Rollin, Rollin, Rollin...

Several months ago, I stumbled across an online map that had been created by a popular energy drink concern that I'd rather not name. The map detailed in fairly impressive fashion, the locations of the most popular street art in New York City.

It rubbed me the wrong way for the same reason that apps that do the same thing do. When I first started seeking out graffiti, it didn't take me long to figure out on my own where to find the best stuff. Basically, my method was to go to industrial areas and just wander. And although I probably spent more time in the company of grime, filth and noise than I needed to, the thrill of the find always made it worth the shlep.

Not only does a map take away any sense of surprise, it also lays bare the one real downside of building-based murals: Lack of movement. Many of the the earliest graffiti masterpieces (I make no distinction between graffiti and street art) unmappable in the traditional sense, because they never actually stood still. They were on train cars, which meant you might be able to clue someone in to the existence of one by telling them what line it was running on, but that's it.

As we all know, the days of art-covered trains in NYC are long past. You might find a train that's been defaced by one of those dreadful car ads, but that's about it. Fortunately, we seem to be living in a renaissance of a different sort of movable art:


I think what I like best about the box truck (and occasional moving van) phenomenon is it brings the art to me. I rarely find myself able to get out to Bushwick, Williamsburg or the Bronx, but I do work near Columbus Circle and Ninth Ave, where I saw this truck from Cernesto.

I also get down to Gowanus fairly regularly, where our local scrap metal recycling concern was host to not one but two trucks last month.


Beyond the occasional tag, you'll never find any decent graffiti on 57th Street, aka land of the billionaire's lairs. But keep your eye open on the traffic...


Some times I need only walk out the door onto Smith Street to catch a glimpse of something awesome.



Now, graffiti is that unlike most art forms, in that its public nature dictates that the best of the best gets mixed in with crap, as there are no barriers to keeping out the latter. This is true of trucks too:


Um, ok....

Eh....

Did we not finish this one? Note the reference to Instagram....
But when they're done right, trucks with murals are like the perfect amalgamation of motion, pizzazz, and whimsy. This van, which was done by the Smart Crew, was parked in the shadow of the Navy Yard.


'Merica!
Grasshopper, from Urban Animal, on Queens Boulevard. Spotted this truck on Fordham Road.

I could go on and on here, but you get the general idea. Although the New York City's robust building mural scene is confined to a handful of neighborhoods, mostly in the outer boroughs, thanks to the equally bustling truck scene, graf is well-served to both well-heeled and down and out New York City hoods. Like food trucks, but with vittles for the creative soul..


Fruit truck, Bed-Sty

The Geisha returns

When it comes to street art and graffiti, the Boerum Hill/Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn has nothing on places like Williamsburg, Bushwick, Bed/Stuy, Dumbo or Long Island City. It's hip here, but not that hip, and in any case, brownstones don't make for the best canvasses.

But we do have enough of a scene to keep things interesting, if you pay close attention. A lot of what we have is pretty amateurish, and even the Zemo (thanks to my wife Kelly for casting the sole vote in my poll to determine his tag) is often seen as more of a work in progress, every so often, someone comes along who clearly has chops.

Back in May, we were graced with paste ups of "boom box Geisha."

On a phone booth

On the side of a building

On the side of an abandoned kiosk

On a mail box

On another mailbox

On a construction fence

They varied a bit, but you get the gist. Not bad, right? Kind of a nice addition to the tags. I prefer the red one on the green box. Being paste ups, they didn't last long, of course; I'd say by late June, most were gone.

But the Geishas have not left  for good. They returned last month, just as we were embarking on a pilgrimage to Martha's Vineyard for some much needed beach time. On July 18th, I walked out to get some bagels for the long ride, and found this at the entrance to my subway:

Yup, the Geisha is back, and she brought a friend. A rainbow tooth? A Pac-Man ghost? Not really sure what that little guy is, but he seems to go with this variation of the Geisha. Again, she's now ensconced all up and down Smith Street:

By the bagel joint (alas, this construction fence has been removed)

On another construction fence

Here tooth guy accompanies two of the Geishas with boomboxes on another one of the abandoned kiosks. Bonus view of ZEMO.

On the door of the Met Supermarket

Grateful that these whimsical characters have resurfaced in the hood, and intrigued to learn who might be behind them, I turned last night to Flickr and did a quick search for the words "boombox" and "geisha," and bingo; I found Geisha Boombox by Jonathan Wakuda Fischer. Seems Fischer is in town from Seattle for a job, and from the looks of his blog, he's quite the street art fan. Interestingly, you can also find these pieces on display in some very reputable places.

