Resources

1. Adams, Hoelscher, and Till, Eds. Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001)
2. Anderson, Michael. “’You Have to Get Inside the Person’ Or Making Grief Private: Image and Metaphor in the Therapeutic Reconstruction of Bereavement” in Facing Death: Grief, Mourning, and Ritual, (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001)
3. “Art in the Contested City.” November 3rd, 2006. Pratt Institute. Program
4. Atlas, Caron. “Culture and Community Development: Tough Questions, Creative Answers.” Progressive Planning: The Magazine of Planners Network. no 165
5. Bell, William. Personal Interview. February 11th, 2007.
6. Bertman, Sandra L., Ed. Grief and the Healing Arts: Creativity as Therapy. (New York: Baywood Publishing Co., 1999)
7. C100. The Art of Rebellion. Ginko Press: 2005.
8. Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
9. Cooper, Martha, and Chalfant, Henry. Subway Art. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984)
10. Cooper, Martha, and Sciorra, Joseph. RIP Memorial Wall Art. Thames and Hudson: 1994.
11. Cooper, Martha, Email Interview.
12. Delgado, Melvin. Death at an Early Age and the Urban Scene: The Case for Memorial Murals and Community Healing. (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003).
13. Delgado, Melvin, Phone Interview March 7th, 2007.
14. Disaster Center online at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
15. Ebersole, Gary L., “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse.” History of Religions, Vol. 39, No 3. (Feb., 2000) found on JSTOR.
16. Ferrell, Jeff. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. Palgrave: 2001.
17. Ganz, Nicholas. Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents. HNA: 2004.
18. Gonzalez, Evelyn Diaz. The Bronx. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
19. Hebrew Glossary online at http://www.headcoverings-by-devorah.com/HebglossSh.html
20. Hijiya, James A., “American Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death: A Brief History.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 127, No. % (Oct 14, 1983) found on JSTOR
21. Howarth, Glennys. “Grieving in Public” in Facing Death: Grief, Mourning, and Ritual, (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001)
22. Ivy, Marilyn. “Ghostly Epiphanies: Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore,” in Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995)
16. Justice and the City. Map. Spatial Information Design Lab. New York: The Architectural League, 2006)
23. Monteko, Remy. “Fuel for Dissidence Running Low: Graffiti’s Evolution into the Mainstream.” (New York: Barnard College, Proxy Magazine, 2007)
24. Paul 107. All City: The Book About Taking Space. ECW Press: 2003.
25. Mack, Tara, Personal Interview March 28th, 2007
26. Newman, Kathe, and Wyly, Elvin. “Gentrification and Resistance in New York City.” National Housing Institute Report, Issue no 142, July/August, 2005 found at http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/142/gentrification.html
27. Newsweek online at http://www.newsday.com/news/local/am-shoot1126-gallery,0,1285473.photogallery?index=161
28. New York City Mortality data found at http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/stats/stats-mortality.shtml
29. New York City Police Department data gathered from www.nyc.gov/planning
30. New York Times Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/nyregion/15shooting.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FPeople%2FB%2FBell%2C%20Sean
31. Not Bored Online at http://www.notbored.org/die.jpg
32. NY Touch online at www.nytouch.com/ FrontPage%20Archive%20VII.htm
33. October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation. Handout from meeting, December 11th, 2006.
34. October 22nd Coalition. Stolen Lives: Killed by Law Enforcement. Second Edition. Stolen Lives Project, 1999.
35. PBS Online at http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov1997/jessesgone/works/anthony_hilton/anthony_hilton.html
36. Revolution newspaper, December 10th, 2006
37. Summary of Vital Statistics for the City of New York, Published by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 1996.
38. The Village Voice online at http://www.villagevoice.com/gallery/0702,0702_gardiner,75524,3.html?pic=6&total=10 and http://www.villagevoice.com/gallery/0702,0702_gardiner,75524,3.html?pic=5&total=10
39. Warren, Personal Interview December 14th, 2006.
40. Zephyr, “The Scrawl of the Wild.” Folk Art: Magazine of the American Folk Art Museum. Fall 2006.

Locating Death

Timing

As is the case with Sean Bell, Trap, and the Highbridge fire, memorial murals are often the last step in the commonly drawn-out process of services, rallies, hearings, etc. I followed these three cases thinking that I would catch a memorial mural like the ones in the previous posting being painted. As it turned out, days, weeks, even months after the deaths, no murals (in the “traditional” and/or “popular” style) went up, though I was told explicitly that they were being planned. My initial disappointment and sense of failure in capturing the most crucial few hours in a memorialization process led me to consider why there was such a significant lag time between death and wall painting. What I learned from this gap made me look at the others walls I found throughout my research very differently.

It is not uncommon for cultures to have social norms attached to the timing of grieving processes. For instance, in Japan, the difference between the “newly dead” and the “settled dead” is forty-nine days exactly, thus memorial services are performed forty-nine days after the person’s death in order to catalyze the transition. In Jewish tradition the tombstone is erected only after the year of mourning--shanah. What is it about memorializing someone that demands time? This question begs another: what is the difference between the makeshift memorials and the painted murals? How do each of these mourning rituals play different roles? The space in between these two forms of memorials gives them meaning. As if this transitional time were a backdrop against which the walls show up, the significance behind the murals came into focus for me best by studying their absence.

When someone dies, especially violently or abruptly, a makeshift memorial goes up first. As revealed by recent cases in this paper, these are made of decomposable objects like flowers, papers, candles, and stuffed animals. Often exposed to the elements, these walls are not supposed to be permanent. At the same time, it is uncommon that anyone dares to take them down. Consequently, the makeshift memorials blanket in snow, bleed with rain, bleach via sun, and blow away in the wind. Their decomposition is saturated with meaning. It would have been insensitive of me to ask family and friends of the deceased what the significance of the deterioration of their makeshift memorials was. Even without asking outright, however, I came to understand these walls as sites of place making and identity-creation. They seemed to be places for expressing grief, more for those in mourning than for the one gone. Almost everyone who walked by one of these new memorials stopped to read the small notes and re-light a candle that blew out. Even the notes themselves, although usually addressed to the deceased, could be interpreted as intended for other mourners. That the walls usually stay up until nature breaks them down tells me that where there is active grief (which I define as pre-acceptance-of-the-loss-phase), there is a makeshift memorial.

