Tag this, baby

I was perusing Craigslist's Boston page today when I stumbled upon this entry.

What a great idea! Boston's Longfellow Bridge is gorgeous and I had long wondered about those stains that were on it for years. They kind of looked like fireworks, so I wasn't sure if it was a city-planned thing. But after reading that craigslist post, I found out it was actually graffiti. They did clean off the graffiti, but like the post says, it took the city ages to do it.

So I contacted the poster to ask how I could help out with all this new graffiti that's been showing up. Turns out, he's already received loads of responses from people wanting to help out. I think that's great, because it's too bad that some businesses and city departments just let the graffiti build up. It reminds me of the "broken window" effect I read about in the book The Tipping Point, which I strongly recommend reading.

Anyway, the broken window effect -- if you just let graffiti happen without cleaning it up right away, more will appear. Marc (the name of the poster) even wrote about that in the editorial he sent the Boston Globe -- but the paper unfortunately didn't print his letter. He did send it to me, so here it is for you all to enjoy:

******
The Boston Globe
To the editor:

Hooray for the Charles River Conservancy in pressing the case for cleaning the Charles River Bridges, but the July 26 article on graffiti made no mention of a new and greater visual obtrusion: the graffiti on the Charles River retaining wall. These large tags--unavoidable by boaters or the 70,000 daily motorists on Memorial Drive--first appeared on the wall by the Double Tree Hotel earlier this summer. Nothing has been done to remove the vandalism and--surprise!--the number of tags on the embankment has grown.

Acting promptly is the best approach to dealing with graffiti. This is the lesson I learned when I worked for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority as it tackled what was considered an implacable plague of graffiti on New York subways. The approach was to have a "rabbit team" to remove any new graffiti tag on every overhauled car in the system on the day the tag appeared. It worked. By a) denying the taggers a permanent easel to show off their work, and b) showing that the agency cared about the look of their trains, the graffiti stopped. After an initial period of activity, the rabbit team put itself out of business. The reputation of the transit agency skyrocketed and the transit authority president, David Gunn, could have been elected mayor for life.

There is a political lesson here too for the Department of Conservation and Recreation. By waiting more than a year to clean the paint splatter vandalism from the Longfellow Bridge, DCR's predecessor agency, the Metropolitan District Commission, certainly didn't help its cause against a governor who wanted to reorganize it out of existence. Now the DCR has a new chance to show that it can care for its assets. Cleaning the embankment shouldn't take a year, and it doesn't need a million dollars. A boat, some staff, and a hundred dollars in graffiti remover would finish the job in an afternoon.

Sincerely,
Marc Warner
Cambridge
******

So, I won't be able to help out this Saturday because Marc says he's already reached a "critical mass" of volunteers. But I told him to keep me posted on any upcoming clean-ups he has.

This graffiti is similar to people who litter. I have said things to people who blatantly litter in front of me, only to be answered with a string of obscenities and choice hand gestures. But I still feel like I should say something. People just don't realize what a big deal it is to throw your fast food bag out on the street or to be dropping your cigarette butts all over the place. If no one says anything, then they'll just keep doing it.

Right, whatever, even though I say something people keep doing it -- and they even get to brighten their days by cussing out some skinny chick who likes keeping the planet all pretty n stuff. But I will keep saying things to litterbugs!

(Btw, that link I just sent you to, the efreak one, is the archives for an old website I wrote for. My handle was "rev." It's chock full of goodness from me and many other hilarious and brilliant writers -- some of whom now reside at the new version of Efreak.)