Hip-Hop You Don’t Stop: Livin’ in a Tagger’s Paradise

How far ahead of Seattle is Redmond? Say seventeen years – that’s how long it’s been since Redmond solved its graffiti problem by establishing Redmond Skate Park’s free graffiti wall. Redmond’s Old Fire House Teen Center even runs a school that turns innocent kids into hip-hop Rembrandts in three days flat. “It is an art form,” says Chris Cullen, who administers the Graff 101 class, taught by Northwest Leadership Foundation’s Fab-5 group (August 18–20).

Last year’s Redmond Skate Park Graff 101 project. Courtesy of Old Fire House Teen Center.

But Seattle does not yet officially get graffiti art. Last month, the city council’s hired sleuths reported 556 instances of graffiti, but “did not find any instances of what could be called artistic tagging (‘street art’).” They don’t teach art appreciation at the police academy, and Seattle presumably hopes to police the problem away.

The Seattle draft report does praise free walls with accompanying graffiti schools, like Redmond’s. But it warns that Portland cops found free walls soon exceed their borders, spreading the spray paint tentacles to surrounding streets. Seattle policy is influenced by sociologist James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” theory. Leave one window broken, and a neighborhood goes to hell; repair that window promptly, and the contagion of destructive chaos never spreads.

Redmond’s graffiti arts program both vindicates the pro-art agenda and supports the broken-windows theory. “We had a huge problem in the early ’90s,” says Redmond police spokesman Jim Bove. “One of our officers, Bill Corson, went to the kids and said, ‘What can we do to help you stop painting on the city?’” They got a place to paint at the Skate Park. “In 1993, our numbers dropped, like, overnight,” says Bove. Instead of sixty complaints a month, they got twenty. “Now we average four per month, which is practically nothing compared to the issues we had prior to the wall.”

But the Skate Park also proves that it’s crucial to keep that first window (or spray paint tentacle) from breaking the social contract. Rivals still tag Redmond’s free wall about every other month. Their work is swiftly erased.

The key to the graffiti solution seems to be: if you respect art, so will they (except for a few idiots). When Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood was recently struck by a mad arsonist, the chamber of commerce sponsored a vast graffiti-style mural on the fence guarding a burnt-out block. “I hope anybody that needs expression through a spray can just grows a brain and walks on by,” said chamber president Steve Gilberto in January. They did so. Graffitists also grew brains on Capitol Hill, respecting the tenant-commissioned mural at the Monique Lofts. “There’s a kind of code,” explains Cullen.

“[The Skate Park wall] wasn’t telling kids, ‘No! Go away,’” says Bove. “It was, ‘Come here and do it right.’ Everyone needs a place to express themselves.” •