Photo by Marc Vasconcellos/The Enterprise
Boulders placed to control traffic in D.W. Field Park are covered with graffiti.
Though his business operates 24 hours a day, David Lynch said the building on North Quincy Street has not escaped the graffiti that has recently been plastered on buildings in the area.
“It’s all around,” said Lynch, owner of Lynch’s Towing. “It seems to happen between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. As soon as we got done cleaning it up, they came and did it again.
“There’s just no respect whatsoever,” he added.
The latest wave of graffiti in the area of North Quincy and East Ashland streets comes as reports of vandalism escalate throughout the city.
Graffiti, if we define it as any type of writing on the wall goes back to ancient Rome, and if drawn images count, then we could point to the first graf artists. But the style of urban graffiti that most people have seen and know about, the kind that uses spraycans, came from New York City in the late 1960s, and was born on the subway trains. Taki 183, who lived on 183rd street in Washington Heights, worked as a messenger who traveled all throughout the city. While he did so, he would use a marker and write his name wherever he went, at subway stations and also the insides and outsides of subway cars. Eventually, he became known all throughout the city as this mysterious figure. In 1971, he was interviewed for an article by the New York Times. Kids all over New York, realizing the fame and notoriety that could be gained from "tagging" their names on subway cars (that traveled all over the city, naturally) began to emulate Taki 183. The goal was to "get up" (using the slang of the day), to have one's name in as many places as possible, and as kids competed against each other to get famous, the amount of graffiti on trains exploded.
Graffiti has a long and proud history. The subculture surrounding graffiti has existed for several decades, and it's still going strong. The graffiti artists (or "writers" as they prefer to call themselves) are passionate, skilled, community-oriented, and socially conscious in ways that profoundly contradict the way they've been portrayed as common criminals and vandals.
