Official Reactions to Graffiti in New York City, 1990–2005
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Qual Sociol (2010) 33:297–311 DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9154-0 Moral Panics and Urban Growth Machines: Official Reactions to Graffiti in New York City, 1990–2005 Ronald Kramer Published online: 9 May 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract This paper analyzes the official response to graffiti writing in New York City throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. Drawing from a variety of documents, such as newspaper articles, political press releases, internal memos and government reports, I show that the city’s reaction to graffiti constitutes a moral panic and that the significance of this response can be discerned when interpreted in the context of theoretical insights developed by urban sociologists. On this basis, I argue that moral panics, or at least a sub- set of panics, may be central to negotiating the social conflict that accompanies the ways in which (urban) space will be put to use. Keywords Moral panic . Graffiti . Growth machine . Privatism . Broken windows Graffiti was ubiquitous on the city’s subway system throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1989, after several outbreaks of moral panic and costly efforts by several city agencies, the subway was officially declared “graffiti free” (Phase 2 and Schmidlapp 1996, p. 112). However, while the city was, and remains, preoccupied with keeping graffiti off the subway system, graffiti writers have simply redirected their energies and now write on buildings, alongside highways, on freight trains and on any other publicly visible surface within reach. Within a historical context marked by aggressive anti-graffiti rhetoric and attempts at removal, the city’s decision to follow graffiti writers “above ground” was far from surprising. Yet, despite the millions of dollars being spent each year,1 the city’s more recent anti-graffiti efforts have not put an end to the “graffiti problem.” 1Exact and comprehensive figures for the amount of money spent on anti-graffiti initiatives are difficult to ascertain. In New York City, approximately 20 city agencies currently play a role in combating graffiti, each performing specific tasks, and therefore spending different sums of money. Based on my documents, I would estimate that anti-graffiti initiatives cost the city approximately 5 to 10 million dollars a year. R. Kramer (*) Social Sciences Department, Western Connecticut State University, 181 White Street, Danbury, CT 06810, USA e-mail: [email protected] 298 Qual Sociol (2010) 33:297–311 The ongoing “war” against graffiti, which is taking place in many parts of the city, has been legitimated by the emergence of a moral panic. In my view, this provides an occasion to extend our contemporary understanding of this important social phenomenon. In what follows, I attempt to outline the possibility of an urban view of moral panics by identifying the points of contact between the city’s response to graffiti and the concepts of privatism and growth machines. These two very closely related concepts have been of central importance to urban sociologists interested in discerning how space is ultimately put to use, and how urban areas develop their particular economic, social, and cultural contours. I conclude by suggesting that future research stands to benefit by acknowledging, at the theoretical level, that the social contradictions embedded in the production of urban space may constitute a distinct dimension that is necessary for understanding a variety of moral panics. Tracking the official response to graffiti in New York City This study is part of a larger ethnographic analysis that explores the subculture of graffiti writing and the official reaction to graffiti in New York City since the late 1980s. Over the course of the 1990s, New York City’s graffiti writing subculture experienced a period of diversification and splintering as many of its members pursued legal and commercial avenues through which to pursue their craft. In conjunction with this growing complexity, evidence suggests that many contemporary graffiti writers lead conventional lives and subscribe to conventional values. Having explored, through in-depth interviews and 6 years of observation, these aspects of graffiti writing culture elsewhere (Kramer 2010), in what follows I focus on the official reaction to graffiti in New York City. I do this by consulting newspaper articles from the New York Times, the Daily News, and other print media, such as The Village Voice; press releases of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations; and political memos and internal reports from the Giuliani administration. Articles from the New York Times and Daily News were retrieved from Lexis-Nexis. Using the term “graffiti,” I conducted “full text” searches for each individual year covered by this study. However, in the case of the Daily News I could only search from 1995 onwards. The articles were then perused and, if deemed to be of some relevance, printed. With much of the “noise” being a product of references to the film American Graffiti or the Palm OS “Graffiti” technology, determining the relevance of any given article was a relatively straightforward procedure. In cases of uncertainty, the article was printed and retained. Newspaper articles from other sources, such as The New York Post and The Village Voice, were discovered in a vertical file at the Municipal Archives of City Hall and through reading alternative media. These articles were used to supplement the larger body of articles from the New York Times and Daily News. Most of the documents from the Giuliani administration were retrieved from the City Hall library in New York City. This would not have been possible without the help of the library staff who provided the information required to locate relevant documents. These included Giuliani’s press releases, internal memos, and figures and literature associated with anti-graffiti initiatives. The press releases of the Bloomberg administration were found online (www.nyc.gov). Like the newspaper articles, I read through Bloomberg’s press releases and printed those that were seen as relevant to the topic at hand. The New York City government website also has a search engine which enables one to find many other documents related to graffiti, such as those made available by the NYPD and other city agencies. Qual Sociol (2010) 33:297–311 299 I then created five files and arranged each file in chronological order. The five files were titled: “The New York Times” (approximately 800 articles); “The Daily News” (approximately 300 articles); “Other Print Media” (50 articles); “Giuliani Files” (210 pages); and “Bloomberg Files” (230 pages). Taken together, these files contained somewhere in the vicinity of 1,500 articles or well over 3,000 pages of material. Assuming that a relatively large volume of material such as this would need to be read several times, I decided to approach my documents with general questions before moving on to more specific ones. Initial questions, such as “what is this article about?” or “what is being reported in this article?” were intended to remove preconceptions and expectations, and more importantly, to let the documents speak for themselves. Asking broad questions allowed for the identification of recurrent themes and patterns. For example, reports often focused on “subway graffiti,”“anti-graffiti legislation,”“graffiti removal,” and “graffiti as ‘broken window.’” In other words, the categorization of articles, or the imposing of borders on an otherwise amorphous mass of data, was developed “from the ground up,” so to speak. With these themes as headings, I created an index that listed each article by its title and date of appearance. Having such an index not only provided an accessible overview of what was contained in my sources, but also made visible which themes recurred with greater and lesser frequency within the discourse on graffiti. The majority of the documents I had gathered contained sentiments and recorded official activity that displayed a clear opposition to graffiti. Amongst documents from the Giuliani and Bloomberg adminis- trations, there was not a single example that did not denounce graffiti. This observation raised two further and more specific questions. First, how can the official response to graffiti be described? Second, how can this official response be interpreted? In order to answer these questions, I isolated and re-read the documents that recorded official responses to graffiti. In this phase of the analysis, I focused on the type of language that was used to describe graffiti writers and the opposition to graffiti; whether it was significant and, if so, how or why? I also attempted to map how the city’s anti-graffiti policies and activities were proliferating and changing over time. The next step involved identifying elective affinities (Weber 1979) between the contents of my sources and sociological concepts that could demystify what I was encountering. Each time I thought I had discovered answers to the more specific questions posed, I went back over the documents to assess their plausibility. This process occurred several times before I settled on the results offered in what follows. Conceptualizing the official response to graffiti The city’s response to graffiti can be understood as a moral panic, which can be said to occur when the reaction to a pattern of behavior that is seen as violating accepted norms or laws is disproportional to the threat posed by the behavior in question. To put it as crudely as possible, it is an “over-reaction.” Two previous studies have assumed that the concept could be meaningfully applied in analyzing responses to graffiti writing. The first, conducted by Ferrell (1996), was based on graffiti writing in Denver, Colorado and argued that city opposition to the practice was grounded in the need to reinforce public acceptance of the rights of the state to exercise authority over its subjects. The second was conducted by Austin (2001) and was based on graffiti writing in New York City throughout the 1970s and 1980s.