As a person who grew up in Minnesota, I know how long the months of February and March drag on as we wait for the brown grass to transition to colorful flowers and ice-free lakes. A prominent contributor to such a drab winter landscape is the monotone streetscape itself, with its gray pavement and stainless steel posts, and Minneapolis’ unique red-backed stop signs repeated at each intersection. These places aren’t welcoming and are void of culture, which reflects upon the city itself.
Nicollet Mall and downtown Minneapolis as a whole come to mind when thinking of examples of “drab.” A moment that triggered me to notice the flaws of our downtown was when multiple out-of-state students at the University of Minnesota mentioned how dead and unwelcoming our core was compared with ones they were more familiar with, like Boston and Chicago. Why wasn’t there a “Gum Wall” or any hot dog vendors?
While we have the Bob Dylan mural and the Stone Arch Bridge to show the world, we lack a real downtown culture in Minneapolis. This is largely the result of decades of planning, but is also rooted in criminalizing the acts that help make a city vibrant, such as graffiti and street vending. The idea of getting a hot dog on the street is foreign to residents of the Twin Cities partly because of xenophobic, racist rhetoric from the late 19th century, preceding the inception of the skyway system which permanently killed the street life of the urban core. In the “bustling, foot traffic-heavy city” of Minneapolis, you used to be able to get corn-wrapped hot tamales on the street. That’s not talking about the 1990s, it’s talking about the 1890s! The city and local newspapers began to take aim at what Heavy Table (Substack) calls the “dirty looking individuals, not infrequently of the colored persuasion” commonly selling roasted chestnuts on the streets.
The City of Minneapolis created a licensing system for food carts, requiring a $75-a-year license (equivalent to over $2,600 today) and limited the area where they could be operated to what is essentially downtown north of South Seventh Street. St. Paul city officials followed suit in 1902, seeking to create a more “moral” atmosphere. Today, city licensing fees are in the $1,000 range, but that is before any public health inspection fees, bureaucracy and the cost of acquiring the necessary equipment. We’ve legislated street culture and art out of our downtowns, and we’ve come to reap the benefits of that years later.
A History of Whitewashing
Infamous 20th-century architect Le Corbusier, who was behind the modernist movement said in Decorative Art of Today:
”Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people.”
Corbusier was a proponent of using urban design and architecture to impose conservative social order, and collaborated with Phillippe Petain of Vichy France during World War II. He saw curves as “feminine” and therefore undesirable, and sought a pure environment that centered work and paternalism instead of community. The City of Minneapolis’ Clean City program’s anti-graffiti campaigns are the descendants of this line of thinking, and indirectly reinforce a sterile social order that erases social struggle to create an artificial urban experience for the few. It’s a restriction on speech in a time when reactionary movements seek to eradicate entire minority groups.
The basis for anti-graffiti legislation in the U.S. is rooted in our most important city, New York City. During its “recovery era” in the 1980s, Mayor Ed Koch sought to criminalize certain undesirable behaviors using the flawed “broken windows theory,“ eliminating and imprisoning repeat graffiti offenders for up to three years. Anti-graffiti activists and elected officials often characterized the artists as “animals” and “psychologically defective beings.” It is easy to characterize the draconian responses to graffiti as “necessary,” in turn justifying the other punitive actions required to maintain a capitalist neoliberal state.
As Ronald Kramer wrote in the book ”The Rise of Legal Graffiti Writing in New York and Beyond”:
”Particular strategies of urban growth include enticing corporations to locate their headquarters in the city, gentrifying neighborhoods, and transforming the environment into a hospitable tourist destination for privileged social classes. As their discourse makes clear, political elites perceive graffiti as a threat to such interests and something that must therefore be eradicated from the city.”
When we pick and choose what is and what isn’t acceptable in a hierarchical society, 99.9% of the time it falls in favor of the dominant, ruling class. In Tampa, Florida, the police department painted a “Back the Blue” mural on a public street without city permits in August 2020, and it was still there on the most recent StreetView in 2023. Locally, the former mayor of West St. Paul painted “Blue Lives Matter” on their fence after their neighbor was forced to remove the “Black Lives Matter” mural on their fence following enforcement of city code. The ex-mayor’s painting was quickly removed; however it illustrates that the norm is “Blue Lives Matter” because it doesn’t need a sign, fence or wall to show itself on.
The errant message was anti-racism, the city took action, and “normalcy” was returned. Portland, Oregon, activists discovered that anti-graffiti efforts were focusing on targeting anti-abatement postings instead of all illegal instances of vandalism. This is without mentioning the numerous LGBTQ+ murals and monuments that are defaced yearly, with the whitewashing of a prominent mural in San Francisco being upheld in the courts. Whitewashing, criminalizing and forcefully sanitizing the urban streetscape is another way we’ve created a downtown that functions as an anti-destination instead of a destination. On a drab winter January day I’d rather see a colorful Lake Street bridge instead of a beige one with gray patches haphazardly covering the art someone else did. The endless war on graffiti is wasting resources, sanitizing our culture and destroying the environment.
What Makes a ‘Cool’ Street Element?
