One more, just up the street from the last!

With the success of Alberta, I turn my attention to another form of crumbling urban infrastructure: The Telephone Booth. Like the Flyer boxes, they are a popular platform for graffiti and stickers, and many are in a bad state of disuse and disrepair. In fact, many even are missing their telephones completely.

Unlike the Flyer Boxes, I am not an advocate for the complete removal of these Telephone Booths. We have built an incredible telephone system, and a remarkably ubiquitous pay phone infrastructure, and it would be a shame to see all that still potentially useful infrastructure completely torn out from the streets. As I wrote back in May:

“Apparently, NY payphones don’t make any money as payphones- their primary value is as a streetlevel advertising platform- a special platform that skirts normal regulations for installing street level advertising. I’m told that they’re even installing more payphones in NYC, even though ubiquitous cell phones are putting the payphone very much out of business.

You know what I’d like to see? If they’re going to maintain, and even grow, the network of payphones as an adverting-revenue generating platform, then they should make all local calls free. That is the old “Contract” of advertising, after all: We shouldn’t have to be exposed to your damn ads if you’re not going to give us something back in return. And how great would it be to know that whenever you hit NYC, getting in contact with the person you’re staying with is as close as the nearest payphone? It would be a great thing for tourists trying to avoid steep roaming charges. As a non-cellphone owner I would LOVE it. And it’s good for locals too. Cell’s dead? PayFreePhone. Lose your cell, need to call your moms? FreePhone. Bars closed, and you’re out on the streets drunk, hungry, and in need a Taxi? Dial “CAB” at the nearest FreePhone and be connected to the nearest cab dispatcher. Dial “INFO” to be connected to a tourism help desk. The possibilities are exciting and immeasurable.

Lets use this incredible, pre-existing infrastructure for something more than advertising.”

In the meantime, while I wait for my public-space utopia to manifest itself, I think Calgary here is a big improvement, don’t you?

In todays update I bring one of my FlyerPlanterboxes to New York.

In it, I have planted an Alberta Dwarf Pine- Hopefully it will do well in the cold weather coming. I have named her “Alberta”, and I hope someone will decorate her if she makes it ’till Christmas! Here is a photo of Alberta on the train!

Wee! Alberta is HEAVY.

So if you are new to these FlyerPlanterboxes the idea is to take the empty & disused newspaper and flyer boxes that litter our sidewalks and put them to a better use than say “Trashcan” or “Space-Filler”.

In this case, I’ve used a Newspaper Honorbox. This is the first time I’ve done this. Before I’ve always used free flyer boxes. For this project I’ve had to pay .75¢ twice- once to open the box and get it’s measurements so I could build the planter box for Alberta, and once again to install her. Add that to the build cost, boys!

I can hear you now, you’re saying: “Well, .75¢ isn’t too bad, The New York Times will cost $2.00 on a weekday, $5.00 on a Sunday!! I’ve never heard of this ‘National’ but it comes at a good price!”

Here’s the deal: “The National Sports Daily, or The National, was a sports newspaper in the United States which debuted January 31, 1990 and folded after 18 months. The newspaper was published daily (Sundays through Fridays) and had a tabloid format.”

That’s why the price is so low, the last time this box could have possibly seen papers was 1992. I remember 1992. Under the Bridge by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jump by Kris Kross, Black Or White by Michael Jackson and Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus were all chart toppers. I slow-danced awkwardly to November Rain by Guns N’ Roses. I watched Bob Saget on Americas Funniest Home Videos, instead of watching You Tube. People born when the last newspaper was removed from this box are about 16 years old now. It was some time ago.

So this empty, useless box has somehow managed to consume valuable sidewalk space in New York (just across from Bedford Station, to be precise) for 16 odd years. It’s held up surprisingly well! Though the rust has messed with the mechanisms- I had to struggle to get it open the first time. I had forgotten; It actually ate two quarters too! Add that to the build cost, boys!

