City Paints Over Legal Graffiti on Lower East Side Building

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — Local artists are demanding answers after the city last week painted over the bright yellow building at 118 Orchard St. that was loaded with legal graffiti. The city said it had received a 311 complaint and was given permission by the building's previous owner to buff the building. But community members said the current developer of the building had given artists permission to graffiti all over the building, which the developer plans to demolish in the next few months.

A local pair of graffiti-trained artists under the name MINT & SERF commissioned several people in late June to tag all over the building for three days. The duo had approached the current owner of the building, developer David Escava, and made an agreement with him that they could legally blast the building with graffiti before it's demolished, they told the publication Mass Appeal. Wallplay, the company that leased the building for three years before Escava bought it, had a farewell party in July and invited everyone to graffiti the building. Escava told Mass Appeal he never gave the city permission to buff it.

"We know that graffiti can take the form of public art, not just vandalism, and we make every effort to alert property owners before dispatching a crew to clean a building," a spokesperson for the New York City Economic Development Corporation said in a statement sent to Patch. "In this instance our crew didn't recognize this as commissioned work, and we had a standing waiver on file granting the city permission to immediately remove any reported graffiti from the property."

Laura O'Reilly, the owner of Wallplay, who commissioned MINT & SERF's project, said the city's excuse for buffing the building is "B.S."

"Wallplay has a longstanding history of featuring art installations, we had public art billboards for three years at that location," she told Patch in an email. "We are known in the neighborhood for doing massive art installations on the facade of 118 Orchard — if they did any research whatsoever, they would have known that we most likely wanted it there, that it was, in fact, legal. The project has been on the homepage of our website since the installation went up, all they had to do was a quick Google search!"

"It's very strange for the city to mistake it for illegal graffiti considering that we were out there for three days with lifts painting a three-floor building," MINT told Mass Appeal. "The local police department was put on notice about our project and the local precinct was fully aware of the fact that it was legal."

118 Orchard St. before:

118 Orchard St. after:

"It was such a magical and incredible moment to have that raw and unapologetic massive graffiti piece on the corner — an homage to the real New York, gone overnight," O'Reilly wrote.

But O'Reilly has a feeling artists might take matters into their own hands and tag the building all over again because the demolition date is still uncertain.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Wallplay