How much better this city would be if we didn’t indulge our vandals by calling them artists. As in “graffiti artist.”
The last few days have given us a fresh reminder. Just before the holiday weekend, the body of 42-year-old Jason Wulf — known by the tag DG — was found along the tracks at a Brooklyn subway station. Apparently he’d touched the third rail.
Upon news of his death, friends began paying homage by heading to the same station to spray-paint his tag all over the walls. When cops chased them away, they headed to other subway stations.
On Tuesday, two men were arrested inside a Queens subway station for painting graffiti shortly after Wulf’s funeral nearby.
In some ways, the fresh vandalism committed in Wulf’s name is an appropriate honor for a man whose criminal record stretches back to 1985, and who’d been arrested 13 times since 2008 alone.
We do not deny that the man may have had some artistic talent. In recent years, Wulf even did some canvases. But defacing property one doesn’t own is not incidental to graffiti. It is its essence, and its re-emergence in New York is a highly troubling sign given our history.
Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing for two decades, out-of-control graffiti — especially in the subways — came to symbolize New York City’s downward spiral into seemingly incurable urban decay.
It’s no coincidence, then, that subway graffiti was among the first quality-of-life crimes Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, chose to tackle head-on.
We don’t mean to denigrate the tragedy of Jason Wulf’s death. But Wulf is dead because he was in a place he shouldn’t have been, likely doing what he shouldn’t have been doing. For more than 30 years, this man was an active contributor to the blight that once made New York a national symbol for urban malaise.
And there’s nothing romantic about it.