nycisdead106

that time COST REVS blasted City hall/court/bookings downtown with bills

Coney '94

1990

Death of An Out-of-Towner By Joyce Wadler, September 24 1990 Brian Watkins Loved New York; One Night in the Subway, Defending His Mother, He Paid for That Love with His Life - Rocstar and his friends had a deadline. A big Labor Day disco party was going down Sunday night at Roseland: 15 bands, dancing until 4 in the morning. The guys of the Queens-based street gang FTS (F—-That S—-) loved dancing. Especially 18-year-old Yull Gary Morales. He had come by his street name, Rocstar, because out on the dance floor, in his acid-faded denims, short ponytail and mirrored sunglasses, the kid sort of looked the part. But Roseland, just north of New York City's seedy Times Square district, isn't cheap. It cost $15 to get in; after 11:30 P.M., the price would jump to $25. Several of the 40 teenagers needed cash. Fast. It was already past 10 P.M. Getting off the subway at 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue, near the club, they knew what would happen next. "Let's get paid," said one gang member—meaning, in the inverted language of the street, let's rob someone. Ten teenagers charged back down to the train. Downstairs on the downtown E train platform, another group of visitors was also heading out for a night on the town: the Watkins family, Sherwin, 46, and Karen, 45, of Provo, Utah, their sons, Todd, 26, and Brian, 22, and Todd's wife since December, Michele, 23. The Watkinses were in New York on their fifth annual vacation to attend the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The subway platform wasn't crowded. There were perhaps a dozen people there in addition to the Watkinses. The family's spirits were high; they had been having a wonderful weekend in a city they loved. On Friday, they had gone on a shopping trip to the discount outlets in New Jersey, then watched the New York Mets beat the San Francisco Giants, 4-3, in a ninth-inning, come-from-behind game at Shea Stadium. The next day they went to the Open and saw Brad Pearce, a friend from Provo, compete in a men's doubles match, then spent the evening at Cats, Brian's first Broadway play. On Sunday, they saw John McEnroe defeat Spain's Emilio Sanchez in a tense five-setter. Now, after changing in their rooms at the New York Hilton, they were heading to a Moroccan restaurant in Greenwich Village for a late-night supper. They were laughing and joking. It had been. Brian's mother would say later, "such a fun day." FTS spotted them at once. They were, said a gang member called Trauma, "dressed nice and looked like they were going somewhere." In an instant gang members swarmed around them. "Give us your money! Give it up!" Apparently, Sherwin Watkins didn't react quickly enough. One of the kids slashed open his back pocket with a box-cutter. Karen Watkins, screaming, went to the aid of her husband before being shoved to the ground and kicked in the face. Her son Brian, a former Boy Scout, jumped to her aid. Sensing that things were not going smoothly, Rocstar had pulled out his double-edged "butterfly" knife, which flicks open like a butterfly's wings, with its four-inch blade. Moments later the knife was plunged into Brian Watkins's chest. One of the gang members then grabbed Sherwin Watkins's wallet, containing $203, and the attackers ran off. Brian ran after them, up two flights of stairs, collapsing near the token booth. His sister-in-law ran to him, cradling his head in her arms; his brother applied pressure to the¾-inch wound to his chest in a futile attempt to stanch the blood pouring from his severed pulmonary artery; his parents raced to summon help. Twenty minutes later paramedics rushed Brian Watkins to the trauma center at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. He was pronounced dead at 10:46 P.M. His family wept, then prayed over the boy's lifeless body. When he reached the street, Rocstar wiped the blood off the knife with a paper bag he found. Then he shoved the weapon into his shoe. By the time Brian Watkins died, Rocstar had joined the FTS crew inside Roseland. The contents of Sherwin Watkins's billfold had bought admission for him and seven of his friends. They danced until closing time. The city and the nation were not so indifferent. Although the murder of Brian Watkins conjured up every tourist's most nightmarish vision of New York, it seemed also to evoke a deeper response. Back in Utah, an editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune said the attack confirmed "people's worst fears about the breakdown of society in America's largest cities." In New York—which last year counted 1,905 homicides—the murder summoned forth horror and soul-searching in a city that has already known too much of both. But the eight teenagers charged with the murder were apparently made of sterner stuff. "There was no remorse," says one New York City detective who reviewed the videotaped statements of the crime that were provided by seven of the eight. "They said they needed money to go dancing, they were gonna rob somebody to go dancing, and then they did go dancing. If you were a kid and you had done something like that, wouldn't you at least run? They're so confident, they just stroll a block and a half away." The killer's callousness is a maddening mystery to Hector Morales. Rocstar's father. A Guatemalan immigrant, his eyes fill with tears when he talks about his only son. "I have always taught him to work to earn money," says the elder Morales. "I went back on Monday night and looked through his drawers, and I did not find anything that can prove to me that Gary is a criminal or a gang leader. All I found was $120 he had saved, wrapped up in a rubber band. All I can say is he did not have to rob and kill for money." In an account Rocstar reportedly gave to the police, he said, "There was fighting. I took out my knife to protect myself, and the guy turned, and it went into him." Provo, the home of Brigham Young University in Utah's "Happy Valley," is a world removed from Times Square. Nestled at the western slope of the Wasatch Range, it is a city in which murder is an anomaly—something that happens to other people, in other places. There has been but one killing in Provo this year—a mental-hospital worker was stabbed by a patient. The Watkinses, like most of the city's 84,000 residents, are Mormons. They live in a neat, four-bedroom split-level house on a quiet street surrounded by peach trees. Brian's father, Sherwin, is a marketing specialist at General Refractories, a brick manufacturer; his mother, Karen, is studying to become an X-ray technician. Since January, Brian had worked with Todd conducting motivational programs for American Business Seminars of Provo. Sitting on a gold brocade sofa in the small, cozy living room of his own