4GIVE YOSELF: R.I.P. Ed Boxx, painter of the Six Year Cigarette and other marvels.

Thomas Crone writes over at 52nd that word is going around that prolific, thoughtful graffiti tagger Ed Boxx has died. People say he was attacked “while painting on the east side.”

Sad, sad news.

[I should pause to say that I AM NOT INTERESTED in reading an argument about the ethics of graf here, and why you think graffiti is 100% always wrong all the time. This ain't the time or place, so kindly hold your tongue if that's what you're after. I will not hesitate to remove comments I find to be insensitive.]

Ed’s work is kinda sorta everywhere. He usually just writes “ED BOXX,” “RED FOXX,” “4GIVE YOSELF,” or “GET UP! GET GOD!” But he has done larger, more complex works, stuff on a level of effort, wit, and skill that one just doesn’t see coming from most taggers around here. I mean it’s one thing to slop one’s name hastily at arm’s height in ugly handwriting, and it’s another to develop signature fonts and characters, and to do occasional all-out installations.

One of my favorite Ed Boxx pieces took up the inside of a Near North Riverfront warehouse. It was a small, two story warehouse, and the only thing Ed painted was the insides of the steel sash windows, such that it looked like cartoon stained glass, the religious scenes replaced instead with stylized cat heads and cigarettes. He only used a couple of colors, I think blue and yellow and green. The limited palette really popped next to the red brick of the building. In good light, the whole piece seemed to slightly glow.

Another favorite took up every window on an entire facade of the Spivey Building skyscraper in East St. Louis. While exploring the building last fall, my friends and I noticed what appeared to be abstract designs in every single window of one side of the Spivey, painted with lilac and white house paint. But once we got outside and looked up, we realized that all those stories of painted windows added up to giantly spell out one of Ed’s aliases (I want to say it was REXX RAM, but I don’t have the photo in front of me, gah!). He had to have thought about that one for a long, long time, and executing something like that had to have been pretty complicated.

Another favorite, albeit one jeered by many, was when Ed edited (ed-ited) the facade of the Orpheum Theater, making it into the ED BOXX Theater.

My feelings about graffiti are complicated, but Ed’s art was something I almost always felt good about. He actually made some really interesting, compelling, thought-provoking pieces. His best works were site-specific pieces that incorporated the location into the work, rather than just the simple throw-up tags that anyone can do. Even when I was preservationist-ily muttering “On terra cotta! That glaze is so delicate! How will they ever remove the paint without damaging it?” I found myself smiling at Ed’s work.

I’ve had a lot of folks say things to me along the lines of “Forgive yourself? What’s that supposed to mean? How is any of this thought provoking?” All I can offer is that it’s kind of like a poem or a really great rock lyric: It doesn’t have to be explicit and obvious to anyone but the artist, to mean something and to make you think. Sometimes the cryptic-ness of the language in and of itself is part of the message.

Even though I never got to meet Ed Boxx, I’ll miss his presence as his tags vanish, one by one, from the city. I get to some fairly hidden spots in the city, but I saw Ed’s work everywhere I went, following me on my travels. You could tell just from where he went that he was really paying attention to the city. I’ll miss walking through some crazily hidden, industrial corner of the Near North Side and stumbling upon one of his works, which has been a small joy for me many times. Running into a particularly thoughtful Ed Boxx tag in a completely unexpected spot feels in a teeny, tiny way like bumping into a friend when I least expected it.

Ed, your presence in the landscape will be dearly missed.

__________________

I don’t have photos of some of his better, more complex pieces, but I have these:

Detail of an Ed Boxx piece in a vacant, notably roof-less building in the Carondelet Coke complex, April 2007.

Palimpsest of Ed Boxx graf and an old advertisement (Not saying I would have modified the neat old ad myself, but I did think the result was interesting). Recently, he seems to have gotten more into this editing of ghost signs.

An unspectacular tag in and of itself, but the location was the walking surface of a completely isolated pedestrian bridge that pretty much no one uses. Coming up here and seeing this tag totally made me grin, full of amused, “What the HELL?” I mean this tag was basically done for a handful of pedestrians walking to/from one of the sketchiest parts of the whole city, and helicopters. Who else would bother? That was part of the joy of Ed’s work.

Drinks & Mortar, at a place where Popeye would drink.

Hey y’all,

Once again it is time for us to drink & discuss architecture. It’s time for Drinks & Mortar. Joy of joys!

This month, we will gather starting at 7pm on Thursday, May, 22 at the exquisitely named Colorado Bob’s Ship of Fools, at 3457 Morgan Ford. You can’t miss it–it has a sailboat in the front yard.

Colorado Bob’s is CASH ONLY and is kinda loud, so heads up on both.

But I hope you’ll join us at this friendly place! It’s nautically themed, and is host to a number of small model ships, as well as a gigantic ship’s wheel that dominates much of the actual bar.

