How Dr. J helped Philadelphia become the ‘Mural Capital of the World’

Five minutes. That’s all Jane Golden had with Julius Erving, the 76ers star’s handler said. Not a second more.

“Fine,” Golden told him. “You can bring in a timer.”

Golden and her team wanted to paint a mural of Dr. J, so they tracked him down in the spring of 1989 at a TV shoot in Center City. Golden can speak with the rapid pace of someone rattling off the side effects at the end of a prescription drug commercial. Five minutes was plenty.

Hi, Dr. J. My name is Jane Golden. I work with young people. We work in communities. We’re the Anti-Graffiti Network.

“He goes ‘Wow. You talk really fast,’” Golden said. “‘What would you like to do?’”

Golden told Dr. J how a famous muralist from Los Angeles agreed to fly to Philly and work with the young artists — many of whom were once graffiti taggers — as long as he could paint Dr. J. Golden thought it was a big ask. Dr. J was a star. He said OK.

“I said, ‘Really?,” Golden said. “He was so gracious. I was like, ‘Oh my God. He said yes.’ We were so excited.”

The mural was finished that summer on Ridge Avenue with the 6-foot-7 Dr. J standing four stories tall. It was an instant hit once people saw the Doctor towering over the neighborhood.

“As we were putting it up, people were literally screeching to a halt, going, ‘It’s the Doc,’” Golden said. “People were coming up to us and giving us food and saying thanks. The neighbors were cheering. It was amazing.”

For Golden’s program, it was a turning point. The program — which later became Mural Arts and celebrated its 40th anniversary last year — soon grew into a powerhouse, painting murals in every corner of the city. There are more than 4,000 murals in Philadelphia, which is often referred to as the “Mural Capital of the World.” And Dr. J played a key part.

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“It reinforced to us the hunch that we had: that art mattered and that it would matter in the life of young people and the life of a community,” said Golden, the executive director of Mural Arts. “It was catalytic in so many ways.”

Golden was born in Margate, N.J., and moved to Los Angeles after graduating in 1977 from Stanford. She painted murals in L.A., which was then the hub for outdoor art. But Golden moved home after being diagnosed with lupus and doctors were not hopeful.

“It was a pretty grim part in my life,” Golden said.

She traveled from Margate to Philly for treatment and read about the new mayor’s plan to clean up the city’s graffiti. W. Wilson Goode said children who were caught spray painting would be forced to scrub walls and join an arts program. Golden went home to Margate and mailed her resumé to the mayor’s office.

Two weeks later, Golden’s father greeted her on the front porch with good news. Oliver St. Clair Franklin, Philadelphia’s deputy representative for arts and culture, called and he wanted Golden to call him in the morning.

“I think I started calling the City of Philadelphia at 6 in the morning. I was so excited,” Golden said. “I was like, ‘They’re not answering. I wonder why.’”

Golden soon came to Philly to meet Franklin and Tim Spencer, the director of the Anti-Graffiti Network. She was hired part-time for $12,500 a year but could not have a desk.

“I didn’t understand why exactly, but I’m flexible so that wasn’t a big deal,” Golden said. “Tim said my job is to channel the negative energy of graffiti writing into something positive. It was very short and very vague.”

Artists joined the Anti-Graffiti Network after they were caught by police or if they turned themselves in and agreed to sign an amnesty pledge, promising to never scrawl graffiti again.

“Which we knew wasn’t really true, but it was a beginning,” Golden said. “There’s always a way in.”

The city gave Golden an old undercover police car in which the trunk popped open every time the horn honked. She also received a decommissioned ambulance.

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“A graffiti artist named Sub drove it and thought he could go through lights,” Golden said. “No, you’re not an ambulance. You’re an artist trying to beautify the city. You have to obey traffic laws.”

They held programs at recreation centers, traveled to different parts of the city, and spent Saturdays at the Art Museum. The program was meant to curb the city’s graffiti problem and quickly become much more. It created pathways to city jobs and helped the artists enroll in college. The Anti-Graffiti Network had 3,000 children painting murals in the summer and employed hundreds throughout the year.

“We all were inspired by art. It was our common ground. Me and the graffiti writers,” Golden said. “This wasn’t a formal art program. Anti-Graffiti was really a cleanup program with tons of young people who loved art. They had creativity and some had extraordinary talent, genius even. But with zero opportunities. Anti-Graffiti really became not an ‘anti-graffiti’ in that sense of clamping down on young people but instead a youth development program.”

