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Graffiti Complaints Rise as Kids Play Tag Uptown

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By Jack Crosbie

On the corner of Sherman Avenue and Dyckman Street in Inwood, a long mural of a woman, her back to the street, stretches across a 20-foot section of wall bordering the G.Q. Mens’ Fashion storefront.

G.Q. has closed, but the spray-painted mural remains on the wall, flanked by elaborate abstract designs, all spiky angles and bold highlights. On the metal shutters of the abandoned G.Q. building and the still-open businesses around it, haphazardly sprayed tags strike a streaky contrast to the colorful murals. The tags are scrawled on any available surface – mailboxes, shutters, walls, signs, sides of vans – and they go up as fast as the city or landlords can take them down.

Graffiti now covers the shuttered storefront of GQ Fashion.

Graffiti now covers the shuttered storefront of G.Q. Fashion.

Calls to 311, the city’s non-emergency line, for graffiti removal have risen steadily over the past three years in the uptown area.

Graffiti is an interesting problem: It can be vandalism, art, petty crime or free expression, often all at once. Simple tags can mark gang or drug-dealing territory, often alongside or on top of intricate street murals.
And though New York’s 1980s heyday of tarnished walls, phone booths and subway cars has faded, graffiti is again taking root uptown.

From Sept. 1, 2011, to Aug. 31, 2012, Community Board Districts 9, 10, 11 and 12 saw a combined 378 calls to get rid of graffiti. During those months in 2012 to 2013, requests grew to 536. And from 2013 to September 2014, uptown residents and business owners called 680 times, an almost 27 percent increase from the previous year.

Still, not everyone considers graffiti a critical issue. Abid Nadeem, owner of Dyckman Pharmacy in Inwood, said that the problem hasn’t been pressing in recent years. He said city workers responded to his calls last year and offered to clean off or paint over the graffiti for free.

Inwood receives almost double the number of graffiti-related 311 calls than other uptown neighborhoods. During the September 2013-September 2014 period alone, Inwood (represented by Community Board 12) saw 282 calls for graffiti removal, well over a third of the 680 total complaints uptown.

Ebenezer Smith, district manager of CB 12, said he has contacted City Hall. “We do have a lot of graffiti here and, yes, we receive a lot of complaints,” Smith said. “I’ve been asking the mayor’s offices to help me with the graffiti removal.”

Smith said the graffiti in Inwood takes many forms, including organized territory tagging, where different groups – Smith hesitated to label them “gangs” – mark their areas of influence, and larger street art such as the murals adorning many Dyckman Street businesses. “You have a little bit of everything,” Smith said.

Some of the biggest problem areas, he said, are the dark underpasses between Inwood’s Haven Avenue and Fort Washington Park, where graffiti covers most of the pillars, walls and staircases leading down toward the Hudson River. The area is a popular spot for taggers and artists to practice because of the abundant secluded space. The Department of Sanitation handles most 311 complaints, but with in-between spaces such as the Fort Washington underpasses, it’s unclear whose job it is to scrub off graffiti.

Graffiti on pillars holding up freeways over the Haven Street underpass.

Graffiti covers the pillars in the secluded Haven Avenue underpass.

“One side has been cleaned recently by Parks Department. … The other side is not clean and is tagged with graffiti all over,” Smith said. Sections of the underpass have fresh green paint over tags; others, merely feet away, are still covered.

Parks Department representatives did not verify which parts of the Haven Avenue underpasses were under their jurisdiction.

The underpasses give both aspiring artists and taggers a place to put up paint unnoticed by property owners or police. But illegal graffiti doesn’t always stay out of sight. Tags pop up frequently on the sides of buildings and shops, particularly on shuttered ones.

The city occasionally removes the damage, but some store managers said that it’s up to the landlords to clean up.

“I just recently saw this, like five months ago,” said Dwight Bodden, manager of Avenue, a clothing store on 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. Bodden’s store has two large faces, sprayed quickly but deftly in single lines of paint onto the side of his building. The face – broad, wedge-shaped nose, spiral ears, with a swift dash of a mouth and crinkled eyes – is a prominent tag in Harlem, and even crops up downtown. Bodden said there’s not much he can do about it; any changes to outside walls (such as graffiti removal) have to be done by the landlord, he said.

Two large faces, a common tag in the uptown area, mar the side of Avenue, a clothing store in Central Harlem.

Two large faces, a common tag in the uptown area, mar the side of Avenue, a clothing store in Central Harlem.

But graffiti artists don’t need to ask permission, except for sanctioned murals like the ones adorning several Dyckman Street businesses.

Mohammed Kamrul, an employee of Citi General Hardware in Central Harlem, said that neighborhood kids hassle him for spray paint on a regular basis. The taggers are mostly underage, and Kamrul keeps the spray cans locked behind the counter in accordance with city regulations. He won’t sell to anyone under 18, but groups of kids still come through the store to badger him.

“If it’s not stopped in childhood, they’ll keep doing it,” Kamrul said. “I don’t know why they do it. They don’t care.”

(Photos by Jack Crosbie)


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