PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Among the goals of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s Clean and Green Initiative is getting graffiti back under control. The city has been here before.
When Wilson Goode became mayor in 1984, his first priority was to clean up the graffiti that seemed to be on every visible surface. His highly successful Anti-Graffiti Network became the Mural Arts program that kept tagging at bay for decades.
As the head of the Community Life Improvement Program, known as CLIP, which cleans up wall scrawls, Tom Conway has been cleaning up graffiti for decades. Most of that time, he says, he felt that the city had a good handle on it.
Then came COVID-19.
“For the first time in my career, I felt like we were losing the war on graffiti in Philadelphia,” Conway said.
“The pandemic created a whole new breed of graffiti vandal. Many folks were not at work. Many folks did not go to school, and they picked up graffiti as their hobby.”
His own crew, reduced by the pandemic, couldn’t keep up. But now, he says, CLIP is back in full force — and catching up: “185,000 properties and street fixtures were cleaned of graffiti vandalism in fiscal year ’23. That’s the highest number we’ve ever done in the city’s history.”
Conway says CLIP is likely to do even more this year. And that’s important. He says the city learned in the ’80s, the last time graffiti was a serious problem in the city, that momentum is a necessary part of taming it.
“We had zero-tolerance zones. Broad Street was a zero-tolerance zone, so that any graffiti that went up on Broad Street was cleaned in 24 to 48 hours. We had crews on the street seven days a week,” Conway said.
That’s why he is negotiating with PennDOT now, to allow CLIP to clean graffiti from the state roads that run through the city, where it can sometimes linger. PennDOT notes it spent a half-million dollars cleaning graffiti in the five-county area over the last three years.
Mural Arts Philadelphia, too, is going back to its roots — involving taggers in mural-painting in a bid to convert their work from defacement to beautification. Executive Director Jane Golden points to three Puerto Rican-themed murals that transformed walls at 5th and Cambria streets in Fairhill, last year.
“It was shocking. Some big-name graffiti writers actually fell in love with painting murals and that’s exactly what we want,” she said.
Golden helped the city beat the problem 40 years ago and seems confident it can do so again.
“Mural Arts is 100% committed. Art everywhere!”
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