An aerosol-painted Addams Family stares blankly at a Long Island City parking lot. Next to it, a mural of the IT clown looms over pedestrians passing through on Vernon Boulevard. Further down that same dark green wall, a pumpkin patch sits on an illustrated graveyard where the names of graffiti artists who’d been part of the iconic 5Pointz appear on a tombstone.
On this vacant building with “HALLOWEEN IN LIC” spray-painted in white and green, lives the work of artists who’d been part of the Long Island City-based mecca for graffiti artists and their work. But it may not be there for much longer.
Those artists — Meres One, Python, Topaz, See Tf, Menace and Resa — had tagged the wall about a decade ago, for free and with the permission of the building’s owners and at the request of local restaurant owner Gianna Cerbone, said Marie Cecile Flageul, a spokesperson for the group behind 5Pointz.
And they did so not long after a developer whitewashed their work along with more than 1,500 artists’ in 2013 to erect a luxury residential tower nearby on Jackson Avenue that uses the 5Pointz name. Cerbone organizes an annual Halloween march for the neighborhood’s kids and is a longtime friend of the graffiti crew.
For years, developers have angled to rehabilitate the building where the Halloween murals sit on 45-40 Vernon Boulevard and build a tower behind it, seeking a zoning variance that would permit residential use there with the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals in 2017 and again last year. Earlier in October, the city announced a “holistic community planning” effort that would culminate in a rezoning plan for an area that includes the graffiti site, whose days may be numbered.
“I would feel really upset, really, really upset” if they were to build over the graffiti, said Cerbone, who owns the Italian restaurant Manducatis Rustica VIG a block away. “Because it’s just a part of the history of Long Island City.”
The neighborhood study, led by the city Department of Planning with funding from Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, “will include proposed land use changes to guide new development in the neighborhood” and “examine ways to create new housing, economic growth, transit connectivity, and open space,” according to a press release this month.
The artists behind the Halloween pieces have long expected the site to be developed, and their work removed, at some point — as has Cerbone, said Flageul.
The artists returned annually to maintain and restore their art until 2019, Flageul said, when they felt that the building may soon be demolished. Still, their work has remained relatively intact since, with almost nothing tagged over them.
“The owner was kind enough to let us do this as his contribution to the yearly Halloween parade at the time,” Flageul said. “This was a temporary seasonal wall. We are grateful that everyone got to enjoy it and that generations of kids took pictures in front of it and enjoyed it as much as they did.”
Cerbone said she remembers when the IT clown was being painted onto the wall. Her old friends from 5Pointz, she said, had painted it as a “joke” because they knew she was “terrified of clowns.”
“When they were doing the clown I actually had to leave … They were all laughing about it,” Cerbone recalled in a perky tone. “When I went back, I was like, ‘I can’t even look at that. Why would you do that to these kids? Why?’”
Over the years, the restaurateur and art school graduate said she’s worked with many local art councils and developers to identify sites where artists like her friends at 5Pointz can put up tags and murals — and added that the developers she’s worked with have generally been receptive to having art on their buildings.
The born-and-bred Long Island City resident of five decades said she hopes the new comprehensive planning effort will ultimately lead to infrastructural repairs and improvements the area has desperately needed for years — and that it would address neighborhood concerns over safety and housing costs. She also hopes for the Halloween art to be resurrected elsewhere if and when it’s taken down to make way for new development.
“In all honesty, I want things to be right on everybody’s level. You need to develop, you need to be positive about stuff,” said Cerbone, who added that she would be accepting of new developments that addressed the neighborhood’s needs. “But at the same time, you also have to be considerate … There has to be respect for each other.”
Reflecting on the meaning of the Halloween piece down the street from her restaurant, Cerbone said she is inspired by the 5Pointz artists who continued to pay respect to the neighborhood even when it had failed to do the same for them when developers destroyed the legendary graffiti site.
“It was saying, ‘You know what, things were really scary when we went through the whitewash’” at the old 5Pointz, said Cerbone.
“But through all the trauma came the spirit of the true person, which are artists. And they were able to give back again to a community that shunned them … They let it go, and they went on to make something that was beautiful — and scary.”