Cultures all over the world, especially Catholic ones, mark the sites of the newly dead with similar memorial shrines. In fact, the practice in North America was probably imported by Puerto Ricans. These temporary markers give people a physical location upon which to focus their grief and prayers. Of course it is noteworthy that the shrines are in public. Although grief is often a private process to the extent that it is a different experience for everyone, these temporary memorial walls bring family, friends, and strangers together to recognize loss by framing it socially. Michael Anderson, a bereavement anthropologist, broadly suggests that grief is a socially constructed process. I deduce that individual people and communities at large cope with high death rates among their family and friends by grieving more publicly than those who are forced to grieve less. In other words, I do not think that memorial murals proliferate in the neighborhoods that they do simply because Catholic memorial rituals “rubbed off” on these communities —I suspect that public grieving is a strategy for people to continue living when many people around them die (or go to jail) young.

What happens in the time between the makeshift memorial deteriorates and the memorial mural goes up? Mourners ready themselves; they begin to accept their loss. Once again, the timing of this memorialization ritual is more for the mourners than it is for the deceased. To depict a loved-one in paint on a large surface is to finalize their absence, which takes serious emotional preparation. Lady Pink suggested to me that some families are never ready to see their loved one’s face on a wall like that—watching their faces peel and fade can be like watching them die over again. If and when the mural does go up, what is behind that paint?
Painting the dead’s face on a wall places them somewhere other than here. This may seem obvious at first, but depicting the person larger than life on a two-dimensional surface renders them present in one sense and simultaneously absent in another. As opposed to the photographs of the deceased that are often put up on the makeshift memorial walls, the painted images are even further removed representations of the real people. Many walls emphasize in words that the deceased will never be forgotten, but the very creation of the wall is usually a marker that they are beginning to be, which is to say forgotten as they used to be and transformed into an image. This is a very different existence.

Urban ghosts live behind the paint of these memorial murals. It may seem far-fetched, sensationalist, and/or dramatic, but numerous artists, community members, and memorial scholars have hinted at their existence. Chico expressed regret after having painted so many memorial murals in the same neighborhood. He even painted over many of them because he thought it was getting “creepy” with “so many dead people on the walls.”

Tara Mack, a former employee of Groundswell, a community murals non-profit in central Brooklyn, undertook a project with youth from the area to understand memorial murals. In the summer of 2004 she lead nine teenagers in an investigation of the stories behind these murals throughout their borough. They put together an exhibit, Gone But Not Forgotten, to share their experiences and findings with the public. In the title and content of their exhibit, the teens evoke the idea that the deceased live on through the murals put up for them, but after having viewed the same murals and interviewed many of the same people, I would have titled my own show less optimistically. I understand why they chose their words as they did—the murals certainly remind family, friends, and neighbors of the life of the memorialized and in that sense, they are not forgotten. But one layer underneath the memories that they evoke, the walls actually signify the end to the active part of the mourning process.

From the minute the mural is finished, it begins decaying, fading, and peeling. The mural’s lifespan directly relates to those mourning. Of the many murals I have come across, I have never heard of one that was touched-up or fixed. Candles may be lit near it, flowers may be placed by it, but no one touches the wall itself. I asked Melvin Delgado, memorial mural scholar, about this phenomenon and he replied, “I’m philosophical about the fact that when they start peeling, people move on…the wall has fulfilled its function, helped make a transition, and that’s fine.” Though the mourners may have transitioned, what is left has been termed by multiple artists and residents as “graveyard neighborhoods.” The images are always watching; their eyes never close; they lurk on building corners in the night. These memorial murals bring present the absent and by so doing blur the distinction between either.

Memorial murals’ significance depends on one’s vicinity to them. For outsiders and insiders alike, the walls humanize victims of ghettoization caused by institutionally discriminatory planning, policies, and practices. For non-community members like myself, the walls contextualize urban statistics and theories on death, violence, and inner-city decay. But for community members themselves, memorial murals re-write space and history; by bringing memories forward and having them fade again, memorial murals mirror life in that they have a birth and a death of their own. At some point everyone must face that death is part of life, but some are forced to face this wall sooner than others.

Painted Walls

Painted walls

My research and site visits surrounding the three recent New York City tragedies mentioned in the previous chapter has brought me into contact with countless finished memorial murals. This section will explore some of the walls that stood out to me most and how I attempted to organize my thoughts on them.

Memorial murals come in every shape, size, theme, and color-scheme. Some are religious, others are political, and still others are violent. Depending on who is being memorialized and who undertakes the mural’s creation, the walls can look and feel very different. Some walls are commissioned by gang leaders and some are done by the deceased’s family. One could cut and organize the city’s hundreds of memorial murals in endless different ways. As I tried to classify the different walls, the first grouping that made sense was old/new. The murals made in the late eighties and early nineties were a part of a movement and as they stand peeling today, I figured that they affect communities very differently than fresh, still-painful ones. When I broke down the differences between old and new murals even further, it made sense to think of them as active or inactive. My logic stemmed from my observations that some murals seem relatively ignored while others (newer ones) are paid more attention to, with community members occasionally lighting candles or placing flowers by them. But the deeper I considered memorial murals, the less and less my organizations of them made sense. Aren’t all murals walked past? How would one judge which ones have the largest impact? Is their magnitude and/or type of impact even a relevant question? The answer, of course, was no. Assessing the impact of memorial murals in the communities that house most of them is an impossible task. Furthermore, categorizing them is futile. As was so often the response when I asked family, friends, community members, organizers, or artists what the significance of these walls is, I was missing the point.

