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.