DeMarco Smith is a front-line soldier in a Sisyphean war.
He stands ankle-deep in dried grasses at 16th and Loomis. Camouflage flaps hang from his helmet, shielding his neck from the noon sun. He wields a water cannon that pounds out 4,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. Every excess ounce on his frame jiggles as he blasts the enemy.
”GIVE ME SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN”-2-foot letters on a cracked concrete wall-vanishes into ”IVE ME SOMETHING TO BEL”. One by one, the characters fall.
By sunrise, though, it could all be back.
”It`s a good battle,” says Smith, 31, a laborer in the City of Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation. ”It`s us against them, and we`re gonna try to win this as best we can. We got some weapons for it.
”It`s tough, Ma`am,” he says, slipping off the safety glasses and handing over the python-thick hose to his superior. ”You gotta lotta pressure in that hose. It can make you a strong grip when you shake someone`s hand.
”It`s a beautiful machine,” he adds, watching the water cannon wipe out the still-standing ”METHI”. ”It takes it off real smooth. Like a magic wand.”
Standing off to the side, Steve Daniels, the driver of the Streets and Sanitation flatbed that holds a 500-gallon water tank, slips his sailor cap low on his brow. He shakes his head, weary of it all.
”You clean it so much, eventually you destroy the mortar. Eventually, you have to tuckpoint. This is their pet (target), viaducts like these,” he says of the opposition, the night writers.
”But we`re gaining, we`re gaining ground. We are the graffiti busters.” Muscled for the fight, the crew at the 16th Street viaduct is but one battalion of graffiti busters spread out across Chicago this summer, part of an all-out campaign to erase the city of its volumes of urban scrawl.
Half a city away, and armed with a far humbler weapon, a paint roller dripping with a pale shade of lime, Cheryl Holt slaps layer No. 36 on the white-washed wall of the Oak Street Beach underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive. Holt, a reservation specialist at the Drake Hotel, is in gold earrings, white stockings and black leather pumps poking out from the one-size-fits-all denim overalls supplied by the hotel`s paint department. She signed up last spring to take her turn in the tunnel, once every 10 days, her part in the campaign to keep the hotel`s front yard spic-and-span.
”I`ve always hated graffiti,” she says, reaching way up to get an errant squiggle of black spray paint. ”I`m the type of person who hates fingerprints on doorways, ask my children. I`m a spot cleaner at home. I have a spray bottle, my children have a spray bottle.”
As the 35-year-old mother of four covers the last of the morning`s marrings, she muses on the progress made this summer.
”When we first started, they were just like little children being rebellious. `This is not the way the wall is supposed to be.` We`d take it down, they`d put it right back up. But after awhile, anybody with a heart, they gotta give you a break.”
The citywide spotcleaning was stepped up late last year and is going full force this summer. Some of the generals, the ones who sit behind desks and issue orders, are ready to claim victory, but not the troops with the brushes, the rollers, and the water cannons.
”It`s just like a dog chasing its tail,” says Victor Morano, 35, a 16-year-veteran of Streets and Sanitation and the man whose job it is each dawn to take the previous day`s graffiti reports and dispatch a crew. ”It`s like chasing that rainbow, you never find it.”
The battleground
The battleground is the 1,400 viaducts, 143 rapid transit stations, 1,216 CTA rail cars, 2,172 CTA buses, 11 CTA railyards and heaven only knows how many garage doors and back-alley garbage bins that dot this city. There is something irresistable about blank concrete or steel or wood for a kid who carries his signature in a can.
This is the enemy: Teenagers, most 17 to 19, police say, many from gangs or street clubs, each of which has several ”tagging crews,” or clusters of kids armed with a full-range of graffiti artillery.
The taggers-so known for the tags, or gang insignia, they leave on walls, seats and other targets-are ”competing with each other, to see who can bag the most,” says Lt. Robert Angone, tactical coordinator of the public transportation section of the Chicago Police Department, and the man who made a science of studying the public penmanship and then cracked the graffiti rings, making 2,000 arrests since 1985.
These are the weapons: a certain brand of shoe polish (we don`t give away enemy secrets here, kids) and a certain brand of aerosol spray paint that lists fish oil in its indelible ingredients.
There are laws against minors possessing spray paint in Chicago. But there`s nothing in the books banning shoe polish. ”It looks innocent; you see a 10- or 12-year-old buying polish, you think he`s going to polish his shoes,” says Morano. The stuff bleeds into bricks, and nothing short of blasting away at the mortar will get it out.
”These little suckers are laying awake nights thinking of new ways,”
says the CTA`s Don Yabush, a man who does not appreciate what some call
”subway art.”
The fiercest zones:
– The North and Clybourn subway station, ”bombed”-or heavily painted-24 times in summer 1986; a favorite for taggers because it`s closed at night. The teams used to crawl in the tunnels and tag to their hearts` delight.
– The city health clinic at 1713 S. Ashland Ave., where cleanup crews have been dispatched five times in the last six months, and where police once kept a vigil for two weeks; the morning after the vigil ended, the brick walls were covered with spray paint.
– Oak Street underpass, where the crew of Drake Hotel volunteers white-washes six days a week, and finally seems to have slowed the taggers.
Murals are untouchable
The demilitarized zones: Murals, anywhere in the city. ”There seems to be an unwritten law out there on the street, `Don`t touch a mural,` ” says Morano, the Streets and Sanitation commander.
