Whoever he is, he’s an advocate for the homeless and artists, has terrific grammar skills, and believes Union City is better than Hoboken and Weehawken.
An anonymous graffiti artist has been scrawling sentence-long messages on walls and bridges near Weehawken’s border with Hoboken for more than a year, as well as near Hoboken’s border with Jersey City. While most other graffiti in the area consists of barely decipherable scrawl and gang tags marking territory, the literate graffitist seems to have an agenda.
He’s poetic, as displayed in an orange taunt under a Hoboken bridge near the Jersey City border: “Dear Hoboken, don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters.” This message, prophetically left months before the new mayor’s resignation, is mysteriously signed “Team Love.” However, other messages in similar handwriting are unsigned.
Two of the notes have a special symbol at the end: a peace sign with a tadpole-like tail. One of them is an ominous message on a wall in northwestern Hoboken warning in blue: “Your days of plenty are numbered.” At the other end of town, under a bridge leading to Jersey City, the artist begs in bright white: “Support your local artists.”
The graffitist also left a short note in black paint on a Weehawken house near the Hoboken border, saying, “U.C. is better,” perhaps favoring nearby Union City as a more affordable artists’ haven. Just blocks away, the Park Avenue bridge in Weehawken is coated with a red “You’re only as good as your word.” And further north, another bridge in Weehawken says “Better to be a lion for 1 day than to be a sheep your whole life” as well as “Lion wears the crown.”
The artists apparently favors the poor, the homeless, and…well…artists.
________
So who is this spray can-wielding soul who knows to use “than” and not “then”?
“I’ve never seen it before,” said Weehawken Public Safety Director Jeff Welz recently. “We do take care of graffiti. Even though it’s not offensive graffiti, it’s negative to the community. It’s a quality of life issue. Our procedure is the police make a report, [especially] stuff that may be gang related. Then we get it we give it to Bobby [Barsa, head of public works] and he removes it. So there’s a checks and balances. I’m amazed it fell through the cracks.”
The day after Welz was interviewed, township workers slapped gray paint over the sayings under the Route 495 bridge in Weehawken, and they were gone.
John Pope, who just took over as public works director in Hoboken, said recently that he wasn’t familiar with the graffiti either. “I need to drive slower,” he said.
He said that his department frequently removes gang tags, and that among those reporting them is former Mayor David Roberts.
“On July 4, there was [a gang tag] added to the Neumann Leathers building,” he said. “It was in white paint.” It was promptly removed.
In Guttenberg, police cracked down on graffiti last year in an effort to stop gangs from leaving tags on their turf. But the different colors of neatly written aphorisms perhaps come from another place.
So who is “Team Love” and why is he taking the risk of writing 16-word aphorisms in plain sight? Perhaps he or one of his associates will e-mail us at editorial@hudsonreporter.com to explain, or comment on-line at www.hudsonreporter.com.
Caren Matzner can be reached at cmatzner@hudsonreporter.com.