When I asked a friend of Sean Bell’s and a community activist, Jugga, about the role that memorial murals play in Jamaica he answered, “it isn’t about memorial murals.” What was this “it?” Jugga and his group, “Project Pick Me Up,” painted the first of what will surely be many memorials for Sean Bell.

Sean Bell’s first memorial mural in Jamaica, Queens. His face can be found in the trunk of the tree on the far left of the mural.

What I had originally thought of as “old” or “passive” memorial murals littered Trap’s neighborhood—indeed, they can be found in great numbers throughout the South Bronx at large. In the course of my research I have come across dozens of artists who have painted memorial walls-Sidney Janis, Anthony Clark (A-One), John Matos (Crash), Michael Tracey, Jean Michel Basquiat (SAMO), Mitchel 1, Paul Tschinkle, Chico, Tito Ortiz, Lady Pink, De La Vega, Randall Barquero (Dragon), and A Charles to name a few.

The Controversial White Boy Memorial on Southern Boulevard and St John’s in Hunts Point.

TATS Cru painted the above mural for White Boy John, who was killed in crossfire at the age of nineteen. White Boy’s mother provided the information for the mural; she wanted the wall to be used as a tool to teach about the realities of urban violence in Hunts Point. The community, however, did not find the wall as useful as she would have hoped. They criticized the massive image for glorifying thug life and even called TATS CRU into their community board meeting where Nicer says they got “railed on.” He suggested to me, “there is a problem, but it’s not our painting.”

Memorial for a 20 year old Puerto Rican in Hunts Point, the Bronx.

TATS CRU also painted this mural for Alberto Silverio, known as Bertolucci, What was a vibrant wall in 1992 has fallen into disrepair today, but the effect of this strong image has only changed, not vacated entirely.

Tommy’s memorial on Selwyn Avenue in the Highbridge.

The above memorial in Highbridge commemorates Tommy Gunz, who died at the age of nineteen. Tommy’s best friend recounted how, when the two of them were riding on their four-wheelers one night, Tommy was hit by a taxicab and riding just ahead of him, his friend had no idea what happened. Tommy was loved deeply in the neighborhood. The holes in the wall house candles that burn twenty-four hours a day. Tommy’s friends say that whenever the candles burn out, someone immediately lights them, whether they are friends, family, or just neighbors. The wall was done for free and depicts what Tommy was wearing the night of his death.

Highbridge Fire

Highbridge Fire

A short walk from the site of Trap’s shooting, the hill above Yankee Stadium rises into the neighborhood of Highbridge. Late at night on March 8th, the space heater chord in the basement of an old single-family home on Woodycrest Avenue set the building ablaze. Twenty-two Malian immigrants (seventeen children) lived in the building and although there were fire detectors on every floor, their batteries had died. By the time the flames reached the upper levels, it was too late for many of those inside to escape. Mothers threw their children out windows in a desperate attempt to save them from the smoldering building. Most of the kids were caught, but some were not. In the end, either window escape attempts or smoke inhalation killed eight young children and one mother.

The remnants of the burned building on 164th and Woodycrest, the Bronx.

The makeshift memorial for the Highbridge fire victims was immense. It spanned the entire block. Poster boards and notes were put up on a long fence and every person on the street stopped for at least a few minutes to read the messages.

Signs were covered in small notes such as “allah bless you,” “rest in peace angels,” and “may God cradle you.”

At the end of the fence in front of a bodega, a huge collection of candles and stuffed animals grew every day. I was told by numerous reporters and photographers that this was the largest such “shrine” they had ever seen.

Highbridge fire victims makeshift memorial.

Of course the Highbridge fire tragedy is quite unlike those of Trap and Sean. Although Mayor Bloomberg has been criticized for not rescheduling his trip to Miami in order to support the neighborhood’s grieving, the entire city has come together to raise money for the victims’ families. $200,000 has been raised by mostly by working-class Malians and other Muslims across the city to support the victims’ families and help send some of the bodies back to Mali for burial. $26,000, mostly in small donations, was raised in Highbridge alone. The owner of the Yankees donated $300,000 to the families and a Jewish rabbi who lives nearby has pledged to pay for the construction of a new home for the families. By no measure has the community needed to shout to be heard.

Trap

Timur Person (Trap)

Just two weeks after Sean Bell’s murder, another young black man named Timur Person (known as Trap) was shot and killed by the police in the entrance to his building in the Concourse/Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. According to the police, on the night of December 13th, Trap was with three friends, hanging out on the street when they “caught the attention” of four uniformed police officers who were on the lookout for graffiti vandals in the neighborhood. When the officers approached, the men scattered and Trap was followed into his building’s entrance. There, the police tackled Trap and one of the officers felt a gun barrel pressing through Trap’s jacket into his stomach, when which he ordered the other officers to shoot. Trap was killed by five bullets to the chest.

Although a loaded gun was found was on the scene, no one was willing to say that it was found in Trap’s pocket. Furthermore, when Trap’s friends recounted the story to me, they stressed that Trap was attempting to surrender the entire time. He was shot on the ground while being held down by two officers.

Trap's murder and memorial site.

At the site of Trap’s murder his friends, puffy-eyed and wearing t-shirts, hats, and bandanas covered in tags of his street name, told me that they remember all of the people who have been shot on the block. Sixteen year old girls pointed to different places on the sidewalk where they saw their friends and family go down. Trap’s godfather asked one of the younger mourners how she was doing and her answer was a resigned, “just another day.”

I arrived on the site of Trap’s murder only hours afterwards. As people began waking up and coming downstairs, they saw the scene in the lobby. Almost immediately, an impromptu memorial wall sprung up.

The memorial wall for Trap, hours after his death.

Trap’s friends spray painted the entryway, put up pictures of him, wrote on the wall, and lit candles at its base. The facade of the building as well as the bricks around Trap’s window on the third flood were also spray painted. Soon enough, a large crowd gathered. On the street outside the building, cardboard boxes filled with candles.

Boxes full of candles could be found around the entire neighborhood.

