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
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.
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