His second round on Smith Street has also yielded a definitively positive response from the locals, if this recent buff is any indication. Gone are the tags from Trooz and Merdz (whose work was, lets face it, pretty lacking), as well as the rainbow tooth. But the Geisha remains, alone in amidst a dark red sea, for who knows how long.

So cheers Jonathan! Thanks for visiting the neighborhood!

And then there's this guy...

So now that we've visited the highest profile graffiti locale in NYC (Brooklyn Street Art just called 5 Pointz a "graffiti holy place" yesterday), I thought it would be fun to come back down to more low key, under the radar phenomenon.

Whereas the artists who write at 5 Pointz are in many cases internationally known, this guy or gal seems, so far as I can tell, is limited to a very small section of Brooklyn. Namely, mine. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, um....well, I have no idea what to call this dude. Z-Dog?

This was taken on the side of a construction fence along Smith Street, which is the major commercial thoroughfare that runs between the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill. The F and G trains rumble along underneath it, and on street level, it's chock full of boutiques, restaurants and bars. It's one of something like 35 versions of the same tag, which is always in the shape of a Z, (or maybe a 2?) and usually adorned with an eye, a mouth and some script inside.

Doors are a popular target

It's is a relatively new tag in the neighborhood, and it got my attention because like UFO, EKG and Jellyfish, it's obviously meant to be more graphical than textual. It's also fairly compact, which you can see compared to the purple tag above. It can be found along Smith Street, Court Street, and some of the side streets, as far up as Atlantic Avenue, and as far south as 9th Street. Basically, the three neighborhoods sometimes known by the horrible portmanteau BOCOCA, plus a few in Gowanus for good measure.

Mail boxes are also a popular canvas.

Unlike those three, however, this has letter scheme attached to it, and for the life of me, I have no idea what it says. I even asked Luna Park, who along with Becky Fuller, runs the site The Street Spot, if she knew what it said, and it was news to her too. Also unlike those three, whoever does this Z shaped tag is clearly experimenting along the way:

Look, I have a tail!

I'm duo tone!

And sometimes it's pretty obvious that he got spooked before he was able to finish.

If I had to guess, I'd say this is a kid from the neighborhood who is trying out his hand on something that is meant to stand out among the other tags in the neighborhood. And while I'm not terribly impressed with the script inside the outline, I'll admit I'm a sucker for a cute character, especially one who pops up in so many different places as I go for walks, pick up groceries or do whatever else it is I need to do outside of the confines of my apartment. It's also a reminder that one does not necessarily need a large space to make a mark.

So what do you think this guys' tag says? Thoughts? If you've just GOT to have more of this, there's lots more where that came from here.

And now, for something completely different, part III

Just two more entries left for Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens: Neighborhood Anchors.

On a totally different note, if you have a copy of either InDesign or Microsoft Publisher that you'd be willing to share, hit me up, will ya? Microsoft Word has made my life a living hell, and I'd really like to try to get the thesis laid out on a proper desktop publishing program. Can anyone help a brother out?

Ok, back to the show.

Crime

New York City’s public housing has been as much of a success as any public housing development in the country, according to Bloom. By standards such as rent collection, occupancy rates, income diversity and building maintenance, he notes that the authority has always enjoyed a solid national reputation.

That said, both the Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens have, if not a major crime problem, a definite public relations problem. To some extent, the projects’ troubles mirrored those around the country such as the Pruitt–Igoe in Saint Louis and Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, as they were completed at a time of great upheaval in New York City. To wit:

The long running borough newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, closed in 1955, the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers decamped for Los Angeles in 1957, and the immigrants’ grandchildren were steadily heading out to suburbs to raise their families. When the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which had done the nation proud, producing record number of warships and material during the World War II years, in 1966, an era ended in Brooklyn.  

Spike Lee arrives at the 45th anniversary ceremony for the
Gowanus Houses on June 25, 1994
Photo courtesy of NYCHA

And indeed, both housing developments became associated with crime. The Gowanus Houses arguably became more infamous, in part because of incidents such as the accidental shooting death of Nicholas Heyward Jr., a 13 year-old resident of the development, at the hands of a New York City policeman.

At the same time, Spike Lee had chosen the Gowanus Houses as the site of his film Clockers, which the Internet Movie Database sums up as: “Young drug pushers in the projects of Brooklyn live hard dangerous lives, trapped between their drug bosses and the detectives out to stop them.”