home in Provo, Todd flips through pictures of his brother and struggles to keep his voice steady. "Here he is on a trip to Disneyland, posing with Mom and Emily [brian's 9-year-old sister]." There is a picture of Brian riding his mountain bike. Clowning around in an empty bathtub. Eating lunch at Trump Tower on his last visit to New York. Brian loved the city, its glamour and its hectic pace. His dream was to become a lawyer and move to New York. Had he done so, he might have made the city a kinder place by his presence. On his last trip east, in February, Brian spotted a weary homeless man on a subway platform late at night. The man was shuffling from garbage can to garbage can, searching for scraps. Brian himself hadn't eaten since lunch, so he had picked up a bag of glazed doughnuts. "Brian was hungry, but without saying a word to anyone he took that bag of doughnuts and gave them to that poor man in the subway," says Steve Nickle, 30, chief executive of American Business Seminars, who was there. "That's the kind of man Brian Watkins was. He wanted to help." Brian was a gentle, thoughtful boy with a warm smile who was not terribly social. "Neither of us had any serious girlfriends," says his best friend, Rett Johnson, a factory worker. "Once in a while we'd double-date. But we'd never go out unless the other guy could bring someone too." Brian's idea of a good time was to join his sister, Emily, in a "cold cereal feast" before bedtime. Tennis was a big part of his life. Brian led the Provo High School Bulldogs to the state championship in 1986 and won a four-year tennis scholarship to Idaho State University. Leaving after three years to work with Todd, he was also a part-time tennis instructor at the Ridge Athletic Club in Provo and often played mixed doubles with his mother. At 5'11", 140 lbs., he wasn't a big kid, but he was, everyone agreed, determined. He once played a Little League game with a broken finger. He didn't tell his parents, who assumed it was merely swollen, and he never complained of the pain. In 1984, after suffering a serious knee injury that eventually required three operations, he overcame his coach's doubts that he could recover in time to play; he led his team to that year's championship. "He was determined to do everything the best," says Todd. "Brian and I were close," his brother adds quietly. "When I need someone to talk to, that's when I'm going to feel the loss the most." Rocstar had no interest in tennis, even though the U.S. Open was played at Flushing Meadow, just a few miles from his home. All he knew about the Open was that this year when it was played, the planes landing at LaGuardia Airport were diverted from their noisy flight path directly above his neighborhood so that the players and spectators would not be disturbed. Yet Rocstar is not a member of the city's large, disaffected underclass, and his home is not in a slum. He and his family live in a four-story redbrick apartment house on Parsons Boulevard in the working-class neighborhood of Flushing. In the living room is a large wooden crucifix and a strand of rosary beads. Proudly displayed is a set of the World Book encyclopedia that Hector Morales, a $13.50-an-hour factory worker, bought for his son several years ago. And Gary was not without hopes of his own. He said he wanted to become a paramedic. Since graduating from John Bowne High School last May, he had been working as an air-conditioning mechanic's assistant. He was never late to work, and at home he was close to his family. He protectively walked his sister, Danica, 11, to and from her friends' apartments. As much as Morales is concerned about his son, he's also concerned about his wife, Celina, who's back in Guatemala recovering from a cancer operation. "Gary is everything to her," he says. "How can I tell her that her son is in jail?...I have a terrible feeling she will die if she hears." Yull Gary Morales was his immigrant parents' pride, joy and hope for the future. "I always give my family everything they need," says the elder Morales. As a boy, he says, Gary was "treated like a little prince." Still, he succumbed to the streets. Graffiti was his passion. You could see his "Rocstar" street name sprayed on the roof of J.H.S. 189, two blocks from his apartment. He had even organized a street gang, FTS, five years ago, which kids in the neighborhood describe as a writing crew—a gang that leaves its spray-painted signature on surfaces all over New York. "[FTS] was like a fraternity," says Hector Morales, as if trying to believe that himself. Now his little dinette table is covered with hate mail. One letter says, "Shame on you, and your family. It's people like you who ruin our country." There arc death threats as well. "This is a nightmare to me," Morales says. "I know my son does not have the heart to kill anyone." Yet on the street. Gary was known to carry a knife. He was still carrying it when the police arrested him in his apartment shortly after 2 P.M. on the day following the stabbing. "He liked knives," one 16-year-old gang member says, "He was always showing us tricks to do with them." But Morales was hardly the fearless leader. During one gang confrontation two years ago, when an FTS member named Soul was getting "rushed"—beaten up—by another gang. Rocstar ran away. It took a long time for him to live that down. Rocstar was better at dancing than fighting. He led his crew to the hot dance clubs like Mars in Greenwich Village and the Sound Factory in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. These are clubs where teenage drug dealers wear beepers and where kids are offered cocaine at $25 a quarter gram, mescaline at $20 a hit. The sound is house music, the driving, inner-city rhythm, part rap, part disco, that has everyone on their feet. The lyrics celebrate sex, drugs, money and violence. The song of the moment, played over and over on a recent disco night at Roseland, is "Dirty Cash" by the Adventures of Stevie V. Strobes flash hypnotically while, on the floor, some 2,000 dancers gyrate to the booming beat. "Dirty cash, I want you, Dirty cash. I need you...Sell yourself or you'll be sold for a nickel not a bag of gold...I want to get rich quick." The sentiment is widespread in gang subculture and succinctly expressed by Skam, 19, a founder of the Corona Boys gang, who was at Roseland the night Brian Watkins was killed. "I don't care about nobody but myself," he says. "Everybody else feels the same way." Brian Watkins's funeral was held in the Provo North Stake Center Saturday, Sept. 8, one week after his death. Bouquets of yellow roses and brown and orange mums rested on his bronze coffin. There was a floral wreath shaped like two tennis rackets, and there were 500 mourners. The family, sustained by their faith, was determined to find some good in what appeared to