While rummaging through a drawer in my parents’ apartment a few years ago, I came across this great button. I don’t remember if I got it an Upper West side street fair in the early 1990s or on some trip to the Transit Museum, but it’s an excellent relic of another age. From the MTA logo to the plea to the public to assist the Transit Authority in wiping out something the overwhelming majority of riders didn’t want to see, graffiti was a constant way of life underground.
In May, the MTA celebrated a significant milestone. For 25 years, trains in service have been graffiti-free. It took a concerted effort, a few MTA heads and some aggressive policing tactics to clean the cars, but nowadays, no subway car will leave a yard with graffiti. This doesn’t, of course, mean that cars are always graffiti-free. Taggers still target yards, and post their conquests on Instagram. But riders see nothing worse than scratchiti or an occasional scribble in marker on a seat.
The MTA marked the occasion last month:
The nearly two decade-long scourge of vandalism began with felt-tip markers and soon escalated to spray-paint. The practice turned the subway system into an unwelcome underworld where it seemed that all official control had been lost. Subway cars and stations were covered with grime and layers of graffiti, which gave the system an air of rot and decay. During this period, ridership plunged, crime soared and a generation of subway riders was left thinking that things would never get any better.
At the height of this destructive urban phenomenon, subway cars were so completely “tagged” that it was nearly impossible to see out of the windows. NYC Transit’s initial attempts to squash graffiti all failed. In 1981, guard dogs and a double set of ten-foot high fences were deployed at the Corona Yard in Queens. Initially, the program worked but vandals eventually switched tactics. The low point came in 1983, when hundreds of subway cars were painted bright white, a virtual invitation to an army of graffiti vandals who took full advantage of a fresh canvas.
However, beginning in 1984, a new management team, the first capital program, new stainless-steel cars, and freshly painted older cars, along with stepped up security measures all combined to turn the tide. By May 12, 1989, major investments in the subway system had created a car fleet that was made up of either new or rehabilitated subway cars. Trains were taken out of service at the end of their runs and scrubbed when a piece of graffiti did appear and removal of graffiti from subway station walls and columns had to be accomplished in a defined period of time.
The MTA at the time was aggressive with their messaging. “When you’re sitting in a graffiti-covered car, you don’t feel safe. When the trains were covered with names, codes and epithets, there was a sense that the system was out of control,” then-Transit President David Gunn said, perhaps a bit hyperbolically. Still, for those that subscribe to the broken windows theory of transit attitudes, the end of graffiti was a welcome day. I remember those trains vividly, even if the button I have has to spur my memory.
For more on the history of graffiti in the subways, check out this Gizmodo post or Martha Cooper’s book. For more views from the subway system past, present and future, give me a follow on Instagram.
39 comments
One of the system’s great successes. I remember the bad old days when graffiti covered every inch on the trains, inside and out. In the late 90s I traveled abroad and it was jarring to see graffiti marred transit cars in other cities around the world.
Now, if they could just get the graffiti off the box trucks…
The next big victory (other than a new signal system) will be too reduce trash in the stations and on the tracks.
Part of this is generational. You had the worst generations in U.S. history, a group that felt like wrecking things on their way to someone else.
Younger generations are different, and will hopefully stay that way. In sports, they don’t run on the field after games and steal and destroy everything the can either.
Meanwhile, Generation Greed has grown up and taken over our public and private institutions.
Meanwhile, Generation Greed has grown up and taken over our public and private institutions.
Which is how we end up with trains defaced with a different kind of ugly graphics.
Of course, this is okay because someone’s making money off of it.
Reminds me of Chrissie Hynes of The Pretenders’ reaction to visiting her native Ohio, where “my city was gone” and the farms “had been replaced by shopping malls” due to a “a government that has no pride.”
I’m no fan of ads everywhere, but it’s enough money that it seems to be silly to pass up. (Are there any cities that don’t have ads?)
Actually, far from going away, the difference with graffiti now is there is a budget for dealing with it – which involves cleaning it up, rather than beating people up. New York City was being thrown to the wolves in the 1970s. “Generation Greed” was already fully ascendant, ready to take its pensions and leave without cleaning up the mess.
Not really…. They go to jail if they run in the field now. Big diff. In many college towns they still riot in the street after victories. If these graff artist could still “bomb” trains with the same old ease – they would! Street graff hasn’t stopped. Human beings are not “improving”… Only the methods to corral bad behavior
That’s a crock of shit. Across the board younger generations behave more empathetically than the boomers and older Gen Xers. Something was simply wrong with that generation that was young in the 1970s to early 1990s and when they aged out of that kind of hooligan behavior, street problems mostly stopped.
