Murals of huge letters are painted on city railroad bridges.
A team of artists, led by Steve Powers, of Manhattan, on Thursday paint a mural on the railroad bridge on West Fayette Street near West Street, in Syracuse. The team of sign painters was hired by the Near West Side Initiative to brighten the rusty bridges as part of the larger project to reinvent the neighborhood. It’s called “A Love Letter to Syracuse.”
The idea — by a team of artists from New York City — is to “visually disrupt” a physical barrier on the Near West Side neighborhood.
They’re murals of huge letters painted on the railroad bridges above the West Street Arterial and around the corner, on the bridge above West Fayette Street.
We love the murals, or are puzzled by them. Or a little of both.
These are what the letters spell:
“Nothing to do is everything with you.”
“Spring comes. Winter waits. Fall leaves. Winter long.”
“I paid the light bill just to see your face.”
And, “Now that we are here, nowhere else matters.”
The man in charge here is Maarten Jacobs, director of the Near West Side Initiative. Maarten started this job a year ago. Before that, he was part of the Northside Collaboratory project for three years.
He says, actually, work painting the bridges — which started last week — is “a long time coming.” The biggest challenge was getting permission from CSX, owner of the bridges, to paint them. That took months, mostly getting to the right person.
Maarten finally reached Dick Hensel, vice president for engineering for the rail company, who gave his OK for the project after making sure the work was paid for and fully insured. Then he said, “God bless and good luck,” Maarten explained.
Actually, the company executive told Maarten the project was doing a service to the railroad, which doesn’t have money in its budget to paint the bridges.
I say “right on” to that. Maybe the bridges aren’t a barrier between the Near West Side and the rest of downtown, but they sure were rusty, as the painters soon discovered.
Maarten said he also had to get permission from city officials for the work, which involved plopping a cherry-picker as a painters’ platform in the streets. He worked out a traffic pattern with the DPW of placing orange warning cones.
Maarten had to find the right artist, too. He was looking for one with a national reputation (that was important to CSX, also) and could “speak to the Near West Side” neighbors. He ended up with a list of 20 candidates.
He finally picked Steve Powers, a New York City-based artist, who until 2000 was a graffiti writer. Since turning to studio art, Powers has painted signs and rides at Coney Island, created murals in Dublin and Belfast, Ireland, and worked on a series of 50 murals in West Philadelphia.
View full sizeMike Lee, of Syracuse, and Lew Blum, of Philadelphia, paint a mural Thursday that reads, "Now that we are here, nowhere else matters." Powers canvassed the Philadelphia neighborhood for residents’ feelings about the place, then translated those thoughts into largely text-based paintings. Maarten said the artist did the same for the Syracuse neighborhood.
Powers worked with eight other artists and “they held neighborhood meetings and went door-to-door asking for input about the community,” Maarten says. “They wanted to know, basically, what’s up in Syracuse.”
They learned that neighbors recognize the hardships and beauty of everyday life. Ultimately, they told the artists that the city is a good place to live and raise a family.
The inspiration for the murals included residents’ comments about paying the bills, having “nothing to do” (they got that from the kids) and living through the changes of the four seasons.
Maarten said Powers at first put his letters onto computer images of the bridges, then sketched them on the bridges’ big iron canvases. First, the rust had to be scraped from the surface, then they were painted with a gray primer, then with a thick, black paint as a second primer.
Maarten said he overheard a man on a bicycle remark as the gray was applied during the first week: “You’ve got to be kidding. Syracuse looks gray already.”
The project aimed to “transform the bridges into enormous pieces of public art, making the intersection more aesthetically interesting and pedestrian-friendly,” Maarten says.
As a sidebar to the painting, Faythe Levine, a documentary filmmaker, has been in Syracuse since last week filming Powers and his crew for her new film about sign-painting as an American tradition. Levine is a member of the DIY Ethic indie craft movement.
The project will cost a little more than $100,000, including the artists’ fee.
This is all part of a project spearheaded by Syracuse University. The mission of the Near West Side Initiative is to “combine the power of art, technology and innovation with neighborhood values and culture to revitalize the neighborhood.”
The Initiative was rolled out by a group of community leaders in 2007. These movers and shakers guessed the work they had in mind would cost about $56 million and would, in the words of their announcement, “reinvent” the area roughly between the West Street Arterial and South Geddes Street.
Progress has been slow. In July, it was announced that WCNY, Syracuse’s public broadcasting stations, and ProLiteracy Worldwide, had agreed to relocate to a renovated warehouse once owned by Case Supply, at Wyoming and Marcellus streets.
A critical element in the renovation project is approval by the state. WCNY once hoped to build a free-standing structure, but that plan failed because of the lack of state money.
The Initiative adopted the logo for the neighborhood of “Salt District” as a marketing tool to promote the area.
Work on the murals is expected to be completed next week.
Dick Case writes Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Contact him at 470-2225 or dcase@syracuse.com.