Friday, September 30th, 2011

I started seeing the tag “Muffin Milk” scrawled on walls around the neighborhood this past February. It is so incongruous, making illegal graffiti with such an innocuous concept, that it makes me laugh. Now it looks like the tagger has gone on to something else. Mickey Mouse body and is that a Nike swoosh?
Filed under: East Village, Photos, Street Art- , Pasted Paper - by gamma
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Friday, September 23rd, 2011

This Elm was cut down in 2003 and I shot these photos then. It may have been afflicted with Dutch Elm Disease. Some neighbor nailed wooden tags to the rings giving radical perspectives on local and national history starting in 1931. It looks like the tree was a few years older than that. The stump is no longer there, the tags lasted a few months. The tree was near the corner of 10th Street and Avenue B. No tree has grown there since.

I was inspired to dig these photos out of my archives by the initiation of the online interactive map for my Tompkins Square Park Tree Identification Project. This project is rolling out slowly, I have thousands of photos to edit and add.
I shot these photos in 2003 with my cheap first digital camera and have enhanced the tags for legibility. The 1981 tag refers to the discovery of AIDS. The 1988 tag has police riot scratched out and replaced with “dirty animal.” The 1989 tag mentions Dinkinsville though David Dinkins wasn’t Mayor until 1990.
Filed under: East Village, Parks, Politics, Street Art- , History, Tompkins Square Park, TSPTIP - by gamma
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Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Speak now or forever hold your piece. A Lipbone Redding photobomb.
Filed under: East Village, Photos, Street Art- , Pasted Paper, Stencils - by gamma
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Friday, September 2nd, 2011

New bit of pasted paper on the Bowery.
Filed under: East Village, Photos, Street Art- , Bowery, Pasted Paper - by gamma
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Friday, September 2nd, 2011

New bit of street art near Avenue B.
Filed under: East Village, Photos, Street Art- , Hitchhikers - by gamma
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Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

An edgy arrangement of shapes, colors and textures on display for the past couple of days on Avenue A.
Filed under: East Village, Manhattan, Street Art- , Avenue A, Sidewalk Art - by gamma
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Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

They’ve started on the foundation for whatever is going to be built on this lot on Suffolk and East Houston Streets. The building next-door contains a day-care center. A while back, after they started digging around the foundation, it was briefly declared unsafe. But then they build a massive steel buttress that apparently keeps the building from collapsing.
I’ve been seeing these top-hatted graffiti figures around. It is tagged ‘Almost Famous.’
I saw the biker swooping around from my right, I snapped to get him in the foreground, and add scale and action to an otherwise boring shot.
Filed under: Architecture, Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York City, Photos, Street Art- , Bikes, East Houston Street, Suffolk St. - by gamma
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