East, through Harlem

Every few weeks I walk east, way east, through Spanish Harlem, to do some shopping.

If I had a garage for it and the gas, I'd be tempted.

Peppers, I think...

...I guess, after the divorce, you need the movers?

Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, babee. Byoodeeful.

Which makes me think of Pablo.

Spring Street at the Bowery

I found myself downtown, yesterday.

"This is the rare month, the only month, when I cannot tell time by what is in bloom. The botanical city is on lockdown. Street trees are naked, the sidewalks are tightlipped and weed-free. Discarded Christmas trees cast adrift on curbs weep dry needles, waiting for trash pick up. Concrete and metal and rust and empty earth are laid bare. The city is stripped. The only thing in bloom on the exposed streets is graffiti..."

From 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life

New York graffiti

Vertical in flavour, from the past week:

 Broadway Lafayette, F platform, downtown

 Coney Island Pier

Bergen Street F, Brooklyn-bound platform

The East Village turns to glass

The continuation of the end of the East Village:

A building whose graffiti has always appealed to me is about to die. I read the story, written by Cara Buckley,  in The Times. That led me to Andrea Legge's blog about the end of the building where she has lived - 7-and-a-Half-2nd-Avenue, where she writes:

One day a couple years ago our front doors (one is the old CUANDO 2nd Ave entrance) turned up grey. Solid battleship grey, not a mark on them. I was furious. Our front had been a glorious mash up of graffiti upon graffiti, neglected, or rather, I'd like to say, a work in progress for about 18 years at that time.

Contrast, contradiction, eccentricity, expression on this corner of the East Village and elsewhere in this city mark for me the opposite of respectable uniformity, which in property development terms means blank resolution. When everything and everyone is the same, what is left to talk about, think about, question, reconsider?

In the years when I passed the building almost every day on the way to work, I took too few pictures.

The original tenants are not being thrown out by evil developers. They will have brand new apartments in the new, 12-storey glass building for the asking price of $10. That's ten dollars. And they sound relieved, after a long battle. Four units were will sold to low income buyers and the rest will be rented out, starting at $3,200 for a studio.

Wall of the Mars Bar

The Times' story ends with a quote from an attendee at a party thrown in the building by tenant Justin Bond (of Kiki and Herb):

It’s going to be suburban people with babies and a Banana Republic and a Gap and one of those candle stores on street level,” grumbled the set designer and performer Machine Dazzle, who was wearing a homemade sheath and towered over other partygoers in Lucite heels that pushed him to 6 feet 8 inches.

Shiny, new, see-through buildings.

And that, to me, means the end of conversation.

On the street

On the Spring Street facade of the Jay Maisel building on the Bowery, where a succession of stick-on and spray-on tableaux marks the change of their own season.

And in DUMBO, this scaffolding made a public service announcement about the portaloo.

New York bed bugs

...in Red Hook.

The fairest Cape

Adenandra uniflora, on Ou Kaapseweg, above Cape Town.

Wind-chopped Scarborough.

Hout Bay from Chapman's Peak.

Peter and Veronica Walsh and Wally and Elaine van Rooyen liked the view of Hout Bay well enough to leave their white impressions on the stones in the wall between the road and cliffs. Glynis and Lauren Walsh, and would that be Maudene van Rooyen, with Weldon van Rooyen, who concurred?

Do they know they are going to leave their uninteresting graffiti when they leave home, and take white stuff with them? Is this what rock art might boil down to?

Ja nee.

Kenny Scharf

Mural on Houston and the Bowery

Atlantic Avenue

Some graffiti on particle board, up close.

Grand Street graffiti

Signs and portents

I think this sums up my approach to 2010 very nicely.

Front Street, in Dumbo.

Graffiti in the woods

Can you see it? It's on a supporting wall for the road on the other side of the stream that runs through Woodstock. I have met my match: found graffiti I do not like, even though this made a strenuous attempt to be art. It may have been shroom-fuelled, I don't know. Lots of mosaic blocks of images and colour.

Thanks to everyone who weighed in on the graffiti question, artists, garden designers and home owners alike. I found them thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Graffiti in New York

Above: Highline in July

There's an article in the NYTimes City Room blogs about removing graffiti still dis/gracing the Highline.

Graffiti fuels an endless debate. I have found street art to be something that pleases me enormously in particular contexts. Removing it on the Highline seems absurd to me. The Highline, this old, abandoned industrial artery has been beautifully restored, but so much of its original context has been expunged. I am a huge fan of the plantings, plant geek that I am, but would find their juxtaposition with paint to be entirely appropriate to where they find themselves.

Below are some examples of graffiti I have loved. Feel free to weigh in on them, and to disagree, with erudite explanation. I am curious about why I like it, and when I would not, and what others think..

Below, the tag in the recently designed and planted Tribeca garden.

Below, above the 66 Square Foot terrace, isn't this graffiti? And more ephemeral and more toxic, and no less beautiful for it?

The roving truck that parks on Forsyth Street, early this year.

More problematic, on the newer side of the Liz Christie Garden, behind the vegetable and fruit plantings. The scraggly white tags are not working . But the black balloon is getting somewhere.

And, of course, the Gowanus Garden, in spring 2006, above. This graffiti was wiped out, as evidenced in this post.

And on the other Gowanus canal bridge, on Carroll Street. Why is this not a successful canvas?

And finally, below, good, gone art, ex Spring and Elizabeth Streets in Nolita.