The program took over an office in the old City Hall Annex before being given a rundown space on North Broad Street. Nothing worked right there, but the room was large. It was perfect. Golden still didn’t have a desk.

“We were doing murals everywhere,” Golden said. “I almost had to pinch myself like, ‘I am so lucky to have this job.’ Our scaffolding was always stolen. We had the wrong paint. I always puzzled why we had these big brushes. We were always begging for art supplies. We were always asking for SEPTA tokens. But it was so great. The talent was so huge and the impact was really profound.”

The Anti-Graffiti Network received a grant in 1989 for a portrait mural, something the program had yet to do. Golden introduced the artists to the work of Kent Twitchell, whom she assisted years earlier in Los Angeles with a terrifying project on a 10-story building. The kids wanted Twitchell to come to Philly.

But the grant was worth only $4,000 and Twitchell usually charged around $50,000. They pushed Golden to call him anyway. So she did. He agreed to do it, but only if the subject could be Dr. J in a suit.

“I said, ‘Why?’” Golden said. “He said, ‘I want kids to think beyond basketball.’”

Twitchell came to Philadelphia and met with Erving for the photo shoot. All the graffiti artists were there to see Dr. J, who had recently retired from the Sixers and was still one of the city’s most popular figures.

“We know he’s tall. But he’s tall,” Golden said. “He walks in and we’re silent. He had his audience.”

Twitchell didn’t charge his normal rate, but he did need his usual art supplies, which were unheard-of for the program that drove around in an old ambulance. They used parachute cloth and mural paints that cost $60 a gallon.

“My old boss said, ‘What’s wrong with beige from Sherwin-Williams?’” Golden said.

Golden’s team did a lot of work in North Philly and often used Ridge Avenue to cut across the city. That’s how Mural Arts found the perfect wall for the Dr. J mural on the side of a house on Ridge between Green and Spring Garden Streets. They knocked on the door and the owner agreed to give them his wall as easily as Dr. J said he would pose. Everything fell into place.

Twitchell taught the artists how to pick out color tones, asking them to stand on the corner and describe what they saw beyond the wall. They pointed to the church steeple in the distance and Twitchell taught the graffiti artists how they could match the background of Dr. J to it.

“It was such an educational experience,” Golden said. “It made young people really believe in their potential to create public art. I think for communities, they realized that public art is really a way to see ourselves in an image. Sports figures are really important in the psyche of our city and I think this was a really positive mark on the landscape.”

The Anti-Graffiti Network shut down in 1996 after Spencer died and Golden considered going to law school before her brother dissuaded her. Golden met with Mayor Ed Rendell and asked about starting an art program with the city. Like Dr. J, Rendell heard Golden’s pitch and said OK. Golden said she wanted the program — Mural Arts — to be positioned under Michael DiBerardinis in the Department of Recreation.

“And guess what?” Golden said. “When we started working for the Department of Rec, Michael D said, ‘We don’t have a desk for you.’”

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Golden didn’t need one. The program that once received a boost from Dr. J was back. There’s now artwork like the Dr. J mural in nearly every neighborhood as Philadelphia has become defined by murals.

“I always thought of Philadelphia as a quilt, like you have all these different neighborhoods,” Golden said. “But art had a way of shining a light on our distinction but also underscoring our commonality. There’s something about the grit and spirit of Philadelphia that responded to public art.”

The murals, Golden said, are like an autobiography of the city and serve as an outdoor art museum. Some of the paintings are abstract, but most are of people who helped shape Philadelphia. Like Dr. J, who needed just five minutes to say OK.

“At the time, we had no idea what it was going to mean to the city of Philadelphia and far beyond,” Golden said. “People from all over the world come to see that mural. It’s very universal. It has transcended time. That mural, I don’t feel like is dated in any way. Even now, I think visitors from out of town drive by and go, ‘Whoa.’ That’s wonderful. It was the response we had back in the day.

“It just shows you the power of art. I always felt like there is a transcendent power of art. I think that mural became like a beacon, inviting people into a civic space and also tapped into the city’s collective imagination to think about more. That’s what good art does. It gets to yearn for more.”

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