99% Invisible - 117- Clean Trains

Episode Date: June 4, 2014

In just about every movie set in New York City in the 1970s and 80s there’s an establishing shot with a graffiti-covered subway. For city officials, train graffiti was a sign that they had lost control. So, starting in the … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I grew up mainly in Ohio and in the 80s, I only knew about New York City from the movies and all the movies, every single one of them had this one establishing shot that said, audience, we are in New York City. It was a graffiti covered subway. It was beautiful. For me, a suburban kid from Ohio, that graffiti was exciting, but it didn't seem artistic or complicated.

It was just scary hooliganism. So bad you can't see. The graffiti was a total mystery to me too. Proofs and peppermint grew up in Nebraska, also far, far from New York City. It was like, Technicolor HiroGlyphics. He doing the forward Z, oh he doing his back at the front. All of these intersecting lines and colors, I mean I knew that they were letters, I just never knew what they said. New York was another planet, and graffiti was its language.

There's only 26 letters to the alphabet, but somehow graffiti writers manipulated it, and they make it theirs. And those trains looked so cool on the outside, but the inside was a whole other story. You would not have gotten on that subway. The place where filthy, the train smelled. They were dirty. The floor, you stuck to the floor. And you got stuck in the tunnels,

and the car spilled up with smoke. And I mean, it was a scary place to be. In the 1970s and 80s, says this guy, David Gunn, the New York City subway was like some kind of daunting and hellscape, the fire and bloodshed and gangs. Come on! Get out of here! And there was definitely a sense that, you know,

the subways were totally controlled by wild gangs of teenagers and kind of were. Now all you boppers out there know that amongst the gangs there were the rogues, the grammar c-riffs, everyone's favorite the baseball furies and of course the warriors. I want you to hit everything inside. I want everybody to know if the warriors were there. Artist Caleb Neelan wields a mean spray can himself but even he admits know the warriors were there. Artists Caleb Neelan wields a mean spray can himself, but even he admits. Graffiti was simply just the symbol that the city had lost control and it was a symbol

that who knew what the future lay with cities. It could be terrible and nothing pisses people off more than writing they can't read. So starting in the early 70s, the mayors of New York City vowed to eradicate graffiti. First, Mayor John Lindsay. He took office at really like one of the worst times for any New York mayor. Lindsay formed the first anti-Graphete task force, and he turned graffiti from a nuisance. Took it out of the category of littering or something like that. Into a crime. Into being, you know, but subway graffiti persisted. It was the problem that wouldn't go away.

For two decades, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, also known as the MTA, failed miserably trying to fix its graffiti problem. Sometimes laughably, like the time they decided to repaint 7000 subway cars all white. They called it the Great White Fleet. Oddly what the graffiti movement needed at that time was new real estate. And then before you knew it, you had the entire subway car covered in spray paint. And then there was Ed Koch's Berlin Wall Method. Koch doubled up the fences in the yards.

All of them topped with razor wire, thus creating a no man's land between them. Plus, attack dogs. Here's Mayor Koch. What I said, you'll two fences and have the dog run between the two fences and that will keep people out and protect the dog from stepping on the third rail. And the response was, well, maybe somebody will climb over the fence, and the dog will bite them. I said, well, I thought that's what the dog was for.

And the razor wire topped fences and the German shepherds worked. Until the graffiti writers realized that they could distract the dogs with food and cut through the fences. Desperate people take desperate measures measures and the transit officials were desperate. No one knew what to do. Hello. Until David Gunn. I'm David Gunn and I was president of the New York City Transit Authority for six years. From 1984 to 1990. If transit systems had halls of fame,

David Gunn would be right up in front. David Gunn cleaned up subways in Boston, Philly, D.C., and Toronto. He headed up Amtrak for a while too. He seemed invincible. But when it came to New York City in 1984, my initial reaction was no, because it was. It just looked to be a hopeless situation.

Guns actual words were suicide mission, but then his mother stepped in. At that point, she was in her 80s. She said, you better take that. Or you'll everybody will think you're a coward. Moms, you got to love moms. Gun hit the ground running with something he called the Clean Train Program. You know everybody says you're going to clean up the cars. Yeah, we did. We got the cars cleaned, but we also fixed them.

The Clean Train became sort of symbolic of the fact that the thing worked. And here's the difference between you and me and David Gunn. When we see graffiti, we think about it in terms of aesthetics. We may like it or hate it, but we're reacting to it visually. David Gunn looks right past all of those wild style letters and sees a transit system not doing its job. You see graffiti you got bad maintenance because having equipment clean is part of maintenance. For decades people in charge treated subway graffiti like it was a sanitation problem. Gunn says that's all wrong.

