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you wouldn't understand. you're into murals and thats fine...thats not graffiti tho. create a mural thread?
tagging and bombing are very much a part of graffiti.
calling the tunnels straight bull is a huge insult. there's *a lot* of history down there...tags from artists that have passed away that are as old as the start of the graffiti movement. entire pieces down there, bombs, etc.
there's only one espo as far as i know, but you never know.
Just letting you know that ESPO (Steve Powers) is actually a Philadelphia native and was born & raised in West Philly. He had been a writer in Philly since his early teens, but went to NY to go to college. He then began to write up there.
I agree with you that grafitti evolved to even larger levels in NY (especially the trains) and spread from there throughout the world. Afterall, NY is the center of American media & entertainment; it is the largest U.S. city and it's an international city, so most trends are naturally dessiminated from there to the rest of the country (and world) --whether the trends originated there or not. Thus, most people in the rest of the country and world just assume that "whatever" trend originally began in NY.
But Philadelphia (North Philly to be exact) has to get credit as the foundation and the originators of what became modern, urban grafitti. Philly was sprayed up years before NY, as early as the 1960s. Later, it spread to NY. A 1971 article in the NY Times referred to Philadelphia as "the Grafitti Capital of the World." A year later in 1972, an article in Time Magazine estimated that Philadelphia might have as many as 10,000--more or less--"habitual grafitti artists." So although NY can be credited with creating and embellishing some of the new styles, they were simply adding to a foundation that had already been laid. The original innovation occurred in Philly.
For those who don't know--Philly was seriously sprayed up in the 1970s, but in the 80s Mayor Goode cracked down and established the anti-grafitti networks. The city was sprayed up seriously again in the 1990s during the Rendell administration, but I gotta give Mayor Street credit for cleaning up a lot of the walls and buildings in the 2000s (in conjunction with the Mural program and former grafitti artists).
I'm not overly judgemental of this since I was a little involved with this scene as a youth. But when I became a man, I realized how detrimental too much grafitti can be on a city's appearance, its perception, and thus, its quality of life. Especially after going into the military, traveling to other places, and then returning home and seeing how fugged up Philly looked compared to other places.
I think Philly's mural program is a great thing, and it has improved the look of the walls and buildings of neighborhoods that were once completely sprayed up with traditional grafitti. I support traditional grafitti art in limited capacities such as the memorials that artists paint in honor of those who have passed away in some of the neighborhoods, which can be see in many neighborhoods. But most of the times, people from the neighborhoods pay the grafitti artists to create those memorials--so they have actually been sanctioned by the block. But I just can't support the older tradition of just spraying up someone's private property and making the neighborhoods look bad.
A few articles mentioning ESPO and other aspects of Philly graff history:
graffiti existed in ny in the 60's. taki 183 was putting his name in ny BEFORE the 70's. during that same year the article was written by philly, taki 183 had an article written about him.
1973:
1972:
phase 2 is the person who came up with the piece:
http://www.team183.com/html/kasinomasterpaper/paper_files/phasebubbler.gif (broken link)
and that was done in 1972.
by 73, most trains were bombed out.
iirc, clouds, the bomb, the wildstyle came from ny. developed in ny, was on our trains, all that.
i give credit where its due but saying philly has the best graffiti is reaching. philly had cornbread which came before taki but thats it.
the streets were filled with crude tags in 71 in philly, as they were in ny before ppl developed more aesthetically pleasing handstyles, in ny.
philly might have been the capital in 71, but it was all crude letters.
ny developed the style you see today. by 74-75, you have what you see today on the streets on our trains and walls.
I did not vote because I personally fail to see anything worth celebrating in most grafitti, which is gang tagging. However I can appreciate the more ambitous artistic efforts that encompass an entire wall or freeway overpass. Atlanta has quite a lot of this grafitti now and in some remarkably hard-to-reach, high profile places. How these guys manage to do their work on a skinny little ledge (or dangling upside down!) over a busy interstate or inside a subway tunnel without getting caught or killed is beyond me.
I don't know who started it, who then followed, etc, etc. All I know is that I have NEVER seen anything like NYC in the eighties. We used to go to NYC all the time when I was a kid. I was a teen in the eighties, and I'll say this. Truth is stranger than fiction. All I remember seeing in NYC at that time was graffiti. There was graffiti in places that you didn't think anyone could get to. It was unreal. Everything in some places, even roads and highways and I mean everything litterally was tagged. To this day, those memories stick in my head like it was yesterday. I never seen anything like it then or since. There wasn't a square foot within reach in most of NYC back then that wasn't tagged with something on it.
The graffiti you see today in NYC isn't even about a tenth of what you saw in yesteryear. Anyone who is over the age of about 35 can vouche for this. It was completely unreal. And unless you have seen it firsthand, you would never believe a city the size and status of NY could look like that. Of course back then there was a lot more crime than there is today.
Without a doubt, and I don't care who you are, you can't tell me Philly was ever anything like NYC. Not a chance. Nothing was. Like I said before, anyone over the age of 35 will or can tell you this..
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(serious question, no shots)