Not long after the spray paint dried, the police arrived to clean it off. This aroused outrage among Trap’s friends who put it up. They yelled, “we’re going to put that right back up again! This is about freedom of speech and we’re going to write whatever the fuck we want!”

The police scattered the crowd and used chemical cleaners to erase the graffiti. One teenager on scene told me that this is what happens when “they prepare for the white people”-press.

As it turned out, Trap’s shooting got very little press. Only weeks after Sean Bell’s tragedy, no one was interested in the death of a potentially armed black teenager in the Bronx. People muttered amongst the crowd, “who gives a fuck about the black people?” “Do you see any white people getting shot? It’s all black men.” Consciously or unconsciously referencing Amadou Diallo’s case and apartheid South Africa, “you go for your ID, they shoot you.”
As the press began to hound the mourners, snapping pictures of them as they cried and rapped on their knees in front of Trap’s wall, I took a walk around the neighborhood. It became clear that the people of Highbridge, Melrose, and the Concourse were fed up with the their treatment from the city. Within several blocks I passed four memorial walls and numerous “fuck the po po” tags, otherwise known at F.T.P.P.

Trap’s neighborhood: signs of the city’s disinvestment and the people’s discontent.

I felt like I had traveled in time and found myself in the South Bronx in the late eighties—a place full of shattered glass, boarded-up windows, abandoned cars, empty lots, and stripped playgrounds. We are told that these neighborhoods do not exist today, that Giuliani and economic growth picked New York City up by its bootstraps. Tragically, these streets have not gone anywhere and even more tragically Trap’s murder by the police really was “just another day” in the Concourse.

About a month after Trap’s shooting, I revisited the site. The police did an extraordinarily thorough job cleaning up signs of the makeshift memorial wall.

The site of Trap’s shooting and makeshift memorial-- cleaned and covered with paint. Apparently, the papers, pictures, candles, and tags were taken down completely within a week of the Trap’s death. When I spoke to residents in Trap’s building they seemed surprised that I would assume it stayed up any longer.

Sean Bell

Sean Bell

The months of November and December 2006 were plagued by two new cases of police brutality in New York City: the shootings of Sean Bell and Timur Person. Additionally, in March 2007 the worst fire New York City has seen for seventeen years killed nine Malian immigrants in Highbridge, eight of them young children. Because of these unfortunate events, I have had the opportunity to study the creation of their memorial walls from their conception. Both Sean and Timur were highly politicized deaths that have caused outrage in communities of color across the country; the grieving processes for both provide compelling insights into the powerful process of public memorialization. The Highbridge fire’s extreme tragedy also presented an opportunity to witness an entire community’s extraordinarily public mourning. In the pages to come I will discuss Sean, Timur, the Highbridge fire victims, their family, friends’, and communities’ story which I hope will paint a fuller picture of the significance of memorial walls.

Sean Bell was killed by the police in a hail of fifty bullets on his wedding day, November 25th, 2006. Sean had been celebrating at his bachelor party in a club in Jamaica, Queens. When he and his friends had a verbal argument with some others at the club, he and two friends decided to leave. An undercover police officer who had been scouting the club for prostitute and drug activities signaled to five more undercover policemen in their unmarked van outside that one of the men may have had a gun. When Sean’s car was approached by three undercovers, Sean and his friends thought that they might be trying to rob them; Sean quickly attempted to get away by lurching the car forward, hitting one of the officers, and then backing into a grated storefront. At this point, the undercover officers opened fire, shooting a total of fifty bullets at the three men; one officer finished a clip, reloaded his gun, and kept shooting.

The investigation revealed that none of the three men shot were armed. The shooting was reminiscent of Amadou Diallo’s in 1999, another case in which an unarmed black man was clearly treated with undue force. Just as with Amadou, communities and individuals who care about justice were enraged and organized their anger with mass protests. There have been numerous rallies, protests, vigils, and meetings to demand justice for Sean Bell’s case, but before all of the political organization, there was a wall.

Sean’s memorial was put up just yards from where he was killed. The glass from his car’s window was not swept away; it remained as sparkling evidence of injustice among the candles that burned to commemorate him.

Sean Bell’s Memorial by Night: Glinting Glass and Candlelight.

The memorial went up just hours after Sean died. The sidewalk was covered in candles, flowers, teddy bears, and picture frames. The wall became a collage of statements by friends, family, and caring strangers.

Sean’s makeshift memorial wall was still intact when I took this photograph nearly a week after his death.

One of them read,

Since the beginning of time
A heavy burden has been put upon us
Not only to limit our capabilities, but
To divide us as well.
Whether there be better days ahead has
Thus far to be determined
Yet, through it all we’ve been able to
Overcome the most difficulty of the time
So, even though what we have now may not
Look promising, I forsee a change coming
As everyone knows nothing stays the
Same.
Just as the four seasons come and go,
So shall we so no matter how hard things may seem, and
Although our backs may be against the wall,
If we are truly the seeds of this earth, then
Lets find it within our hearts to make this
Earth a better place to live
Because when the smoke clears, when everything settles down
As God is our Savior,
We will be left standing high and proud.
All those unanswered questions will be answered.

It is time we say we’re not taking it anymore.
It is time we say stop all the madness.
It is time that we demand a change.
It’s time people, it’s time to let your voices be heard.
It’s time that we fight back but not with guns,
With our minds.
We’ll continue to keep on striving
Until we reach higher grounds,
Until everything and everyone is seen as one and the same.
Just as the almighty sees us all as
Being one and same, and just as he sees
Us all being equal.
So whether you are black white, hispanics, jewish, or asian, it’s time,
It’s time to let our voices be heard….

Yes, our spirit may have been broken once,
But no more.
We will do everything within our rights
To overcome these obstacles that has been put in front of us.

People of the world unite.

Other notes advocated no such union: “death to the pigs who kill our kids” was repeated in writing on several papers. Others included, “2006 has ended in murder” and “cops need to be held accountable.”

