Tags

There are plenty of garages on Crosby Street. Plenty of gray metal doors, utilitarian facades, and back entrances. In New York, this means graffiti, and there's an abundance of it here. The bubble letters pop out of the corrugated metal gates, and blast color into the street.

It makes me think about 1983. I was just getting born in 1983, but I hear that was when the city got tired of candy-colored subway cars. Mayor Koch told the riff-raff to "Make your mark in society, not on society," and a man died after police caught him making his mark in a subway station. Now, there's no contest. Tags don't survive in the subway, and they stand less of a chance on the street, where there's too much valuable property. You have to look for it: along the elevated train routes in the boroughs, or in places like Crosby Street.

As my friend and I made our way down Crosby, we were struck by the concentration and variety of tags. Some plump and simple, others sparse and sardonic. All were suspiciously unscrubbed. We found the same arty and witty graffiti on surrounding streets. Here it's cool, and the city knows that it's a profitable image. A white, moneyed audience consumes that image and makes SoHo their shopping destination. Anywhere else in the city, the law doesn't budge.

Eventually, we came to a large white-board map of the world, where hundreds of passers-by have scrawled some hasty tags. It's inviting, and we stopped to add our initials - the ultimate safe scrawl for permission-seeking scrawlers like ourselves. In between stores, take a minute for some recreational transgression.

'Oh, wouldn't it be too much if we really sprayed some paint?' Of course, we won't.