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GRAFFITIST ATTITUDE LEAVES ITS MARK ON TEENS

MICHAEL SOKOLOVE, Daily News Staff Writer

June 24 1983

 

 

 

 

The former Cool Bill or C.B. or Country Bill is plain old Billy East now, retired for many years, but still an admirer of his own work.

"There's a B-E-E right there," he says, pointing to the side wall of a tavern near 50th Street and Chester Avenue. "That's my initials, B-E-E - I went by them, too. Man, those must be up there 10 years, 'cause I haven't done any writing in a long, long time." East is 27, but looks younger with his jeans and white T-shirt and high-top basketball sneakers. By graffiti-writing standards, though, he's old.

Climbing on buildings and atop railroad bridges, making early-morning hits at schoolyards - that's a young man's game.

East gave it up in high school, not that he's been that much missed. Contemporaries like Cool Earl, Cornbread and the immortal Chewy were far more famous: Country Bill was just an occasional writer, by comparison a mere dabbler.

And besides, there is a new generation to carry on.

That generation, younger teens mostly, has taken up the tradition with such zeal that there are blocks in certain neighborhoods without one unmarked building.

The squiggly, indecipherable scrawl known on the street as "Philly style" coats schools, government buildings, churches, mail boxes, private homes - even trucks that stay parked too long.

"In the last year there has been a big resurgence of graffiti," says Gordon Cooper, a community organizer in the city managing director's office.

Says Temple University professor Harry A. Bailey Jr., who's made a personal crusade of ridding the city of wall-writing: "Philadelphia is the graffiti capital of the world."

The city wants very much to eliminate it. To scrub off and paint over the writing that's been on the walls for 10 and 15 years, and to talk to and stop the kids who have created the graffiti renaissance.

The trend is to catch and punish wall-writers, and there is little sentiment now, as there once was, that graffiti is the work of youngsters groping for a way to express themselves.

The Graffiti Alternatives Workshop, an early '70s solution that tried to put graffiti on canvas, has shut down, a relic of some bygone theory on crime and punishment.

A program coordinated by Cooper this summer will attempt to take 25 wall- writers off the streets and have them create murals instead. But City Councilman John Street has expressed what seems to be the prevailing sentiment.

"The only programs I'm interested in with graffiti is how to get it off . . . I'd rather start breaking arms than refer to them as graffiti artists," he said at a Council session last week.

Council currently has before it a bill that would ban the sale of spray paint to minors and force stores to keep the paint and indelible markers in a ''controlled, inaccessible area."

Task forces to combat graffiti have been formed in West and Northwest Philadelphia, and the School District, spurred on by Bailey, has also put together a task force.

But if writing on walls is no longer chic, not everyone has gotten the word. In many parts of the city, graffiti lives on as positively a rite of youth. It is inbred and organized, with a language and a code of its own.

In many schools, students sign one another's composition books in the same style they spray-paint a wall, or they'll wear their signature on the back of a shirt. A scrawl that is unintelligible to an outsider is easily identified by a wall-writer's peer.

Certain signatures are known and copied, and their authors are revered just as a high school basketball star might be.

Cooper estimates that 3,000 or more teen-agers write on walls, and "300 are known by their peers. They've built reputations by having a big number of hits, or one or two that are bold and colorful." "Come on," Billy East says, "I'll take you to talk to some guys who are still doing it."

East, who is unemployed, married, and the father of two, picks up money doing odd jobs and driving a gypsy cab. A reporter approached him as he talked with friends near a hot dog cart at 48th and Spruce, and asked simply if he knew any graffiti writers.

A self-described "nice guy," he pointed the way to a playground at 58th Street and Kingsessing Avenue, in Southwest Philadelphia, a hotbed of graffiti writers and an area where it is literally almost impossible to find a virgin wall - one unmarked by graffiti.

East points out a grocery store wall that is being painted over. ''Guaranteed," he says, "that'll be hit before the night's out."

Feelings of boredom, or depression, drove him to write on walls years ago, East says. Now, he watches in amazement as others do it.

"You wouldn't believe it - crowds of kids walking around with their spray cans, marking up walls. Then they be laughin' and slappin' hands." "One day," says a young wall writer who goes by the name of Easy Money, ''I'm going to have a boy. And I'm going to show him. I'll say, 'Boy, this was your daddy way back when.' "

Easy Money breaks into a broad grin, and his friends, who sit beside him on a curb beside the basketball courts at 58th and Kingsessing, nod in approval.

he's an active wall writer. One who goes by the moniker SAKE produces a broad-tipped indelible marker from his right-hand pocket, and a SEPTA Transpass from the other pocket.

"You can go anywere with this," he says, holding up the Transpass as if he's making a commercial for SEPTA. "You don't have to stay in the area."

The last wall he marked was about a week ago, he says, at 9th Street and Susquehanna Avenue in North Philadelphia.

Why do they do it?

An 18-year-old in gray sweats and a Nike hat answers first. His signature is SNAKE, not to be confused with SAKE.

"It's not just to be damaging up government property," he explains. ''It's to get a name for yourself. People recognize you."

The four teenagers conduct an informal survey among themselves, and come up with a list of what they believe are the three top names in Philadelphia graffiti.

The stars mostly write in what's called the New Yorker style, bold block letters done in bright colors.

RAZZ has to be one, they agree. But he's retired, and has become a ''hustler" in Center City.

TAN is still signing walls, but rarely, they believe.

And KR, or Kool Ruff, he's out of it altogether. He's locked up at Holmesburg Prison, they say.

Snake leans against the cyclone fence as he thinks about the competition and the potential consequences of his hobby.

Sometimes he thinks he'll give up wall-writing, he says, because it's certainly a petty thing to go to jail for. But probably he'll keep doing it.

"I'd like to be the top writer in Philadelphia," he confesses.

"I think it would be really impossible now for anyone to spend any time at all looking or driving around the city not to have seen one of these spectacularly beautiful murals and not be convinced of the progress we've made in cleaning up graffiti all around Philadelphia," Aborn said.

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