Postcard: Philadelphia

By Brendan Lowe

One good thing about being stuck in a traffic jam in Philadelphia is that there's a fine chance you can spend your time looking at a mural. There are over 2,500 murals throughout the city--more than in any other place in the world. On South 47th Street, a lush mural shows a row-house scene in the foreground with Van Gogh's Starry Night--inspired sky as a backdrop. Gigantic, stunning portraits of Dr. J and Malcolm X grace other buildings. Prince Charles visited the mural on 40th and Pennsgrove in January to see the outsize rendering of a girl reading a book that has a brilliant column of butterflies streaming out of it.

These murals were painted mostly by locals. And they have an even more practical purpose than beautification or attracting tourism: they're an anticrime initiative. Philadelphia has grappled with a murder-a-day crime rate that is among the highest in America's big cities. For many years, the city's rampant graffiti problem was seen as closely linked to more violent crimes, whether explicitly as gang markings or simply as a sign of neighborhoods in disrepair. But in 1984 then mayor W. Wilson Goode made a fateful decision: instead of declaring war on the spray-painting vandals, he would offer them amnesty. Goode gave Jane Golden--a petite, white, high-energy, Stanford-educated muralist--a six-week trial period to persuade the black and Latino youths who made up the Bronx Bombers, the High Class Lunatics and other graffiti gangs to channel their creative energy into muralmaking.

Driven by her evangelical belief that art can not only beautify but also pacify, Golden, now 51, has spent the past 20 years enlisting as many communities as possible--mostly schoolkids teamed with artists but at times other groups, like cops or prisoners--in planning and painting the murals. A decade ago, she spun off from the Anti-Graffiti Network and started the Mural Arts Program, an organization inspired by F.D.R.'s Works Progress Administration that, as one former student says, is pro-art rather than antigraffiti. "Race, crime and violence, immigration, gentrification--I think it's our responsibility to help people grapple with these different issues," says Golden, whose group holds community meetings to decide on each mural subject.

The graffiti war continues unabated in other cities. New York City recently doubled sentences for graffiti offenders. Peoria, Ariz., has placed surveillance cameras in graffiti-prone areas. Philadelphia doesn't keep exact stats on graffiti crimes but says the mural-as-peacemaker model has proved its worth. In the late 1990s, the Grays Ferry neighborhood suffered an outbreak of racial violence. Golden believed the divisiveness called for a multiracial mural. Not everyone agreed. "It was a mess, a real mess," recalls Jim Helman, a white neighborhood activist. "And along comes this diminutive little thing [Golden] who promises to do this ridiculous project that turns out to be anything but ridiculous." The community rallied around the project, and Helman says the resulting mural, called The Peace Wall, is "an icon."

Monica Mathieu, 17, spent a recent summer day inside an Olney High School rec room painting a panel for an upcoming mural. She'd ordinarily be sitting at home watching TV, Mathieu said, but on this day she was giddy about the pending arrival of a group of Irish students who have been collaborating with the Philadelphia teens on a mural called Common Ground. As Mathieu talked about raising money for a trip to Dublin to work on a project next summer, she was asked how two such seemingly disparate groups overcame the challenges in creating such a big (180 ft. by 30 ft.) and coherent piece. "Come on now," Mathieu said, aghast at the ignorance of the question. "It's art."