Graffiti Taggers Turn to Trees, With Possibly Harmful Effects
Uptick in spray-painted trees in the Mission appears to violate a tenet of the graffiti subculture
Outside Elixir bar in the Mission district of San Francisco, graffiti taggers have left their mark — not on the wall, but on the living. Every tree on that 16th Street block has been spray-painted in shades of purple, red, white and black.
“I can’t imagine why anyone would think that’s OK,” said Shea Shawnson, the bar manager. “What do you do to clean up a tree without messing it up?”
That’s the point.
In a city where graffiti abatement is swift — property owners are fined if graffiti is not immediately removed, and the city spends $20 million on the problem — taggers have discovered a way to ensure that their mark has staying power. Graffiti, taggers believe, is not easily covered or removed from trees without harming them.
The vandalism has angered residents, and possibly threatened the health of some trees, which are remarkably rare in San Francisco because very few tree species are indigenous. The tagging also appears to violate one of the tenets of the graffiti subculture: it is supposed to be a reaction to urban life, not an attack on nature.
“It’s an insult to the tree,” said Jeremy Novy, a local street artist. “It has nothing to do with urbanization.”
Novy is well known for his stencil art of koi fish that have become ubiquitous on city sidewalks. He has painted at least 3,000 in the past few years, often at the request of property owners. Novy is also an instructor at First Amendment Gallery in SoMa, where graffiti art is taught.
“Graffiti artists look for areas where it’s hard to reach or remove,” Novy said. As for the trees, “That’s them finding a different surface that’s difficult to cover over or remove,” he said.
The police reviewed several images of the graffiti for The Bay Citizen and said it was not gang-related or drug turf insignia.
“To me they appear to be individual tags or monikers,” said Officer Martin Ferreira, who investigates graffiti crimes.
The extent of tree defacement is unknown. The city has applied to the state for money to inventory the city’s trees, but it is unclear when or if that project will happen.
Trees in other neighborhoods have also been hit with graffiti, including the Ocean View area in the south of the city.
It is also not the first time taggers have targeted trees. “Three or four years ago, there was a rash of it in the Mission,” said Dan Flanagan, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, a nonprofit group that plants and cares for trees in the city. “Then it went away.”
Flanagan was dismayed to hear that the problem was back.
Trees play a crucial role in the city’s ecosystem, reducing air pollution and absorbing rainwater to prevent dirty street runoff from entering the bay. But it takes decades for trees to become mature enough to have this impact, and the city’s unusually foggy climate and other factors (including vandalism) kill 20 percent of newly planted trees. That makes existing trees, especially older ones, far more precious than many realize.
San Francisco has one of the sparsest tree canopy covers in the nation, ranked 22 out of 23 similar cities surveyed by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in 2007. Only Chicago was ranked lower.
“It takes 20 to 30 years for a tree to really give back,” Flanagan said. “It takes only a few minutes to destroy it.”
But the city has a message for those who believe that tagging trees will give their graffiti permanence: you’re barking up the wrong you-know-what.
“With many species of trees, a wire brush and mild soap and water can get graffiti off,” said Carla Short, an urban forester with the San Francisco Department of Public Works. “With most trees, it’s actually easier than cleaning a building,” Short added.
Trees with smooth bark, like ficuses, might be more vulnerable to damage from removing graffiti, but Short said that steel wool would most likely work on those species, and that in some cases limited use of painting over graffiti would probably not cause much harm.
Indeed, along 16th Street some ficus trees have had their graffiti painted over.
“Trees are so beautiful in and of themselves,” Flanagan said. “They don’t need taggers to add to that beauty.”
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
Ronn Cook
The community of trees creates the breath of the world. The world’s rainforest not only sustain and perpetuate overlapping ecosystems that exists around and underneath their habitat, but they also purify the air of pollution. Rainforests are a continuum of recycled moisture, nutrients and breathable air. Trees take part in the eternal cycles of life on earth. This includes carbon cycles, wate...r cycles, oxygen cycles, cycles of food and nutrients and more. Rainforests are the lungs and breath of the earth and her organisms. As the first land organisms, trees are the oldest living ancestors, which all other land organisms depend for life and from which all evolutionary life descends.
Mary Mcallister
Thank you for this article about the beleaguered trees of San Francisco, of which there are few. In addition to the many threats to trees mentioned in your article, the biggest threat is the native plant movement which wishes to destroy most of the trees in the City’s parks, where most trees in the City live. Because most of the trees in the city are non-native, native plant advocates demand their eradication in order to “restore” San Francisco to its historical landscape of grassland and sand dunes. There were few native trees in San Francisco prior to the arrival of Europeans and they grew only in areas sheltered from the wind where adequate water was funneled to them by watersheds.
Please visit two articles about the thousands of trees that have been destroyed in San Francisco in the past 15 years and the tens of thousands of trees that are planned for destruction in the future:
http://milliontrees.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/destroying-the-trees-of-san-francisco/
http://milliontrees.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/the-healthy-trees-of-san-francisco/
Ronn Cook
The evolution of the seed and its properties is one very important step in the settling of plants on land. The seed does many things, one use allows the embryonic plant to be protected from drying out. It also stores the food that the growing plant uses as a source of energy. Some seeds are protected by fruits that help to distribute or carry them in a variety of ways. In ancient mythology, the seed or bean symbolizes resurrection, transformation and renewal. They are like children symbols of fertility, birth and the future. Beans are seeds and like anything that represents the beginning are symbols of youthfulness, potential energy, transformation, birth and origins. Thus beans are sometimes thrown on graves laid on altars and thrown on newly married couples.MA
Julius Zsako
Jeremy Novy refers to "graffiti artists". Aren't they vandals? Great web site on understanding and controlling graffiti at www.defacingamerica.com