nearly everyone else an utterly pointless and irredeemable tragedy. "Mom and Dad, you always wanted Brian to go on a [religious] mission," said his brother, Todd, breaking into tears at the lectern. "I'm telling you. he's on some mission now. He's touched more lives than anyone could." Later Bishop David Hansen told the mourners that Brian's death had moved many people to rally against street violence. "One little light from a subway platform has grown to a flame of glory," he said. Brian's parents held hands through the ceremony and wiped the tears from daughter Emily's eyes. Afterward the coffin was taken to the Provo City Cemetery. At graveside, Karen Watkins removed four roses from her son's casket and handed three to Todd, Emily and Michele. "We are not bitter toward New York," she says later, while sitting in her living room. "We are so grateful to the New York City police for moving so quickly...for the hundreds of phone calls, strangers from all over, calling to offer their condolence." In the near future, the Watkinses will be returning to New York. Not as tourists this time, but as witnesses against Rocstar and his seven FTS friends already in custody. (The police are still seeking two accomplices.) "I think there is some value system that is not being taught." Karen Watkins goes on. "Take what you want, no matter who is in your way. Our family's values are that you work for what you have, that you respect people and they respect you in return. I think more people need to get involved, to make sure kids don't run around and mug other people. If people don't get involved," she concluded, with the certain knowledge of one who had met the bitter truth face to face, "the fear is just going to grow."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz_X4b4f0Lg One thing I can say for sure about the Old New York I know about is that we always set standards for the rest of the world wether its music, fashion, dance or anything that has to do with culture. All over the world people copy what we do. Especially when it comes to shit like hip hop which is most definitely a BIG part of that Old New York flavor. Back in the day, I'd say BK was ahead of the game as far as niggas dress'n dip & shit and they was gully about how they got their gear too. Motha fuckas would bum rush stores and clear racks and run out with it all. I mean it was nuts, fuck'n straight nuts. Around 1992 I started hang'n in the Vill. This is when shit was crazy out there. Astor place was the place to go get hair cuts. I can remember going there just to bomb the bathrooms. For me that was a big deal. Back then the bathrooms had tags from dudes all over the 5 boro's. Around the corner was Uniques. They too was another place I was always thirsty to go and write my name on shit. They had these lockers in the front of the store that you would pass on the way out. It was covered in marker tags & stickers, just layers of shit. Further down B'way was a store called EMS and boy did we bang them out for all kinds of gear. Around this time (1992) A group of really young kids formed the ill squad of really young juvenile delinquents who came from all over the city to hang out & break night. I cant front, from these kids is where I learned how to rack shit. Up the back, down the leg, sleev'n shit and of course the good old fashion Lizzie bag. Most of you probably dont even have a clue of what Im talk'n bout Willis. Well what Im talk'n bout is boost'n shit like my name was David Copperfield. Now these Bk cats put me on to a lot of ways on how to get busy. As a kid with no real family and not a whole lot of nice things in life, I paid attention. I too wanted to be dipped in Lo from head to toe with the girlie's jocking as well. I'd be with these kids & see'm get busy and I realized that if they can do it, so can I. But when I got busy with it, I would go alone and play the preppy herb kid dressed like I was from the Upper East Side. No one would ever look my way and stop to think I was bang'n them in the head. My last year of high school was up the block from Macy's. Everyday I'd detour through the Lo section and something would get got by me. I also spent so much stolen money in there that the people knew me to spend doe in there so I really never had an issue with being watched. Its all so crazy to me now that I think about it.Whats even a lil more nuts is I be came really cool with this lady who ran the Lo section in Macy's, her name was Sharon and to this day she has no clue that, that sweet little white boy was getting over. Dam I feel bad and she still works there. I still see her to this day in there when Im shopping with my daughter, but now I can afford to pay for the things I want. A lot of stuff that I took from Macy's was always returned to Paragons downtown. They where hip to us boost'n in there but dumb as rocks when it came time to us returning shit for store credit. Im telling you we had all of this on lock, especially them Brooklyn niggas. They knew what time it was fo sho. Then there was a store called BFO on 5th ave. they was hip too to us racking, but clueless to us throwing shit out the window to others outside waiting for goodies to fall from the sky. Dam those was the days. Back then, nothing got paid for. It was a free for all from sneakers to clothes to paint & markers to food. Even going to the movies we did not pay. Ahhhhhhhh the good 'ol Dinkins days. Thank you Mayor Dinkins for letting us run wild through your city. Well my city, cause I had my way. We did so much bad stuff then that I look back now and cant even fathom how we all got away with it. Definitely a different time. Believe it or not, I still have a good amount of Lo from back then. That shit seems to be more popular now then before. Its outta this world the price that people will pay for some of that stuff now. Go look on ebay, you will see things selling for $3000 its bananas when the original price was like $298 for like a Snow Beach pullover jacket. Straight RETARDED! The one thing thats different now then before is you dont have to worry about getting robbed for your shit. Us as RFC or them Brooklyn cats as well, we would leave you in ya fuck'n skivvies in the street. They would take it all like vultures to a carcase. Now dudes from Japan & all over the country pay top dollar for that shit on ebay not knowing what it was all about. That whole shit was a movement that unless you was there, you'll never understand. It was also such a rush. I can remember going on spree's coming home with 2 to 3 G's worth of shit being like dam, how Ima tell my foster parents where I got all of this from. Fuck it, I didnt really care any ways. Well Now shit is not the same, but I have pictures, memories, clothes and friends to share them days with. Good 'Ol New York. From here: http://oldnewyork76.blogspot.com