The political mobilization around Sean Bell’s shooting has been remarkable. I have attended at least five rallies and have heard of countless others. Each of the political demonstrations demanding justice for Sean Bell reveals the proliferation of visual aids to the cause. Shirts, hats, suits, banners, stickers, pins-you name it there is a picture of Sean Bell and his widow and children on it.

Pins and hats with images of Sean and his family and or slograns demanding justicewere designed for marchers and activists to show their support. Reverend Al Sharpton organized a march down 5th Avenue during the height of the Christmas shopping season entitled, “Shopping for Justice.” The march aimed to bring attention to the Sean Bell case and disrupt “business as usual.”

Tens of thousands march past Bergdorf Goodman’s and the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, demanding justice for Sean Bell and communities under the gun.

Numerous black power, panther, and other groups who are furious at the poor police-community relations in many non-white neighborhoods held their fists in the air and counted the numbers one through fifty. Some signs read, “No Justice, No Peace,” “Stop Police Terror,” “I am a victim of police brutality,” “Jail the Killer Cops,” “Police the Police,” and “NYPD Guilty.”

The marches and rallies did not end with Shopping for Justice. The October 22nd Coalition and Parents Against Police Brutality organized numerous rallies in Jamaica. I attended one of them on a cold December night.

At the October 22nd Coalition rally in Queens, Margarita Rosario, whose son and nephew were killed by the police, shouts, “they cover it and cover it and cover it again…my son stayed at the morgue for two and a half weeks! Why did the police have to become judge and jury in one night? I don’t want to see Giuliani’s face on the news-I hate him!”

Nearly one hundred people gathered and expressed their outrage at Sean Bell’s shooting. Racial tension at the rally was extremely high. There were only a few white activists there and when one NYC Civil Liberties Union spokesperson had his turn at the mircrophone, he was verbally assaulted by the crowd. As he addressed the angry mob, assuring them that the NYCLU was willing to help any community members who had personally experienced police brutality, one middle-aged woman began shouting inches from his face, “get out of here,” “we don’t need your help,” and “you are part of the problem, not the solution!” Others shouted at the organizers, “October 22nd Coalition is a fucking rock group!”

A white member of the October 22nd Coalition activist group held up a sign naming all the victims of police brutality in America. One of the organization’s main focuses is to update their book, “Stolen Lives,” a documentation of the many Americans who have been killed by the police.

Other political actions seemed to have stronger sentiments of solidarity. The most striking example was the Bell family’s fifty-day vigil for their son. Beginning on January 1st, the Bells organized twenty-four hour presence outside their police precinct in Jamaica. As I approached the vigil for the first time one frigid Sunday afternoon I could hear the chanting of “this little light of mine” before I even saw the crowd. I happened to show up on a day when the activist group Power to the People organized a showing and nearly eighty members from Newark participated in the vigil.

Members of Power to the People at Sean's 24 hour vigil.

After the protestors boarded the big bus from where they came I began to talk with the men sticking it out in the cold for the rest of the afternoon. When by chance I happened to engage in conversation with William Bell, Sean’s father, and he understood me to be writing about his son’s death, he invited me into his warming trailer for a more private interview. There, as I struggled to compose my first question and William sensed that I was overwhelmed by the situation, he hugged me endearingly. Struck, as I was, by his warmth, I returned the hug and before I knew it, we were crying in each other’s arms. Needless to say, our conversation that followed provided me with uncut, genuine insight into the process of grieving and memorialization.

William Bell is a rock. There is something about his eyes and barrelly chest that make everyone feel like his child. As we warmed up in his trailer he told me stories about Sean’s life—how he “was about to hit it off great.” Sean did odds and ends. At one point, he was studying to be an electrician; he was also a star pitcher for numerous baseball teams. William remembers Sean’s baseball shining moments. He recounted them in detail to me, almost as if there was nothing else to say-except there was. Without a prompt from me, William told me that he wants to put up a huge memorial mural for his son. About memorial murals at large, he said, “they’re always looking at you…you can’t ever forget.”

Sean Bell's makeshift memorial, five months after his murder.

Context

Contextualizing Memorial Murals

Memorial murals are only a symptom of the dire circumstances of violence that developed in inner cities throughout the eighties and nineties. Although memorial walls often commemorate people who did not die of homicide or drug-related crime, they became established as a tradition in conjunction with a proliferation of handguns and intensifying violence due to a crack-cocaine epidemic. Cooper and Sciorra, in the first significant compilation of memorial murals “RIP Memorial Wall Art,” are careful to emphasize that people of all walks of life are memorialized. They are young and old, victims of car accidents, AIDS, heart attacks, war, and other “normal” causes of death. That said, conditions in New York’s inner city, especially the Bronx, deteriorated in the last half of the twentieth century. As youth homicides escalated, memorial murals proliferated. These walls were born of the violent conditions in inner city New York and they have evolved and continued as a practice today. Although the ritual of painting memorial murals peaked in the late nineties, they have been produced in recent years as well. By tracing the history of memorial walls through their zenith to their current cultural position, I hope to begin to tease out the walls’ significance in the communities that house them.

The Bronx’s Plight (1950s-1990s)

