Graffiti is writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written "monikers" to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.
Riverside Park is a scenic public park on the waterfront of the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The park measures 4 miles (6.4 km) long and 100 to 500 feet wide, running between the Hudson River and Henry Hudson Parkway to the west and the serpentine Riverside Drive to the east.
In the United States, the term mole people is sometimes used to describe homeless people living under large cities in abandoned subway, railroad, flood, sewage tunnels, and heating shafts.
Jennifer Ninel Toth is an American journalist and writer.
Dark Days is an American documentary film directed, produced, and photographed by the English documentarian Marc Singer that was completed and released in 2000. Shot during the mid-1990s, it follows a group of people who lived in the Freedom Tunnel section of the Amtrak system at the time. DJ Shadow created new music for the documentary and also let Singer use some of his preexisting songs.
The West Side Line, also called the West Side Freight Line, is a railroad line on the west side of the New York City borough of Manhattan. North of Penn Station, from 34th Street, the line is used by Amtrak passenger service heading north via Albany to Toronto; Montreal; Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York; Burlington, Vermont; and Chicago. South of Penn Station, a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) elevated section of the line, abandoned since 1980, has been transformed into an elevated park called the High Line. The south section of the park from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street opened in 2009 and the second section up to 30th Street opened in 2011, while the final section to 34th Street opened in 2014.
Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art.
Zoo York is a style and social philosophy inspired by the New York City graffiti art subculture of the 1970s. Its name originates from a subway tunnel running underneath the area of the Central Park Zoo. This tunnel, called the Zoo York Tunnel, or simply "Zoo York," was a haunt of very early "old school" graffiti writers who hung out with the hippies around the Central Park Bandshell in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Since the 1980s, the area surrounding the Sydney inner west suburb of Newtown, Australia, including the suburbs of Newtown, Enmore, Erskineville, Camperdown and St Peters, has been known for its wide range of prominent graffiti and street art on walls. The public visual art in the Newtown area consists of a variety of styles and methods of execution, including large-scale painted murals, hand-painted political slogans, hand-painted figurative designs, spray painted semi-abstract designs "tags"), and other stylistic developments such as stencil art and street poster art, "Yarn bombing", and sculptural items cast from plaster and other materials.
Chris Pape is an American painter and graffiti artist. He started tagging subway tunnels and subway cars in 1974 as "Gen II" before adopting the tag "Freedom". Pape is best known for his numerous paintings in the eponymous Freedom Tunnel, an Amtrak tunnel running underneath Manhattan's Riverside Park. Prominent paintings in the Freedom Tunnel attributed to Pape include his "self-portrait", featuring a male torso with a spray-can head, and "There's No Way Like the American Way", a parody of Coca-Cola advertising and tribute to the evicted homeless of the tunnel. Another theme of Freedom's work is black and silver recreations of classical art, including a reinterpretation of the Venus de Milo and a full train car recreation of the iconic hands from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Chris Pape also was one of the first documentarians to cover the mole people, homeless living underground in the Freedom Tunnel.
Florentin is a neighborhood in the southern part of Tel Aviv, Israel, named for Solomon Florentin, a Greek Jew who purchased the land in the late 1920s. Development of the area was spurred by its proximity to the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway.
The 79th Street Boat Basin is a marina located in the Hudson River on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, within Riverside Park at the western end of 79th Street. Maintained and operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, it is the only facility in the city that allows year-round residency in boats, so it is a hub for houseboats in New York City. The marina closed for rebuilding in 2021 and was still closed as of July 2024.
Voices in the Tunnels is a 2008 documentary directed by Vic David, a New York City filmmaker and a graduate from New York University. It explores the lives of people who lived in the New York City Subway tunnels.
RISK, also known as RISKY, is a Los Angeles–based graffiti writer and contemporary artist often credited as a founder of the West Coast graffiti scene. In the 1980s, he was one of the first graffiti writers in Southern California to paint freight trains, and he pioneered writing on "heavens", or freeway overpasses. He took his graffiti into the gallery with the launch of the Third Rail series of art shows, and later created a line of graffiti-inspired clothing. In 2017, RISK was knighted by the Medici Family.
Graffiti in Iran consists of different styles. Some are slogans painted by governmental organizations, and some are works of art by regular citizens. During the last few years, Tehran Municipality has been drawing graffiti in order to beautify the city. Much governmental graffiti regards the Iranian Revolution, Islamic Republic of Iran policies and The Politics of Resistance. Pro-democracy activists are also continuing a political graffiti campaign in Tehran. Islamic graffiti can also be seen around the city. Graffiti has long served as a medium of expression through Iran's complicated political history.
In recent years, Atlanta has been called one of the USA's best cities for street art. Street artists have prominently created murals in Krog Street Tunnel, along the BeltLine, and in neighborhoods across the city. The street art conference, Living Walls, the City Speaks, originated in Atlanta in 2009.
Sane and Smith were the names used by a New York graffiti duo, composed of David Smith ("Sane") and his brother Roger Smith ("Smith"), active during the 1980s.
Teun Voeten is a Dutch photojournalist and cultural anthropologist specializing in war and conflicts. In 1996 he published the book Tunnelmensen about homeless people living in an old railroad tunnel in Manhattan. He also wrote books on the war in Sierra Leone and made a photo book on the drug violence in Mexico, on which subject he wrote a PhD thesis at Leiden University.
Tunnel People is an anthropological-journalistic account describing an underground homeless community in New York City. It is written by war photographer and anthropologist Teun Voeten and was initially published in his native Dutch in 1996, and a revised English version was published by the Oakland-based independent publishing house PM Press in 2010.
Subterranean New York City relates to the area beneath the surface level of New York City; the natural features, man-made structures, spaces, objects, and cultural creation and experience. Like other subterranea, the underground world of New York City has been the basis of TV series, documentaries, artwork, and books.