Old MQUE

http://youtu.be/8XVtfWxNMss In Manhattan: No Radio. Soon, No Car? By David Margolick; David Margolick, a writer, specializes in legal subjects. Published: May 31, 1989 My tired 1981 Datsun had paid its dues. It had logged 73,000-odd miles, mostly on the Baltimore-Washington interstate. On the outside, it had suffered numerous bumps and bruises and scrapes. Inside, it was coated with spilled baby formula and Donald Duck apple juice. It deserved a decent dotage. Instead, it was sentenced to Manhattan. I had heard all the horror stories about auto ownership in New York City, what with its sadistic parking regulations, lunar roadways. But when my brother offered to give me the car, I figured it was worth the price. I thought a battle-scarred, pockmarked jalopy with a busted radio made a far less tempting target than all the shiny Volvos, Saabs and BMW's parked nearby. ''No self-respecting burglar would even think of breaking into it,'' my brother said. Joey, things aren't that simple. I've had your car only a few weeks now, but already, you wouldn't recognize it. The body count began almost immediately, as the car sat on West 88th Street, when the back lock was drilled out. A few nights later and a few blocks to the south, the lock on the passenger side disappeared. Not long ago, the rear window was kicked in on West 85th Street. After that, some spray cleaner and a roll of Bounty paper towels, bought to remove the apple juice but foolishly left in the back seat, vanished. Sorry, Rosie, but on New York's streets Bounty is not the quickest picker-upper: The thieves are quicker. Then, a speaker went. And most recently, the radio. The steering wheel remains - at least when I last looked. I'm hardly the only victim of predators. Walk along Riverside Drive any morning and look down on the ground. Every few feet, you'll see fresh nests of pellet-sized, Coke-bottle-colored glass, all of which were car windows only a few hours before. The city is powerless and seems utterly incapable of stopping the problem, if not altogether indifferent to it. Of course, where there are dollars to be made - from parking violations -New York is uncharacteristically, uncannily Johnny-on-the-spot. Oversleep by five minutes or double park for 10, and invariably you'll find a ticket tucked under your windshield wiper. But there's no profit in crime prevention, so the cars are sitting ducks. The situation leads to strange consequences. Some New Yorkers take a Zen-like attitude and leave their car doors unlocked. Others adopt a more pragmatic approach. They carry on a bizarre one-way conversation with the pillagers through signs posted on car windows. Some are crude homemade jobs, some are printed stickers; some resemble ''Baby on Board'' notices. The tone varies, as drivers strive to sound firm without prompting gratuitous vandalism. Most signs are straightforward. Some more comprehensive: Not only is there no radio; there's nothing in the trunk or glove compartment either. Some are defiant: ''No anything.'' Some are sardonic pleas for sympathy: ''No radio - already taken.'' Some are more informative: ''Nothing in the car - just maps.'' And some are abuser-friendly, if not downright degrading: ''No valuables. No radio. Thanks.'' Imagine someone thanking a thief for sparing him and victimizing someone else. I was half tempted to scrawl my own addition to that one: ''No dignity.'' Maybe the most articulate messages aren't signs but wounds: paper bags, cardboard or plastic where windows once were. These drivers are apparently wrestling with the problem I face: whether it's better to fix things or leave them as they are. The first is expensive and, quite possibly, futile. But the second may be worse. As the hulks along New York's highways attest, vultures can find something of value in even the most picked-over carcasses. Perhaps my experiences are atypical, like the car itself. My Datsun has an Achilles ''wheel'': an out-of-state license plate. To local brigands, this is a sure sign of a hopeless rube - the type who couldn't possibly imagine how barbaric life in New York City has become. They're right.

Damn I just posted that too Pearl Paint in Chinatown listed for sale at $15 million, marking the potential end of a landmark http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/pearl-paint-chinatown-listed-sale-15-million-article-1.1751755 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk6_ESy8cwQ

