Graffiti

One thing about graffiti taggers: they leave behind lots of destruction, but very few actual words, so it's tempting to ask, when you see their work: "What were they THINKING?" That's why we're publishing these excerpts from Web sites devoted to the defense of graffiti. - The Editors FROM: "Hows and Why of the War on Graffiti. Things every graff artist should know!!" By Zener, Praez and Chris Caruso of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union: www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/ 1519/ war_on_graff.

LET'S EXAMINE the graffiti thing (editorial, Oct. 10). Graffiti is NOT nasty when done the right way. I've seen graffiti that would make famous artists look twice in amazement. Tagging on any property is ugly - but graf artists are extremely talented and some might not have a chance to show any respectable, established artist or business what they can do. Who's to say that businesses can't benefit from graffiti intended to advertise the business? These cats that are "bombers" are some talented homemade artists who have some of the same knowledge and expertise that established artists have, without all the studies.

If you have the volunteering bug but don't have a project, you have two days to sign up for this one: Zero Tolerance Day II, the kickoff event for the School District's anti-graffiti program. Saturday morning, hundreds of students, faculty and volunteers will paint over graffiti, clean up yards, plant shrubs and do other beautifying projects in more than 22 schools. More schools will do projects on other weekends throughout May. This is the second year for the program, co-sponsored by the Daily News.

In a Dec. 28 article on graffiti, the question of whether graffiti is art or vandalism was raised. An officer, who exists outside our "subculture" responded, "the whole point is rep" and that graffiti is ugly and could not be considered artistic. Well, unfortunately, this investigative officer has wasted both your time and his. Writing one's name on walls incorporates a specific style. Writers who deviate from this implicit style of writing are considered outcasts; they are not tolerated.

Parents and guardians will be held responsible when their children destroy or damage property under a new ordinance approved by the City Council to help erase the local graffiti problem. Under the ordinance, which was passed Tuesday parents or guardians of youths younger than 18 would face up to 90 days in jail or $2,000 in fines for each violation. A municipal judge also could order the parents or guardians to clean, paint or restore damaged property. The youths would face a hearing in the juvenile domestic relations court.

Police today began rounding up five adults and 12 juveniles who they said were responsible for defacing buildings throughout the city with spray-painted graffiti. The suspects, according to investigators from the Juvenile Aid Division, usually operated in teams of three and, according to one spokesman, considered themselves "stylistic artists. " A two-month investigation led to today's arrests. Police said the suspects, although acquainted with each other, did not run as a gang, but operated individually or in small groups.

They're the graffiti-busters, cops whose beat is nabbing the spray-paint vandals and wall scrawlers in West Philadelphia. But Wednesday was anything but routine for the four undercover cops. They tracked down and arrested a murder suspect. And it was a suspect in not just any homicide case. It was the high-profile, purse-snatching-turned-fatal-stabbing of Vladimir Sled, a University of Pennsylvania biophysicist who was slain on Halloween night while walking home from campus with his fiancee.

Some fortune tellers read tea leaves. Nick Tamaro and Bill Bain read walls. But unlike some readers who may predict good fortune, the news that Tamaro and Bain deliver is always bad. Tamaro and Bain, both from the Northeast, are members of the Police Department's Preventive Patrol Unit and are trained to read graffiti. They are participating in a major crackdown against high-profile wall-writers in the city. In a little over a year, the unit, headed by Capt. Al Lewis, has made nearly 100 arrests for wall-writing in the city.

The graffiti mystery that has confounded officials for months may have come to an end Tuesday when police arrested a local high school student on numerous counts of criminal mischief. Police took Washington Township High School senior Mandel Harris, 19, into custody at the end of the school day Tuesday. Police said they soon uncovered several pieces of evidence linking Harris to more than three dozen cases of graffiti that included the word sour on private and government property throughout the community.

They looked tiny against the backdrop of the tall, expansive masses of stone and brick. Elizabeth Barone was kneeling in the front yard of Bok Technical High School in South Philly planting palm-sized begonias. William Wallace was reaching up with his paint roller to cover new graffiti on the back wall of Sayre Middle School in West Philly. Young Jason McDowell was sweeping away dirt and trash behind Bryant Elementary School in Cobbs Creek. These people were among the small armies of students, school faculty and parents doing what they could to change those long-time magnets for graffiti and trash into pleasant places to learn.

Behind the charming boutiques of Main Street in Manayunk sits a crude shell of a building. The property, which runs along the Manayunk Canal on a strip of land called Venice Island, is what's left of a 19th-century textile mill. It's basically four jagged, graffiti-covered walls with no roof and nothing inside — as if someone had started demolishing from the top and worked down, but never finished. "It's pretty gruesome," says Mike Yanofsky, who works on Main Street and was taking an afternoon stroll along the canal's boardwalk when we caught up with him. He noted the nearby construction of a new Venice Island recreation-and-performing-arts center and wondered, shouldn't something be done about this eyesore?

CAIRO - After Egypt's ruling military sealed off streets around Cairo's Tahrir Square with walls of imposing concrete blocks, a group of artists decided to reopen the avenues on their own - in the public imagination, at least. On one of the walls, they painted an exact trompe-l'oeil reproduction of the street behind it, as if it were open. The perspective painting matches up with the architecture of the neighboring buildings and even has some "pedestrians" strolling along the boulevard.

Two Philadelphia universities have been hit within a month with anti-Semitic graffiti, one at an international Jewish fraternity house and the other at the hub for Jewish life on campus. At the University of Pennsylvania, a nickel-size swastika was found engraved into the aluminum surface of a service elevator at Steinhardt Hall on Feb. 9, according to a report Friday in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. Steinhardt, in the 200 block of South 39th Street, houses Penn Hillel.

Two Philadelphia universities within a month have been hit with anti-semitic graffiti, one at an international Jewish fraternity house and the other at the hub for Jewish life on campus. At the University of Pennsylvania, a nickel-sized swastika was found engraved into the aluminum surface of a service elevator at Steinhardt Hall on Feb. 9, according to a report Friday in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. Steinhardt in the 200 block of S. 39th Street houses Penn Hillel.

Change is coming fast to the blocks around Broad Street and Ridge Avenue. Restaurant impresario Stephen Starr is opening a kitchen and commissary in the soon-to-be-vacated Ridge Avenue men's shelter. Project H.O.M.E. is building a four-story apartment building on a vacant lot at 15th Street and Fairmount Avenue. Across the street, private developers are replacing a warehouse and taproom with 34 rental apartments. Around the corner on Broad, the Laborers' District Council of Metropolitan Philadelphia is raising a five-story office building.

EVERYONE knows the adage that begins, "If these walls could talk . . . " But in the eyes of Spanish artists Patricia Gomez Villaescusa and Maria Jesus Gonzalez Fernandez, even silent walls have plenty of stories to tell. The problem is not that the walls are mute; it's the fact that, eventually, walls fall down. "We always choose buildings and structures that are destined to disappear," Gomez said, through a translator. That's how the pair came to use historic Holmesburg Prison for their latest piece, "Doing Time/Depth of Surface," opening Friday at Moore College of Art and Design.

The handwriting was on the wall - in this case, on a bathroom wall at Avon Grove High School. Authorities won't say what was scribbled Tuesday in black marker at the southern Chester County school. But the message has helped heighten concerns about repercussions in the school from Saturday's double homicide in Avondale. An Avon Grove student and a former student have been charged in the ongoing investigation. Avon Grove Superintendent Gus J. Massaro said the words on the wall were linked to the weekend slayings.

The lies that a graffiti tagger told on the witness stand this week proved more egregious to a Philadelphia judge than the alleged beating and broken jaw the man suffered after a run-in with two police officers in 2007. Common Pleas Judge James Murray Lynn yesterday, at the request of the now-ex-cops' defense attorneys, ruled that the testimony given on Wednesday by David Vernitsky was so riddled with lies that the trial could not proceed. Calling Vernitsky, 40, a liar and a "patently unreliable witness," Lynn announced a judgment of acquittal, meaning he believed the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction.