The beginning of a trend
The city of Boston, which currently designates more than $250,000 a year for graffiti removal, has endured kaleidoscopic waves of vandalism since the 1980s. But Salem — where in 2007 police established a Community Impact Unit specifically (though not exclusively) to investigate and arrest vandals — didn’t see its disproportionately heavy graf scene explode until the mid ’90s.
Some date the North Shore epidemic to 1995, when members of the then-young graffiti crew FLOE (Famous Like Old English) convinced operators of the Clemenzi Industrial Park to allow them and other artists to legally utilize the facility’s 500-foot wall facing the Beverly commuter-rail tracks for its art. The area was already under routine attack by FLOE, and its members promised to limit its work to that space in exchange for amnesty.
Willing to cooperate, Clemenzi management agreed, and “The Wall” — or “The Beverly Wall,” as it’s called in graf circles — made its debut. According to one writer (as graffiti artists often refer to themselves and one another), who was partly responsible for securing the space and luring artists from around the world to paint there, “The Beverly Wall created a whole new microcosm of the scene on the North Shore, whereas the South Shore and Boston already had scenes. There wasn’t really much out here before that, but once we got The Wall, people started coming from as close as Connecticut and as far away as Europe.”
There had been active taggers north of Boston prior to The Wall; particularly in Lynn, where renowned artists such as RELM (real name: David Bogart) began bombing in the early ’90s. But before FLOE and a host of other budding crews introduced the craft to Beverly and surrounding suburban targets, the North Shore scene was relatively contained. One former Salem-based writer reminisces: “It wasn’t long after The Beverly Wall that towns like Salem started getting crushed. Lynn was a definite inspiration for a lot of us, but we helped spread the scene out. A lot of us moved to Boston, or at least started going there to write soon after that. Our crews were finally known, so we went to get up in bigger cities where more people could see us.”
By the mid ’90s, the South Shore graf scene, which previously dwarfed anything above Boston, was largely snuffed out. Influential members of the Weymouth crew RTK (Ready To Kill) were slapped with thousands of dollars worth of fines, and in 1996 a writer known as PRONE (real name: Steve Canniff) told the Patriot Ledger that few legitimate South Shore artists remained. But while such towns and cities as Norwell and Quincy cleaned up, writers spawned like gremlins between Boston and Salem. They smacked tunnels, walls, bridges, and other usual destinations to gain maximum exposure — the ultimate goal for the overwhelming majority of writers. Mostly, they sought subway and commuter-rail trains as the canvasses for their art.
For taggers attempting to win notoriety, a moving train is the equivalent, visibility-wise, of securing a spot for your work in the Louvre. But in doing so they unwittingly provoked a foe they were unprepared to battle: a tireless Irish woman with a badge who seemed all-consumed with stopping graffiti.
