For nearly 20 years, Chicago and Cook County have waged war on graffiti.
The city estimates it will spend $5.5 million to remove graffiti this year, and despite a $487 million budget deficit, the Cook County board renewed its commitment to the cleanup by rejecting Sheriff Thomas J. Dart’s proposal to scrap a suburban graffiti-removal unit costing $600,000 a year.
But the anti-graffiti strategy — deploying crews called graffiti blasters to quickly erase or blot out painted surfaces — has imposed a kind of natural-selection process in the graffiti subculture. By discouraging all but the shrewdest and most determined practitioners, the city and county have inadvertently contributed to making Chicago a vibrant hub of graffiti activity, according to experts.
“It made Chicago graffiti an aggressive and competitive sport,” said Sebastian Napoli, 32, who began writing graffiti around the city in the 1990s when writers called Chicago “the chocolate city” after the brown paint used to cover their work. The enforcement efforts “weeded out guys that get up once or twice and tried to call themselves writers,” Mr. Napoli said.
Roger Gastman, co-author of “The History of American Graffiti” (HarperCollins), said Chicago was “the biggest scene in the U.S. that is the most undocumented.” The book, to be published next month, explores graffiti in several cities and devotes two chapters to Chicago. It will be the first look into the city’s elusive subculture since William Upski Wimsatt’s self-published “Bomb the Suburbs” in 1994.
According to Mr. Gastman and his co-author, Caleb Neelon, the rise of Chicago’s new breed of graffiti writers dates to Mayor Richard M. Daley’s campaign to eradicate graffiti as part of preparations for the 1994 World Cup games at Soldier Field and the 1996Democratic National Convention.
In 1993, Mr. Daley unleashed what became known as the graffiti blasters, a removal initiative graffiti writers call “the buff.” Two years later, the sale of spray paint was banned within city limits, and its possession was prohibited except for commercial use. Around the same time, graffiti writers caught painting on trains became more commonly subject to felony charges, not just misdemeanors.
Mr. Gastman and Mr. Neelon said the city’s crackdown prompted some graffiti crews to focus on painting Chicago Transit Authority trains, since their graffiti was likely to be removed from walls and buildings hours after it was done.
The elevated and exposed trains also provided an irresistible canvas for graffiti writers hungry for a challenge.
“The elevated trains allow for a whole new way of writing graffiti,” said Jim Clay Harper, 26, originally from Wilmette, who goes by the tag name Ether. “It’s a mark of Chicago. It affects the landscape, and within that, the landscape of graffiti.”
The city’s aggressive anti-graffiti campaign “changed the dynamic of a lot of writers in Chicago,” Mr. Harper said. “It dictates how they paint, where they paint.”
Mr. Harper became a high-profile example of graffiti writing’s risks when he was arrested in 2008 for tagging New York subway trains. He also was convicted of vandalizing property in Boston and spent the last year serving sentences in New York and Boston.
“Any writer after the ’90s I consider five times the writers we were,” said Tyrue Jones, 41, known as Slang, who painted trains in the 1980s when they would bear a writer’s tag for weeks as they circulated the city.
Alderman Proco Moreno (1st Ward) has sought to keep graffiti taggers away from small businesses by commissioning them to paint designated walls. If they ignore his initiative, Mr. Moreno said, he will attend their hearings and recommend maximum punishment.
“You need to use a carrot and a stick approach to this,” he said. “I would prefer to use a carrot.”
Because of budget cuts, graffiti blasters can be slow to remove graffiti, so Mr. Moreno organized and personally financed a volunteer crew that paints over graffiti in his ward within 48 hours.
“Don’t give me this anticorporate idea,” he said of writers’ explanation of their graffiti. “We don’t have Microsoft headquarters on Milwaukee Avenue.”
Without a doubt, the buff’s regime conditioned graffiti writers. “If you could be a writer in Chicago,” Mr. Harper said. “You could be a writer anywhere.”
mknight@chicagonewscoop.org