars”).  As graffiti evolved stylistically, its content also expanded, moving beyond depictions of artists’ names to include commentary on the art world and City life.

At the close of the ‘70s, for instance, Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quinones bombed one train with comically distorted Campbell’s soup cans, a conscious send-up of advertising in the City, as well as of local art-god Andy Warhol’s own famous send-up of commercial iconography. By the time Mayor Ed Koch took office in 1978, virtually all the trains in the City’s chrome fleet were saturated with colorful motifs, garish graphics, and large lettering.

While a graffiti outbreak would have been controversial at any point in the City’s history, graffiti’s emergence during a period of dramatic change in the subway system’s symbolic value amplified its disruptiveness. Historically, New Yorkers have treated their subway as a barometer for the state of the City and its people. From the time of its grand opening in 1904 through the 1940s, the subway widely figured as a sign of the City’s economic power, cohesive cultural identity, and potential for even greater prosperity. 

During the ‘50s, however, New Yorkers began to fear the subway, a fear that only worsened over the ‘60s and ‘70s. Years of persistent underinvestment in maintenance for both trains and stations left the subway in shambles; as the subway decayed physically, order below ground also unraveled, with muggings and assaults becoming more common. Making matters worse were heightened racial tensions: subway ridership, like the City as a whole, was diversifying slowly but steadily, a fact not lost upon agonized white New Yorkers.

Graffiti plunged into this perfect storm of dilapidation, crime, and racial tension. Working- and middle-class riders who weren’t down with writing saw graffiti as evidence of the City’s victimization by an alien underclass and/or lawless criminal element. As critic Nathan Glazer famously wrote in 1979, “[The subway rider] is assaulted continuously, not only by the evidence that every subway car has been vandalized, but by the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable” [N. Glazer, 1979, “On Subway Graffiti in New York”, Public Interest 54 (Winter), p. 4].

City officials, for their part, found the initial graffiti eruption difficult to manage. Thousands of writers buzzed through New York’s trainyards, covering any recently cleaned car with fresh forests of paint. The technology for removing paint, meanwhile, did little for the graffiti-bombed trains’ look; early chemical baths left the car’s shiny silver finish cloudy and drab… making the writers’ work seem, to some, desirable by comparison.

City Hall’s Response to Subway Graffiti
While anti-graffiti efforts were high on the Lindsay administration’s (1966-73) agenda, initial policy responses to graffiti treated it primarily as an aesthetic nuisance. It was only in the early ‘80s, under the Koch administration (1978-89), that circumstances pushed City Hall to decisive action. By then, the economic ramifications of the subway graffiti renaissance emerged as an explicit prompt for anti-graffiti action.

New York, in the early ‘80s, was not only suffering a financial crisis, but also facing increased competition from other cities for business and investment. Changes in manufacturing, shipping, and information technology over the course of the ‘70s eased the flow of goods and money throughout the world and contributed to the rise of “footloose” capital – transnational corporations that shifted their operations around the globe in search of comparative advantages. Seeking a leg-up on other cities competing for their share of this footloose capital, City officials offered a plethora of tax abatements and planning exemptions.

With City Hall’s concessions to global capital came (and continue to come) influxes of investment into the City’s business districts, primarily in the form of “commercial mega projects” such as the Times Square and South Street Seaport renovations, and the “privatization” or “pseudo-privatization” of public spaces, particularly in Midtown and southern Manhattan. All told, the ‘80s witnessed the beginning of New York’s transformation into an open field for capital investment… the city as commodity.

Over the course of the ‘80s, City officials took the commoditization of New York one step further, seizing on the form or image of the City – its appearance as a physical environment – as a means for attracting capital investment in its own right. At a time when competitor cities could offer many of the same economic incentives to global capital, New York tried to sell corporations a unique place identity, one that was friendly and attractive to white collar workers and their employers.

Graffiti, of course, didn’t fit with this new image. As Koch explained, “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” (Quoted in Austin, 2001, Taking the Train,  p. 165). Under Koch, eradicating graffiti became a key gambit in City Hall’s attempt to expand and consolidate New York’s global economic influence.

Announcing a “war on graffiti,” City Hall and the MTA ratcheted-up pressure on New York’s writers. The courts transformed graffiti-writing, once only regarded as a public nuisance, into a sort of “hyper-crime” punishable under criminal mischief, burglary, and criminal trespass charges. Meanwhile, the MTA began to surround the lay-ups where writers did most of their work with 10-foot-high, razor-wire-topped fences; in some yards, attack dogs roamed to scare off intruders. MTA officers patrolling the trainyards became more aggressive in handling writers.

Inevitably, police and writers scuffled along the catwalks and rails of the most popular yards. In certain cases, however, routine physical contact tipped over into acts of brutality. The most prominent casualty of the anti-graffiti campaign was Michael Stewart, a young tagger attacked by MTA police in September, 1983. According to reports, a group of 11 officers brutalized Stewart, choking him with a nightstick and striking him repeatedly over the head, before hogtying him and dropping him off in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. The beating left Stewart bloodied, bruised, and comatose and sparked a new round of public outcry regarding acts of brutality against the City’s minorities.

Strong-arming writers did little to stop the spread of graffiti. If anything, it added more fuel to the fire. Writers taunted City Hall in their work. In 1982, for instance, Spin debuted his infamous “Dump Koch” design. The piece’s spraypainted slogan was catchy, but the art carried the day: the most noticeable part of his work was a caricature of the Mayor, complete with a light-bulb shaped head and a red “SPIN” tag placed squarely on his brow, as if to suggest that the Mayor’s own broad, shiny visage was now writers’ territory. Through this and other acts of similar audacity, New York’s writers had, by 1984, bombed virtually all of the MTA’s 6,200-car fleet.

