Bansky and His 31 Days in New York:

Artist Stirs Memories of Taki 183, Caine 1, 
Dondi and the City's Graffiti Heyday 

Graffiti emerged on the New York scene like a tsunami rushing in from the sea in the early 1970’s. Taggers with pseudonyms like Taki 183, Dondi, Cliff 159, Stayhigh 149, and Blade staged an aggressive in-your-face assault on a captive and unsuspecting audience, the million plus people who rode the subways on a daily basis.

This first wave of artists or vandals, depending on your view of art, defiance and defacement, used the subways as their personal 24/7 galleries and forum. With their energy, fervor and quite often talents graffiti entered the mainstream quickly. Their monikers became synonymous with the subway lines they tagged.

Their worked appeared everywhere: on doors, windows, seats, and ceilings throughout the system.

If you took the #4 train to Yankee Stadium you thought you rode the Mitch 77 train. If you went to Shea Stadium, where the NY Mets played, you rode The Caine Freedom Train compliments of Caine 1 and not the #7. Competition grew fierce and the graffiti exploded. Graffiti crews worked long hours in unguarded train yards creating their next eye-catching displays.

Tags evolved from simple lettering to huge block letters, large decorative illustrations and zany designs with cartoon characters like Snoopy or Dick Tracy emblazoned in vivid colors. Comparable mind-boggling works graced the exterior of cars from end-to-end, and not just a handful of cars but almost all cars.

The grime, filthy, smelly, and unsafe conditions of a deteriorating system compounded with smudged incomprehensible drawings, illegible scribbles, tags and designs copied on top of each other made it difficult to appreciate the works created some talented artists.

Bansky Unveils His Stuff

Graffiti as street art or vandalism resurfaced last October when Bansky, a British artist, painter, activist, and documentary filmmaker announced on his website a month long artist residency in New York City. Bansky received an Oscar nomination in 2010 for his film Exit Thru the Gift Shop and that same year made Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Bansky, a recluse, is well known for “bombing walls in San Francisco, Detroit, Paris, and Barcelona.

His true identity is unknown although the London Daily Mail speculates he is Robin Gunningham, who began with the tag Robin Banx. He developed his pencil sketch style in his native Bristol, England.

In 2003 he staged his breakthrough exhibit “Turf Wars” in an East London Warehouse. In 2005 his celebrity grew when he traveled to Palestine and stenciled nine images on the West Bank Wall including his iconic Masked Armed Thrower. He has had major shows in Los Angeles and Sydney.

At the Miami Street Art Auction in February his “Kissing Coppers’s sold for $575,000.

His New York exhibit called “Better Out Than In” had one Bansky work popping up at undisclosed locations all 31 days in October. Bansky hit all five boroughs. His first installation in Chinatown, “The Street Is in Play,” showed one boy standing on the back of a second boy touching a sign which read “Graffiti is a Crime,” It ended with a set of balloons spelling BANSKY! And tied to a Queens warehouse on Halloween.

In between Bansky had a real person shining the shoes of a large fiberglass Ronald McDonald statue outside a Mickey D’s in the South Bronx; in Manhattan’s meatpacking district he unveiled “The Sirens of the Lambs” a slaughterhouse delivery truck crammed with stuff animals, heads butting out from slots, while touring the meatpacking district as a recording of animals crying played; and the Two Geisha Girls with parasols in Williamsburg, where bystanders tussled with a hooded vandal as he tagged the work.

Bansky artistic exploits, product placement (most off the beaten path) and PR showmanship tweaked my interest. And I like his work. In a city where graffiti survives for years more than half of his had not. Property owners destroyed or removed some. Taggers vandalized others.

Five days after his exhibit ended, I left my house at 10 am in search of Bansky. I headed to Larry Flint’s Hustler Club, at West 51^st & 11^th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen’s, near my apartment, to see my favorite “Waiting in Vain.” Painted on October 24, it showed a forlorn lover dressed in a suit and a loosened tie slouched against a wall holding wilted flowers. No luck! The club, knew its value, removed it.

Next I walked to West 25^th and 11^th Avenue to see his second one, a text piece which read, “This is My New York Accent…Normally I Write Like This.” Strike two!

I went to 24^th near 10^th Avenue for his 18^th installment, an outdoor exhibition, and two hanging pieces, under the High Line in Chelsea, done in collaboration with Brazilian street artists Os Geneos. Strike three!

Moving to 24^th Street and 6^th I found his third posting, marred with graffiti. Called “You Complete Me” it showed a dog urinating against a fire hydrant. 

I walked to four other Banksy locations with no luck: the East Village (Priest in a Concrete Confessional), Lower East Side (the Two Boys; Night Vision Horses) and Nolita (Grim Reaper Rides a Bumper Car).

I flirted with the idea of crossing the Williamsburg Bridge to continue my search in Brooklyn but called it quits. At 4pm I returned home. At least I found one.