Street poles of Capitol Hill: If you’ve been to the gayborhood of Capitol Hill in Seattle, or the city in general, you’ll notice the unique street art and “bulging street poles” with years of posters on them. You’d be hard-pressed not to see the queer stickers and drawings all over the public streetscape, claiming the space for themselves. That doesn’t exist here at all, because of the city’s repeated successes in erasing and sanitizing the local queer atmosphere and lack of public posting locations.
Sigil in Toronto: After arriving in Toronto for university this past fall, I quickly noticed several signs affixed to street poles that were definitely out of place. Sigil is an alternative reality game much like Pokemon GO that invites locals to explore “The Gloam” and create unique, fun experiences. Why not encourage goofy, innovative stuff like this to exist on our public infrastructure?
Minneapolis’ Approach to Graffiti ‘Vandalism’
What contributes to a vibrant place? Stickers, “postal slaps,” posters and the culture that surrounds them. Preventing the proliferation of these is a network of concerned citizens, police and responsibilities on property owners. Minneapolis has an entire department dedicated to a “clean city” with many admirable goals; however, “graffiti abatement” is one of the goals as well. You can sign up for free paint (home renovation idea!) to “abate” graffiti to return the public-facing structure to its original state as required by city code, but there doesn’t appear to be an accountability structure to verify whether the recipient is actually using the paint to combat the “problem.”
Nicollet Mall is the center of debate for many reasons given its central location within the Minneapolis core, also within the hearts and minds of Minnesotans because of its cultural and historical significance. It’s fallen victim to capital flight and unfounded fears of crime, though, and it has become a dead destination even for many Minneapolitans. The urban design of the Mall is changing, but we can learn from its current failed state as a sanitized corridor and create something that includes public art or even legal graffiti walls.
While the act of graffiti is perceived as taboo, there are many proven benefits for having these in urban spaces. In 2021, the City of Minneapolis reportedly spent $691,444 on graffiti abatement, estimated by some to be over $2.5 million. Portland, Oregon, which is a “West Coast twin” of us, spent between $3 million and $5 million on efforts annually, and cities spend an estimated $12 billion to 15 billion nationally every year on graffiti abatement. Paired with this, the chemicals and amount of paint that goes into the “endless war on graffiti” is untold and certainly benefits no one outside of those selling supplies to fuel these futile efforts.
Minneapolis also keeps diligent records on the numbers of reported “graffiti incidents,” “gang percentage,” “tagger percentage” and “other percentage” to classify the types being reported. With 2009 and 2017 being the worst years for total graffiti reports, the average typically is 6,000 to 9,000 reports per year within the city. In years past, Minneapolis has cracked down on graffiti spaces including removing a two-block-long legal wall at “The Bomb Shelter” (formerly at 2051 Bloomington Ave S in Minneapolis) in 1999.
“The Bomb Shelter was great,” the muralist Peyton said. “I painted there and we loved going there. Some of the best artists painted there.” Peyton, who had a silk screen show at an Edina art gallery recently, said the wall attracted graffiti writers from Detroit, Chicago, New York and elsewhere.
While some instances of graffiti are certainly vile and hateful, the mitigation of those are not tracked, and the total impacts of graffiti abatement aren’t known to have any effects on crime. If you try to look up reasons in favor of removing it, however, you get a graffiti removal cleaning service saying it is for “reclaiming public spaces, fostering community pride, reducing crime”. Given that the budget dedicated to repeatedly painting the same surfaces again is greater than the entire sidewalk plowing pilot, it seems like we have yet another misguided application of city funds in Minneapolis. While removing racist and hateful graffiti is non-negotiable, I find it hard to believe that the accessibility benefits of snow clearing or having a series of street fairs matters more than wasting paint.
Takeaways
This article isn’t meant to erase or minimize the beautiful works of art that already exist in the metro; we’re lucky to have such a vibrant and important artist community here. Events like Chroma Zone have beautified the Creative Enterprise Zone in St. Paul and provide a huge launching point for immigrants, people of color and LGBTQ+ muralists in the Midwest.
Our “legal” art scene is great, but we’re still trying to eradicate other forms of street art just like we tried with drugs during the “War on Drugs.” The Minneapolis Street Art Festival is just two days in August and claims to “celebrate street art in all forms” but is run by the Downtown Improvement District which is the No. 1 culprit of graffiti abatement in the downtown core. Across Canada, the United Kingdom and at numerous events across the world there is a real positive energy around the art form that would be considered “illegal” and a symptom of societal decay where we are.
It’s an art form defined by struggle against authority and oppression, and one that provides community for those who are often overlooked by our heteronormative and racist society. After the news media decried the tagging of the Oceanwide Plaza in Los Angeles last spring, CNN interviewed local graffiti activist Roger Gastman: “They can erase the graffiti on buildings, but they can never erase the impact that it has on the city of Los Angeles and the world,” he said. “There’s a lot to it. Yes, it’s vandalism. Yes, it’s art, and it’s everything in between,” Gastman concluded. “This is a real culture. It’s not going anywhere.”
The idea of having such a sanitized downtown should die, and we should stop trying to revitalize it with bouncy houses.
Instead:
“Legalizing graffiti” just means focusing on solving real crimes instead of painting walls gray. At least we know the art and tags on the side of the McDonald’s aren’t AI trash. Let’s break out of this type of broken windows policing mindset and allow our urban spaces to be more colorful and human.
All photos by author River Flom.
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