The City finally managed to quell graffiti only by removing cars from the rails immediately following a bombing incident; once back in the yard, maintenance workers ran the cars through a paint-stripping chemical wash. Taking freshly bombed trains off the tracks undercut the main appeal of the trains, namely, their high visibility. With their main mode of getting-up shut down, writers gradually migrated to other, more graffiti-friendly locations aboveground, in the City’s decaying industrial districts and neglected highway arteries. By 1990, nearly all the subway cars were clean… for good.

The War on Graffiti Widens
Despite the massive public relations problems associated with Koch’s war on graffiti, City Hall followed the writers above ground. The chief promoter of the expanded anti-graffiti agenda, Rudy Giuliani (1994 – 2001), once again linked graffiti to the health of the City economy: “Graffiti… is an attack on our communities and our quality of life… Graffiti intimidates residents. It encourages street gangs. It discourages tourists, lowers property values, and invites other kinds of crime” (Quoted in Murray and Murray, 2002, Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC).

In an attempt to choke off the writers’ supplies, the Giuliani administration introduced new controls on the sale of spray paint and certain broad-tipped markers. Under these new provisions, codified in Title 10-117.1 of the NYC Administrative Law Code, writing implements popular with graffiti artists could not be sold to minors or displayed in unlocked places. Meanwhile, the NYPD introduced a new Anti-Graffiti Vandal Squad to patrol the City’s streets for any writers who did manage to get their hands on Krylon and Sharpies. This squad, which remains active to this day, employed “computer tracking, confidential informants, painstakingly gathered intelligence, and seemingly endless surveillance” to catch graffiti artists in the act of writing.

Over the course of its struggles with the writing community, the City has taken pages from the style books of the graffiti artists to advance its own interests. The City has used the “all-over” graffiti aesthetic to create new opportunities for commercial advertising in city spaces. As graffiti artist E20 recently pointed out, “You see the way they are wrapping city buses with advertisements. That all comes from graffiti… from the trains. Which is like a hypocrisy… like we couldn’t do it but they can because they are making money out of it” (quoted in Murray and Murray, 2002, n.p.). Public buses now travel through the City’s crowded streets, covered in advertisements that add further layers of visual material to the City’s screaming, neon-lit commercial palimpsest.

Scratch Underneath the Surface
If anti-graffiti represented a neo-liberal effort to enhance the City’s capital-friendliness, it also took part in another neo-liberal dynamic: the transition from a welfare to a “revanchist” state. Alongside its attempt to attract white-collar workers, global capital, and commercial investment, City Hall rolled-back many of its traditional social welfare programs. The combination of New York’s anti-welfarist turn and the basic class dynamics of its globalization produced a systemic tension within the City: Even as welfare provisions for those lower-income New Yorkers collapsed, the lower-class population continued to expand. Much of that lower-wage workforce, in turn, moved downward into an expansive and expanding low-wage informal economy. Insofar as this growing, informalized lower-class posed a threat to the City’s capital-controlling elite, this very same class facilitated the elite’s further capital accumulation. City officials in the ‘80s and ‘90s faced the challenge of keeping a lid on a potentially volatile class situation.

Their answer to this class problem was not a new form of welfarism. In a very real sense, City officials chose to deal with material contradictions in New York in the ‘80s and early-‘90s by fiddling with the surface appearance of the City, replacing structural approaches to managing contradiction (like progressive taxation, subsidized public housing, etc.) with strategies for masking it. If graffiti could be seen as an emblem of the City’s marginalized populations, City officials chose to erase the evidence of that population rather than to try to alleviate its marginalization; it became more important to mask the signs of “getting-up” than to address why “getting-up” was so important, why an entire aesthetic could be built around self-advertisement, why teenagers and 20-somethings would risk their lives to do it, and why the surfaces of the City were the only places it seemed it could be done.

Danger, fame, illegality have always had a certain allure, and most definitely factored into graffiti writers’ choices to bomb the City, but what about the rampant poverty, disinvestment in the arts curricula and schools, political marginality, and social stigma that informed graffiti aesthetics, influenced the materials closest at hand for aspiring artists, and gave writers a sense of purpose? The specific material and human conditions in which graffiti historically flourished didn’t necessarily have to give birth to graffiti; but aspiring artists – or even just dawdlers on the outskirts of the writing world – might have had different ideas, found different opportunities, and made different choices had the City been a different place.

As subway scholar Joe Austin puts it, anti-graffiti became the ultimate postmodern conservatism – a way of shifting the debate over the distribution of resources and the right to space into the realm of appearances and aesthetics. Graffiti might not have always been the most appealing – at times it could be downright ugly – but what about what lay behind it? For City Hall, nothing mattered beyond the surfaces… anti-graffiti was business as usual.

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Special thanks to Joe Austin, Michael W. Brooks, Craig Castleman, Jeff Chang, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Jorge Fiori, Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Hua Hsu, Eleni Kyrou, Louis Menand, James T. Murray, and Karla L. Murray, whose writings, lectures, and feedback contributed to this article.

T.M. Wolf is a writer and hip-hop journalist based in the New York Metro Area. In addition to PopMatters his writings on hip-hop have appeared in Stylus Magazine, Undercover Magazine, and The Foundation: A Mixtape Magazine, as well as on Okayplayer.com, where he is a Staff Critic. Readers are invited to peruse his blog, CanineMind, for more of his work.