I really like this one. The pine tree emerging from this dead, rusting shell of the print industry is very striking, since trees very much like this one were used to make the papers that this box once held. This box, more so than any of the others I’ve done, is a Phoenix.

It’s beautiful.

Jack Appleseed, born (John Hammer, September 26, 1980), is an American pioneer, a wanderer who walks the sun bleached, lifeless roads of America- stopping only to turn the public parking wastelands he come across only all too often, into public parks!

Something like the festival happening tomorrow in NYC!

More Celosias for your ass! Pow!

So I found myself on a sudden four-day trip to NYC last week! It was great!

While I was there I managed to get some Celosias into a Poster Pocket Planter! If you haven’t seen these before, they are the brainchild of my fellow Torontonians Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale.

I’ve meet with them. Good dudes. You might be excited to know that we have schemed together. We have made plans to collaborate! YES WE HAVE INDEED.

They have also posted the above pics of this installation to the projects official site! Check it out!

These tags will be the last bit of “Guerrilla Gardening” for a little while.

What are we sowing? What have we planted? It seems like we forget unless it’s labeled.

This is an attempt to highlight the “obvious-yet-invisible”, to encourage/shame municipal authorities into doing some real gardening with their many derelict planter boxes.

It is also meant to inspire Guerrilla Gardeners to take action of their own!!

Or, at least, maybe just discourage people from planting anymore garbage trees. I don’t think we need more of that sort of “Guerrilla Gardening”.

This is the last planter!!

It is was installed on the opposite side of the intersection as the planter in yesterdays update. This intersection happens to be Sherbourne and Carlton (Carlton is College after Yonge)

Interestingly, not only have the planters been removed, but the two empty flyer boxes, shown yesterday, on the opposite side of the intersection have also been removed! Completely gone!

As for the two barely used boxes featured in todays update, they have been packed CHOCK-A-BLOCK FULL of flyers, as well as contact information for how to obtain advertising in the offered publications! They have had a makeover! A full-sized vinyl sticker has been put onto the sides of the “Dream Box” to re-brand it as the “Immigration News”. I guess they’ve realized that having two boxes on both sides of the intersection was too much. Perhaps they’ve also realized that a full, functional box, is the best deterrent to a box full of garbage, and is necessary if they expect anyone to ever stop and look inside. What they’ve yet to realize is that the writing is on the wall for these sort of flyers. Or should I say, the writing is online.

This is not the only sort of box to have an image makeover. I’ve noticed some boxes have had a big vinyl sticker put onto the back of the insert slip (The spot where you’d tuck a single copy of the publication for display) This sticker implies that the box was recently FULL of publications, and they’ve been going like hotcakes! You are TOO LATE to get a print copy, but you’re welcome to check out their popular content online!

This is one swift piece of marketing. In one stroke it deftly turns an empty and forlorn box -a box that signifies failure and irrelevance- into an empty box that is now an ad that implies that the emptiness is a signifier of success! It says: “Hey, we have good, heavily-desired content!” And it also smoothly directs you to their online content without seeming desperate. The message is: “Well, we can’t help it if our publication is wildly popular! But not to worry, there’s lots to go around online!”

Pretty slick, if disingenuous. It sure beats: “We’re dying. We’re dying slowly and we don’t know why or what we can do to stop it. As physical proof, here is yet another rotting corpse of a flyer box, littered at your feet. But hey, were trying our hand at this “ONLINE” thing -though we don’t really understand it- so if you’d be good enough to check out our “WEB-SITE”, you’d be doing us a favor!”

I can’t hold it against them for trying this little bit of marketing cleverness, they are doing their level best to survive, but I very much don’t like how these stickers callously cover up years of artists stickers. That spot is the preferred location!

Of course, they probably see that as a side benefit! All of this cleaning-up and re-imaging in one fell swoop of a simple sticker! HOW CLEVER.