 Even before that, shocking, seemingly random crimes were being documented in the vicinity, such as when Teresa Roger, 17, a “brown-haired Syrian” was found dead on the roof of 198 Bond Street, one of the six story buildings in the Gowanus Houses. (From “Strangled Girl is Identified; Slain for $4.” The New York Times, October 22, 1971) 

In a depressing twist of fate, Ronald Herron, the 12-year old friend of Nicholas Heyward Jr. who was playing cops-and-robbers with him when Heyward Jr. was killed in 1994, was arrested on charges of running a crack and heroin ring out of the Gowanus Houses in 2010.

A quick search through news clips reveals a tawdry past at the Wyckoff Gardens as well. The Daily News reported the in March 1974 the addition of two more patrolmen there, raising the number there to 12.  There have been deaths reportedly linked to the drug trade there, such as a 17-year-old killed in 2006. 

There have been confrontations that escalated to the point where lethal force was used.  And there have been reports of prostitution, particularly near the southern end of the development, where the industrial streets of Gowanus are noticeably quieter at night than neighboring Boerum Hill.  On Thursday, August 21, 2008, a confluence of several awful things came together, when 38-year old prostitute Elizabeth Acevedo was found murdered in the hallway of one of the three towers.

Relation to Community

When Helen Buckler first embarked on her campaign to rename the neighborhood, she was quoted as saying she was excited to find out that the reason her building was so cheap was because it was a “mixed neighborhood,” at the time 40 percent black, 30 percent Puerto Rican and 30 percent Italians, Polish, Lithuanians and Irish.  As she noted: “Of course, there are noisy people in the block and people who get drunk, Miss Buckler conceded. But don’t we have that almost everywhere in New York?”  (From -->"Rescue Operation On ‘Boerum Hill,” New York World Telegram, March 26, 1964)

Then there was Diane Foster, a Brooklyn Heights interior decorator and antique storeowner, who wrote the following in a March 1967 letter “Protecting the Perimeter,” to the Brooklyn Heights Press.

What I’m trying to do, is get some of our young people, who cannot afford the high prices of Heights homes, but who want city town homes, to get up enough “guts” to move into these beautiful townhouses, because that is what they once were, and will be again, and push out all the undesirables. It can be done, and more importantly, it can be done much easier, and much cheaper, than people think.

In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman notes that the leaders of the then nascent Boerum Hill Association were “horrified” by comments such as these, but it’s worth noting that when one visits the associations’ website today, it still draws both the Wyckoff Gardens and the Gowanus Houses right out of the neighborhood. One could argue that the later extends into Gowanus and is named for it, therefore it should be associated elsewhere, but 2/3rds of the Wyckoff Gardens falls within the neighborhoods’ borders. There is still ambiguity about where the residents stand within the larger neighborhood.

Screenshot taken from the Boerum Hill Association website April 16, 2013

And yet…

Next: Signs of Hope, and the Conclusion.

And now, for something completely different, Part Deux

This is part two of Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens: Neighborhood Anchors, my final paper for the class Urban Political Processes.

The History

221 Hoyt Street June 27, 1945, shortly before
being demolished to make way for the
Gowanus Houses

Photo courtesy of NYCHA

The Gowanus Houses came first. Bordered by Wyckoff, Douglass, Bond and Hoyt Streets, the 12.57-acre complex was completed June 24, 1949. With 1,134 apartments spread across 14 buildings that vary from 4, 6, 9, 13 and 14-stories high, it houses an estimated 2,836 residents. To make room for the site, NYCHA began demolishing 199 buildings there on September 3, 1946, resulting in the eviction of 442 residential tenants and 62 commercial tenants.

Befitting its name, the development straddles the neighborhoods of Boerum Hill in the north and Gowanus in the South. It was designed by Rosario Candela, Eli Jacques and William T. McCarthy, and estimated to cost $6,738,000 when it was proposed in 1945.  McCarthy, the chairman of the board of the housing for the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, was also instrumental in the design of the Red Hook Houses, which were finished in 1938, just a year after the passage of the United States Housing Act of 1937.

Perhaps stung by criticism from Lewis Mumford, who in a 1940 New Yorker column Versailles for the Millions criticized Red Hook as “Leningrad formalism,” “barracklike” and “hygienically undesirable,” he laid the Gowanus Houses out in a more varied pattern, with five different building heights.