Meow,
Claire N-B
thee hostesss
myspace.com/drinksandmortar

Vanishing America photographer at Left Bank tonight

Local photographer Michael Eastman will be at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid, at 7pm tonight, Monday, May 19.

I got to see a sampling of Eastman’s work at his retrospective show at SLUMA last year, and found myself returning to the show several times over the months that it hung, to meditate on a few favorite images. His gorgeous image of a block of vacant buildings under a bright but ominous, cloud-marbled sky on Commercial Street in Downtown Cairo, Illinois, haunted me. It stuck in my mind enough to get me reading about Cairo, and to foster a curiosity about the place that prompted a road trip with two friends just this past weekend. (There’s a small version of the Cairo photo here.)

Eastman shoots disappearing Americana: the orphaned New Orleans shotgun house and the vacated small town downtown theater, and all sorts of things in between. Rarely have I seen photos of buildings devoid of people, that were so deeply suggestive of human presence. Sometimes, I’ll look at one of Eastman’s images and swear that there’s someone just out of sight, about to step up and look out a window or to round a corner, and that they’d have ended up in the shot if Eastman had hesitated and pressed the shutter just a moment later. Other times, I’ll look at one of his images and be unable to stop thinking about the stampede of so many thousands of people through the depicted space over the years, before it was abandoned. Eastman is also not at all afraid to use rich colors. Combine the bright palette with his thoughtful use of light, and some of the images you end up with border on the sublime. It’s easy to take photos of vacant, sad spaces, but it really takes something to make them this beautiful and this rich with life.

Hope I’ve not overhyped, but I love these photographs. Check ‘em out for yourself here.

Wheeeeeeeeeee

As I was finishing up that post on the Clemens Mansion chapel partial roof collapse, I heard a big ol’ round of fire sirens to the west and south of here. Biiiiig ol’ round of ‘em.

Uh, so anyone ever hear a resolution on what happened with those arsons, those eight Blairmont buildings and two collateral buildings that burned in four days? I’d like to know what happened.

I climbed up on my roof to see if I could tell what’s burning right now, to no avail. If I didn’t have to get up early tomorrow morning, I’m betting it wouldn’t be too tricky to figure out: If I were to walk out my front door and just go in a straight line, west along Hebert, I’d probably find it before I’d gone too many blocks.

This might be unrelated to those arsons, and it might not be a Blairmont-owned building that’s burning, but that’s exactly the trick: striking a nice, ongoing, lingering fear into the hearts of neighbors, so they’re never really quite sure if the trouble has disappeared. And hey, with so many forcefully, aggressively neglected buildings around, there’s plenty to worry about.

Methinks I’m going to conclude this blog entry now, because there’s not much I else I can say on the topic in my current state that doesn’t start with the letter “F.” Lots and lots and lots of capital-lettered words starting with the letter “F.” The word I’m thinking of has four letters, but it ain’t fire.

Blairmont does pathetic “repairs” on Clemens Mansion; part of Clemens Mansion Chapel roof collapses.

Part of the roof of the chapel of the Blairmont-owned Clemens Mansion collapsed. (Thanks to Chris Naffziger for catching this.)

There’s information and video over at KSDK.

I went by to take a look:

From the east:

Up close:

Front and west facades:

Doesn’t seem to be an emergency condemn on it yet, but time will tell. It’s already condemned to be demolished according to Geo St. Louis, although I’m not sure a non-emergency condemn can go through on a building that’s got this level of historic status.

The big ha-ha funny punchline (once again, Blairmont’s joke is on the Near North Side) is that Blairmont was doing an absolute farce of “maintenance” just a couple of days prior, without a building permit and using the absolute wrong, brick-damagin’ kind of mortar to do the job. Can y’all say too little, too late?

Thank you so fucking much, Blairmont.

At this point, you can still save this house. You can sell, or you can at least do real, actual, legit mothballing and bracing work with serious contractors who know what they are doing. We know you have the money (Yes, you, McKee), so the question is: Do you respect us enough to preserve this building? I’ve got a pretty good idea what you think of me and my neighbors after I’ve spent recent nights agonizing over the sounds of your buildings going up in flames nearby, but I’m always willing to be positively, happily surprised.

You can still make this one right. The time to act is now.

Should you catch a craving for pecans whilst exploring the Armour Stockyards Ruins….

At Robertson’s Farm Supply on Route 3 in East St. Louis, you can buy lots of useful things. It’s hard to beat farm supply stores for sheer “Wow, I didn’t know that existed but now I need one!” gluttony.

Among the goodies:

They sell pecans by the pound. And they sell grass seed by the pound.

I bought two bags of pecans and one of grass seed. The clerk silently labeled the grass seed bag for me, ever so helpfully:

 

Didn’t even break his poker face while he wrote it. Fantastic.

The annual Old North House Tour is tomorrow (I am SO! excited!)