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014 An Interview With OJAE. 1986, A young kid who was clueless and afraid of the world and everything in it. Ojae was born in the 70's to a mother who was a junkie and a post traumatic stressed father who was in Viet Nam. The common denominator between the two was heroin. In return this determined the future for OJAE, or did it? Well your about to find out... 1982, OJAE was taken away from his mother on B'way & 78st. by the cops and he had no clue as to why. He was placed into foster care due to his mother and father being junkies and not being able to care for him. This was the start of it all, a long road through hell and back. A road that would strip him of every comfort & security he knew, to only later build him self back up into the man he is today. Graffiti for some has changed their lives for the better and for others, it has changed it for the worst. This interview with OJAE is rare. So you will be privileged to a one of a kind post/interview from me about someone who is not only a True Old New Yorker like my self, But one of the last of a dying breed so enjoy. OLDNYC76: So, what does graffiti mean to you, how did you become involved and at what age with graffiti? OJAE: Graffiti means the world to mean in some aspects, but in others it don't mean shit. I try not to get my self tangled in all the drama that there is. At this point I have a life and responsibilities to take care of first. But the love is always there. Graffiti peaked my interest in the 1980's when I had returned from living in a L.I. foster home. I came back to the UWS where I was originally from to live with my mother. For that first wk being home, it was a major overload of information and visually mind blowing and the one thing that caught my mind the most was the graffiti on the trains. When I saw it, I knew at that moment I wanted to be apart of that world. At the age of 10 it was kind of hard to find out about it. Plus I knew no one. OLDNYC76: Wow that's a little bit crazy, When you say visually mind blowing, what were you talking about? OJAE: I can remember in the beginning of the return to my mother, I was not in school that first month so I went everywhere with my mother. I spent a lot of time around the Bellevue Hospital area because my moms went to a methadone program there. So on the bus ride down there I would see all the ill stores and theaters on B'way going through the 40's. I just couldn't understand all the titties on the marquee's. I mean I was 10 and seeing tittes was a big deal. Taking the train was my most favorite experience being back with my mom. I use to love the way the lights would turn off on the 2 going express. The train felt like it would rocket through the stops and being surrounded with the graffiti made me want to rebel like a mother fucker. I was very intrigued by the griminess, the noses and lights of the subway system. Its ultimately what lead my to write graffiti. OLDNYC76: I can definitely see the appeal. How did the name OJAE come about and does it mean anything to you? OJAE: After I was home for about a month, I started the 3rd grade at P.S. 87. My mother wasn't fully clean but in some what good health standing. And because she still got high, the other kids knew this, so I was an outcast sort of. The bad kids is who I wound up hanging out with and the older kids in the area as well. There use to be a ShopWell supermarket on 78/77st and B'Way. I met this Kid named Brian who at the time wrote CHOOCH 156, but goes by MENT TVS now. As I began to hang with em, He would put me on about graffiti and he would take me down to the freedom tunnels to paint and hang out. It was a wild place in the 80's. All kinds of trash, burned cars and all sorts of odd shit. CHOOCH was also the first to take me to do tunnels and to the Ghost station on the 1 line. Through out the year, I played around with other tags but the only thing to stick was the OJ. Thats what it was originally, Just a O and a J. A year after I started getting involved with graffiti, I became involved with skateboarding. There was a wheel company called OJ's so I chose to keep the name OJ. It holds a lot for me through the skateboarding, because of the people I know in that community as well. Ive made some really good friendships through skating. OLDNYC76: How do you manage to go out and paint at such a young age and how did you get paint? OJAE: Well, like I said before, my mother was getting high. It came to a point when she would be passed out all night or I just didn't care what she said, I mean, I saw it as she's doing what she'e doing and that aint right so who was she to tell me I can't do what I want to do. Life was hell and I just didn't care. My mother was the ill con artist and booster/shop lifter. Her main scheme was Older men, she use to swindle them for mad cheese. And when she went to sleep, I would peel a $20 bill out from her stash. To get paint, I wasn't old enough, so I knew some pimps that lived over at the Bellclair Hotel on 77th and B'Way and what I would do is by em a 40oz so they could get me paint. I spent all my money on paint until I learned how to rack paint. I remember once my mother gave me $100 to get some ice skates, I made it all the way out there to Wollman Rink to only turn around and go all the way back to my hood and spend it on paint. OLDNYC76: Can you tell me about the first time you went bombing in the streets, what was that like and who were you with? OJAE: Damn, I can remember it like it was yesterday, It was in 88. The night Mike Tyson knocked out Spinks. Earlier in the day I met this kid named KEV CM and he asked me if I wrote graffiti and I was like YESSSS! I was siked. He then asked me if I wanted to go bombing later that night and I did. Kev said meet up at I.S.44 school yard at 9pm. When I got there, There where a lot of people there to go bombing. It was KEV, his brother NICEO, STILE, WISH, WISE, BLASH, MEER, ARMOR and REEZ. we kicked it there for a few until everyone showed up then we took the C train to 14st. and got off. We were bombing everything like no one was out side, it was a free for all, just straight nuts! We walked up 10th ave back to the hood on the UWS. It was a night not to forget. After that night I was hooked. OLDNYC76: Do you have any crazy bombing stories you would like to share? OJAE: I have a few stories I can tell, actually I have enough to tell stories for days, but anyways. I can remember this one time I was leaving a club called Nasa downtown. I was trip'n on acid and when we got to the 1 train on Canal st, I started to bomb all the polls. As the train pulls in, there was a cop on it and saw me. When he got off the train he put KAZ and I on the wall. He started with me first, going through my pockets and he found my marker. It was a Sukura SG7 filled to the brim with some marsh ink. The marker was wrapped in tape, in a rubber glove and inside a potato chip bag. As the cop starts peeling the layers off, I keep saying "whatever you do, don't open it" and in my head I was like because it'll spill all over you. So it got to the point where he un-capped it and turned it sideways to look at it. All the black ink poured down his hand and into his sleeve all over him self. The worst part is this is when the cops were still wearing the light blue shirts so you could see all the ink soaked into the sleeve. I don't know why he let us go, but he looked at KAZ and told him he had 3 seconds to get out of here and then he was going to fuck us up. So we took off so fast and just jumped into a cab. OLDNYC76: Wow! That sounds pretty crazy. Now that you are older, How would you say graffiti has affected your life? OJAE: Graffiti in some ways have helped me through the hard times in life. When I was younger, graffiti was my escape from my problems at home and it work wonders. When I was a kid, I use to have bad outbreaks when I got mad and I would break and throw things. Graffiti helped me to control my emotions. It has also helped me express my self as an artist in my paintings as well in my adult life. Still to this day, It helps me in many ways. After all graffiti has played a huge roll in my life in becoming the man I am today. OLDNYC76: Who are some of your influences as you were growing up? OJAE: When I was first starting out, I use to ride the train from 72nd street up to 103rd on the 1 because I could go and transfer to the other side to back and forth. The 1st time I was at 103rd, I figured out they laid the 1's up in the middle track so I would sit there for hours looking at all the JON 156, SEPH TCW, CHOW, OMNI & PRAZE pieces on the train. So all the 156 crew played a big part, especially OMNI & PRAZE lived in the same hood. As far as hand style goes, I loved seeing REVOLT & ZEPHYR tags in the area and HANG10 tags too. My friend lived in the Bellclair Hotel and his mom hung out at the neighbors house so my friend Mark and my self would hang out there too. One day there a bunch of people over and I was scribbling on some paper and some dude asked what I was drawing, He saw and started to show me some outlines and tag style for me to learn. That dude was KEL 1ST and his brother MARE 139 was there too. I wound up becoming friends with both of em not knowing how important they really were to the whole movement. Really the first to take me under the wing was TOST WOL & DOS TEK. My style and how to draw in the black books come mostly from TOST. As time goes on, you should naturally progress as you keep at it. Ive definitely have taken little things from an array of people Ive met over the years. OLDNYC76: Where do you see your self in the next 5 years with your art and or graffiti? OJAE: Well I have several projects in the works and I have been focussed on producing paintings as well. Im pretty close to finishing up a book also. As far as the graffiti goes, Im kinda done. I feel Im too old to be fighting and beefing over it. I have done my thing so I have nothing I need to prove, not that I ever had anything to prove but thats that. Id like to focus more on some personal projects and live in peace. Graffiti can be a big headache so I have manage to cut a lot of that out of my life and Im happier w out the drama. OLDNYC: Do you have any last words or anythings you want to say or share? OJAE: Hmmm, lets see? Be sure to check out that State Your Name 2 when it drops! Stolen from here: http://oldnewyork76.blogspot.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOVN5esQs64