The announcement of the Gowanus Houses

Wyckoff Gardens, which is just one block west, between Third Avenue, Nevins, Wyckoff and Baltic Streets, came 17 years later, on December 31, 1966. It consists of three 21-story buildings on 5.81 acres, with 528 apartments housing some 1,226 people. Like the Gowanus Houses, it is linked to the industrial Gowanus neighborhood; the pumping station for the Gowanus Canal is a mere block and a half away on Butler Street.

Although it is newer than the Gowanus Houses and much more compact, Wyckoff Gardens, which is named after Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, a 17th-century immigrant from the Netherlands, is very much tied to the Gowanus Houses; when it was first proposed, it was known as Gowanus Area Federally Aided project No. NY-5-74.

When it was first proposed by NYCHA on August 29, 1962, at a cost of $10,234,000, it was estimated that there were 317 tenants living on the site, of which only 206 were deemed eligible for public housing. Planning documents reveal the rationale for placing the development in this particular area:

The condition of the buildings in the neighborhood varies considerably. The dwellings in the conversation district are in fair or good condition as are the houses between Nevins Street and the Gowanus Houses. The conditions of the structures on the site, however, is generally poor. Most of the buildings have deteriorated to the point where clearance is necessary.

(From Major Change to the Development Program Project No. NY5-74 For 531 Dwellings Program Reservation No. 5-C Gowanus Area, Borough of Brooklyn, NYCHA, August 29, 1962)

Befitting the hope and promise of the development at the time, one of the first residents of Wyckoff Gardens, Sergeant Leonard Pavia, a World War II veteran, was a guest of honor at “Public Housing Day,” a ceremony held on at City Hall Saturday, Dec. 3. Pavia, who had been paying $110 a month for a five room apartment for his wife and three children, was now paying only $84 a month for the same space.

Design Differences

The two complexes share a goal, as they are both owned and operated by NYCHA, whose aim is “to provide decent and affordable housing in a safe and secure living environment for low- and moderate-income residents throughout the five boroughs.”

As noted earlier, they are very different designs though. This is not an accident, as the New York City Housing Agency (NYCHA) experimented with different kinds of layouts and designs between 1935 and 1967, the years it was actively constructing public housing. For instance, to construct the appropriately named “First Houses,” on the Lower East Side, in 1935, NYCHA took a series of 1846 tenements and demolished every third building to provide adequate light and air, and rehabilitated or rebuilt the remaining buildings.

Later developments would embrace features such as geometric designs and cross-streets that were closed to create “super-blocks.” Whereas the early 1940’s saw the embrace of the “Tower in the Park” idea, which featured high-rise buildings surrounded by park-like surroundings, the 1950’s were a time when developments were characterized by in-line layouts and random spacing.

The Gowanus Houses, being the older of the two developments, show elements of the Tower in the Park design, as the eight tallest of its buildings were build for the most part toward the middle of the two super blocks that are split down the middle by Baltic Street.

The Wyckoff Gardens are an even more extreme variation of the Tower in the Park model, as its three 21-story buildings are surrounded by even more greenery. Since their nearest neighbors top out at no more than 5 stories, the Wyckoff Gardens’ upward thrust appears even more dramatic than the tallest Gowanus House buildings, which at 14 stories are not short by any stretch either.

Architectural renderings submitted by McCarthy’s firm to NYCHA.
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society

In addition to the height differences and setbacks, the developments most obviously differ in color. While the Gowanus Houses were build with traditional brick, and thus more closely match many of the original structures in the neighborhood, the Wyckoff Gardens sport a white finish, which, while completely out of place, at least has the effect of giving the buildings’ an appearance of being lighter than they really are.

One would never mistake them for a condominium in Miami, Florida, but at the same time, they’re less imposing than the Gowanus House buildings which, outfitted with massive water tanks atop them, appear to be hunkering down with hunched shoulders. This difference in appearance can be attributed to the push of architects working for NYCHA who were tired of the agencies’ seeming indifference to creativity.

The architect Albert Mayer, in a series of tough radio conversations with NYCHA administrator Ira Robbins in 1962, asserted that that authorities obsession with low ground coverage inhibited the creations of better architecture. Robbins responded defensively, but he grudgingly agreed that he would be happy to look at Mayer’s estimates. In a different public appearance, Robbins sounded like the old guard when he defended the use of “Hudson River red” brick because anything else was very much more expensive.