Writing now at the end of this experiment, It’s hard for me to say for sure whether or not I’ve helped inspire all of these recent reactions. The project has gotten a great deal of coverage, and it may have been an impetuous for these companies to realize that they need to change, but then again, it may all just be a coincidence. There are certainly lots of other signs out there that these companies need to change! In recap, Of all 8 flower boxes installed, at this time of writing: All have been removed. Of all the flyer boxes that they were installed in, only 2 have had flyers placed in them, 1 has been removed (along with the one beside it), all the dream boxes have been re-branded, and all the rest stand as they stood before, giving no sign or evidence of the colour and life that so recently and briefly inhabited them.

I’ve gotta admit, I really expected that they would last allot longer.

Well, wanna see what kinda results you’ll get in YOUR TOWN?!

Make your own!

I’ve been asked to post a “How-To”. Making these is really very straightforward, but I’ve posted some pics of my design that I sketched up in my blackbook, and I’ll talk a little bit about it here to get you on the right track.

As you can see, It took me about 3 sheets of plywood to build 8 planters. I would NOT follow my design exactly however. Just use them as a departure point. All of it will change depending on the sizes of the flyer boxes in your area. That’s your first step: go and measure their interiors. What is their height, depth, and width? Is the door hinged right at the base, or is it several inches up? Will you need to accommodate that? Does the box have a swing arm and will you have to allow for its width? Is there anything else you’ll have to allow for (Like the metal separating bar in the three-tiered style boxes)

Tips! -Never build exactly to size. Give yourself a little bit of wiggle room. These boxes are sometimes pretty beat up, and irregular in shape. Don’t make it so tight that a two millimeter difference will prevent you from installing the box once you’re on site. Trust me, IT SUCKS.

Also, some boxes have a spring-bottom, so that they can be loaded up with a great many papers and rise up to dispense them as they are removed, and the spring is unweighted. Like a napkin dispenser at a fast food restaurant. This sort of box will probably be unsuitable for a planter, unless you can devise a good way to support it’s weight, such as drilling in from the sides.

Speaking of which, a word about drilling, screwing, gluing and such. I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions to up the planters permanence by using one of these techniques. I’ve decided not to, for two reasons.

ONE: it ups the seriousness from littering or some form of minor mischief to “Criminal Damage” of the box.

TWO: My experience with guerrilla gardening in the past, and the shared experience of my fellow guerrilla gardeners, has lead me to believe that there really is such a thing as “Flower Power”. (Thank a hippie, I guess.) And this “Flower Power” is best wielded by an open heart, not a clenched fist. There is maybe something more striking, more beautiful, more sympathy-gaining, and in the end, more powerful in a gentle, vulnerable act of defiance, than in a “powerful”, protected one. (Tiananmen Square V.S. The Los Angeles Riots of 1992)

That said, everybody must make their own choices, and live with them, and if I were to be more aggressive In installing these guerrilla planters, I would take a power drill and some washers with me and fire several tamper proof screws into both sides and the back of the flyerbox- right through the thin metal, and anchored into the wood of the planter.

But hey, I’m not recommending it.

This is the Second-Last Planter!

It is filled with Chocolate Mint, if you can fathom such a thing.

Guerrilla Gardeners! Here’s a tip- Mint is maybe the Guerrilla plant. It is hardy, aggressive, and grows quickly. It spreads like crazy.

Like the first herb I used; Thai Basil, Mint is also decorative and will flower with small, purple flowers. Of course, Mint is also functional. For example, It is good for Mojitos. You know. Something for that businessman-on-the-go, busily making Mojitos on his way to work.

I think it’s time for another Posterchild Book Review!!!

Vandal Squad

by Joe Rivera.

If you don’t know, the New York City Transit Police Vandal Squad (now the Citywide Vandals Task Force) is a notorious department that was created to focus on subway vandalism, and Joe Rivera was one of it’s more notorious officers. Vandal Squad is Joe’s story, in his own words, of his time spent in the department.

