Buffing and Bombing

By Max Lewontin

"…I know a lot of cats hate that/all I can say back/there's a city full of walls where you can post complaints at" —Mos Def, "Speed Law"

In the wide alley tucked between two sets of brick brownstones, all is quiet. The silence is broken only by the far-off din of cars crossing the tree-lined streets of Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. It is a typical morning in July, the area mostly empty of college students and the tourists who descend on downtown Boston in the summer. For Erik Barry, this is good news. A tall, solidly built man in his thirties, he walks up to the back of a waiting pickup truck and presses a button.

Suddenly the alley explodes with a low rumbling which becomes a loud roar, seemingly shaking the buildings out of their slumber. Dressed in cargo shorts, boots and a t-shirt, he walks over to the truck again and picks up a long hose with a faucet-like handle attached, proceeding to clamber slowly up the back of a building, hose in tow, before stopping momentarily on a nearby fire escape. Barry is a graffiti removal contractor, specializing in "power washing," high pressure cleaning of buildings or and other surfaces. He uses a combination of a chemical rinse and water. "I'm doing these this week," he says, pointing up towards the back of one building covered with a medium-sized graffiti tag, spray painted in white.

Graffiti removal is often a hazardous business. Graffiti "buffers," as they are sometimes called, must climb on top of roofs, dangle out of windows, and hang off the sides of buildings for extended periods in order to remove particularly stubborn graffiti tags and throwups—so named for the ability of a graffiti writer to "throw" them up quickly on a surface. While companies and city departments specializing in graffiti removal pride themselves on their ability to restore a building to its original condition with minimal damage—hopefully reducing the prevalence of graffiti in the area—they also need the presence of graffiti to do their jobs. This dual perspective influences and also divides the views of many who do graffiti removal professionally.

In the Back Bay, a historic district constructed from a filled-in bay in the late 19th century, graffiti removal has become a high priority. This is mainly due to the efforts of a community organization, the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay (NABB), through a subcommittee known as the Graffiti NABBers. The NABBers focus specifically on graffiti removal, either hiring contractors or performing small-scale removal themselves, as well as assistance in prosecution of graffiti writers caught in the neighborhood.

"Our group formed about two and a half years ago," co-chair Anne Swanson says, sitting in a small restaurant on the first floor of the Boston Public Library's main branch in Copley Square. Swanson, a stately woman in her sixties with a commanding presence wearing a business suit and a strand of pearls, adds that, "we've been working with a committee and a larger group of volunteers to address the chronic problem of graffiti vandalism in the Back Bay." Co-chair Kathleen Alexander, a local real estate agent, says, "Anne and I both have backgrounds in art, and in all the time we've been doing graffiti removal, we haven't found anything worth saving."

This is where Erik Barry and his company E.J. Clean come in. "I used to have a business doing house painting," he says, pausing for a moment before applying the graffiti cleaner to the building in Back Bay. He adds, "I stopped doing that after a while and moved slowly into doing graffiti removal and power washing." For him, the decision to go into graffiti removal professionally was practical, an extension of the contracting and painting work he had done earlier. "It sort of took off about five years ago," he says. In addition to working with the Graffiti NABBers and other community groups, Barry now does graffiti removal for various organizations around the Boston area, including local colleges and universities.

Graffiti removal poses a number of obstacles. In addition to the hazards of getting to the graffiti to remove it—retracing the steps of that particular graffiti writer—there are also the removal chemicals. "They used to use a pretty toxic mix," Barry says, "but it's gotten better over time." In Boston, he is one of the first to use a completely non-toxic, environmentally friendly solution, which he says is less damaging to the buildings. It also poses very little risk of harm to those who have to apply it. Barry says this has become an important point for him when he describes his services to potential clients. "They always ask me if it will hurt the buildings," he recalls, "so it's good to be able to say that this really is a truly environmentally friendly solution." Breaking for a moment while waiting for the cleaner to adhere to the building before washing it down with high-pressure water, he adds, smiling slightly, "It also makes it easier to work with too."

The city of Boston has its own graffiti removal program, known as the Graffiti Busters. It comes complete with a truck depicting a can of spray paint covered by a red prohibitory sign—though lacking the "Ghostbusters" ghost—which operates out of City Hall in the Property Management department. The department's head, Michael Bartosiak, says the effort was started by the city's five-term mayor, Tom Menino. Menino—who was nicknamed the "Urban Mechanic," early in his career, according to his official biography— spearheaded the program after seeing the progress of a similar initiative in Philadelphia. Seated in a small conference room a few doors down from a crowded office filled to the brim with pending requests for graffiti removal, Bartosiak, a congenial man in his mid-50s with a strong Boston accent, mentions some of the program's successes. "Since the program began," he says proudly, "we have done 1300 sites over the course of 12 years… in all 22 neighborhoods of the city."

At the same time, graffiti is also considered by some as being part of the larger cultural movement of hip hop as part of its "four elements"—rapping, breakdancing, DJing and graffiti. Emmett Price, a professor of music and African American studies at Northeastern University, argues that graffiti and hip hop culture go back even further. In his recent book Hip Hop Culture, he writes that graffiti and hip hop come out of the same "history of oppression" against many people living in urban areas that produced the earlier musical forms of jazz and blues. Sitting in his small office overlooking the university's campus, his speech occasionally inflected with phrases that recall his background as an ordained minister, Price says that beginning in cities like Philadelphia and New York, "graffiti came from young people who decided to use public property and claim it. So here you have a population of people who felt like their parents and their grandparents were paying taxes, but they didn't have equal access to public facilities, so they would take [those] public facilities and they would literally claim it, and they would write their name on it or write a message on it." He adds that graffiti began to be associated with other elements of hip hop as a musical form—spoken word raps, DJs using turntables, and breakdancers—in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Graffiti's existence as both an independent artistic form and a part of hip hop culture is reinforced by Craig Castleman in his 1982 book Getting Up about graffiti in New York in the 1970s. He describes the graffiti writers he interviews as a diverse group surrounded and influenced by a wide variety of music, including punk rock and metal, which were also becoming popular at the time. In addition to music, they were exposed to a variety of cultures and shared experiences of urban life located far outside the elements of hip hop, which did not become popular or achieve mainstream artistic recognition until the following decade.

Rob Gibbs, a graffiti writer from Roxbury, MA who works as a mentor for young artists from many parts of the city at Artists for Humanity in South Boston, illustrates the dual nature of graffiti as both cultural expression and illegal act. Sitting in the expansive paint studio on the top floor of Artists for Humanity, surrounded by partially completed canvases and large murals, he notes that, "the basis of graffiti is guerilla art, so you don't really have to ask no permission to do it, you just feel like it's something that the world needs to see." However, he clarifies that in graffiti, "If you're going to try to do things and represent the culture—which is hip hop—I think you should go about the proper means and get the permission and put your time and energy into it, because—whatever you lay down with that spray can—you're not just representing for yourself, you're representing for everybody else that does [graffiti] as well."

While many see graffiti as an art form, for Erik Barry graffiti has a more utilitarian purpose. He says he is neither for nor against it, and while some see it as destructive or as artistic, for him it is simply part of his business. "These kids go out and do it, and some of the graffiti I've seen has been pretty nice," he states. However, he stresses that despite his own feelings about graffiti, if he's hired to clean it, it becomes his job. Michael Bartosiak of the city's Graffiti Busters maintains a similar viewpoint. "Graffiti is a form of expression, it goes back to the Roman times, it's a form of communication," he says, "but that doesn't make it necessary or right if it appears on someone's property and it's unwanted."

From his position as an active graffiti writer and an art teacher, Rob Gibbs brings up a similar idea. Musing on illegal and legally sanctioned graffiti and how it is removed in Boston, he says: "There's a lot of vandalism on the street that, like, clutters the hood, and there's a lot of buildings that they might paint fresh just to keep, you know, the little bit of tags off of it." Gibbs adds that though graffiti removal can seem unjust as a graffiti writer who has worked hard on their pieces—whether legal or illegal— graffiti removal is "just a job at the end of the day."

In the Back Bay, graffiti has become tied to larger quality of life issues, affecting not only residents of the neighborhood but also those who visit it on a daily basis. This idea is generally known as the "broken windows" theory, stemming from a 1982 article in the Atlantic Monthly. The article, which became extremely influential in the years following its publication, posited that broken windows, graffiti, litter, and other markers of a neighborhood which make it appear "run down" can lead to bringing further crime, disorder and property devaluation to that neighborhood. The broken windows theory has had other effects, inspiring new forms of urban policing that specifically target "quality of life" offenses like graffiti writing and may punish offenders more harshly—with jail time and fines, for example—than in the past.

Kathleen Alexander outlined quality of life issues associated with graffiti in the Back Bay. Sitting with her co-chair in the restaurant at the Boston Public Library, she says that, "When we started, we found that if we simply cleaned one building, it really wasn't enough, or we really couldn't do enough for the owners in that area." She adds that, "We really had to clean a whole block or several blocks at a time in order to get to level where a single building wouldn't be the target of vandals."

Back in the alley, the cleaner has finally set for a few minutes as the tags begin to mottle and darken. Erik Barry wipes his brow and picks up his hose again. It is approaching 11 am, the temperature slowly rising. He begins to ascend the first escape to get to the building's second story. Suddenly a car horn rings out loudly. He keeps walking, shouldering the heavy hose. The horn gets louder and a woman in her mid-thirties steps impatiently out of the car, pointing at Barry's truck and gesturing. "How long are you going to be here?" she shouts over the steady hum of the compressor powering the hose. Barry stops and looks down, shrugging his shoulders as if to say, "What now?" He grimaces slightly, drops the hose gingerly on the fire escape, and walks slowly down the stairs.