I’m not alone in my assessment either:

In the distance, the Deco crown of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, the tallest building in Brooklyn, once its only legitimate high rise, and until recently, a haven for dentists’ offices, though now inevitably converted into condos, towers over the Wyckoff Gardens, a public housing complex whose white-brick facades make it appear more hopeful or at least less stigmatized than the usual grim red project brick of the Gowanus Houses, glowering off to the right.  

The Wyckoff Gardens, as seen from the south, in Gowanus

Next: Crime and the developments' relation to the community....

And now, for something completely different

DONE!

So I e-mailed my eight-page take home final exam for urban political processes Tuesday afternoon, and with that, I am officially done for the year. I still have three more classes to take to earn a masters in urban studies, but for now, I'm taking a break for the summer.

Oh, and the thesis? Also, DONE. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I haven't actually submitted it to the GSAS yet, because they don't want it until I've fulfilled all my class credits, but I'm working to get that changed.

Quite frankly, I'm ready to push this sucker out the door to a publisher or turn it into a web site if no one will have it. Quite happy with it too, although I have a confession to make. It was only after I'd already uploaded all 155 pages of it to Google Drive with the intention of sharing it with the world that I realized I hadn't done a full spell check of the damn thing. Ha, yeah....

Anyway, I'm going to print it all out this week on special acid free paper, slap the forms with my advisor's signatures on the top, bind it all up in a regulation Fordham dissertation folder and start shopping it around. I've got interviews in there from 2010, so I'm damn well not gonna wait any longer!

As for the summer, I've got a lot of ideas for the blog that I've been sitting on while the aforementioned urban political processes kept me busy. This, by the way, was hands down one of the better classes I've taken, and I'm not ashamed to say I worked my ass off for it. So much so that I'm going to share my 22 page final paper with y'all, via the next four or five posts.

It's not graffiti related, because  I'd already written quite a bit about graffiti when I started the class, and I wanted to explore something different. It's public housing in my neighborhood, so if that's not your bag, you might want to bail. I hope you don't.

Cheers!
PV

P.S. Since I have no idea how to embed citations, I've simply linked to my sources whenever possible. If anyone knows of a better way to do this, I'm all ears.

Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens: Neighborhood Anchors

Introduction

Boerum Hill is a small neighborhood in Brooklyn, a mere eight by six blocks long, at .27 square miles. But unlike nearby neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, it is home to not one but two public housing complexes—the Gowanus Houses and the Wyckoff Gardens.

This paper will argue that these two developments, which were built at different times and in different styles, are representative of what Nicholas Bloom calls the New York City Housing Authority’s management of 2,600 buildings, including almost all extant high rise public housing in the United States, a “smashing success.”  In particular, I will show that in spite of occasional bad publicity, the developments have little negative impact on the Boerum Hill neighborhood.

The Neighborhood

Although the area of Brooklyn currently known as Boerum Hill was inhabited as long ago as the 1800’s by Dutch Farmers, in the 1950’s, it did not exist in its current form as an identifiable neighborhood, in contrast nearby Brooklyn Heights.

Bucckler's House

That change came about thanks to the efforts of Helen Buckler, a writer and publicist from Greenwich Village who in 1962 purchased for $18,000 a four-story brownstone building at 238 Dean Street. Although it was advertised as being in the “Borough Hall” section of Brooklyn, at the time the area was known as simply “North Gowanus,” taking its name, like the Gowanus Houses, from the 1.8 mile Gowanus Canal to the south.

Eager to find a name to replace the stigmatized North Gowanus, Buckler enlisted the help of the curator of the Long Island Historical Society. While examining 18th century maps of the area, they discovered Simon Boerum, a local farmer and politician who served as Clerk of Kings County from 1750 to 1775.

He was present at the March 1764 Assembly meeting where a resolution opposing British imposed sugar and stamp taxes was passed, and a relative, William Boerum, served in the Brooklyn Light Horse regiment during the Revolutionary War.

“The members of the new Boerum Hill Association (BHA) lobbied local newspapers and real estate brokers to use the name to attract new residents to the “reawakening” neighborhood. While some new arrivals took to calling the area Brooklyn Heights East, when an article about Boerum Hill appeared in the World-Telegram and Sun in 1964, the latter name stuck.”

The neighborhood has more than fully rebounded in the days since Buckler moved in; for perspective on housing prices, a four-story brick house one block away from Buckler’s house on Dean Street was put on the market in February 2013 for $4.2 million.

And yet, a few blocks away, there are the Gowanus Houses and the Wyckoff Gardens, looking tidy but tired.

Next: The history and design differences between the two developments...