Last Bohemian Turns Out the Lights Clayton Patterson, Rebel and Photographer, Plans to Leave the Lower East Side for Europe By ALAN FEUER APRIL 4, 2014 At the end of March, Clayton Patterson, the outlaw artist, was sitting in the window of his storefront home on Essex Street complaining about New York. It’s something Mr. Patterson does well. He is an accomplished ranter, whose disputes with the city are numerous and varied but tend to revolve around the ruination of the Lower East Side by luxury apartments, ugly corporate chain stores, overpriced parking meters, pretentious restaurants and college students who vomit on the street. After 35 years of these diminutions — years in which his friends have died, his favorite haunts have vanished, his drinks have gotten more and more expensive and his work has stayed unknown, at least beyond the boundaries of the countercultural hard core — Mr. Patterson had finally had enough. Early this winter, to the shock of those who knew him, he made an announcement: He was leaving New York. This was news in what remained of the creative underground that sits below 14th Street. After all, one of the last men who could credibly claim the title of Manhattan’s last bohemian had not only decided he was quitting the city, he also figured he could find a richer existence 4,000 miles away — in the Austrian Alps. Clayton Patterson in his Lower East Side space. Mr. Patterson is leaving New York for the Austrian Alps. Credit “There’s nothing left for me here,” said Mr. Patterson, who, at 65, is still a physical presence, with his biker’s beard, Santa Claus belly and mouth of gold teeth. “The energy is gone. My community is gone. I’m getting out. But the sad fact is: I didn’t really leave the Lower East Side. It left me.” While it’s certainly no secret that downtown institutions, like CBGB and the Knitting Factory, have been disappearing one by one for years, Mr. Patterson’s pending departure is further proof, as if more proof were needed, of the difficulties artists face in surviving the seemingly irreversible tide of gentrification. What does it suggest that a man who endured the crack epidemic, the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and at least a dozen arrests can no longer stand what the city has become? “What Clayton is telling us is that his world is gone and that he’s going too,” said Alan Kaufman, a writer and a friend of Mr. Patterson’s. “This ought to send up a red flag for someone. It’s remarkable, really. It’s kind of like Atget quitting Paris.” Almost from the moment he arrived from Calgary, Alberta, in 1979, Mr. Patterson’s world has been the downtown demimonde of squatters, anarchists, graffiti taggers, tattoo artists, junkie poets, leathered rock ’n’ rollers and Santeria priests. When he and his companion, Elsa Rensaa — she, too, is an artist — landed in New York, they took an apartment on the Bowery where their $450 monthly rent was paid by their jobs producing commercial art prints, and where one of their neighbors was the not-yet-famous painter Keith Haring. Four years later, the couple bought the building where they live today — once a dressmaker’s shop, at 161 Essex Street — at a time when Art in America magazine described the neighborhood as a “blend of poverty, punk rock, drugs, arson, Hell’s Angels, winos, prostitutes and dilapidated housing.” This was the culture that Mr. Patterson seized as his subject, wandering the area on endless expeditions with his camera and gradually acquiring an archive of ephemera that grew to include graffiti stickers, concert posters, images of tattoos, thousands of hours of audiotape and videotape and empty heroin bags he had picked up off the streets. Continue reading the main story Gentrification can often gestate invisibly for years, and in the mid-1980s, as Mr. Patterson founded the Tattoo Society of New York and opened up the Clayton Gallery on the first floor of his home, The Village Voice was already reporting that major developers like Helmsley-Spear were investing millions of dollars on vacant lots and abandoned buildings in the neighborhood. Even as local rents began to rise, Mr. Patterson’s arts space was showing work by nontraditional artists like Hasidic Jews and the leader of a local motorcycle gang. Here were the conflicted seeds of an eventual transformation: On the one hand, corporate money was pouring in; on the other, Mr. Patterson was making custom baseball caps for rebel celebrities like Matt Dillon and Gus Van Sant. Then, on Aug. 6, 1988, hundreds of downtown residents clashed with the police in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. The nominal issue was a 1 a.m. curfew imposed on the park, which had turned into an encampment of the homeless and a gathering place for what were described by many as skinheads, drifters and rowdy youths. As darkness fell, officers in riot gear descended on the crowd, and a nightlong melee followed. The park that night turned into something like “a war zone,” The New York Times reported; more than 100 complaints of police brutality were lodged; and Mr. Patterson caught it all on tape. It was, in a sense, the height of his career as a documentary artist. The networks showed his footage on the nightly news, and journalists and academics called on him for quotes. While Mr. Patterson was able to capitalize on the attention and channel it into projects that later included a well-received photo exhibition, “L.E.S. Captured,” and a multivolume history of the Lower East Side’s Jews, for him the riot marked the moment when the city’s business interests and security apparatus joined forces and, in so doing, made New York unlivable. It took another quarter-century for progressives in the city to catch up with Mr. Patterson, who stayed in New York despite its metamorphosis, with an obstinate belief that if he couldn’t counteract the creeping corporatization, he could at least manage an existence on its margins. Twenty-five years is a long time to live on hope; but a few months ago, just as it had finally died, something happened to restore it. In 1988, downtown residents clashed with the police over a curfew in Tompkins Square Park. But first, there were more losses. In July 2011, the Mars Bar, a notorious dive on East First Street that Mr. Patterson frequented, closed its doors and turned into a TD Bank branch. A few months later, the Life Cafe, where an acquaintance, Jonathan Larson, wrote a portion of the musical “Rent,” was suddenly shut down. Last year, it was the artists’ bar Max Fish, which decamped to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, prompting a devastated Twitter fan (not Mr. Patterson) to write: “Final nail to the post-punk guts of upper Ludlow Street’s coffin.” But perhaps the cruelest blow of all was the death last May of Taylor Mead, an artist and actor who rose to fame in the 1960s after starring in a series of underground films by Andy Warhol. At age 88, Mr. Mead was forced from his home on Ludlow Street, where he