Having lived in New Orleans for 4 1/2 years in the 1960s, I was appalled to read of the plague of grafitti and tagging that has now infested and defaced hundreds of historic buildings in the French Quarter. Certainly, one never saw a single primitive scrawl in the 1960s. And when my family arrived in July, 1967 to visit they could stroll the streets of the Quarter and admire the atmosphere that surrounded them.
My dad even being so nonplussed by one nun walking up Royal Street he felt compelled to take her photo, e.g.
But nowhere at no time in his (and my brothers) wanderings did they see- or photograph - one single sign of so-called "public art" - that has been a euphemism employed for grafitti since the year dot. Ronda Findley who has owned businesses in the French Quarter since 1998, certainly isn't buying this palaver. According to her, quoted in New Orleans Times-Picayune:
"Tagging and grafitti is not art. It is a subculture of destruction. ... It's a crime and an assault to our quality of life."
Further, she never had to deal with graffiti there until this year. Findley's voice is now one in a chorus demanding city intervention in a graffiti epidemic. Increasingly pervasive, it manifests as unwanted "tags" in tourist-friendly downtown locations. Many tourists are now calling attention to this grubby hallmark of blight forcing locals on the spot to try to make apologies or redirect visitors to more scenic areas like the Garden District uptown.
Erin Holmes, executive director of the nonprofit Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents & Associates observed:
"It’s increased over the last couple of years, where we have more vacant storefronts but also on residential properties.”
In other words an urban 'cratering' has occurred parallel to the once -in- a- century pandemic. The past two years, the city has also demolished 100 and 105 buildings, respectively. This year alone 95 blighted structures have been razed. No surprise that N.O. officials now have graffiti in their crosshairs.
Ms. Holmes said residents and businesses are increasingly frustrated that the historic neighborhoods that drive the city's tourism economy appear bedraggled. Mark Romig, Chief Marketing Officer for New Orleans & Company, said the city's tourism leaders are also concerned about the amount of graffiti marring the landscape, and would love to see a more organized effort to stay ahead of the problem.
Frank Bombaci, 31, who has worked downtown for 13 years, also noticed the lack of enforcement, saying matter-of-factly last week while working the desk of the New Orleans Visitor’s Center:
“The French Quarter is disgusting. A tour business on Decatur Street seems worse than it’s ever been before.”
"As we’re coming out of a two-year pandemic and opening our doors, if what they’re seeing is a lot of tags and spray paint on private property, it gives an overwhelming sense of a lack of care, that the city is not taken care of.”
Graffiti and other forms of vandalism tend to vex urban areas from two sides -- enforcement and remediation. Even in the best of times, police typically have too many major crimes to deal with, so tagging falls by the backboards. But this neglect of lesser crimes often leads to gradual degradation and blight as taggers interpret non-enforcement as an invitation to spread their scrawl. That's what as occurred in the Big Easy. Davon Barbour, who took over as executive director of the Downtown Development District in December, put it into perspective:
"When an area looks as though no one cares for it, it does invite unwanted behaviors and limits investment. For me and for my team, graffiti absolutely drives us crazy."
But blight breeds blight and graffiti is just the tip of the 'iceberg'. So no surprise that apart from the 160 city blocks impacted by grafitti there are missing bricks on sidewalks, planks laid over open manholes, broken streetlights and lamp posts with hatch covers torn off their bases that become makeshift trash receptacles. This is to say nothing of the deeper problems like crime, homelessness and mental illness all of which expanded in the wake of Katrina in 2005.
One of the difficulties with graffiti is that it requires property owners to clean it up. Barbour's DDD team can quickly remove tags from public infrastructure, but has to rely on businesses and residents in other cases. Barbour said his agency is working to better promote a program that will cover up to 50% of the cost of graffiti removal up to $2,500.
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