Thursday, January 20, 2011

Verizon brass content to keep battling graffiti artists on 13th Street

We've been documenting the battle for the brown wall here at the Verizon building on 13th Street at Second Avenue... (Previously.)


At DNAinfo, Patrick Hedlund checks in with the Verizon folks to see what the next steps are.

"We'll try to clean it off, and the next thing you know…" said Verizon employee Sam Ashraf, who manages the phone company's retail store in the building. "It just looks bad."

The NYPD's 9th Precinct has observed the building for years, even sending undercover officers to stake out the site and making numerous arrests, said Det. Jaime Hernandez, a 22-year-old veteran of the neighborhood.

To deal with the graffiti scourge, Hernandez suggested that Verizon bring in a muralist to paint the wall, noting that street art rarely gets run over by vandals because of the respect given to the work.

However, a Verizon spokesperson said that they don't allow murals to be painted on their buildings, and that they'd simply continue to paint over any new graffiti.

Sounds good coming from the company HQ. But what about the people on the ground here?

Ashraf told Hedlund that he's tired of seeing the eyesore each day on his way to work.

"It's miserable," he said. "But it's New York."

12 comments:

  1. Hey Verizon, customer here. I have your MIFi mobile device (love it) and even used to have a landline until it magically stopped one day. But that's another story...

    Why not a big Verizon iPhone mural ad here? By Chico? Or other LES artist? I walk by this wall almost everyday. With my lousy AT&T service it wold be a nice reminder to get the Verizon iPhone rather than a brown wall, which reminds me to do something else when I get home.

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  2. "...a Verizon spokesperson said that they don't allow murals to be painted on their buildings..."

    Then what's this?

    A community mural there is a great idea.

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  3. Nice one, T.E.V.B.

    I'll make that a separate post.

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  4. I can't believe they're willing to spend money on paint and labor and, even worse, waste the time of the NYPD. How stupid is this? A mural on that wall would be great and might even make Verizon seem like a customer-friendly company.

    (I'm still reeling after a horrific Verizon experience that has caused me to never, ever be their customer again.)

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  5. If they really have such a problem with it, and want to do something about it, why don't they just install cameras and staff to monitor. They can certainly afford it.
    I mean upping the city invasive camera count from 6,345,334,000 to 6,345,334,001 shouldn't be much of a big deal.

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  6. The detective is a 22 year old veteran of the neighborhood or 22 year veteran of the nabe?

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  7. Verizon is possibly the only company left that has customer service hours limited to 9-6, Mon-Fri.

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  8. detective hernandez has been at the 9th precinct for 22 years.

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  9. I'm glad they keep browning out the graffitti. Not that I like plain brown walls or overblown telecommunications corporations. I just hate graffiti and hate that regular hardworking taxpaying neighborhood people have to look upon this narcissistic childish futile not to mention aesthetically retarded scribbling all over the place. Tagging is the perfect expression of a pointless existence though really. Hey look at me Im a drain on society! Taggers, I hope they just keep banging their unemployed heads against this brown wall, like a retarded sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill again and again and I hope that Verizon has enough brown paint to cover those walls for the next hundred years.

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  10. keep painting over the vandalism Verizon.. its your buildng and they are criminals and their graffiti looks awful. this is not 1979 - move on losers.

    suggestion: put up cameras. that will help nail these morons.

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  11. Your the moron. They already have cameras. You think they should pay some one ten bucks an hour to sit around and watch a wall all day. Graffiti writers do stuff in front of cameras all the time. Even if you got a cop sitting watching they still have enough time to get away. Its paint get over it. Takes one second to do graffiti and one second to clean it up. No one gets hurt. You sound like you should move back to suburbia.

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