Today’s Metro New York newspaper ran an article (below) regarding the elimination of subway graffiti. The information is nothing new to those of you in the know but I want to point out a particular quote, “The NYPD’s transit bureau keeps a database of about 1,500 tags to identify repeat offenders. Locations are staked out, often planting a car on an isolated stretch of track and hiding cops inside.” Don’t say you weren’t warned. As subway writing increases, and it is increasing in NY, cops are starting to stake out yards and lay-ups like they did in the 80s and 90s. Be careful out there people.
peace
How the subways wiped out graffiti
by patrick arden / metro new york
APR 1, 2008
MANHATTAN. While envisioning the future of the MTA recently, transit boss Elliot Sander recalled the past.
The city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s had led to a decade of neglect. Trains derailed every 18 days. “Subway crime was a fact of life in a system covered with graffiti,” Sander said.
That described the situation in 1984, when David Gunn was named president of the New York City Transit Authority.
The MTA was two years into its first capital improvement plan, and the 4 line began to get new stainless steel cars. Gunn asked about plans to keep the new trains clean of graffiti.
“They had no plans,” Gunn, still amazed today, told Metro. “They had sort of given up.”
Repainted cars were simply sent back into the system. “You’d have one virgin car in the middle of a train completely covered in graffiti,” Gunn said. “You might as well put a sign on it: ‘Paint me.’”
Adding field managers, Gunn hatched a plan to rid graffiti, starting on the 4 and 7 lines and then focusing all efforts on one line at a time.
“We had to put in place not only clean trains, but the means to keep them clean,” he said. “We also decided that once you put out a clean train it would never go out dirty. If we could keep them clean, we could make a projection as to when the last train with graffiti would run.”
One line at a time isn’t a new tactic
The line-by-line solution of the Gunn Era sounds similar to the broader plans of current NYC Transit President Howard Roberts, who wants to make every line more autonomous.
Now retired, David Gunn is reluctant to draw a comparison. “We isolated subway lines in terms of priority, but we ran the trains as a system,” he said. “Yet the best way to attack a problem is to break it down into small pieces.”
The authority versus the artists
In a train yard at 132nd Street, the graffiti was sophisticated. With the same trains laid up every evening, taggers could take their time: one night for an undercoat, the next for an outline and the third for color.
“These kids worked three nights, all night long, until they had something they were proud of,” Gunn said. “Just before the train would go into service ... we’d have cops dressed as car cleaners come in to slosh paint all over it. The kids would be in hysterics, literally, crying and begging you to let it make just one trip.”
The new scourge: Scratchiti
Graffiti is still a problem, though not as daunting as in the old days. NYC Transit is now waging a war on the more menacing scourge of acid-etched scratchiti. Newer train
models even have Mylar sheets on their windows that can be removed once marked. The NYPD’s transit bureau keeps a database of about 1,500 tags to identify repeat offenders. Locations are staked out, often planting a car on an isolated stretch of track and hiding cops inside.
Posted by Alan Ket on April 01, 2008 at 05:52 PM
