In 2012, when Toll Brothers, a suburban developer branching out into urban markets, completed a condominium building in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, with units that would be priced at between four hundred thousand and two million dollars, it aimed at constructing a complex that looked rough and industrial, in keeping with DUMBO’s historical—if not its current—character. Workers used architectural concrete for the façade, because the material has cracks and other inherent imperfections. When they discovered graffiti on a neighboring building’s brick wall, adjacent to the Toll Brothers building’s internal courtyard, they decided not to approach the neighbors about erasing the spray paint but, rather, to highlight it as part of the project’s aesthetic. “I thought it looked really cool,” David von Spreckelsen, the president of the New York City division of Toll Brothers City Living, the developer’s urban division, said. “It reflected New York’s history.”
Graffiti is used to sell lots of things, of course. In the nineties, Nike and Coca-Cola began hiring well-known graffiti artists to paint large-scale murals and to help design advertising campaigns targeted at young people. Other industries—fashion, vodka, fast food—followed. But the real-estate industry’s use of graffiti is different; after all, taggers don’t vandalize sneakers. Historically, property owners and developers have tended to consider graffiti a sign of decay that lowers property values. But that was before people started finding grittiness really cool.
These days, residents of the Toll Brothers’ DUMBO complex can sit in the landscaped interior courtyard and look up at a weathered brick wall that displays the word “NO” written in dark-orange spray paint. Toll Brothers compared its efforts to contextualize the DUMBO project to its efforts on Park Avenue, where it has designed a tower to mimic the prewar architecture of nearby buildings. Still, the DUMBO project presented unique challenges. Developers usually fix cracks in façades and erase graffiti on walls, rather than enshrine it, and Spreckelsen said that the company’s board was reluctant to sign off on these features. Spreckelsen was persuasive, however. The DUMBO property sold out in less than a year, and it is featured prominently in Toll Brothers’ 2012 annual report to investors. The company says that it is considering adding similarly “edgy” touches to a new property being designed on West Seventeenth Street, in Manhattan.
Some developers’ earliest forays into aerosol art did not involve actual graffiti. In 2007, Herzog and de Meuron, the architecture firm behind 40 Bond, a luxury residence in Manhattan with units that are currently valued at between ten and twenty-seven million dollars, designed a “graffiti fence” to surround the property. The aluminum-cast fence is constructed to resemble a web of soft, bubbled swirls—like jumbled graffiti. “I wanted to do something that was incredibly special that fit in with the neighborhood and that had the feeling of a downtown-on-the-edge point of view,” the project’s developer, Ian Schrager, told Architect’s Newspaper.
Just don’t step over the edge. Niklas Maak, an architect and a critic whose upcoming book about public space addresses the contradictions that he sees at 40 Bond, says that the development is “a barrier against real graffiti artists.” Developers like Schrager don’t want taggers spray-painting their buildings, Maak argues. They want to appropriate the stylishness of graffiti while avoiding its cultural implications. “What they pioneered as a form of protest is transmuted into a fortification that prevents them from spraying onto the actual façade,” he says.
Maak compared 40 Bond and similar condo projects to designer labels’ distressed jeans. The complexes are made to look worn in order to appeal to buyers who crave a gritty urban experience. Meanwhile, the kind of graffiti for which New York is most famous—tags wallpapering subway cars and city walls—has largely disappeared. Michael Bloomberg declared “a war on graffiti” in 2002; at the moment, the best place in the city to find classic New York graffiti is at an exhibit at the Museum of the City of the New York about aerosol art of the seventies and eighties.
Until a few months ago, there was another space to see original, large-scale graffiti in New York: 5Pointz, an outdoor graffiti gallery in Long Island City. In the early nineties, a building owner named Jerry Wolkoff gave graffiti artists permission to paint the building. The façade acquired layers of art work; in 2002, an artist named Jonathan Meres Cohen got Wolkoff’s permission to curate the graffiti, and 5Pointz eventually earned a reputation as one of the world’s première sites for aerosol art. Inside, Wolkoff leased studio space to jewelry designers, painters, and other artists.
But Wolkoff harbored other ambitions for the property, and last summer he got approval to tear 5Pointz down and replace it with two apartment towers with a thousand units, as well as a pool, a gym, and retail space. To the outrage of graffiti artists worldwide, Wolkoff painted over the outside of his building last November, in the middle of the night, and is now waiting for the paperwork that will allow him to demolish the structure and start anew. “I can see the area growing,” Wolkoff said. “Why shouldn’t I grow with it?”
That’s not the end of it, though. Wolkoff hopes to incorporate the site’s graffiti history into his new complex by building a series of walls in the new towers that graffiti artists will be able to paint freely on; he plans to have security guards working twenty-four hours a day to make sure that no one spray-paints the apartments themselves. But he probably won’t be collaborating with the artists who volunteered at the outdoor gallery. Many of those connected to 5Pointz still feel betrayed by Wolkoff. In March, a street artist wrapped the whitewashed façade in a large yellow banner that read, “GENTRIFICATION IN PROCESS.” In October, 2013, Cohen, the 5Pointz curator, sued Wolkoff’s company, G&M Realty, to prevent the demolition of the building on the ground that it displayed art work of “recognized stature” that shouldn’t be destroyed according to the federal. (He lost the suit.)
While Wolkoff doesn’t think that living among spray-painters will appeal to everyone, he doesn’t anticipate great difficulty finding tenants, either. “I believe I will attract more than I will lose,” he said. He may be right; Wolkoff knows better than most people how much graffiti can generate interest in a piece of real estate. Yet some, like Gabriel Specter, a former graffiti artist, aren’t so sure. “I don‘t think he knows how much it’s going to smell,” Specter said.
Specter, who now creates murals and other installations for galleries, nonprofits, and corporate clients, painted a wall last summer for the boutique hotel King and Grove Williamsburg, out by its pool. Working from photographs he had taken, Specter created a painted collage that re-created old windows from the neighborhood—rust, graffiti, and all. The mural, called “Brooklyn Windows,” is so detailed that it looks like a real wall of battered glass windows. “It’s a work that, in some ways, is going to give you the feeling of this authenticity,” Specter said. “That was the appeal for the hotel—it looks natural.”
Specter knows that working for an expensive hotel presents its own contradictions: the artist is selling out to “the other side,” as he described it. But, he said, the opportunity to make his art mattered the most to him, and the hotel gave him free rein. And, in fact, the irony of recreating graffiti in the kind of hotel that is rapidly wiping out the city’s countercultural spirit made the commission particularly appealing. Plus, he said, this is how New York works. “The same people kicking you out of your place might be hiring you to redesign it. You take the money and move on.”