The Officers of the Vandal Squad have a famously unique relationship with the writers of New York. The officers job is to prevent graffiti. To achieve this, they must study and understand graffiti- day in and day out. Even if this is all done in an effort to deter graffiti, it is perhaps inevitable that all of this time spent emerged in graffiti culture can cause somewhat of a crossover, as the book explores. It’s no coincidence that the book is made to recall a blackbook, in size, shape and colour. (The Blackbook, a common hardcover black sketchbook, is the traditional book of the tagger- used for collecting the tags of other writers, as well as for sketching out and developing ideas.) On the cover is a work by graff legend SEEN- a work originally commissioned for the jerseys of the Vandal Squads softball team!

Few non-writers have the sort of knowledge that Vandal Squad officers have, and no other sort of person has their unique insiders/outsiders view of the culture. No Vandal Squad officer has ever told their story in a full book before.

So I was excited for this book. It has a unique and fascinating perspective. An important perspective that had not been committed to paper for history yet.

But it was a bit disappointing. The book is quite thin in content. Dismally thin, actually. It has lots of glossy full-colour flicks of graffiti pron, but so does almost every other graffiti book already made (not to mention the internet). The book is much too sparse on written content, and it never digs too deep into what it presents. It is shallow and it holds back. I was hoping that this book would read something like a lazy afternoon in the bar with Joe Rivera. A casual, comfortable time where Joe spins the true insiders tales of his time on Vandal Squad. Joe does narrate in the casual voice of a street-cop, and he does give us a tiny bit of true-crime drama (like the time he had to roll the decapitated head of a subway jumper into an evidence bag) but this is no tell-all. Joe uses more secrecy and innuendo than actual writers do!

Tell us what actually went down, man!

Instead he gives us single-sentence stuff like: “…the V’s that mysteriously appeared over graffiti tags from the 80s through the mid 90s (Which was the way of warning vandals that the Vandal Squad was on to everything.)”

Hey, that’s interesting! Really Interesting! LET’S HEAR MORE. You were actually tagging V’s? Was the whole squad tagging them? Did your superiors unofficially sanction it? Did they know about it? How risky was it to be doing it? Would you lose your job if caught? Did taking that risk make you better understand the risks the writers took? What was it like to be crossing out writers, claiming territory on their own terms? How much of it was really done? Did you target any particular tags, say, writers you had just arrested, or writers you were gunning for? What was it for; to put the fear of god into particular writers, to intimidate all writers, or to feel some control? All of the above? What was the response from the taggers? Did it feel good to do it? Do you regret it? Why did it stop? Were you caught? Did you buy your markers, or did you use the ones you confiscated? Did you walk around with markers tucked in between your gun and your badge? What was it like? Did you feel hypocritical? Did the writers, angry that a cop had crossed them out, (perhaps with a stolen marker, no less) accuse you of hypocrisy?

“Mysteriously Appeared”…… Pfhhffft!!- bullshit innuendo that’s little better than all the rumors already out there!

Where do the rumors stop and the truth begin? I expected this book to shine some light, but it does precious little to clarify. Really, it just muddies the waters. In fact, Joe seems to relish in his secrets and almost seems to enjoy muddying the waters. In an early part of the book, Joe writes:

“In 1987, the unit was in the process of reconstruction. Two of the original Graffiti Squad officers from the mid-late 70’s had retired. It has long been rumored that two other Vandal Squad cops acted as look outs at the Zerega Avenue station on the No. 6 line in the Bronx while SEEN painted a whole car in honor of their retirement. If that really had happened, the Vandal Squad would have been closed down the same day- but that rumor definitely makes for an unforgettable story.”

then later, he writes:

“Mr. X, my last partner in the Vandal Squad, was no doubt the best cop I have ever worked with. He was just as addicted to graffiti as I was. He was an old-school writer from Brooklyn so he had great knowledge about graffiti (when I retired he painted a small train car and put my name on the side in bubble letters). ”

What?

Huh?

