Chris Pape: Freedom Tunnel
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
First generation NYC graffiti writer, author, documentarian, archivist, and historian Chris Pape, AKA FREEDOM, tells his own surreptitious stories around the Upper West Side Manhattan train tunnel that was ultimately named after him. His decision to live on the streets and paint in the "Freedom" tunnel propelled him toward a career that he never could have imagined.
Related Links
• Check out Chris Pape’s extensive image catalog of early New York City graffiti on Instagram.
• Pre-order Chris Pape’s new book “Nation of Graffiti Artists” at beyondthestreets.com.
EPISODE CREDITS
Written, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Luz Fleming. Original Music by Luz Fleming and James Ash. Executive Producer: Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Andy Cotton. Cover art and episode art by Andy Outis. Production assistance by Davis Lloyd.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Yard Tales – CHRIS PAPE: FREEDOM TUNNEL
Luz Fleming:
This episode contains strong language and mature subject matter. It may not be suitable for young ears.
What up, this is Luz Fleming. You have come to the place where we tell tales of the train and the bus yard, the tenement yard, and the prison yard. We detail close calls and chase stories. We dig into larger conversations about crossing boundaries, the other side of the tracks, borders and forbidden space. Whether to make big life changes to forward the artistic or professional practice to escape peril, or just for the sheer thrill of it.
Chris Pape:
Sure enough, just as it was told, there was a plank of wood there and there was a blown out hole on it and you slide down to this embankment that was just dirt and rats and stuff like that. And then there they were.
Luz Fleming:
Today I'm super excited to bring you the legendary New York City graffiti writer, author, documentarian, archivist and historian Chris Pape, AKA FREEDOM. Chris's early life was defined by crossing many boundaries and entering multiple forbidden spaces, including spending some time living on the streets of New York City.
When he found one space that he could not help, but to return to over and over again, a place where he developed his style, built up a well-documented body of work and made lifelong relationships. A place that connected graffiti, homelessness, capital “A” Art, and the need to express oneself at all costs.
Chris was generous enough to let me record his story in his apartment in Brooklyn. So you’ll hear the sound of New York City in the background at times, which seems fitting for this episode. So sit back and let FREEDOM Tell us some of his favorite Yard Tales.
Chris Pape:
My name is Chris Pape and as a graffiti the artist I'm known as FREEDOM and they actually named a tunnel after me called the Freedom Tunnel.
So in 1974, at the age of 14 with my brother and my friends, we roamed the city. The city was in financial straits and what that meant was places like construction sites, they just stopped. Construction throughout the city stopped and they couldn't even hire a guard to watch over all the wood that had been left behind or watch over the equipment, everything just sort of stopped.
So we did things like climb up the scaffolding and then one person would stand there on the fourth floor of the scaffolding, grab onto a pulley, and then the other person would stand on the ground and hold on to the other rope of the pulley. And the person on the fourth floor would then jump out into to just the open air and start yanking. And they zip right by as the other person, wouldn't zoom straight up to the fourth floor.
So you do that kind of thing for a month. You know, and then there's another one in Grand Central terminal, where they had to know an escalator bank that went from really the second floor to the first floor. And you could just spend the entire day just diving down the metallic slide in the middle of it.
And so eventually they put brackets in and that stopped that. So that went on for a month and then we heard this great story. That STEVE 161 who was an Upper West Side, graffiti writer had stolen some dynamite from a construction site and he had blown a hole in this bathroom in Riverside Park.
And that was the way to get into that tunnel, you know, with all the freight trains in it. And then you could go rob them and then you'd just be rich because you're 14, so naturally you would have a whole lineup of people that you could sell all this great material to.
The Freedom Tunnel began not as the Freedom Tunnel, It was actually the freight train tunnel and it was built if I remember by the WPA back in 1931. Prior to that, it had been an open railroad track that ran along Hudson River and went all the way down, I think ninth or 10th avenue, where it went down into the High Line.