The story of how neighborhoods in rustbelt inner cities spiraled into steep decline from the fifties through the nineties is an important part of contextualizing the street art movement. Most of the murals that will be discussed later in the paper reside in the Bronx; its history is extremely relevant in understanding the memorial murals of the eighties, nineties, and today.
Until the fifties, the Bronx was largely the home of European immigrants. As these Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, Italians, and Irish slowly assimilated to the rest of the city and were incentivized by the post WWII suburban housing boom, they gained access to higher paying jobs and nicer neighborhoods, leaving their ethnic enclaves for places with better living conditions. New populations moved in, namely immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and African Americans migrants from Harlem and the South. Between 1950 and 1980, the Bronx transitioned from 11% to 64% Black, Puerto Rican, and Hispanic.
In the sixties and seventies, Robert Moses embarked on his infamous urban renewal tactics, designing highways straight through neighborhoods of color (e.g. the Cross-Bronx Expressway), displacing people and destroying communities. With neighborhoods ruined by the shadow and noise of six lane highways, banks and insurance companies escalated their racist practice of redlining residents of communities already negatively impacted by urban renewal. With entire neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment of the city and private institutions, they were set into steep decline. Housing pressures rose as homes were destroyed in the name of slum clearance. Moreover, jobs fled the Bronx; between 1970 and 1977 three hundred companies employing a total of ten thousand people went out of business or left the borough. Evelyn Gonzalez, a historian of the Bronx, writes,
Neighborhoods that had been home to successive waves of immigrants and their children suddenly became unlivable. Hunts Point residents were “literally living in a state of siege,” reported The New York Times in 1969. Because of crime, people feared for their personal safely, local businesses could not function, and apartment buildings lost tenants. Because of the crime and poverty already there, city services for the poor and the deviant were put in the South Bronx, while fire, police, and sanitation services were cut back, worsening the situation further. People moved to the South Bronx out of necessity, not choice, often installed there by the welfare authorities….thus shops closed, landlords abandoned buildings, the population declined, and the neighborhoods of the South Bronx collapsed.

Between 1950 and 1980 the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania, Hunts Point, and Crotona Park East declined in population by an average of 53%. With little profit to be made by renting their apartment buildings, many landlords cut down services and maintenance to the point of driving out their last, most desperate families, then sold their buildings to the city. When fire insurance became available in the 1970s, many investors and landlords bought buildings with the intention of burning them. By 1990 a significant portion of the buildings in the South Bronx had burned to the ground.
The Bronx’s Restoration (1990-Today)

Today, the Bronx, and New York City on a whole, is much safer, cleaner, and more vibrant than its exigent history would suggest. Indeed, one of the main problems facing communities of color in the city today is increased land and building value driving gentrification in communities that need housing the most. In the year 2000, the South Bronx experienced 14% population growth rate. It is important for anyone studying New York City to understand that it is a place full of culture, life, and beauty. There are hundreds of murals around the city that celebrate New York’s infinite assets. The focus of this paper, however unfortunately, is on evidence that certain neighborhoods have had extremely difficult histories and continue to struggle with many of the legacies of their past.
Guns and Violence

The poor conditions of many New York City neighborhoods throughout the latter 20th century resulted in high levels of violence. In the city at large, homicide was the leading cause of death for fifteen to twenty-four year olds in 1996. The high death rate must be contextualized by the increased accessibility to guns and the poor urban conditions of that time period. It is estimated that in 1988 between 130 and 170 million guns were in circulation. In 1994 the estimate soared as high as 200 million, which translates to almost one gun for every home in the country. As a result, American children are twelve times more likely to die from guns than children in twenty-five other industrial countries. In 1999, as many as 8% of students admitted to carrying a gun to school in the past month. Between the years of 1988 and 1996 more than 80% of homicide victims killed by guns were teenagers.

Victims of Color and Poverty

These statistics are even more staggering than they first seem when the demographics of death are considered more closely. Among eighteen to twenty-four year olds, homicide is the leading cause of death for African Americans and the second leading cause of death for Latinos. The New York City neighborhoods in which all of the murals discussed in this paper can be found-Melrose/Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Highbridge/Concourse, and Jamaica-saw 251 homicides in 1993 and 138 in 1999. Comparatively, all Manhattan neighborhoods combined (minus Harlem and Washington Heights) had 113 in 1993 and 28 in 1999. In the same outer-borough neighborhoods in 1999, a white person was three times less likely to get murdered than a black or Latino person. When lines are drawn socio-economically, conditions seem only slightly better. A public housing resident is twice as likely to get shot than a non public housing resident.

People of color are also more likely to die of AIDS and cancer. In 2000, death by AIDS was more than twice as likely for people living in the Bronx than it was for the white-majority neighborhoods of Manhattan. The leading causes of death for African Americans and Latinos ages twenty-five to forty-four are AIDS-related. The three neighborhoods with the highest cancer rates in the city are Highbridge/Morisania, Hunts Point, and Central Harlem. Indeed, the four neighborhoods with the highest overall death rates in the New York City are those three plus Central Brooklyn . Hunts Points’ death rate is a full 35% higher than New York City’s.

From Graffiti to Memorial Murals: TATS CRU’s Story

In response to the horrendous economic, social, and health conditions of New York’s inner city, graffiti artists incorporated both subjects and styles of injustice. What began as vandalism on subway cars in the late sixties and early seventies evolved into a legalized and popular art form. Today, walls are commissioned by corporations such as Coco-cola and MTV; their images can be found on t-shirts around the world in the most mainstream stores. But how did this dissenting art form wind up a central expression of popular culture? Furthermore, how did graffiti transform into the highly respectful tradition of memorialization?

TATS CRU’s story of artistic evolution in the South Bronx includes the emergence of memorial walls. As one of the most revered subway graffiti crews in the seventies, the memorial wall specialists of the eighties and nineties, and the “mural kings” of today, the four men in the crew began their careers vandalizing public property. As New York City disinvested in its public transportation system, the teenagers would steal deoderant sticks from the supermarket, take out the fragrant powder, fill them with ink-soaked cloth, and write their tag names on subway cars. Soon, subway graffiti became an incredibly competitive process, with larger, more elaborate pieces on trains that traveled throughout the entire city- a moving advertisement of spray painting talent.

As TATS CRU moved up in the subway art ranks, New York City’s poorest neighborhoods began their spiral into economic and social crisis. During the apex of urban renewal, tendencies of lending agencies to redline, and service cut-offs, members of the crew honed their talent and spread their reach. As homicides in the Bronx reached an all-time high in 1990, TATS CRU members began to be approached on the street by people who wanted their artistic services. With their pieces traveling on trains like moving advertisements, what Nicer calls a “rolling canvas,” the crew made a name for themselves. When city buckled down on petty crimes during the late eighties it invested in pressure washers that could clean an entire subway car in twenty minutes. Unable to compete with the washing system, TATS CRU moved their art to the street. Once they began their street art careers, community members could put their faces to their names to their art. TATS CRU’s talent entered the above-ground scene and family and friend of the victims of urban degradation began to commission them for memorial murals.
Soon enough, TATS CRU’s memorial murals covered the streets of Hunts Point. As the crew members aged and began having families, they grew reliant on their art form for income. The painters’ mural experience allowed them to penetrate the commercial graffiti world; today, they design many music video sets and photo shoots in addition to running cultural programs at The Point, Hunts Points’ well-known community center.

