nycisdead106

Graffiti complaints up as city wages seemingly endless battle By CRISTIAN SALAZAR December 7, 2014 From amateurish scribbles to elaborate murals, graffiti has for decades transformed the city into a giant outdoor art gallery. And there's no sign of it fading. Graffiti complaints were up 16% for the 12-month period between Nov. 1, 2013 and Oct. 31, 2014, according to an analysis of 311 data by amNewYork. There were 15,539 complaints compared to 13,366 in the previous 12-month period. ZIP codes with the highest number of complaints in the current period -- 400 or more -- included neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, Williamsburg and Sunset Park. Other ZIP Codes with more than 300 complaints included neighborhoods like Greenpoint, East New York and Cypress Hills. City officials declined to speculate as to why the numbers were up, saying it was impossible to tell whether there was simply more awareness of how to file complaints or more graffiti. But those who follow street art trends closely had a basic explanation for the popularity of neighborhoods like Williamsburg and the Lower East Side for graffiti artists: visibility. "These places are really good places to promote," said Sotero "BG183" Ortiz, a member of the famed band of graffiti mural artists known as Tats Cru. He said there are a number of galleries, especially in Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, that have been known to pluck street artists from obscurity and show their works, which can mean both fame and money. "People sell their graffiti paintings for thousands of dollars," Ortiz said. Sacha Jenkins, who is teaching a course in graffiti to graphic design students at Pratt Institute, agreed. "In these areas that you've outlined that are hot spots you have hipsters who want to be artists," said Jenkins, who is the creative director of Mass Appeal, a pop culure site that began as a grafitti zine. "They are advertising their products to people like them. It's not like they're going to the South Bronx doing their graffiti." An analysis of four years of available 311 data showed that the numbers of complaints had dipped during that period from a high of 16,498 complaints in the period between Nov. 1, 2011 and Oct. 31, 2012. Talk to people in some of the neighborhoods with the most graffiti complaints, and you get mixed responses. Art student Kristen Stark, 22, and English major Steffani Daniello, 24, were walking past a mural on Bedford Avenue when they were asked recently what they thought about the graffiti in Williamsburg. "I think it's fun, colorful, and expressive. It's an art form, just like traditional paintings and drawings, and it has lots of meaning, just like any traditional art form," Stark said. "It isn't vandalism, it's just someone expressing themselves, putting their work out there." Daniello agreed. "I enjoy walking around my neighborhood and seeing these really colorful, brilliant pieces," she said. "It's like living in an art installation, and I love to see what's new." But Eileen Chrystie, 50, a former teacher who was at a nearby coffee shop, didn't have much love for the graffiti in the neighborhood. "To me, it makes me feel as if the buildings are dirty and I don't think it's adding beauty to the neighborhood. It's doing the opposite; it doesn't make me feel at peace," she said. "Some graffiti, I'll admit, is artistic, but lots of graffiti contains vulgar messages and swearwords that can be disturbing to children." Modern graffiti is a quintessentially American form of expression that emerged in the 1970s alongside hip-hop culture in New York City. With little but cans of aerosolized paint, urban kids were able to communicate with each other by "tagging" their names on walls and subway trains. Graffiti soon evolved into a street art with more complex wall-sized murals. By the 1980s, artists like Jean Michel-Basquiat and Keith Haring were appropriating graffiti techniques in their works, and graffiti was going global, spurred by depictions in movies and on television. Today,artists like Banksy reap tens of thousands of dollars from their pieces or make a living working for companies like Coke, doing mural-sized ads on buildings in urban markets. Recognition-seeking aspiring graffiti artists post their latest works on Instagram and Twitter. Of course, not everyone is in love with graffiti or embraces it as art. And for decades the city has tried to balance respect of freedom of expression and property rights in dealing with what many consider urban blight. The police investigate and arrest graffiti artists through its Vandal Squad; it even maintains a database of so-called street vandals. The NYPD won't say how many officers are assigned to the squad. The department was unable to provide arrest figures for the current year by press time. The city's Economic Development Corp. also provides free removal of graffiti through its Graffiti-Free NYC program. With a fleet of 22 vans, 35 employees and a roughly $2.5 million budget, the program responds to 311 complaints , routing requests based on proximity using GIS mapping software. There are two ways that they go about dealing with graffiti: by painting it over with a color that matches the underlying surface; or, on exposed bricks and brownstones, by applying a light concentration of a chemical mixture and power-washing the graffiti off. Andrew Mainardi, an assistant vice president with the New York City Economic Development Corp., one of the people who oversee the Graffiti-Free NYC program, said that they maintain maps of chronic graffiti sites. He said, "From a long-term standpoint it isn't cost effective to go to the same property just to remove graffiti." Instead, he said they were looking into "creative solutions to keep people from retagging" including encouraging street art, which often refers to elaborate murals created by established artists. "Something that was done with care or time, something that was done lawfully" -- and with the permission of the property owner, Mainardi said. To be clear, the city has no formal program to encourage street art -- it's simply one innovative idea that is under consideration. "There are areas of Brooklyn where there are beautiful murals where there is no graffiti," Mainiardi said. Another hot spot for graffiti was Sunset Park, and a stretch of Eighth Avenue between 40th and 60th streets was among the hardest-hit in recent months. Storeowners on Eighth Avenue were less than enthusiastic about the tagging. At Fortune Prize Grocery, Patrick Chen said that his rolling storefront gate had been tagged a year ago. He said the city removed the paint by March. He said he sees similar graffiti at a lot of stores and has gotten used to seeing it. But that doesn't mean he likes it. "The way they draw is ugly. There's no art," he said. "They just want to have fun." http://www.amny.com/news/nyc-graffiti-complaints-up-as-city-wages-seemingly-endless-battle-1.9690545