The smarter sociopaths from that generation are still with us, sitting in boardrooms and political offices shitting on society. Bratton is one of them.
believe that if you want… your own comment shows you are full of anger… you sure don’t sound like you have any empathy.
Nice ad hominem, but no (unless your definition of empathy is getting an erection when you see this – in which case you can keep the empathy). There is no need to “believe” anything. When the last of that generation aged out of street crime, a lot of antisocial behavior simply stopped. This is quite easy to establish. Unless you think the gubbermint and/or police are lying?
Something is up with especially American males who were teenagers and young adults during that era. Not all of them, but a lot of them exhibited (and I’d say often still exhibit) antisocial tendencies at a rate that people who grew up before and after don’t.
i’m sorry it’s simply false to say human beings are improving. maybe you have an issue with your older generation – I don’t know.
what separates these good in these cases besides 80 years –
http://news.yahoo.com/more-100.....20897.html
from them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgFbcmz4irk
nothing except they wouldn’t have reached so far. I won’t even get into all the young ppl who have committed mass murder in just the past 5 years in the U.S.
also – I can’t believe you could with a straight face believe that there aren’t plenty of destructive teens and young ppl who wouldn’t gladly “bomb” subway trains with graffiti if they had the chance. Trust me they are still there…. it’s not too hard to find them either. The fact is they simply don’t have the same opportunity because of measures taken by the MTA.
In any event – this is a transit site – not sociology.
Those are anecdotes. News is the stuff that is so unusual it rarely affects anybody. You’re paying too much attention to the shocking stuff in the news and ignoring trends. Do you conclude that all police are authoritarian little piggies because of stuff like this? ‘Cause that’s basically the logic you’re using.
Not that I would conflate vandalism and street violence, but you think taggers don’t graffiti the trains anymore? As I understand it, that never anywhere near stopped. To this day NYCTA relentlessly removes graffiti and other vandalism from equipment. That is probably what they need to do with station garbage. Either way, the response is to cope with it rather than ignore it.
Street violence? That’s down a lot. Kids at that peak crime age (15-23 or thereabouts) just aren’t doing it at previous rates.
i’m off topic again – but…
yeah – anecdotes – but they tell a large story. sorry humans are not getting any less evil. just as there have always been good cops and bad cops.
you are absolutely right street crime is down… but it is not because somehow kids are “nicer” or more “well behaved”.
the diligence of law enforcement is the main reason – just as it is the reason we don’t see trains in service full of “art”.
There are quite a few countries to our south where violent street crime is at or near an all time high (Venezuela – Brazil – El Salvador – Honduras – Jamaica – Mexico – Guatemala – Trinidad – Guyana). Why are they not more “empathetic”?
Lets not forget that if you show antisocial agressiveness at a young age, many schools with there zero tolerance policies will either expell the child or require them to take psychotropic drugs as aposed to solving the actual problem. I know this issue first hand, and the age of that child doesn’t matter to school administrations.
yes – I’m aware…
Except data back up nary any of your claims. For law enforcement to explain a street crime decline, and everything else to stay the same (as you claim), then arrests in those categories should be steady or up. At the very least, we should have a swelling youth prison population, especially given how much tougher sentencing laws are now compared to the 1980s.
Rather, youth arrests are down and have been going down sharply across the board for over 20 years. Likewise, the youth crime rate has plummeted to the point where the bulk of inmates are now older at intake and median and mean ages at prison intake time are now in the late 20s or early 30s.
Law enforcement is an even worse explanation for a graffiti drop. Why? Low odds of capture, penalties that aren’t exactly Sharia. Statistics not conflated with other property crimes seem hard to come by, but this mentions 913 citywide graffiti arrests in a 5-month period in late 2004/early 2005. I actually expected more. If that holds throughout the year, that’s about 2200 arrests; attempts to graffiti trains could only be a fraction of that.
” Across the board younger generations behave more empathetically than the boomers and older Gen Xers”
One of the few things we may agree on. Young people today seem to mean well more than the spoiled navel-gazing Boomers. On average, not per every individual.
But they are, as always, easily redirected the wrong way. I think many have thoroughly swallowed a sophisticated version of hate politics, and may not discover this before they become too old to change.
The MTA once put a line in the sand as respects graffiti – ” no more “.
They should do the same, now, as respects litter.
A relentless, well publicized campaign of enforcement of anti littering laws would do a world of good, just as the crushing of the graffiti ugliness did the system, and all of its riders, a world of good.
Please!
