G'Day Bklyn

Graffiti Be Gone

Spotted on a recent stroll up Carroll Street towards Third Avenue – the Graffiti-Free NYC  truck removing spray-painted scribblings from a residential building. I had never seen the truck in the neighborhood and I certainly wasn’t aware of the City’s Graffiti Free NYC Program, which offers free graffiti removal to properties throughout the five boroughs.

 If you want a graffiti-busting van to come cleanup your site, you can call 311 or fill out a Forever Graffiti Free form. Typically, a cleaning crew will show up within about 35 days after the City is notified there’s a problem, and either repaint or power wash away the graffiti.  If you want to do it yourself, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Paint Program will provide supplies and paints for community-based and volunteer groups to plan and execute their own cleanup projects.

I’ve written before how much I like topical or artistic graffiti but sadly much of it polluting local walls is just juvenile vandalism, and for that ilk there’s Graffiti Free NYC.

Eat the Rich

I like graffiti; there’s a rawness to good, creative graffiti art that I really admire. Then, of course, there are the random scrawls sprayed across public and private property – many of them infantile and uninspired, like a middle school anatomy lesson some delinquent plastered on the freshly-painted sidewall of  a recently renovated house on Sackett Street.

And somewhere in between, there’s stuff like this scrawling spotted on the Union Street bridge crossing the murky Gowanus Canal, best known these days as a noxious Superfund site in urgent need of a cleanup. I don’t know if the sign is a jab at the much contested Superfund project or just insightful commentary on local property prices, school admissions or the lines outside Blue Marble to get an ice cream  on a warm spring day.

Mostly, it makes we ponder who went to the effort to stop on the bridge, pull out a spray can and leave this note. What was the motivation? It’s too political to be kids – and do kids these days even know what a yuppie is? It seems too self-loathing to be hipsters. So, I’m left wondering.

Either way, it makes me stop, smile and mutter Eat the Rich out of earshot of my children  en route to school and back each day.