”I don`t know, maybe we should give each gang one wall in a viaduct and let them put up a mural.”
The progress: 83 viaducts, 27 city buildings (fire stations, health clinics, libraries) and 12 Streets and Sanitation buildings have been reclaimed this summer. That is, 35,250 square feet of graffiti removed from buildings and 20,750 square feet from viaducts.
The defense artillery: Four water cannons that Streets and Sanitation bought late last year for $13,899 apiece. In an officially sanctioned coverup, the city has distributed 8,966 gallons of paint through its new ”Give Graffiti the Brush” program that gives free paint to community groups.
You can blast it off, or paint over it, but there`s no way to wipe off certain fish-oil paints that seep into the bricks. Not even products like Gang Busters graffiti remover will work; ”doesn`t even faze it,” says a salesman for the chemical company that makes Gang Busters.
Whoever whips up the first effective graffiti buster will be one rich, retired scientist, everyone in the industry agrees. ”So far they`re all coming up with blanks,” says Morano, who is routinely called upon by salesmen who insist they`ve found the cure.
Graffiti goes national
Despite the lack of chemical weapons, and the indefatigability of the enemy, ”it`s a winnable war,” says Edward Gregerman, director of rail technology for the American Public Transit Association in Washington, D.C.
”The only way to do it is to keep ahead of it.”
Nationally, graffiti burst through the cracks about 10 to 15 years ago, shortly after two graffiti films, ”Style Wars” and ”Wild Style,” were released, elevating the scribble to an art form in some eyes.
The full counterattack didn`t start until late 1984, when the New York City Transit Authority declared war on graffiti.
”You have to be more persistent than they are. There`s no secret,” says David Gunn, a legend in the world of public transit and now general manager of the Washington Metro Transit Authority.
As president of the New York City Transit Authority, Gunn managed to rid the city`s 6,200 rail cars and 4,000 buses of graffiti by installing 1,400 cleaners, or one cleaner for every four cars in the transit system.
”People thought I was crazy when I said in late `84 that I was going to get rid of graffiti,” Gunn recently recalled. ”In May of `89, we ran the last graffiti train. If you can win the war in New York, it`s winnable. You gotta be serious.”
Gunn is very serious about his No. 1 Rule: ”You don`t let the sun set on graffiti.” On second thought, he adds: ”Sometimes the sun set, but it didn`t rise and set.
”If you`re in this business, a railcar or a bus is a thing of beauty,”
says Gunn, sounding not much like a bureaucrat. ”It`s not to be desecrated.” Some danger
Fighting back has its dangers. Morano, of Streets and Sanitation, tells of dispatching a crew to one of the city`s public housing projects to clean off a cross with the name of a recently killed gang member. ”A car pulled up, five guys got out, walked over to our crew, and said: `That guy just got killed a couple weeks ago. You remove that name, yours is gonna be up there with him.` ” The crew wasted no time packing away its cleaning supplies.
To understand the art of taking it down, it helps to know something about how graffiti gets up there in the first place.
The man who knows best is Angone, the brash Chicago cop who cracked the city`s graffiti rings back in 1985, when he and eight members of his tactical unit went undercover for six weeks to figure out tagging.
”It`s a whole subculture,” he says, describing a hierarchical order any anthropologist would dig, a subterranean society complete with ceremonial rituals, language, self-styled tools, a system of rewards and punishment, even costumes.
Here`s how it works: Taggers buy supertransfers, allowing them to switch from train to train without paying again, and then paint their way through the night. But never on Sunday; that`s Prance Day, when the taggers take their girlfriends on tour, proudly showing off their weeks` work. And a smart tagger knows never to wear anything but a tear-away jersey, so if chased and caught, he can slip right out of his shirt.
Angone & Co. started ”hauling in 10, 15 guys a night,” says Angone.
”It`s really embarrassing for a gangbanger to (be) locked up for graffiti.” If convicted more than twice, vandals can be sentenced to a year in prison. If between 17 and 20, the vandals` parents can be held responsible for damages, according to the city code.
But Angone says that too often the taggers get nothing more than ”a slap on the wrist. And if they don`t get more than a slap, the problem is going to continue. What finally started to turn it around is when they started to get hammered in court. Once it started hitting in parents` pocketbooks, the parents put their hands around their kids` necks. That made a difference.”
Just how much?
”We stopped 99.9 percent of the tagging,” says Angone.
”Now it`s sporadic,” he says. ”Every once in a while gang guys are still throwing forks (gang graffiti) up.”
So fluent did the cops become in the art of tagging, they now recognize every individual tag ”like it`s a fingerprint,” says the CTA`s Bill Utter. Time and again, the transit police have been called out to a subway station, eyeballed the tag, and driven straight to the tagger`s address. When the front door opened, there stood the tagger, ”covered head to toe in shoe polish,”
says Angone, chuckling.
Tagging the taggers
On file in Angone`s office is a computer list of 284 taggers, complete with name, address, tag name (that is, each taggers so-called graffiti trademark), gang affiliation, hair color, eye color, height, weight and school. Angone says that at one time there were 65 tagging clubs inking their way through the city.
Not all are urban born and bred. Some taggers, working solo, travel south from Lake Forest and Kenilworth.
When Angone once arrested a kid ”from a wonderful family in Oak Lawn,”
he asked the parents: ”What do you think your kid is doing when he comes home at 1 a.m. all covered with paint? He`s not doing the Sistine Chapel, you know.”