I cringe whenever some misguided soul bemoans the absence of subway graffiti as a lost art form. For those too young to remember the ‘bad old days’ or who lived elsewhere, it really is difficult to paint a picture of how bleak the transit system was back then. The film ‘The Warriors’ was fiction but it’s give you a pretty good idea of what things were like. The TA managed to keep the R44’s and R46’s somewhat clean – when they ran – but the rest of the fleet was a filthy mess. The ever-present grime that covered everything was just about as bad as the graffiti. Many trains had at least one ‘dark car’ with no working lights. Destination signs were often missing, broken or out of date. Most trains were shorter thah today because so many cars were out of service. The fact that some felt it necessary to band together as the Guardian Angels just to keep some semblance of safety and order was a depressing reality. The fight to eliminate graffiti and take back the subways for the people was a gigantic milestone and I applaud the MTA for spending the money to keep the trains clean for 25 years and not allowing this progress to be lost.
Hard to believe we’ve gone 25 years without the scourge of graffiti. Anyone who rode the IRT 7th Ave Line can attest to how awful those 1940s-’50s vintage subway cars were. Covered in graffiti, signage all but ripped to shreds (am I getting on a 2 train or a 3 train?), broken lights, missing windows punched out by the cretins who thought it was funny to vandalize other peoples’ property. Don’t miss those days at all.
And yes, I think there was a huge disconnect with the generation that grew up in the late ’60s to early 90s. Somehow they felt they had permission to destroy everything they touched. Good riddance to them and the crappy subways of yesteryear.
I actually saw an L pull into Sixth Ave a couple weeks ago with a tagged-up car, bad old days style. It was… surreal. I can only surmise that someone did it while the train was waiting at Eighth Ave.
Come to Greenpoint , there is crappy grafitti every where . Very disheartening as an owner of a multifamily building . So many stupid young people with zero regard for private property . Supposedly a lot of hipsters are coming from the Midwest just for the opportunity to grafitti here. Pretty sure this isn’t the work of generation greed
yeah – i’m perplexed that ppl seem to think young ppl somehow no longer deface property. I guess I was dreaming when kids (under 12) in my neighborhood were throwing rocks off the roof onto cars in their very own neighborhood.
Graffiti’s been contained, not eliminated. It’s just a matter of risk/reward that the MTA discovered worked in the late 1980s — clean the graffiti off as soon as it’s noticed, so that it doesn’t become a rolling display of the spray-painter’s efforts, and they’re for the most part discouraged from going through all that work with little to show for it.
Forty-four years ago, all those ‘Taki 183’ black marker pieces were allowed to remain on the trains, and were then followed up by the Krylon corps of sprayers who could see their work roam the A and B Divisions, often until they went in for their William Ronan-mandated new corporate paint job (Platinum and Blue exterior, pistachio green and gray interior with stenciled lettering — the ugliest interior paint job in subway history). And once the pristine new paint jobs were there, they just created a fresh canvas to mark up, which again, wouldn’t be cleaned or covered for months, until they went back into the paint shop.
It began a decade of both obtuse and misguided thinking on how to solve the graffiti problem, until the Kiley-Gunn administration decided to expend the extra effort to clean the cars based on immediate need, and not just when it was time to clean them. If the MTA ever opted to get away from that, to the point where the graffiti crews again think the risk to mark the cars up is worth the reward of having your work on exhibit for weeks or months at a time, the problem will come right back again.
very true. same with graff in neighborhoods too. if you paint it as soon as it appears – eventually it wears down most… only the real stalwarts will keep attempting.
Notice how little law enforcement has to do with his explanation?
As I said, it’s probably the solution to the garbage issue too. You have to relentlessly remove litter too.
Tokyo and other Japanese cities are essentially free of litter. This isn’t due to any relentless removal. The Japanese just don’t litter.
In a healthy culture, it’s not acceptable to throw an empty food container on the public sidewalk when you’re done with it.
Change the culture, and you won’t necessarily have to have an army of people cleaning up afterward.
No, Japan is clean because they believe in cleaning up the garbage. The cultural difference isn’t that nobody litters. The cultural difference is that the Japanese don’t believe that we should just allow the garbage to stay there. Japan definitely has “relentless removal.” If you wake up early in the morning you’ll see virtual armies of men sweeping up any litter into dustbins by hand. If businesses don’t clean up the litter on their sidewalks, they get fined, just like the laws we supposedly have on the books in the US that we never really enforce.
This thing about how we should just change the culture so literally nobody will ever litter sounds like a copout. You’re basically saying that because people are imperfect we should live in filth, which is ridiculous.