The Old North St. Louis House Tour is tomorrow, Saturday, May 10, from 10-4. Tickets are $10 today (buy them via paypal here) and $12 day of. I’m really psyched, and I really hope you’ll consider coming up to take a look around our community.

What I like about our house tour, versus others I’ve been on, is the mix of all the kinds of homes you get to see. The house where I’ll be helping out in the afternoon looks like a perfect, sparkling 19th century house right out of Lafayette Square, but we’ve also got gritty in-progress rehabs and everything in between. You’re not going to see two dozen identical perfectly historic, spotless old homes, nor are you going to see twenty identical loft-style contemporary spaces. We mix it up. As an architecture and design geek, I never get sick of seeing the endless variety of ways my neighbors finish the 1880s and 1890s buildings we have in ONSL.

Particularly of interest is that this year, you can have a sneak peak at the ongoing development of the 14th Street Mall. Come take a look, and watch us turn an icon of bad planning and decline into one of rebirth and resurgence.

And meet the neighbors! The main thing that keeps me in Old North is how wonderful and diverse my neighbors are. People genuinely do take care of each other up here. It’s the kind of place where people ask how you are and mean it.

More info about the tour is available here. If you can’t make it but you’re curious about Old North, I’m always glad to answer questions or take you on a walking tour. Yay Old North!

An unfunny post about funny

It’s before 8pm on Wednesday night.

You are, for some reason, reading my blog.

Don’t do that–come see some improv! Arch Rivals Comedy (no relation to the Roller Girls) is doing a show at the Tap Room (2100 Locust), and it promises to be a good time. Doors at 7:30, funny at 8, $10, 18+.

More about Blairmont fires.

Well.

No sirens heard two nights ago, although I slept soundly enough that I could have missed em.

Then, I heard a big mess of fire engine sirens around 9:30 last night, to the south and west of my home. Headed over on foot to St. Louis Place and couldn’t find anything. Granted, I didn’t go that far west, but…. feet are not a car, and I couldn’t hear engines or smell smoke. So who knows. It only sounded like three or so engines, nothing like the six that were at the 2206 Hebert fire. Might have been a false alarm, might have been totally unrelated, might have been nothing. It was the kind of thing I wouldn’t have paid much attention to before this whole thing frayed my nerves. But hey, frayed nerves are what life in Blairmontland is allllll about.

And of course, I have no way of proving these fires have anything to do with Blairmont. But my neighbor Barbara Manzara has been compiling addresses of the fires, and eight out of ten are owned by Blairmont companies. Awful funny, no? Granted, if one randomly selected a bunch of vacant buildings in the target area, a good portion of them would be owned by Blairmont. But the thing is, not a single one of the ten buildings that burned was owned by the LRA (the city’s Land Reutilization Authority), and there are a lot of LRA properties in the fifth ward. In fact, I remember someone telling me that we’re #1 or #2 in the city for the number of LRA properties in our ward. So if this was really, truly a random selection of vacant buildings, why was not a single one of the buildings owned by the LRA? Save for the occasional “NO TRESPASSING NO LOITERING” sign, LRA and Blairmont buildings are often hard to distinguish from the street.

Besides the lack of LRA properties on the list, it’s just awful coincidental that this is happening so neatly within Blairmont’s project boundaries. There are plenty of other depopulated, high-vacancy areas in North City where an arsonist could burn buildings that don’t happen to coincide with somebody’s bulldozer-happy real estate project.

Even if there proves to be no direct Blairmont connection ultimately, I reiterate: Brick rustling was a minor problem in our area, something you heard about sometimes, before Blairmont descended. Now, it’s a plague. So, direct connection or not, we can still thank McKee for this latest ravaging of our community. Even if the fires have nothing to do with brick rustling, some of these buildings were occupied before Blairmont bought them, and certainly they were likely better secured if they were not. And the entire area was more populated, which in and of itself would have been a great deterrent. Blairmont deliberately created these conditions in our area. But that’s okay, none of us were using our human rights anyway, and who wants to feel secure on their own block? (argh, argh, argh….)

Barbara Manzara is compiling a Google map of Blairmont buildings that have burned, both in the past week and in the past couple of years. Here it is.

So a librarian walks into a biker bar…. (Dewey Drinks tomorrow, May 8.)

Once again, it’s time for Dewey Decimal Drinks.

FOR THE MONTH OF MAY, we will gather starting at 7 pm on Thursday, May 8, in the party room of Shady Jack’s, located at 1432 N. Broadway, just north of Downtown. They have tilapia, they have a tuna melt, and they have all sorts of fried goodies as well.

Look for the red “Bikers’ Paradise” sign to identify the place. Biker bar, you ask? Yessir! What other opportunity in your life are you going to have to find out what happens when you mix two dozen librarians and two dozen bikers in the same bar? Hmm?

Claire-ian the Librarian
myspace.com/deweydecimaldrinks