Photo Credits: 
a. DONDI - www.UKStreetArt.co.uk/dondi by Andy. In memory
    of Donald Joseph White "Dondi" (April 7, 1961 - Oct.2, 1998)
b. "The Street Is in Play" (Two Boys)  - Flickr - www.noupe.com by Tara Horner
c. "Waiting in Vain" Flickr - JC Decaux www.mobility-trend.com 
d. "You Complete Me" - Dog at Hydrant - Rudi Papiri
NYC Subway graffiti reference: Spar One Editor/Resource Director for Graffiti @149st

Moses Gates: Hidden Cities...

Urban Adventurer Explores the Secret 
Places of the World's Great Cities

Moses Gates is not your typical tourist with a passion for cities. 

He is an urban planner, a licensed New York City tour guide, and a visiting assistant professor of demography at Pratt Institute.

He has an adventurous streak that leans more towards Indiana Jones than that of a starry-eyed Smartphone carrying photo-snap-happy tourist from the Midwest where he grew up.

Gates is not searching for the Ark of the Covenant or evading Nazis like Jones, Harrison Ford's character in the movie Raiders of the Lost Arc.

He is not satisfied sauntering across the Brooklyn Bridge to marvel at its beauty and enjoy the views of the New York Bay and the lower Manhattan skyline. It is just as hard to picture Gates entering the magnificent Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, or any other noted world destination in as a normal tourist.

Why? Gates thinks differently. While most people are content to walk across a famous bridge, Gates wants to climb it. He wades, no he dives head first into the underbelly of the cities he visits and unveils their hidden secrets and shares his stories with us.

In his book Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World’s Great Metropolises; A memoir of Urban Exploration we learn Gates is a thrill-seeking urban adventurer with a wanderlust for going where very few people have ventured before him.

In the first sentence of page one of his insightful and humorous memoir he writes,

“I have just rung the bell of Notre Dame.”

Gates and several companions, including his best friend and the ultimate urban explorer Steve Duncan, are drinking at a Paris bar when they decide to investigate the city’s 1200-plus miles of underground canals. After squeezing through a locked gate they walked for a mile and-a-half before they stopped realizing it is tough to wade through a sewer without rubber boots and an air meter (this is an adventure for another day). They exited the sewer by popping open a manhole cover. Next they opt for the Cathedral of Notre Dame and its bell tower. They reach the bell not with a tour guide or by ascending the 387 steps of its narrow spiral stairwell but by scaling its exterior. They climb its gargoyles; flying buttresses and a makeshift ladder at night, in the rain, and tipsy.

His adventures span four continents. He has dodged third rails in five of the world’s ten largest subway tunnels including New York, Stockholm, Paris, London and Moscow. He has roamed the catacombs, water and sewer tunnels of these cities as well as Naples, Rome, and Odessa. Besides the Brooklyn Bridge he has climbed the George Washington, Williamsburg, Manhattan, Hell’s Gate Bridges (Gates calls it a beast of a bridge and a direct inspiration for the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge) and the Moscow Bridge in Kiev. Climbing is challenging and dangerous, especially at night, his preferred time in order to lessen chances of getting arrested.

There is only one way up the Brooklyn Bridge he writes: “climb the suspension cables, navigate around the suicide guards – metal gates on the cables designed to keep people from scaling them…then balance on the cables, hang on to the guide wires for dear life, and hope a gust of wind doesn’t come along.”

  

Gates writes about these dangers and his adventures in a casual matter-of-fact style like someone visiting the Statue of Liberty or the pyramids for the first time. His tales are funny. He writes about his “Sex on the Bridge Club” and his own rendezvous on the Williamsburg Bridge, of getting karate kicked in the face by a homeless woman named Brooklyn at 2 in the morning at her birthday party in the train tunnel under Riverside Park in New York City, and walking the streets of Rio de Janeiro dressed in drag and losing his negligee after getting drenched in a downpour.

 Gates gives us the history of the places he visits and he sheds light on his world one of squatters living in a vacant mansion in San Paolo, teenagers occupying Cold War bunkers under Odessa and much more. He writes about an informal network of students, travelers, historians, adventurers including legends with names like Dsankt and Siologen, members of Cave Clan, a group formed in Australia whose purpose is to climb urban storm drains. He writes about graffiti artists some of who have created masterpieces in the catacombs of Paris and in the train tunnels and unused subway stations in New York.

With Gates we enter ancient Roman ruins in the sewers beneath the Capitoline Hills in Rome, and German bunkers in Paris. We explore the city’s catacombs and wind past ossuaries filled with skulls and bones neatly stacked together. We discover the tomb of Philibert Aspairt who disappeared in the Paris catacombs in 1793. Legend says his torch expired while searching for the wine cellars of the Chartreux monks.  We travel through many rooms and a cave several stories high, and sliver through two-foot-high tunnels.

This is the ultimate reference book for those travelers whose curiosities know no boundaries. For the rest of us it may not inspire us to risk our lives climbing famous landmarks but it will certainly stir our interest to learn about the secrets of our hidden cities.

Buy his book: Hidden Cities: A Memoir of Urban Exploration

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, Paperback Edition 2013

Follow Moses Gates on Twitter.