The Power of Place

An Important Exploration

Before delving into the meat of my findings I would like to first address why an exploration of memorial murals is an important topic. Memorial walls are one facet of place-making. In communities with many such walls, the images may have a considerable impact of the creation of place. Tim Cresswell, a humanist geographer, writes,

Because places are meaningful and because we always exist and act in places, we are constantly engaged in acts of interpretations. This has led some to talk of places and the landscape as a text. Like a book, the landscape is created by authors, and the end product attempts to create certain meanings. But also, like a book ,the people who “read” the landscape and its places can never be forced to read it in only one way. The text is subject to multiple readings despite the fact that some readings are encouraged more than others. We can thus talk of a hierarchy of readings, with favored, abnormal, accepted readings and discouraged, heretical, abnormal readings-dominant readings and subordinate readings.

Graffiti artists, called “writers, ” often engage in what Cresswell would call subordinate storytelling. Quite literally, creating a place positions people inside and outside, included and excluded. Space and place manage power. They designate proper and improper uses for the area. Beyond just controlling power, they convey it as well. Reading a place reveals dominant ideologies, and oftentimes with the case of memorial murals, resistant ideologies as well. By creating values and reflecting values, places are always interacting with themselves. Given the strong power of place, planners, policy-makers, and strategists of other kinds benefit from a deep understanding of the places they would like to affect.
There has been a recent admission of art as a powerful player in community development. An entire conference at the Pratt Center for Community Development entitled “Art in the Contested City” brought many professionals and New York City dwellers into the same room to discuss issues of public art and struggles over urban space. The conference’s program aptly summarized the day’s events and the processes to be examined.

The role of the arts in urban change has become the subject of intense conversation. Some forms of cultural development-like arts districts, major film festivals, new museums, and iconic buildings-are seen as tools to jumpstart rapid economic development and attract tourism and creative talent. Such development has often seen controversial, as it is perceived to be linked to gentrification, displacement, and even the exclusion of some local forms of art and culture. Other strategies of cultural intervention-like community based theatre, arts education, and street art-are being deployed in resistance to these same paths of urban chance. Here, arts and culture are mobilized as arenas for creative expression and political engagement about what form development should take.

Art as resistance, whether to forms of development, political agendas, or dominant place stories, is an emergent community development strategy. Caron Atlas, a Brooklyn-based community development consultant, embarked a project to raise tough questions with a diverse group of community stakeholders. Her tactic, instead of asking questions herself, was to generate questions that communities themselves would like considered. Atlas’s findings, published in the fall 2005 Progressive Planning journal, highlight the significant intersection between culture and community development. One question that was offered has significant implications with regards to memorial murals in New York City; it reads, “how do we value and respond to the history of a place (particularly if that history is unpleasant or challenging) while designing ways to improve it for its present and future uses?” Memorial murals, in their content, colors, and shapes, tell history and by so doing contribute significantly to place and identity creation.

How Graffiti Memorial Walls Reclaim both Space and History

Space

As illuminated by Tim Cresswell, places designate “us” and “them,” “in” and “out,” “high” and “low,” “central” and “marginal.” Their arrangement “can be thought of as a ‘meta-narrative’-a text of established meanings.” Graffiti takes back space. A significant portion of its roots was laid in the South Bronx. Quite literally, graffiti began as a political activity in the sense that its very act challenges established norms of property rights.

History

Beyond murals’ roots in graffiti and “taking over space,” memorial walls “are much more [even] than artistic representations; they must be understood as fulfilling important social, political, and economic motives within an urban community.” Memorial murals, as a form of political graffiti, publish what the mainstream media does not readily. When reports of violence in poor neighborhoods are conducted, they often sensationalize events, minimizing the extent to which the loss of life affects people and communities themselves. Often, high death rates and trends of violence shock researchers and readers alike into a staggered or overwhealmed state in the face of horrible circumstances. More often than not, however, criminal, academic, and development reports fail to make an accurate account of violence.
Winners write history. The story of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City is no exception. Melvin Delgado, a prominent authority on memorial murals, writes

If the community is marginalized, segregated, attacked, and undervalued by the broader society, then murals must reflect this reality in their content, and seek to capture and record major historical events in a community’s life. Since traditional sources of recording history are often unavailable to marginalized groups, particularly low-income groups, murals serve this vital function.

For instance, it is common for memorial murals in New York City to reveal cases of police brutality. Although professional literature and the popular press usually focus on violence within and/or between communities or the role of drugs, a serious discussion of death in inner cities demands attention to the role that police play. The police have killed 126 New Yorkers since 1999 and the past few months have seen the political mobilization and outrage of many communities under the gun.
On November 25th, 2006, Sean Bell was killed in a hail of fifty bullets when leaving his bachelor party in Jamaica, Queens. Only twenty-three years old, unarmed, and hours before his wedding, Sean is considered one of the most recent and severe victims of police brutality in the country. His memorialization process is a potent example of public grieving and an expression of political resistance.
One of the most explicit pieces reflecting injustice is the Amadou Diallo mural in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. In 1999 the West African was shot and killed by four police officers that believed that he was armed and dangerous. As it turned out, Amadou was neither and his violent death exposed a serious case of police brutality. His memorial mural portrays four police officers wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods and pointing guns, a burning American flag, and a skeletal statue of liberty holding a gun instead of a torch.

