A Spray of History in Cyberspace

By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 17, 1999; Page A1NEW YORK – They called themselves writers. They considered themselves artists. And just as New York’s intellectuals of the 1920s had their Algonquin Round Table, the city’s legendary graffiti taggers of the 1970s and ’80s had the 149th Street subway station in the Bronx, a salon where the elite could meet to bicker, swap ideas and admire their own scribblings.

Those days are gone, and the 149th Street Grand Concourse – “the bench,” as the taggers called it – is just another station on the Lexington Avenue line. To the cheers of most straphangers, an intense anti-graffiti campaign by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority – known underground as “the buff” – scrubbed the entire subway system clean a decade ago, sending scores of the city’s best “writers” into retirement and forcing most of the others to spray-paint elsewhere.

But the bench has resurfaced – in cyberspace. The creators of the Art Crimes Web site recently stopped adding to its list of more than 500 graffiti-related links because “there are too many new sites every day for us to continue.” As for the old 149th Street crowd, it now hangs out at www.at149st.com, New York City’s Cyber Bench, featuring museum-style photos of classic works by 100 subway vandals, a glossary of tagging terms, notices of gallery openings featuring graffiti artists and a history of the “New York movement.”

The site’s thirtysomething managers, former taggers Luke Felisbret (a freelance artist who used the tag SPAR during his days with The Fantastic Partners and The Non-Stoppers crews) and his brother Eric (a graphic designer whose tag was simply ERIC), see themselves as modern-day preservationists, keeping alive a lost urban art that symbolizes rebellion at a time when New York is shedding so many of its rough edges. They say they also are preserving a lost underground community, and through the magic of the Web, expanding it around the world, connecting with imitators in Australia, Germany, Japan and Brazil.

Their critics, including many of the 3 million New Yorkers who ride the subways every day, say the cybertaggers are promoting criminal activity and glorifying a despicable era of lawlessness in New York. To which the Felisbrets reply: Well, maybe. But they believe the exuberant “wild-style” designs that once covered almost every square inch of MTA steel are reminders of a significant youth movement, in the tradition of the Beatniks and hippies.

“The movement’s gone from on the lines to online,” says Eric Felisbret, who used to carry a pocket camera with his spray paint to capture his creations on film. “The Web is all about freedom of expression, and that’s what the subways used to be for us. And on the Web, you don’t have to worry about the buff. The art can last forever.”

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