Midtown Tags

I used to be fairly obsessed with documenting the tags that beautify Kansas City. Then I got, uh, distracted or something. But these new-ish pieces off Broadway and Westport Road were worth stopping to shoot. They've blacked out the murals that were there last time I explored this alley with my Nikon.

Bunny

My friend's daughter modeled for this bunny, true story. She's, I think, eleven years old, and she's the subject of a Scribe portrait. How awesome is that? I guess she got to eat dinner with him and everything.

My all time favorite Scribe is the billy goat that's in the background of this blog, which has sadly been tagged by idiot gangsters and then covered over. But this one is probably a close second.

Portraits in Decay

I took this picture a couple years back, this old semi trailer has been sitting just off the bike trail, all tagged up, for as long as I can remember.

The enormous tire has been there for a long damn time, too. It's massive, like something off an ore truck or something. Maybe a big Caterpillar earth mover.

And then something ate the trailer. Or more precisely, someone cut it up and hauled a bunch of it off. Not the whole thing, mind you, it's got a recognizable bit of the tags and all that. I don't know how to account for it, if it was an attempt to clean up the area, it's the most half-assed cleanup since my desk.

Right Under My Nose

I'm into graffiti, so I'm kinda embarrassed that it took me so long to notice this building. It's like a hundred feet from Westport Road on Central and I pass within that hundred feet or so of it three to five times a week on my way home from work. Pretty much the whole building is wrapped, and it's wrapped by quality writers including Roast and Scribe.

For the uninitiated, Scribe is like a poet laureate of taggers, if there was a Nobel Prize for graffiti or a Pulitzer for tags, he'd win it. And really he's more a muralist than a tagger, he doesn't just stylize a word until you can't read it, he creates fantastic characters and tells elaborate stories with his pieces.

I don't mean that praise of Scribe to demean the other writers I'm sharing here. I wouldn't bother taking the picture, let alone blogging it, if I didn't consider it art worth preserving and sharing. These things are fleeting, even legit walls get painted over and knocked down too soon. They get vandalized by wannabe kids, or by people paid by the city to deface them. But they're beautiful, and they add flavor to a neighborhood, a little hot sauce for your alley, your boarded up (or sometimes fully occupied and commercially vibrant) building.

Wet Paint

For a couple of reasons, when riding home I tend to turn off Beardsley onto the lower deck of the 12th Street Bridge riding home. One reason is the 'truck stop' gas station/liquor/convenience store where I often carpe brewski for that last stretch home (the bottle of Guinness commonly seen in my bottle cage).

Plus there's no bike lane past 12th, it gets skinnier and cars on Beardsley seem to think that speed limit sign said 55 not 35. But as I went to make my usual turn I saw a flash of color. I had to check it out. After procuring a bomber of Guinness, of course. I rode back up to Beardsley and went down to photograph two tags so new I wondered if the paint was dry to the touch.

West Bottoms Update

So I'm riding home from work and as I pass by Black Label Cycles, I see a couple of guys re-doing the whole tag wall on a side of the building.

So this made me realize I had been neglecting my precious West Bottoms tag galleries. City people come cover up some with gray, but even without that, the writers will come back themselves and cover over their old work. Especially with legal walls, there's a limited amount of time to take it in. The Scribe billygoat I framed a 24 x 36 poster of for my living room wall is long gone.

One of the guys repainting Black Label Cycles, I said there were lots of other walls in the West Bottoms to tag up before redoing one and he said, 'Well, there's the matter of getting permission.' Okay if you want to be a stickler.

But then, talking to one business owner as I shot some of these pics (I won't say which, that might cause problems that shouldn't happen), I got another angle.

He said, 'I came here one Saturday and these guys were painting my fucking building. I got in their face, I was like, who told you this was okay? They were like, Well, there were already gang tags here, we were just covering them up with something better.'

And realizing they were right, he let them finish. Then he got a letter from the city that he could be fined for being urban blight and he got madder about that than he ever was at the taggers. He told city hall to shove it up their blighted asses and apparently they did.

I was curious about Black Label's signs. The taggers have it as Black 'Label' Cycles, which is how me and Spellcheck see it. But there's a sign cut out of steel hung out of the side of the building that has it as 'Black Lable.' I've made plenty of txpos in my day, probably even today, but shouldn't you proofread before you carve it out in steel and hang it out there?

I run into a lot of photographers in this neighborhood and I asked one the other day, it's starting to wake up, where are you going to go for urban decay backdrops when the West Bottoms is all gentrified and urban renewed?

He said maybe East St. Louis. Seems a long ways to go.