Try enforcing laws against litter and publicize the hell out of it and watch the behavior change.
The law isn’t enforced at all in NYC now.
This is such low hanging fruit. If littering went down ” just ” fifty percent, that would be such an improvement in the quality of life here.
FWIW, I think the fine is too low too. Enforcement costs might very well exceed the revenue you gain from, what, is it a $100 fine? Especially considering catching people is probably hard.
Bolwerk
The fine I believe can be as low as $50.
But I think that trained plainclothes people could easily nab many offenders.
I see acts of littering all the time in Bay Ridge and in Manhattan.
People dropping empty soda cups on the sidewalk, leaving plastc food clamshell boxes by subway benches, leaving plastic bags in the park etc
It should probably be several times that, but the idea should be more remediation than punishment. The ones you catch can help pay to clean up the mess created by the ones you don’t catch.
A fine that is swift and ( fairly ) certain is more important than the amount of the fine.
Especially if you get one of the tickets where you have to appear at a court of some kind to resolve it.
I think that we pretty much agree on this – now how do we get the city and MTA off their dead ass?
Try to raise the fine too much and you’ll get a lot of push back from poor advocates.
Really though, $50 fine for littering in a subway station/on a railcar, on an eight hour shift, giving out one ticket every 20 minutes seems feasible, and brings in $1200. Make it simple, like a parking ticket that you can pay online or through the mail to avoid overloading the courts/encouraging people who don’t want a criminal record to get a lawyer to fight this, force the enforcement agent to take a day off and go to court/push back from advocates who would scream when this violates somebody’s parole etc…Not a crime, nothing on anyone’s criminal record. Just a simple fine. You’d pay for the guy giving the tickets and have some left to pay for someone to clean up. If you want to raise that to $100 you could probably get away with it, but more than that and you run into opposition.
And if you give the guy a uniform, you have a customer service agent walking the platforms, or on the train, or some kind of pseudo security, which will act as a minor crime deterrent, even if they aren’t actually in a position to help anyone.
On sidewalks? Don’t ignore business/residential owners, and then they’ll leave a garbage can out for passerbys.
DSNY has minimum crew size of 2. Get the trucks most cities have that pick up the garbage cans so you can go to crew size of 1, at least in some areas, cut down from city council mandated twice weekly pick up in the less dense areas that never fill up trucks, and you’ll have a small army of garbage men with no work that the city could use to clean stuff up (some parks and other city property are a real mess). Right now NYC has the highest trash collection rates (not counting landfill costs here) in the country. Might as well be clean if we spend so much.
If finding a person littering every 20 minutes were that easy, why wouldn’t the NYPD be doing it? It’s scarcely a secret they love using rather flimsy application of quality of life rules to practically harass people who don’t do anything malicious (like put bags on the seat on a mostly empty train, or snooze on the subway after a late shift) with fines.
Littering is so unambiguously malicious and selfish that going after people doing it is unlikely to even be controversial. So I rather doubt they can find people that easily. Not to mention that we have record high numbers of police, and record low crime. In other words, we have precious little else for them to be doing.
It’s a bit of both… sure Japan typically does a much better job of maintenance and cleaning, and it isn’t the wonderland of completely law-abiding earnest citizens some people seem to think it is, but there is a palpable difference in the attitude of the Japanese public towards things like littering. It obviously happens, but rather less so than in the U.S.
I think if you want to make places like NYC cleaner, attacking on both fronts would be a good idea…
I believe you are right that other places frown on litter more than we do, and I think changing the culture can have an impact, but overall I agree with tacony. Some people will always litter and not all littering is even intentional, so of course there always has to be litter removal.
I’m not sure about Japan, but across western Europe there are other remedial measures: like producing less waste, putting a bounty on more waste (25 eurocents on glass in Germany, plastic bottles are more rare), plastic bags cost money, etc..
Oh, and the broken windows people may actually have a point on this one. The incentive to litter or graffiti might actually drop off somewhat if that stops being normatively acceptable. So maybe you don’t need as big an army, but you still need someone whose job it is to deal with this.
Key to the anti-graffiti efforts was putting razor wire and improved fencing around the yards. From what I’d heard and read, the ‘artists’ used to be able to get into the yards pretty easily. The white cars from the early 1980’s are commonly seen as something of a joke these days but they were an important part of the effort – starting with Corona Yard, they were a test to see if the improved fencing was actually working. I’m assuming that added yard space was also a factor – it seems that back in the day the TA used to park more trains out on the various express tracks during nights and weekends where they were sitting ducks for the cretins to tag up.