The Problem – Where Are The Graffiti Blasters?
Since fall 2009, Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods have experienced a sharp uptick in graffiti taggings on the walls and windows of businesses up and down Milwaukee Avenue.
“It’s really bad in the alley,” Andrew Manto, a metal fabricator who works in Wicker Park, told the Chicago Sun-Times.
In February, the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago was tagged with graffiti, as was the “Bean” sculpture in Millennium Park, causing alarm across the city that the problem was getting out of control.
City records show that the Streets and Sanitation Department has had an unusually difficult time keeping up with recent graffiti incidents.
Since October 2009, the department’s “Graffiti Blasters” team has cleaned up 10,000 fewer graffiti incidents than it did during the same period a year earlier.
A spokesman for the department argued that changes in cleanup efforts are cyclical and not related to budget cuts.
“Some years and months, there are more, and some less,” Matt Smith told the Sun-Times. “It fluctuates. Graffiti is also impacted by the weather. I’m not sure it can be analyzed beyond all of these issues.”
But some residents in Wicker Park and Bucktown are skeptical, noting the coincidental timing of the graffiti boom and Chicago’s failed October bid to host the 2016 Olympics.
How We Got Here – Chicago Fights Graffiti
According to the City of Chicago, “Graffiti is vandalism. It scars the community, hurts property values and diminishes our quality of life.”
As much as 35 percent of all property vandalism involves graffiti and graffiti clean up efforts devour millions of dollars from city budgets across the country.
In the early 1990s, the City of Chicago tried to combat graffiti in an aggressive way by staging a two-prong war.
In 1992 the city outlawed the sale of spray paint within city limits and in 1993 Mayor Daley started the Graffiti Blasters program.
As a free service to property owners affected by unsightly graffiti, the city’s Streets and Sanitation department operates 13 trucks armed with high water pressure baking soda blasters that are used to erase taggings and 14 paint trucks that cover graffiti. To request service, please dial 3-1-1.
The program costs more than $6 million annually and over 170,000 taggings are cleaned up each year.
Other Solutions – If You Can’t Rely On The City…
Community leaders on the West Side have become so frustrated with the city’s efforts that they have developed their own graffiti-fighting plans.
The Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring a “Graffiti Abatement Program,” which will help business owners replace glass sprayed with acid-laced graffiti and help cover the cost of installing “anti-graffiti film to protect glass from damage.”
The program started taking applications on April 1, 2010. To apply, please contact the WPB Chamber of Commerce at (773) 235-6385 or at info@wickerparkbucktown.com. There are also private companies that specialize in graffiti removal.
Keep America Beautiful suggest 10 steps to preventing graffiti:
1) Educate yourself about how graffiti impacts your community and who is responsible for cleaning it up
2) Report incidents of graffiti
3) Organize people in your community to clean up the mess together in a safe way
4) Paint a mural over graffiti
5) Organize a graffiti awareness campaign
6) Talk to your neighbors about graffiti prevention
7) Adopt a wall or block in your community and make sure it stays free of graffiti
8) Plant a tree near a graffiti-laced wall
9) Install better lighting in poorly-lit areas
10) Volunteer with local clean-up efforts in your community
Related Links
Video tribute to Chicago graffiti artist “Sole” | Graffiti with soundtrack by DePaul students |
Flickr gallery of Chicago graffiti |NBC5 gallery of graffiti tagging |
Photo essay on graffiti by TIME | Photos of “permission wall” in Pilsen
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