had lived for more than 30 years, after battling his landlord, who was converting the building into market-rate apartments. He moved to Colorado and within a month he had died of a stroke. When Mr. Patterson got the news, he was crushed. “The fact is, no one gave a damn about Taylor Mead,” he said, “and what it made me realize was just how vulnerable people in this city are — even well-known and well-loved people. I might think that I’m the king of the world, but the truth is there’s no appreciation here for what I do or what I’ve done.” Mr. Patterson was increasingly afraid of ending up like Mr. Mead: “Hocked up on the curb,” as he put it, “like a gob of bad meat.” Continue reading the main story Complicating matters, his partner, Ms. Rensaa, had been suffering from memory loss since she sustained a blow to the head in the chaos of Sept. 11. Last fall, two intruders broke into their home while Mr. Patterson was out, and although Ms. Rensaa was not harmed, the experience scared her half to death. Mr. Patterson himself isn’t getting any younger — “I’m an overweight male,” he complained, “at the end of the road” — and so this winter, he decided it was high time to fashion an escape plan. He immediately thought of Bad Ischl, a spa town in Austria, where he has been involved with the Wildstyle tattoo and music festival for nearly 15 years. If the notion of a New York fixture like Mr. Patterson moving to a chalet in the Alps struck some in his circle as unfathomably strange, it nonetheless possessed a certain logic. There exists in Bad Ischl, Mr. Patterson contends, a creative community of artists, writers, tattoo designers and musicians that “is very much alive.” Then, too, he happens to be big in Austria — unlike in New York. “They love me over there,” he said. “They think of me as America’s No. 1 underground photographer.” Still, as the news of his retreat leaked out, the downtown avant-garde shuddered with amazement and despair. “Clayton is the neighborhood — or what’s left of it,” said Ron Kolm, a poet, editor and bookseller who once worked at the Strand with Patti Smith. “I guess I always figured that he’d be the last one standing, surrounded by tall buildings. This really is the end of an era.” To Daniel Levin, who directed “Captured,” a 2008 documentary about Mr. Patterson and his work, the plan to leave New York was further evidence of the city’s cultural decline. “Sadly, ironically, New York is displacing the people that made it what it was,” Mr. Levin said. “The entire city has become a playground for money, wealth and sterilized housing, and that’s not what’s traditionally made it interesting.” Then again, Mr. Patterson has reached that point in life when the youthful allure of being interesting has slowly given way in importance to the more mature comforts of belonging. Bad Ischl, on the River Traun, has a population of 14,000 people. “It’s a very small village — everybody knows everybody,” said Max Hirnböch, a tattoo artist there who met Mr. Patterson in 1995. Mr. Patterson, in a hat he designed. While Mr. Hirnböch wondered how his friend would adjust — “the mountain air, no crime at all” — he assumed that Mr. Patterson would eventually fit in. “The last time he was here, I gave him a traditional Bad Ischl hat and I have to say he looked quite good in it,” Mr. Hirnböch said. “Clayton is already part of our family. And we are going to take care of him.” It was at this point, just as Mr. Patterson’s Austrian adventure was starting to take shape, that the city surprised him. One night, not long ago, he was at Katz’s Delicatessen, on Houston Street, at a photography show. He saw a young woman in the crowd — in her 20s, exquisitely dressed — whose fashion sense impressed him. Mr. Patterson asked if he could take the woman’s picture, she agreed, and they gradually got to talking. It turned out her fiancé was the singer for a band called Dameht, whose members had distantly worshiped him for years. What resulted from this spontaneous encounter was a creative collaboration of the sort that Mr. Patterson thought no longer existed in New York. The singer, Gary Angulo, whose nom de band is Rivington (for the street on the Lower East Side), commissioned Mr. Patterson to design a logo for the group’s leather jackets. When Mr. Angulo and friends — artists, musicians, filmmakers and a couple of professionals who worked in public relations — discovered that their idol was on the verge of leaving New York, they decided to honor his departure with a gallery show. “So much of what you see these days in terms of art is just veneer,” said one of the friends, Kate Litvinov, who is 25 and helped secure a pop-up space for the show in the meatpacking district, on West 15th Street and Ninth Avenue. “But Clayton and Elsa’s work is real, it’s authentic. It doesn’t derive from anything but itself.” Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Advertisement The show, “$16 Burger” (Mr. Patterson loves to complain about the price of New York food), is scheduled to open on April 15 and to include a collection of Mr. Patterson’s photographs and several of his rarely seen ink-on-paper prints. Ms. Rensaa’s work — mostly portraits done in oil — will be on display as well. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Patterson, in his thick black glasses and a baseball cap embroidered with a skull, was on all fours tagging the gallery’s whitewashed floor with a chalk reproduction of one of his most familiar black-and-white designs: a squiggly, graffiti-esque NYC. Mr. Angulo had just ducked out for coffee for the members of his band, who were mopping the floorboards and polishing the windows. A laptop on the bar was streaming a Ramones song. Art was being made and Mr. Patterson looked ecstatic. “It’s kind of like a dream,” he said, “to have found these kids just as I was on my way out. My whole life has been about the old New York, and here they are about the new New York.” As the afternoon went on, the Ramones gave way to more obscure contemporary music, but Mr. Patterson, directing an assistant with a pool cue, did not mind. He was, it seemed, in his element again, drawing, painting, pausing to consider things with a pensive tug on his beard. One of the band members, in skinny jeans and new wave hair, followed him in circles around the room. He was documenting everything that Mr. Patterson did, on a hand-held video camera. It had been a heady day. Mr. Patterson had worked for hours and talked — he loves to talk — not about what a wasteland the city had become, but instead about Pop Art, Google, Jean Baudrillard, Lou Reed and the cultural significance of the television program “The Real Housewives of New York.” His plan to flee the city hadn’t changed, but Austria seemed very far away. “It’s exciting,” Mr. Patterson admitted. “It feels like we’ve got youth here — youth, vitality and interest. It’s almost like we’re on the threshold of a new moment. Who knows? Maybe this is the beginning of an actual beginning.”

