Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City
Book by Joe Austin; Columbia University Press, 2001

A TALE OF TWO CITIES
At no time in the last century have resident New Yorkers or outside observers been unanimous in their opinion about the present state or the future of New York City. Predictions of impending civic collapse have a long history in this metropolis, fueled by scare stories with an ever-changing cast of urban villains-the "dangerous classes," "the immigrant threat," "welfare queens," "wilding youths." In the shared public drama of urban life, New York City is sometimes portrayed on the newspapers' front pages and in editorials as a chaotic human hive, an unstable structure whose frantic inhabitants are at risk of fracturing the moral and legal pillars that have held it upright in the past. At the same time, we may hear and read proud and fervent assertions that New Yorkers are living in the Rome of our time, the contemporary center of human civilization. Cast in these equally familiar terms, New York City is the Big Apple, "the City That Never Sleeps," and the Capital of the Twentieth Century-the global ground zero for fame, fortune, culture, and the cosmopolitan good life. Somewhere between these opposites is an undetermined, heterogeneous human collective of seven million people with coexisting presents and fluctuating futures, held together within the shared public imagination by the single name "New York City." These seven million live within thousands of differing cultural, social, and economic networks, networks that overlap in one location, intertwine and integrate in another, or remain rigidly segregated in others.

The city, as a whole, is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified. 1 While [the city] may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is everchanging in detail.. There is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases.. The image of the Manhattan skyline may stand for vitality, power, decadence, mystery, congestion, greatness, or what you will, but in each case that sharp picture crystallizes and reinforces the meaning. 2 Optical illusion pop-art gallery: Fantasy life surreal illusions street arts.

We seem unable to envision the whole of New York City without significantly reducing its all-too-human complexities. Within the commercial marketplace, the communications and entertainment industries filter these complexities of urban social life through familiar framing stories about the city's present and future. Mass-mediated public framing stories do the cultural work of simplifying the complex city by selectively guiding our attention to particular individuals, groups, events, or trends via representations of their most easily recognized and distinguishing qualities. In commercial broadcasts, framing stories sort things out on a citywide scale, and thereby reinforce and subtly revise the mental maps that coordinate and focus our shared public expectations. Framing stories transform the complex whole of New York City into a place that is transparent, legible, and relatively predictable for the newspaper reader and television viewer, as well as the commuter, the taxi driver, and the neighborhood stroller. Framing stories encompass and orient the myriad local stories-from a horrific murder on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a new shopping area in Flatbush- by placing them into an understandable relationship to common visions of the city's present and future. They allow us to confront a constantly changing social environment with an always undetermined future, and yet still "put things in order" for ourselves: set daily expectations and make plans, initiate and adapt to change, interpret the past, and maintain the stability of everyday life. A framing story is a more or less unconscious and unex- amined but nonetheless socially produced public narrative of "how things are" and "how things are likely to be" in the city. Powerful framing stories easily become "common sense."

As might be expected among seven million people, there are always several conflicting framing stories in widespread circulation at any given time. But these competing stories tend not to be equally influential. It is by way of the commercial public sphere-the mass media business-that most New Yorkers grasp the city as a whole place. It is by way of commercially produced stories that most New Yorkers know what their governments have done and are doing, which individuals or groups are in the public spotlight, what important events are taking place, what trends to expect, what the stakes are in interpreting "the way things are" in this way or that, and so forth. In a competitive information marketplace, the "important" events and "real" meanings of our shared public lives are sold as commodities to consumers, even if payment for this commodity is only an endless barrage of advertising. As a result, some of the most important documents of public life are contained within the dominant commercial framing stories: news reports, editorials, headlines and photos, radio talk shows, and so on. The commercial public sphere signals to its audiences their respective places in the several ongoing dramas of New York City. It informs them which of the several framing stories they were, are, should be, or will soon be living. Since New York City is a national center for the commercial media, these stories are not just local; they are frequently broadcast to the entire nation and to the world. Optical illusion pop-art gallery: Fantasy life surreal illusions street art

Even though we usually think of stories as fictional and immaterial, the mass-mediated framing stories I have in mind here both alter and reflect concrete reality in important ways. The assertion that we are guided by stories that narrate our collective lives does not deny that there are more or fewer crimes committed in some areas, more or less economic prosperity now, more or less desirable housing in this neighborhood or that. Any observant New Yorker can easily produce a substantial body of undeniable material evidence in support of any one or several of the prevailing framing stories of the moment. Framing stories are intangible, difficult to recognize, and often unconscious-they are, after all, "common sense"-but they are nonetheless created and sustained through concrete human history, through real life. But a framing story, like all other stories, selects a certain limited number of recognizable aspects of human experience for interpretation, and discards or diminishes the others.