Image Pending

Amadou Diallo memorial on Wheeler and Westchester Avenues in the Bronx

Clearly, Amadou’s memorial attempts to re-write history and expose the reality of injustice that caused his death.
The memorial for cousins Anthony Rosario, age eighteen, and Hilton Vega, age twenty-one, similarly attempts to make public the story of their brutal deaths committed by police officers in 1995. The police department claimed that Anthony and Hilton were killed in a shootout in the Bronx when in truth two policemen shot them and their friend Freddy Bonilla twenty-eight times. Rosiario was shot fourteen times, with at least six bullets in his back. Hilton was shot eight times with five bullets to his back. Bonilla was only shot once in the leg, but he pretended to be dead, thus living to tell the story. Anthony’s mother decided that a memorial mural would do more than honor the lives of her son and nephew, it would also publicize the manner in which they died.

Image Pending

A Memorial for Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega, killed by police in University Heights, the Bronx.

Mrs. Rosario went one step further by creating an organization, Parents Against Police Brutality. Part of the mural for her family members acknowledges other victims of police brutality around the country.
Although it might not come to mind first, Princess Diana’s mural on the lower east side of Manhattan is in many ways the epitome of a memorial wall that attempts to reclaim history. Although there are many obvious reasons why Diana is a completely different kind of victim from those usually memorialized in murals throughout New York City, they all have one important trait in common—they are victims of the media. While the lack of press coverage and attention for many of the city’s worst-off neighborhoods perpetuates their poor conditions, Diana was literally killed my too much attention. When Chico put up a memorial mural for her it was continually defaced. (See right-hand image below.) Apparently, people who felt they had to fight for cameras to cover their problems were sick and tired of everyone focusing on the death of a princess. In response to Chico’s wall, A Charles created another one. (See left-hand image below.)

Memorials and political statements in one: Princess Dianas on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A Charles’ mural on the left is a reaction to Chico’s on the right. Chico’s mural was defaced with the words, “no saints, no sinners” and “we spent years of toil to break free from the TYRANNY of british rule.”

With the arching pink bubble words “media overkill” above her wheat-pasted portrait, this second mural is critical of all of the attention that her death received. In contrast to many victims and communities that have had to fight to publicize their struggles, Princess Diana’s death was dramatically produced and portrayed by the media. A Charles’ memorial wall for her on Houston Street makes a political statement by retelling the story of her tragic death with different colors, ones that emphasize the dually negative role that the media can play.

Introduction

Memorial murals are symptoms of New York City’s racial and socioeconomic polarization. They proliferate in certain neighborhoods and cannot be found in others, evidence of the city’s evolution into a segregated urban core where certain neighborhoods have suffered the consequences of deindustrialization, urban renewal, fiscal crisis, and gentrification more than others. Poor conditions in the negatively affected communities have led to their ghettoization. Economic, environmental, and social degradation are entirely intertwined enough to propel each other, a process that peaked for New York City around 1990. Even though the city has bounced back from its fiscal crisis, thus mending many of the deplorable circumstances that plagued New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, extremely unjust conditions persist in recent years. According to the 2000 Census, the Bronx, an outer borough of New York, had a poverty rate of 31% and in certain neighborhoods it was as high as 43%. Disease and violence follow the decay of neighborhoods and in 1998 a Latina woman was eight times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS than her non-Latina, white counterpart. The same year, African American males age twelve to twenty-four accounted for 17% of single victim homicides yet only accounted for 1% of the population.
These revealing statistics have been studied by criminologists, policy-makers, doctors, and sociologists alike. Expert urbanists have researched and documented the health, quality of life, and income gaps that have caused the current unjust conditions. It is difficult to understand polarized New York City without contextualizing and humanizing the related statistics, numbers, and ratios.
Memorial murals do just that. They place youth deaths in a socio-cultural context. Although memorial murals are markers of death, they are no tombstones; these colorful solemnities are public art, ironically livening neighborhoods by coloring them
in-- albeit not in the lines. What began as graffiti transformed into an artistic and cultural movement. Today, New York City is considered the “capital” of memorial mural walls, with neighborhoods in the South Bronx and central Brooklyn hosting the bulk of them. Although the memorial mural “heyday” ended in the late nineties, pieces remain in the neighborhoods’ public space and have been incorporated into the fabric of communities. Melvin Delgado, the only scholar who has addressed memorial murals in depth, wrote, “memorial walls are reminders of if not indictments against, civil society’s inability or unwillingness to address the systematic poverty and the pervasive racism that promote that rampant flow of drugs and guns into inner city communities.” These walls reclaim space and history. Often, in their content, they retell stories and reveal injustices glossed over by the mainstream media. Memorial murals humanize victims and by extension, they humanize entire communities.
Intentions and Questions
My intention in exploring memorial murals has been to decipher their role in communities. I know why their images move me, but I wanted to find out how they affect the people who walk past them every day. As an urban studies student, beautiful memorial murals give faces and names to the unjust urban conditions that I study in class and in books. Beyond that, I am attracted to issues surrounding public space, art, community development, and social justice, all topics nicely tied together by memorial murals. But I could hardly expect the walls’ significance to be the same for everyone. As an outsider, I took the subway and/or a bus to get to the murals; ultimately, they were destinations for me. But for people living amongst them, the memorial murals are part of their streetscape. They walk past the walls on their way to work, the grocery store, school, or any other outing, unlike myself, who stops, examines, and studies the images.
How could I learn the meaning of memorial murals if my experience with them was so entirely different than that of community members? Community members themselves were destined to have quite different experiences of these murals. I addressed this issue by going back to the basics and adjusting my questions. Instead of trying to decipher how certain memorial murals affect communities, which inevitably leads in opposing and dispersing directions, I took a step back and began asking, “what is a memorial mural?” With an interdisciplinary urban studies spirit I braced myself for a diverse array of answers. As it turned out, memorial murals meant different things to different people in the same community. They are commemorations, art, graffiti, color, life lessons, political statements, and part of mourning rituals.

A Few

Crown Heights

Highbridge

Hunts Point