Forever Graffiti Free Form

[Jon Levatte]

Property owners can submit a Forever Graffiti Free form, allowing the City to remove graffiti from their property whenever it is reported, without having to receive a Notice of Intent first. You can enroll in this program even if there is no graffiti currently on your property.

You can report graffiti on United States Post Office blue collection mailboxes and green drop boxes. The United States Postal Service (USPS) takes these reports as maintenance complaints for the local post office.

You can also request that the responding officers issue a police report for insurance or other purposes. If you request a police report, you cannot remain anonymous and you must be available to meet the responding police officers.

You have the option to remove the graffiti yourself and report that you did within 35 days of the date on the notice. You can also request an extra 15 days to make a decision. After 50 days of the date on the notice, the City will inspect the property and close the case if no graffiti is found. If graffiti is found, the City will remove it.

You can ask the City to leave the graffiti on the building for artistic or other reasons. You must respond within 35 days of the date on the notice. If you do not respond in 35 days, the City will remove the graffiti from your building.

You can request a 15-day extension to the 35-day timeframe within which you must notify the City that you either wish to keep the graffiti or that you have removed it yourself. If you request a 15-day extension and do not report either of these options by the end of the additional 15 days, the City will remove the graffiti from your property.

By submitting this form, you ensure that the City will always attempt to remove graffiti from your property free of charge in case it is ever reported. You will not receive a Notice of Intent to Remove Graffiti each time graffiti is reported on your property.

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This time it was a crashing wave of color rather than scattered splotches, as the underpass, lit up by the flashlights we were carrying, erupted in the colors of years of spray paint, with no inch of wall left untouched besides the precipices of the underpass, kept safe from the majority of writers frequenting the spot due to the simple fact that the average person cannot actually reach much higher than a couple feet above their heads.

Here was a city of Troy of urban art, each level of city being built on top of the ruins of its predecessor. It was a constantly developing location changing in character in between subsequent visits, shifted in sustenance and color each time by those who had visited in my absence. I had come for photographs, but left with a passion, a reignited interest for the art form which covers our city; and with the Coronavirus crashing into our city, state, and country, this time around I found plenty of time to develop it.

Graffiti from an outside perspective is, frankly, a mess, figuratively as well as literally. Plenty of it is often unreadable to the average person as artists push stylistic and structural limits to their breaking points, but even in the form of simple block letters it remains illegal, damaging, and disruptive.

Whereas in an art museum or gallery you are presented with a piece of art, the name that goes along with it, and means to contact and communicate with those who created it, you are not awarded such privileges with graffiti. Identification of authorship exists, as graffiti quite literally consists of names, but the means of contacting a specific artist often end there. This leads to a vast community of people who may have never met, but express and communicate through the paint in their can and the pen names they go by.

Written pieces also require consistency and alignment, just as any other comparable form of calligraphy. This seems simple enough with basic writing, as all of us do on a daily basis, but when pushing the limits of written letters and seeking to find originality and creativity in a rather rigid alphabet, it can be easy for individuals to lose track of the original letter they are seeking to represent and consequently have the quality of their work deteriorate.

With a concrete understanding of letter structure, writers are then able to lift off from it, adding unique style and expression into their work and gaining both recognition and reputation on the streets they write on. This leads to the expressive and elaborate pieces that can be found all over the city; complex in design but ultimately compliant in structure.

Graffiti forces itself upon the passerby, never being wanted yet nonetheless appearing, covering the varied surfaces of public spaces with letters, numbers, and all sorts of doodles. It is painted over, buffed out, logged, and persecuted, but the art form continues to not only exist but flourish in urban areas, thriving off of the anonymity and vastness that a cities provide, being presented with more empty nooks, crannies, postboxes, and poles than will ever be filled, and an audience of passersby forever present as long as the city stands.

I do not condone the damages done by the art form nor do I encourage its proliferation, but I have learned to appreciate it, as it appears alongside us in New York City, as it has been here before us and will continue to exist long after us.

Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view.[1][2] Graffiti ranges from simple written "monikers" to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).[3]

Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities.[4] Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions.[5]

The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vandalism,[9] which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.[10]

The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.[11][12]

Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia.[9] The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago.[13] Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences.[14] Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.[9]

Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries.[15] Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:

Wet with cool dew drops
fragrant with perfume from the flowers
came the gentle breeze
jasmine and water lily
dance in the spring sunshine
side-long glances
of the golden-hued ladies
stab into my thoughts
heaven itself cannot take my mind
as it has been captivated by one lass
among the five hundred I have seen here.[16]

Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.[17][clarification needed]

Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls.[18]When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.[19][20]

Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s.[22] Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.[23]

The oldest known example of graffiti monikers found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.[24][25]

During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".[28]

Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains.[29] and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.[30]

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