Oh, wait, by “small train car” you must mean a MODEL TRAIN? Maybe I’m just dumb, (probably) but I feel as though that sentence was possibly constructed to be purposely misleading. (Or at least, it was poorly constructed.) At first blush, you’re led to believe that an actual -if somehow small- train car was painted. Only after rereading it a few times did the real meaning become clear to me. It would have been easy to clarify the sentence, say, by adding: “ …He gave it to me and I keep it on my desk. I’m looking at it right now while writing this. It’s a cute ‘lil number with my name rendered in gold and pink. I call my train ‘Mr. Choo-Choo Mumbles’.”

Sometimes Joe claims he can’t tell us more because he can’t reveal police secrets, which I suppose is unavoidable, but I doubt Joe worked hard to get anything published under freedom of information or what have you. He does give us a taste, such as when he gives us a scrambled list, a “Confidential Internal Document”, of the top 40 vandals from 1984-2004. (which covers the entire length of time while he was on the force). It’s interesting, but it would have been deadly interesting if it had been organized from Top to Bottom vandal, instead of alphabetically. The disappointment felt at this list that goes not quite far enough sums up the entire disappointment felt with the book-

It is a brief and arms length secret-keeping/legend-building summary, with a very shallow account of, what we can only imagine, was a very interesting time spent on a very interesting job.

Two dead astros out of Five!

]]> http://www.bladediary.com/flyerplanterboxes-7/feed/ 1 http://www.bladediary.com/flyerplanterboxes-6/ http://www.bladediary.com/flyerplanterboxes-6/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:07:14 +0000 post http://www.bladediary.com/?p=2620

Another planter!

As the sharp-eyed can see, this one was installed on Bloor and Brunswick.

This box is planted with White “Vista” Salvias: “A Hot Summer Survivors selection!”

Now I just need a plant that is a Tough City Survivors selection!

… something that people won’t tear out or remove..

I had a dream the other night that I’d like to share with you. I was in a huge area full of farmers fields and I was drawing the outline of a giant middle finger- the biggest one ever drawn. It was big enough to be seen from space.

The enormous middle finger was meant to be seen by the International Space Station. I was flipping the space station off because I will never get there. It’s absolutely impossible for me to go.

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Do you see that sharp-looking black gentleman waiting for the College Streetcar? (Waiting for the College Streetcar is something you’ll do alot of if you ride the College Streetcar) He’s looking at the planter box in the third photo. This photo was taken the day after the install, which was several days ago. I had come back to check up on how the plants were doing and take photos. When I crossed the road to take closer photos, the fellow noticed my interest in the planter, and said: “That’s great, isn’t it?!” I said, “Yeah! I love it!”. He continued: “Do you think they know?”. I replied “Apparently not, It’s still here!”

As we were talking I continued taking shots, and didn’t notice at first that one of the other dudes waiting for the streetcar wanted to be in the photos too! He was pulling faces for the camera- sticking out his tongue and embarrassing/amusing the younger man he was with! A middle-aged man acting like a five-year-old! Brilliant!

I’ve been getting such a great reaction to this project, both on the street and online! It’s been so inspiring! I think my favorite comment that I’ve seen online so far has been from The Nieman Journalism Lab. The comment is by Reza Farzan, and she says:

“One comment:
Reza Farzan at 2:22 pm, May 27, 2009

As a life-long gardener who believes in creating green spaces, not to mention my years of working in the publishing field, I am happy to see a clever use of empty newspaper boxes around town; perhaps we no longer see these boxes chained to the posts, or even smashed by vandals; instead, we will see these flower boxes decorating our sidewalks. This, I truly believe would offer us a soothing transition from print to digital era that has come in our midst.”

It’s very satisfying to see support come from people involved in the industry itself- whom I assumed would be dead set against this project on principle. Maybe the box owners haven’t been the ones removing these planters (This particular planter walked away yesterday, by the way. No flyers have been put in its place- Yet again, the box is just empty) Perhaps I’ve been too quick to assume. After all, it would seem that plants are popular with thieves in my town.