SM and DOBY

Wisdom. Except for those Becky's, white girls are their own quality of life problem. Won't front on my corniness, but it's only a user name. 2008 was a pretty dead year when I registered. A lot has changed with me and the city since then, but there's no philosophy, just love for New York City. We're probably on the same page more than you think, I say the same thing myself all the time. You can see what I post, it's all mixed with current and old stuff together. There's no one era or topic that's consistent except for my love of NY (in all eras). Gems are gems, they speak for themselves. Since then I just try to post what's on the inside of my mind. The mind of a New Yorker.

Upper West Side Matt Weber photo. 91st and Broadway 1985, Hooker in front of Twin Donuts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3dAwQqcVmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoHAGtTECPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdI-WR4XUe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd6weJzmPrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpRKos8Af1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MykIEXos8Nw

Add a little funk to the brain ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_LNx0Ne37Q

Keep up the good work http://nypost.com/2014/10/06/graffiti-rearing-its-ugly-head-again-in-nyc/ Graffiti rearing its ugly head again in NYC By Lois Weiss October 6, 2014 | 10:10pm Graffiti, a “broken windows” indicator about the quality of life in any city, is starting a slow, ugly creep around the Big Apple — with new tags appearing nightly. In August, The Post noticed three tags that popped up overnight on the electronic road signs along the FDR Drive. In the Bronx, a red-brick apartment building at 903-905 Summit Ave., visible from the Major Deegan, has become a full-blown sprayer magnet. The tags and pseudo art on its rear base along Sedgwick Avenue expands on a nightly basis. From the West Side Highway, graffiti can be seen along the Amtrak tracks where fences are torn away as well as on buildings in the West 100s. While kayaking on the East River, The Post spotted graffiti along the esplanades, under various bridge abutments and high up on railroad trestles — proving the taggers are as daring as they are pernicious, as one misstep could spell doom. “[Graffiti] has always been simmering and always an issue in the last 10 years, especially in the boroughs,” said Frank Ricci, director of government affairs for the apartment building owners group, the Rent Stabilization Association. “A lot of owners try to stay on top of it, and a lot get disgusted and stop trying.” The NYPD is also trying to keep up. Graffiti arrests in the city rose 4 percent in the first eight months of the year, to 1,080, city statistics show. But despite law enforcement’s best effort, graffiti continues to leave its mark. The NYPD arrested 3,598 people for graffiti and related crimes in 2013, up slightly from 2012 but down 13 percent from the 4,000-plus levels of 2009 and 2008, city statistics show. Graffiti-Free NYC, a partnership between the Mayor’s Community Affairs Unit, the Economic Development Corp. and the Department of Sanitation, said that between 2008 and November 2011, more than 170 million square feet of surface area had been cleaned. Up to and including this past May, the team had cleaned 82,644 incidents of graffiti. Despite the efforts, the taggers seem to be winning this latest round. No one knows this better than Marie Franco, 24, who lives in the Summit Avenue building in The Bronx that has been targeted by graffiti taggers. Google Maps Street View showing photos from 2007 to 2012 detail the slow but steady progression of tagging. By the end of August, the base of Franco’s building was completely covered with layers of random drawings and tags that wound along its south and west sides — and even across several apartment windows. Franco, who lives in the 43-unit building with her 3-year-old son Grayston, sees the problem growing and growing. “It’s getting more and more,” said Franco of the graffiti. “It’s even in the windows.” Back in the 1980s, this Summit building was a poster child for abandonment and its broken