20 years

IZ THE WIZ RIP 34th street 1982

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyD4mdM-OKQ

Subway Path Boarded Shut After a Rape By CRAIG WOLFF Published: March 23, 1991 In the heart of midtown Manhattan, stretching from 34th Street to 42d Street, there is a little-known subway passageway used by as few as 400 people a day walking between stations or dodging bad weather. Last year, it was the site of dozens of crimes, and after a rape inside it in July, the transit police tried to close it. But their plans went into a bureaucratic shuttle between a local community board and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and were lost -- until Wednesday, when a woman was raped behind a pile of construction debris inside the tunnel. On Thursday, after the city police reported the rape of the woman -- a 22-year-old commuter on her way to a PATH train to New Jersey -- and reporters began to call about it, the Transit Authority declared an emergency and closed the tunnel on its own. And late yesterday, a Transit Authority spokesman said the authority would designate other dangerous passageways for closing next week. Yesterday, as padlocked gates barred both ends, a transit police spokesman tried to explain how it could have taken so long to close a passageway that the police clearly thought was dangerous and that many New Yorkers instinctively regarded as creepy. "The bottom line is that the transit police asked for it to be closed," the police spokesman, Albert W. O'Leary, said. "We should have been more forceful," And Jared Lebow, the Transit Authority spokesman, said officials had worried that any closing of a spot in the subways where homeless people sleep would provoke an outcry. But he conceded that they may have erred by not holding a quick vote on the police recommendation. That recommendation to close the path, which runs beneath the Avenue of the Americas, was first made after the July rape, Mr. O'Leary said. After another rape in August, the closing was sanctioned in September by the local community board and sent to the M.T.A. board. But Mr. O'Leary said that the closing was presented to the board as part of a larger package that included many operations changes. It was not even scheduled for a vote until next month. In October, there was a report of sexual abuse in the passageway, and in December, an attempted rape. Asked why none of these crimes warranted the kind of emergency closing that took place this week, Mr. O'Leary said the police had first decided to go through the usual procedures. The passageway is a sometimes rolling strip that extends nearly half a mile, past stairwells at 38th and 40th Streets. Mr. O'Leary said that the authority had long known of the dangers inside, as there had been 30 felonies there in 1990. As nightfall approaches, he said, many homeless people and drug dealers come to sit along the wall and sometimes harass people. The latest rape victim had entered the walkway at 5:10 P.M. Wednesday at 40th Street, on her way to the PATH train at 34th Street for a trip home to New Jersey. Just south of 38th Street, a young man grabbed her, Mr. O'Leary said. The man threatened to stab her and demanded money, then dragged her about 200 feet south, behind a pile of debris. "She indicated to detectives that he threatened to stab her if she screamed," Mr. O'Leary said. "But he never produced a knife." After he raped her, as she was hidden from view of perhaps a dozen commuters walking by, Mr. O'Leary said, he took the woman's radio, her wristwatch and an earring. As soon as he left, she began screaming, and a passerby chased the man, who got away. Mr. Lebow, director of public affairs for the Transit Authority, said yesterday that the decision to close the passageway had been delayed to allow for public hearings about service reductions systemwide. He said that closing the corridor without allowing for public comment would have caused an outcry from advocates for the homeless. But Mr. Lebow said that he did not know why a crime problem had been lumped with decisions about service cuts at the hearings. "We should have made an exception in this case," he said. Photo: After a 22-year-old woman was raped on Wednesday in an underground passageway that connects the Sixth Avenue subway's 34th and 42d Street stations, the Transit Authority declared an emergency and closed the tunnel. The entrance at 38th Street and Avenue of the Americas has been boarded up.

A sample of recent happenings and crates digging til I find time to upload the rest of March. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG4Sv7esJus

Membership Is Closed. "Just because you live or have lived in NYC for a long period of time does not make you a New Yorker or an Old New Yorker. Being a New Yorker is more then just living here. Its a way of life, an emotion, a certain cockiness and a lot of other things to it as well. You cant just move here in your adult life and then become a New Yorker. When your an adult, you are set in your ways and you will not change. With that said your ass'd out for member ship, so just go back home and fuck your own town up. When you move to NYC as Teen, you adapt and slowly become transformed into a New Yorker whether you want to be one or not. Being a New Yorker is not a status symbol, its badge of honor plain & simple. The things we go through in life growing up in NYC is what makes us a New Yorker. If you dont know about the Duce, graffiti on the trains, what a subway token is, brown bagging a beer in the streets, Broadway Arcade, Uniques, the original days of Washington Square park, the World Trade before 911 & the first bombing, you are not a New yorker. I could go on & on but at the end of the day you know deep down inside if you are or if you are not and definitely if your friends are not from NYC then you are not a New Yorker. Also just so that we are clear, membership for being a New yorker has been closed for quite some time. Membership is closed do to the death of good old New York. When they changed the "DONT WALK" signs to a hand & a person, that was officially it. New York never did things for people from else where. We always did things are way and if you didnt like it, then tough shit son, keep it moving. New york has spawned a lot of things that take place all over the world and now because of it, New york is no longer an exclusive place to be. Instead it has become exclusive to those who have money and thats not what New york was about. New york was a place that you can come and make something of your self out of nothing. All you needed was a dream and some ambition which you can no longer make it in New York on just that. Everything here in New York has been changed in a way that the personality of NYC has been killed. You people who have moved here thinking "Sex In The City" & "friends" was a reality in the late 90's have killed NYC by driving up the rent and pushing out the natives. You will never be welcome here nor will you ever understand what NYC is really about. And Im not gonna take the time to explain it to you. Thats something you learn & figure out for your self along the way. Thats what being a New Yorker is all about, but like I said New York is so dead and gone that you will never know what its about. When New york was at its worst, it was at its best and that'll only make sense to those who it first hand. You can call me bitter, an asshole, rude, a smart ass, sarcastic or what ever else you may think of, but I dont care and those are all traits of an Original New Yorker. Yours truly, me. Born, bread, dead… Old New York." - OJAE FYC

This aint no Mudd Club, or C.B.G.B. I ain't got time for that now. -Talking Heads going on about living on Avenue A. and 7th street in the 70's: