Derailed

When I was going to college in the early seventies, I often spent the weekend in New York. As my bus wound its way toward the Uptown Port Authority, the phrase "Taki 183" scrawled across the side of a tenement welcomed me to Manhattan. The memory of ghetto uprising and racial hostility was still strong in those days, and this assertion of individual identity emerging from the faceless cityscape held a double message. On the one hand it was a simple declaration of presence; on the other, a warning that that presence was not going to go away. Taki's tag caught on. By the time I graduated, kids scurried about with magic markers leaving their names and block numbers on every unguarded surface.

I returned to New York as the decade drew to a olose. The city had survived its brush with bankruptcy. Its streets had lost their angry edge. Fists once clenched in black power salutes now curled around huge radios blaring disco and the "Rappers Delight." White middle class artists ventured guiltlessly into once forbidden neighborhoods, young professionals hot on their heels.

In the subways the scattered markings had become a tangled thicket of hieroglyphics as the anonymous multitude vied to put their tokens of individuality into public circulation. Occasionally this dense overgrowth blossomed into startling images, spray-painted scenes of city life populated by figures from the comic book pantheon, as some graffiti artists went beyond the assertion of existence to proclaim their right to remake it.

For a few glorious years subway riding came to feel like membership in a secret and exclusive society. The spay-paintings that surrounded me confirmed my participation in a city that reached beyond the protocols of Manhattan to the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side. My fellow riders and I might be strangers to one another, but we all knew Dondi, Zephyr and Futura. The act of commuting baptized us all in the democratic spirit of our metropolis, and graffiti which gave expression to that spirit equipped us with the irony to withstand the world upstairs. Whatever our role in the city's hierarchy, as New Yorkers we shared in something else, the exhilaration of our collective energy.

New images began to appear on the trains and station walls as art school dropouts and renegades of white suburbia, drawn to this energy, offered their version of the subway experience. Graffiti artists welcomed these newcomers to their medium, just as in the world above, the neighborhoods they came from accepted the incursion of artists and bohemians into their midst, believing that spatial proximity might promote a closeness of spirit as well. Traditionally hostile communities opened to the possibility that people who could appreciate their culture might respect that culture's makers as well. For a moment it seemed as though a new and multi-racial solidarity might come about through art, that graffiti's redefinition of the city's surface might lead to a transformation of its depth.

In 1983 I attended the first gallery opening of Keith Haring, a young white graffiti artist, and watched his entire collection of paintings sell out in one evening. A few months later Michael Stewart, a young black graffiti artist, died in the care of the Transit Police.

Like so many utopian dreams, the democracy of graffiti squirmed on the pitchfork of money, social class and authority. As artists climbed the subway stairs to embrace the world of commerce, the long arm of city hall reached into the tunnels to protect the public's property from art. Private collectors spent thousands for canvasses spray-painted with images that the city spent equal sums to sandblast from the trains. New York restocked its underground arteries with silver corpuscles, paint-resistant and antiseptic, while in the world above, its streets surrendered to glassed-in cafes and sanitized exteriors. The new middle class that drew its tag across the city wanted no reminder of the unrenovated life that preceded it.

Last month the last graffiti train was officially removed from service. There was little fanfare; the press was preoccupied with the Central Park jogger and its discovery of "wilding." Tabloid headlines screeched of "wolf Packs," while more sober publications deplored the sorry state of "race relations." The slum-scarred city that graffiti had sought to depict through art and humor came back to public consciousness in the form of mindless violence. The last representation of urban rage had been expunged, leaving us to confront its bitter reality.

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Desperately Fleeing Sushi

When I moved to New York in 1979, I had the misfortune to find a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side. Inexpensive. Quiet. On an elegantly brownstoned street close to Riverside Park and a few blocks from Zabar's. Rents had not yet made the quantum leap of the coming decade, but living space was already hard to find. Friends assured me of my beginner's luck.

The only problem was that I had come to Manhattan in hopes of becoming a punk, lured by the poetry of urban squalor that I heard in the music of Patti Smith and glimpsed in photos of a new race of beings cloned from the ruins of metropolis. After a decade of enforced mellowness, these evocations of jagged reality had jolted me into wakefulness. I wanted to be part of this new attitude, and New York seemed to be its epitome.

But my idyllic surroundings provided little fodder for dark romance. No glowering tenements. No alleyways of ecstatic risk. No sidewalk garbage rotting with the stench of the 20th Century. Just newly co-oped buildings with well-wrapped trash bags, presided over by a block association that saw grime as a call to renovation, not art. Sweatsuits clothed the Naked City, its mean streets pounded into submission by joggers' feet.

I began to head downtown every night. In abandoned warehouses and gutted storefronts I found oases where the Future was being constructed. Black-clad figures who had rejected everything created the sights and sounds of an alternate universe, drawing screeching chalk across the prison walls of convention. The gratifications of everyday life meant nothing to them, for they had discovered how to rearrange the present to produce the New. I watched them, imbibed their spirit. But I was a dilettante of their future; the subway awaited to drag me back to life as it had always been lived.

I grew adept in the art of uptown survival, inventing a system of checks and balances to counter the influence of my neighbors. The "ham-hashbrown-overeasy" cry of a surly Greek waiter on upper Broadway could wipe out the memory of the mimosa-hungry masses lined up for Sunday brunch. Cafe con leche at a Cuban-Chinese counter relieved the horror of Zabars bags bulging with decaffeinated blends. I learned to exist in the hollows of upward mobility, searching out those experiences too stubborn or delirious to be swept up in the cheerful consumerism that renovated the facades and sanded the floors of my neighborhood. I told no one. It was my unspeakable secret, the price I paid to reappear downtown, a self-respecting nihilist.

Eventually, I met others like myself, trapped by fate and three-year leases in our outpost of shame. We devised elaborate theories of why the 'Scene" was about to move uptown. Just a little while, we said to ourselves, sitting in coffee shops shadowed by sushi bars and Perrier emporiums, and the epicenter would shift. But we were wrong. Columbus Avenue kept getting longer and the rents kept going up. The salad bars spilled over onto Broadway, and our neighbors installed Jacuzzis. We accepted our lot stoically -- our punishment for living with one foot in the past -- for there was always the subway ride downtown and the future.

I don't remember when I first noticed the change, only that the downtown streets I nightly prowled were coming remarkably to resemble the ones from which I was descending. I followed the Scene's forced march east, over the edge of the known world, beyond Avenue A. Being artists, the others did not look back. Being less sure, I did, and found that where the avant-garde had been, real estate now was. The portals of the New had become floor-to-ceiling windows, behind which lurked tax attorneys, frozen margaritas and The Gap; the whereabouts I'd fled had become my destination.

Now Columbus Avenue stretches the length of Manhattan. The future I longed to be part of has passed, and the past which entrapped me has become an unrelenting present. I came to New York to join the avant-garde, and, while seeking it, stumbled into the city that was to come. Today, all Manhattanites live between the condos and health clubs, uncertain of their identity in a world of pale neon and cold pasta. Considering their rents, I'm glad to be paying so little for my share.

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