windows were eventually covered with then-Mayor Ed Koch’s cover-up brainchild — decals depicting drapes and potted flowers to fake inhabitance. By the early 1990s, it was among a handful turned over to the Mid-Bronx Housing Development Fund for low-income renters and the building’s yearly $72,000 in city property taxes is waived. Aoianon Espiano, a maintainer with Mid-Bronx, says he was going to paint over the graffiti. “We got an insurance company that does not want the graffiti on the wall,” Espiano explained. He can’t catch the vandals, and can hardly keep up with them, having painted it over twice in the last year, he said. The efforts of the city’s free program, Graffiti-Free NYC, that cleans up private buildings, is being matched by even more brazen taggers. They watch fellow “street artists” getting cred, fame and fortune at the same time police officers seem to be concentrating on the growing surge in gun crimes and phone thefts. If a graffiti report is taken by 311, a notice is sent to both the owner and the building address, giving 35 days to decline the services. The long time period is to ensure that owners who commission graffiti or murals by Banksy don’t wake up and find them painted over by the crew. “It’s one of the contentious issues in the city,” said one city official, who asked not to be identified. “What is graffiti and what is art?” “Graffiti-Free NYC has proven to be an extraordinarily successful program since its inception, cleaning tens of thousands of square feet of graffiti in all five boroughs,” said Ian Fried, an NYCEDC spokesman. “We look forward to continuing to offer this free service to all New Yorkers as we remain committed to improving community life and responding to the needs of neighborhoods across the city.” The Sanitation Department is about a year behind on clean-ups. Since August 2013, the agency had closed 7,166 graffiti reports, but as of last Aug. 31, had another 7,739 still open. And the service does not clean up the city’s own roadways, bridges or parks. Since 2003, the city has actually kept score through its 311 system. According to open data Web information, since 2003, 81,525 graffiti reports were made to 311 and the police responded to 1,161 of those. Six arrests for graffiti vandalism were made since last October, with five of those in April (four in Brooklyn, one in Queens and one in Manhattan at 20 W. 72nd St.) In late August, The Post reported two vandals were arrested spray painting doodles, tag names, faces and “in god we don’t trust” on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument on Riverside Drive and West 89th Street around 3:20 a.m. “When responding to a graffiti call, the suspects are usually long gone when you get there,” Sgt. Nathaniel Herman told The Post. “But this time we got them, literally, red-handed.”

The forgotten apple been vandalizing way too long to run out of gems. Don't get it twisted, City Hall knows how long that buff budget is every year. New York always gets it in. #JewishAccountants #Crunchtime #Layoffs #QualityOfLife #NoChristmas #ThoseFuckingVandals #Negogiate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpRKos8Af1o

Rappening is what's happening Don't forget to scroll through the past few pages, hope to see these all over the web in the future.

& another. That's what happens when you go through that many I guess

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That took a while https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WwiOoTQiPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixYvr0s0E44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mPqFEhmz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY6BoEtO5VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw_zEwljHhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ButY1tujCOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi7rto_Hl-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsYm27DRxLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IaHemQ6iJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0gP2mACZa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvTJjQg9Psc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEI94kPpr3Q Dead City....