It wasn't just a sanitation problem. Gunn says that's all wrong. It wasn't just a sanitation problem. It was something else entirely. Gunn says the root of the problem was MTA's deferred maintenance program. In the 70s, New York City was broke, and the city pays for a big chunk of the transit authorities operating budget, so they asked the MTA to reduce its budget because fewer people were writing the subways. The MTA made the worst decision. They cut back on the things that kept the subways running, routine inspections, replacing

parts, even subway mechanics. And what you expect to happen happened. The subway deteriorated, breakdowns tripled, trains derailed nearly every two weeks, and get this. In 1981, there were 1800 subway car fires. 1800. Writership should go down when there's 1800 fires. No wonder David Gunn called running the MTA a suicide mission. Still, he took it on.

First, he hired 1,500 non-union managers and increased repair staff. He rebuilt thousands of cars. They had new control cases, rebuild trucks, new motors, air compressors, motor alternators. All alternators. The whole nine yards. Here's the thing about maintenance.

It's not sexy. It takes years to see improvements. Gun new people needed to see something now, or in this case, not see something. My approach was to drive the bastards out and to clean up the mess that made and fix the equipment. And we gradually drove the little bastards into a corner. By little bastards, if it's not obvious, gun mint, everyone vandalizing the trains. And here's how he did it. He figured out a way to do it systemically lined by line.

Again, that's Artis Caleb Neelin. Like the A line or the one line or the two line. Taking the seven line off the map for graffiti writers. While they were fixing it, they didn't allow any graffiti on it, zero. And if graffiti artists bombed a train car. Bombed, in this case, means covering the outside of the train with graffiti. If an artist managed that. The MTA pulled it from the system, even during rush hour.

It was tough going at first. I mean, we had one day I ended up pulling 500 cars out of service. And it worked, and people knew it because they could see it. Gunn achieved the impossible. He got rid of graffiti on New York City subways. There is even an official date, May 12, 1989. People remember V.E. and V.J. Day. You know, this was like their greatest generation moment for the people who ran the subway system. This was you know, this was the their greatest generation moment for the people who ran the subway

system. This was, you know, this was the time when they were declaring victory. The Transv authority held a ceremony that day. It was up at 273 shop. That's at the end of the A-Train. All of the MTA brass and a lot of employees were there. Mirror Ed Koch was there too. privately I kidded them about the fact that I've never thought it'd see that day. And he said I was right.

They even made commemorative t-shirts. They were red and they had the old New York City transfer the throwy logo on them and down below it hit graffiti free in the date. But I wore it for years. It's funny now to ride the subway and imagine that there ever was so much graffiti. I mean, I've lived in New York for almost 10 years now and no graffiti covered subway has ever pulled up to my stop. I always wondered, where did the graffiti go? I thought the answer might be more complex. But this time, for once, the answer is simple.

You can point to a man, David Gunn. David Gunn, who I think like a lot of New Yorkers, was this, you know, white night coming in to fix the subway system. And, you know, to graffiti writers, he was this Darth Vader character. And, you know, took away their fun and ultimately was better at taking away their fun than they were at sustaining it. May 12, 1989, the day Subway Graffiti died. Okay, hold up.

The story's not over. Graffiti didn't actually end that day. There is still subway graffiti, but because of David Gunn's Clean Train Program, it's almost become impossible for us on the outside to see. It almost never leaves the train yards. MTA crews are on patrol there constantly looking for graffiti and hosing it off with these crazy solvents that they see any. And they see it.

An international gallery of it, in fact. So the kid from Munich would go paint subways in Paris. The kid in Paris would go paint subways in Amsterdam. Graffiti writers today are kind of like Sam Collectors, hitting the Berlin's U-Bahn, the Paris Metro, and the London Tube to put into their album. Collections are judged by two things, size and value. The Subway Graffiti Completist would have to hit

190 systems in 54 countries. And as for value, there's only one that matters. There's a real way of thinking in graffiti, which I don't think is entirely wrong, which says, you're not a real writer until you got your piece on a New York subway. It's kind of like the holy grail of all trains, you know? Right now, spray painting a New York subway car is a felony.

If painters get caught, it could mean jail time and thousands of dollars in fines. Graffiti artists have to ask themselves, is this worth it? I'm pretty nervous talking on the microphone right now even about it because you know It's it's not really something that people are like great you're painting the subway. That's that's very nice Thank you for doing that. It's total opposite, you know This is Joe or at least that's what he wanted me to call him Joe is a graffiti artist from South Africa He hits trains and countries around the world.

