Perhaps his most famous work is the mural that took up the side of an entire subway car, a photograph of which almost got to the Museum of Modern Art as part of its “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” show. The exhibit featured great masters, their impact on street art, and in turn, street art’s impact on them. Freedom’s work was a version of Michelangelo’s Creation, an ephemeral hand reaching down from a white cloud to touch fingertips with another from below. Across the bottom he scrawled the words “What is Art. Why is art.” The photograph of the car with the mural was incorporated into the sixty-page catalog, but in the end the museum chose not to display the picture for fear it would alienate trustees and donors who might interpret it as an endorsement of graffiti.
WHEN CHRIS IS WORKING ON HIS TUNNEL ART HE IS FREEDOM. Recently, he and Smith have agreed to collaborate, but they are not agreed on the subject. Freedom wants to do Picasso’s Guernica, but Smith argues for Goya’s Third of May. Freedom agrees, recalling the sense of violence and terrorism in the original, which he wants to transfer onto the tunnel wall in an attempt to dramatize his fear and horror of that world. The campfire will illuminate the stinging colors, he explains, and the homeless around it will live with the scene even as they are part of it.
A twenty-foot ladder is trundled several miles along the tracks to Bernard’s camp. Next come cartons of spray-paint cans. The work begins one morning before sunup. By the firelight, Freedom and Smith—and now the wakened Bernard—whitewash a thirty-foot-long, sixteen-foot-high section of wall.
It will be the largest piece in the tunnel, they say, and as they work, determined and intense, tunnel dwellers passing by only whisper lest they disturb the effort. Holding a picture of the original, Freedom outlines the scene with light blue paint. Neither he, with baseball cap under hooded sweatshirt, nor Smith, in green army jacket and heavy boots, talk much. From across the tracks, Bernard hands over old clothes fot rags.
A train approaches and everyone freezes, melting against the tunnel’s gray walls to escape sight. When it passes, the ladder is erected again and the work continues. Smith moves smoothly from side to side while Freedom, on the ladder, nearly falls several times.
Smith becomes impatient. He usually completes his murals within hours. Freedom is slower and more critical. When a figure looks wrong to him, he repaints it, despite Smith’s objections. However, at the end of the first day, when they step back to regard their work, they agree it will be great. It will be big, big.
The word had reached the homeless on the surface by the next morning. “They’re doing something big,” one man says as I begin down the slope toward the tunnel’s entrance. “Real big. For us.”
Another man cautions me against going into the tunnels alone, and he comes with me. As we watch the second day begin, he says “Everyone down here knows about it. This is going to be the biggest thing in our tunnel. Too bad, though. A lot of people will want to come down here now to settle.”
Bernard is not happy. As the mural takes shape, he sees the blood and gore and begins to reconsider his permission for the work right there across from his campfire. For the sake of friendship, he says, he shrugs off his doubts and Freedom and Smith continue to fill in the figures they have sketched and add lines that bring the figures to life. Smith completes the top of the cathedral and sprays the misty blue sky that symbolizes hope above the violent execution scene.
A man and woman who live in the tunnel pass by. “I think we should put this piece in our den,” the man jokes.
“Do you think they’ll eat sandwiches if we bring some?” the woman asks. “They’re outsiders and I just don’t want to intrude,” she explains to me.
“We’ll have to visit Bernard more often now,” says another man to a group as they watch briefly. “It’s civil here.”
Toward the end of the day, Bernard tells Smith to walk me to the exit, but Smith is impatient to finish. He resists until Bernard orders him, almost threatening. “It’s the law of the tunnel,” he says, probably inventing a new law for the occasion, “that a woman visitor doesn’t leave here alone. And you’re in a tunnel.”
Icy rain and bitter cold weather prevent Freedom and Smith from completing the work the next day. They wear light layers of clothes, Smith in an army jacket and Freedom in his bomber jacket, to allow flexible movement. Nothing can protect their hands and fingers spraying the paint, though. Even on a warm day, I can only spurt the paint for a few minutes at a time. Graffiti writers spend hours at a time.
The piece is completed a few days later. It spreads large and wide and intricately. The gruesome scene is alarming, just the effect Freedom wanted. The misty cathedral promises detail from afar, but up close turns out to be only an image—a sign of Smith’s mastery of his material. Smith hands the signing paint can to Freedom. At first he refuses, for some reason I do not understand. Then he writes his tag. So does Smith. And he adds Sane’s tag.
As I leave, the day seems more sweet than others despite the brisk chill blowing off the river. I feel I have witnessed something remarkable being created underground, a bit of wonder, if not beauty, for homeless underground people to appreciate and call their own.
“I like the place,” Tony tells me. “It gets damp, but it’s safe enough, and there’s OK people down here, and I like the art,” he says, almost embarrassed to use the word. “It makes me feel human, you know. And underground, believe me, you can feel like the animal they think you are upstairs.”
13
Graffiti
IT WAS THE CHRISTMAS SEASON IN NEW YORK IN 1978. THE lights were still on in the Brooklyn train lay-up and Lee didn’t like it.
“Let’s go home,” he told Mono.
“Yo, you crazy, man?” Mono was in his face. “We racked up all this paint,” he yelled at the suitcases full of spray-paint cans they had stolen over several weeks and carried on subway trains, through stations, and finally into the tunnel. Their goal was to “do”—to cover with graffiti—the side of an entire ten-car train, which had never been done before.
The two men, along with a third, Slave, belong to the Fabulous Five, New York’s most notorious graffiti gang. They crouched at the end of the tunnel before it opens into the train yard, or lay-up. They refused to allow Doc to take part because he was wasted on alcohol, and Dirty Slug, the fifth member, seldom joined them anymore.
“Ah, fuck it, man, let’s do it,” Lee agreed. The Transit Authority was cracking down on graffiti writers, increasing its police force to 4,300 in an effort to stop the “vandalism” that constituted “pollution of the eye and mind,” as officials put it, and the gang might not get this close to sleeping subway trains again.