Fordham in the Bronx: Banksy Goes Bronx, Joins Unknowns

He strikes at night, just a man with a can.  A shake, then a hiss — it’s all done in seconds. “ALBINO POOP,” the wall now reads, paint dripping as the artist disappears.

“The reason I tag changes from time to time depending on my life circumstances, sometimes I do it to release anger, or stress or to overcome paranoia,” said the artist known as ALBINO POOP (AP), [in a conversation over text message].

He’s one of the dozens of graffiti artists, also known as writers, tagging walls in Belmont, just south of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. A walk past some of Belmont’s painted-up walls will reveal some of their names: “SCAP,” “Loud Boy Nation,” “SPUN” and a variety of other tags, unreadable to the untrained eye. But the one everyone seems to remember is “ALBINO POOP.”

AP is a former Fordham student who recently moved out of the neighborhood. He said the memorable name came from the first time he went tagging, using a can of shaving cream instead of paint.

“We tagged the area with huge piles of the stuff which looked like huge piles of white s***, or ALBINO POOPS. When I started getting more serious about graff I wanted to choose a name that was a little less serious that most of the other taggers I saw, so I stuck with the name ALBINO POOP.”

The tag has won AP some fans. “I’m really connected to the ALBINO POOP tag.  I’m Team ALBINO POOP,” said Katie Costello, FCRH ’15.  She lives off-campus and walks up Hoffman Street several times a day.  There, plywood walls blocking a parking lot from the street have become a hotbed of graffiti tags.

Costello appreciates the art. “I like the ALBINO POOP [tag] for the humor, but I do think that there is an artistic quality to any graffiti I’ve seen, even if it is just something written really badly.” She hesitates: “I guess if I lived here [for more than just two years] I’d be kind of annoyed.”

Just one block down Fordham Road from some of AP’s tags, an entirely different graffiti culture is thriving behind the bright purple walls of Tuff City.  The tattoo parlor’s walls on Belmont Avenue show brightly colored, gesticulating dragons grasping subways cars with their scaly claws. Tuff City’s backyard holds even more: Bugs Bunny on the side of a mock subway car, a scantily clad angel wading in the beach off of Rio de Janeiro and dozens of loud, bubble-lettered names.

A writer, who introduced himself as Criz 156, was using spray paint to shade in the gray of the human-sized Bugs Bunny on the wall.  Large-scale works like this, called pieces, can take hours, or even days to complete, as opposed to tags like AP’s which take just seconds.  But, Criz sees it all as part of the same culture.

“That’s how you start off,” he said.  “The first thing you pick up the pen and you just start writing. Next thing you know, you want your name everywhere. The thing is about fame. Getting your name recognized.”

Criz said Tuff City is a place where artists can work without having to worry about being hassled by the city. Tuff City’s “almost like a Mecca spot” for writers, who visit from as far as Amsterdam and Brazil. It is reminiscent of 5Pointz, the graffiti-covered Long Island City warehouse doomed to demolition and redevelopment as luxury apartments just this month. But Criz thinks Tuff City is even better in some ways. “This one’s more personal, more enclosed,” he said.

While he has never seen any Fordham students painting there, he does not have a problem with it.

“Anybody’s welcome, you know? We all come from different walks of life, but if you enjoy the art, you enjoy the art.  Art has no borders,” Criz said.

The Bronx is full of other great places to see graffiti as well. “The best street art in the Bronx is in the Hunts Point neighborhood,” said Kelly O’Brien, FCRH ’13, in a conversation over Facebook. She should know. O’Brien is currently in Montreal studying graffiti as a Fulbright scholar. At Rose Hill, she wrote her senior thesis on anti-feminist attitudes in graffiti and street art.

“The Point [is] one of the most isolated and ill-equipped areas of the borough,” she said, “but also one of the main stomping grounds of the collective TATS CRU. They had a major hand in a mural project a few years ago that totally changed the face of the area.”

Patrick Verel, GSAS ’13 has also taken an academic interest in graffiti, writing about legal graffiti murals to earn an M.A. in urban studies. He mentioned Hunts Point too and the neighboring South Bronx neighborhood of Port Morris. Closer to Rose Hill, he said there are good pieces in the Kingsbridge neighborhood north of campus, plus some good work on Third Avenue and behind the Botanica store on Webster and 189th.

All of those works pale in notoriety to a certain piece on 153rd St. in the Melrose section of the Bronx.  There, a young boy is depicted tagging “GHETTO 4 LIFE” on a wall while a tuxedoed butler stands waiting with more spray cans. It is not just the social commentary or originality of the piece that is turning heads but the artist that made it. British street artist Banksy is completing a one-month “residency on the streets of New York,” painting walls and putting up pieces in all five boroughs. The “Ghetto” piece was his first time painting in the Bronx.

“There was a really funny juxtaposition of people who lived in the area and hipsters trying to get good Instagrams, but it was awesome to see that everyone there was being very respectful of each other,” said Connor Moran, FCRH ’14, who went to see the piece soon after it was painted.

Moran even heard great conversation about the meaning of the piece at the site. “I think it’s a very cool way to bring art into the public eye,” he said.

It was just a matter of time before Banksy came to the borough. O’Brien said the Bronx has played an important role in the history of graffiti. It was the birthplace of hip hop, which is a parallel culture to graffiti. Plus, a number of subway lines terminate here, and graffiti culture took off when writers began tagging the side of subway cars.

It is a culture that modern writers like AP don’t see coming to an end.

“Most taggers will tell you that once you start, something inside you makes you want to do it forever, it’s extremely difficult to quit writing, and most people don’t quit unless they are forced to,” AP said.