•His notes at the end of the book are an invaluable resource. His black/white and color photographs are priceless. 

Larry Cole Eubanks

The Bard of Atlantic City

I did not see Snooki, The Situation or JWoww on the beach at Atlantic City near the southern end of the Jersey Shore. 

I saw no signs they had partied anywhere near where I walked in late August. The playground for these loud-mouthed heavily muscled guidos and their sassy big-haired guidettes lies further north in Seaside Heights.

Instead on my stretch of the Atlantic City beach, between the Tropicana, The Chelsea and Hilton Hotels, I met a poet disguised as an ice cream vendor.

Tall, wiry and athletic dressed in army boots, tan cargo pants and a military fatigue cap wearing black framed orange lens sunglasses Cole Larry Eubanks moves across the hot sands, weaving past scores of colorful beach umbrellas and matching chairs with a steady graceful rhythm. He covers this ten-block radius many times over hauling his mini trunk sized hot icebox strapped over his shoulder. He sells ice cream cones, sandwiches, ices, Oreo-cream sticks, snicker bars and more. As a bonus he dispenses his poems for free but not to everyone.

Eubanks, 61, is personable, articulate and tireless considering now many times he treks back-and-forth with his wares. Engage him in conversation beyond the usual “what do you sell,” and he reveals he is a poet.  Ask him what he writes about he replies “would you like to hear one?” Of course you shrug a shoulder and mutter, “okay” expecting a light-hearted Good Humor or Mister Softie type jingle. After he recites two lines you know this is special.

Eubanks speaks with clarity and passion. His is serious and intent. You roll with his every word hoping you grasp his message.

Forever the educator he is not looking to impress his audience with fancy rhymes or puffery. He is serious about sharing his convictions and educating as well. He achieves this by connecting past with present. His words nullify the sound of waves breaking on the surf. They pierce the laughter and screams of children playing nearby and slip through the whistling wind bouncing off the rough waters of the Atlantic. He finishes. You regret this is a one-time deal as he wanders away, especially when his next words  are “ice cream, frozen ices”

Eubanks, 61, called The Professor, by an Atlantic City Weekly columnist, taught in the Philadelphia and Atlantic City school systems for 28 years. The former high school teacher retired in 2005. He has read his works at a Buddhist monastery, at Apiary Magazine events, on the Café Improve television show, local radio, Tunes against Turmoil rock concert, and books stores in south Jersey and Philadelphia. In 2008 “Poets against War” honored Eubanks and several international poets for their works.

He has conducted workshops at the Teen Arts Center Festival at Stockton College and has read at the Atlantic Cape Community College, both in south Jersey.

Eubanks writes about the brutalities of war, slavery and social injustice. In his biographical Clenched he describes his childhood with an abusive father. 

He joins historical events with current ones.

in Playing Softball in America he begins with “my American daughter playing softball, unwinds at why her trying to-be-american dad has frozen….to his memory of the horror experienced by girls in under Taliban rule.”

In Angel From Harper’s Ferry (see below) he describes a dream-like jail cell encounter between abolitionist, John Brown and Dr. Martin Luther King, JR. Brown, in prison for leading an armed insurrection to end slavery was tried and hanged for treason in Virginia. Dr. Martin Luther King, JR., arrested for his planned non-violent protest against racial segregation, wrote his powerful “Letter from Birmingham jail” during his incarceration in that city. Speaking in the first person Brown counsels King and discusses the burden of slavery and King’s place in this fight.

Eubank is the current “Poet of the Year” for the Literacy Volunteers of America Atlantic/Cape May. His work is featured in “E Pluribus Unum: An Anthology of Diverse Voices produced by The Light of Unity at Philadelphia’s Moonstone Arts Center. 

Angel From Harper’s Ferry

On December 2, 1859, my neck snapped

and I pendulumed in the Charlestown sun.

swinging, completely at ease,

the breeze whispered a divine mission.

many would fine that iconic

with kansas blood still on my hands,

but I was always God-guided.

now a spirit, i am back in a cell not unlike

the one I just vacated in virginia 109 years ago.

in the room sleeps a small black man

while he rests, a century of history flashes

between us.

it seems shortly after my death,

america went to war just as I did as an individual

over the same stain…slavery

and 600,000 died.

coincidentally, the assassin of the president

was at my execution…

i think they killed the wrong man.

while the prisoner slept, i fed him dreams

in preparation for our visit.

gently, i commanded him…awake.

first, we talked about working for

 a similar cause with dissimilar means.

he wanted to know about frederick d.

i told him i hid out at his house for three weeks

and that they were two of a kind…

same sharp mind, same resolution.

he told me local clergymen

were warning him…slow down

and wondered if he was moving too quickly.

i said if God wanted him to be more moderate

the last one he would have sent was john brown.

martin laughed so hard the guard came,

but all he saw was my new friend.

i loved seeing him relax.

he said before you go…one question…

how do you plan projects not

knowing when you are going to die?

i said, martin no one knows that,

but your case is an exception…

you have four years and twelve days.

then he took out a pen and wrote his letter

from a birmingham jail…