He didn't want to say if he was going to hit New York. You can't say. I can't say. No, no, I'm not. We distorted Joe's voice to protect his identity. That's the only way that he would agree to talk to us. Joe's never been caught, but it's been close. I've looked, seen a flashlight, and turned around to tell the guy that someone is coming for us.

And when I've turned around, he's already like running. We actually caught a couple of guys from Australia just last week who were trying to breach our security and go into a yacht. And now Vincent DiMarino. He's the vice president of security for the MTA and New York City Transit transit. He sees guys from all over the world in new york's train yards. DeMarino didn't have hard numbers of who gets caught from where in the yards. But when a train gets hit in new york, the graffiti artist is more likely to be from say spain or france, not from new york. Some put the ratio at something like 80-20.

The international folks, it's cost them a lot of money to do. You know, if I was to get on a plane, I'd go somewhere and sit on a beach. I wouldn't buy an airplane ticket to go commit a crime and a train yacht. The graffiti artists say that's part of the draw. It's a rush to break the law. No, I want to get over this f***ing fence. It's hard to resist. It's exciting at first, you know, when you go inside to the yard and you stand on the floor, you know, on the platform and you see how big this train really is.

I mean, when you're on the platform, a train's a train, when you're on the floor next to it, it's like, like an iron beast, you know. I love it. It's intoxicated. The smell and the sound is so much more intense because you're already like super nervous. Luke was coming at you, what is it? There's not much that could be that feeling. It's like better than sex. Like better than money, better than anything.

It's like that's how people do it. That's why someone would risk their career and their life to press the button on the spray can. They put colors on a train, you know? I see no Europeans doing it. So I'm like, why New York? Dozing doing it. This is where it's from.

This way it was built that like, I see, you know what? Let me bring the trains back. This is CTE. I spell it C-E-T-E and then I have a two letter C-T. The same thing means clean trains. if people don't get it. C-T tells me he always feels like an old soul, but I call him a romantic. I seen it on the trains and I seen subway art and I'm like, damn I missed this time. C-T bombed not one, but two trains this year.

The first was the art train. It was a spy versus spy theme. It took about 11 cans and an hour to paint. But days and days of preparation. I studied these lines. I studied the times. I even studied down to the workers because if you could find a lazy worker one day

and you could do a lot of stuff. In this MTA, they have a lot of lazy workers. The second train they hit was a B-train, this time with a pink panther theme. We had the whole day planned like recon mission. And here's what ties CT and David gun together. Both men that spent a lot of time scrutinizing the weak points in the MTA system. CT dreams of bringing back New York subway graffiti. But the number of hits are rapidly declining.

In 2007, there were 75 yard hits. So far this year, only 9. The MTA's police force can take some credit for those numbers, but there is another factor. I find it hard to think of graffiti writers who were much under 25. And a lot of the most active people that I know are in their 40s, honestly.

Graffiti is an art form may just age out at some point. And if subway graffiti did die out, how would we even know? The artists know that their work will never be seen by the public at large. They break into the train yard, paint their murals, and immediately after this subway cars are scrubbed clean by MTA workers. The art form is totally ephemeral. It reminds me of those Tibetan sand mandalas made to disappear. If you think you're just going to live forever, it's not.

Everything you do would turn into sh** one day. Pretty much all that keeps that from happening right now is social media. There are invitation only Instagram accounts where subway bombers post their work before it disappears. Those painted trains that crossed our movie screens on countless establishing shots of dirty New York City in the 1970s. They are just a little square on your smartphone now. And by the time you see them, they're already gone.

My love is the trains. There's always going to be trains to the casket drop. There's always going to be trains. And yeah, that's a body. Let's roll. Until the casket drops or until the NYPD Antigraphy Unit, called the Vandal Squad, catches up to you, which is what happened to CT. He was arrested and charged with more than 180 misdemeanor counts for things like possession of a graffiti instrument and intention to damage property, along with some felony charges. He took a plea deal, agreed to pay nearly $19,000 in restitution charges, and is now on probation. 99% and visible was produced this week by Ann Heperman, with help from Gulliabarton,

Roby Flores, Sam Greenspan, Katie Mangle, Avery, Trophamon, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW and San Francisco, and produced at the offices of Arxign, the coolest architecture firm in beautiful graffiti adept downtown Oakland, California. If you like fun, you can keep up with this show and all the people who make this show. At Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but if you want to see the Spy vs Spy subway car, it is amazing. You have to go to 99pi.org.

This is the last stop on this train. Everyone, please leave the train. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit. Radio Topee-O. From PRX. From PRX.