They called it the murder express because it ran down people on the street. It was very congested down there and people just walked across the streets and were run down by freight trains. So that's really the very beginning of the tunnel and it was quite beautiful when they built it. There were all these modern things in it, a great deal of technology, that would later rotten decay and give it kind of a nice the patina, I suppose.
So, what we did was we kind of herded along some of the tougher guys on our block. We had a lower income housing thing next to right next to where we lived and we got those guys and we went down there, we went into the bathroom and sure enough, just as it was told, there was a plank of wood there and there was a blown out hole in it.
And you slide down to this embankment that, you know, it's just dirt and rats and stuff like that. And then you'd have like a six foot drop down to the train tracks eventually. And then there, they were five tracks across and freight trains and stuff like that. It was exhilarating. So we did that. We bought spray paint with us cause we were just getting into our graffiti thing.
And this was a much, it just seemed like a much safer place to write than actually going to a real train yard where real kids could rob you and stuff like that.
We actually did try and open some of the freights and there was nothing in them. They were just empty. One time we open them and there were some boxes and we're all, “Boxes! We've got boxes!” You know, this is so great and there were cans of Carnation instant milk, aluminum cans of Carnation milk, kind of like soup cans.
And so we had a battle of those. We would throw them at each other because that's, which weren’t the swiftest bunch, and they would hit the wall though and crack open and just go, “Plssssh!” This white powder everywhere.
Then the next time we went down in there, somebody fired a shot at us. So there was a track security guy who had a salt gun, and we had been warned this, and he fired it at us. I fell, I hurt my knee, and then that kind of turned into the story that I got shot with a salt gun, which wasn't really true. But it was a great story, you know, when you're 14, so yeah, I got shot.
You know, but yeah, they dragged me out. We got home, cleaned the whole thing up, and then we never went down there again.
High school in New York was a defining moment for every kid because you had three major high schools, maybe four, you had Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, which wasn't that good back then, Music & Art and Art & Design. And if you did not get into one of those schools, you were dead. It was just that simple.
You were going to your own local high school where you would be just raped and stabbed and shot and you'd be killed and they bring you back to life and then they would kill you again. And then they would do it in front of your parents. Like it was really that, that frightening.
I tried out for three different schools, Stuyvesant, Music & Art, Art & Design. I got in as I started that was when I siphoned off to graffiti because I had to keep up with these guys. I had these friends named Cisco and Stead Roy and Stead Roy used to come in all the way from Brooklyn. I have no idea how he did it.
Cisco came all the way in from the North Bronx. I have no idea how he did it. I mean, my trip was 25 minutes compared to what these guys did, but they respected the school and we spent most of our time on the rooftop of the school drawing, or we meet at the school, then we'd go downtown. We'd go to MOMA, we'd go to the Metropolitan. We just immersed ourselves in art and you know, we'd just roam around and do that stuff.
But competing there meant for the first two years or so It was really more about drawing comics. And the day I met Stead Roy who I was 14 and he must've been 15 because I was really under age. He had with him a 20 page comic that he had written, illustrated, hand colored in Ph. Martin dyes. And I thought, “My God, this guy's more motivated than I am. This is insane. Who does that? I mean, who even knows how to do that?”
So if you weren't home drawing two or three hours a day, you weren't competitive. And that's what I enjoyed about graffiti was how competitive it was. So I burned that energy off there, and it was the best thing for me. It was really good because I was kind of heading in a bad direction.
I wound up dropping out. I wound up having to leave. My grades in my studio classes, straight A's and Klein who was the principal there had already purchased two of my paintings. The great adviser had already purchased a sculpture of mine. So life was good in that regards, but I was getting more untethered from my family and the grades got worse and worse and that's all my parents care about.
You know, they, they, they loved me to death, but they felt that the way for me to go was good grades. That was, that was the way that your, that would get you into college and then college would help to set you up for life and give you more flexibility in what you're doing. And for some reason, I was just on a collision course with good grades.
I couldn't, I just couldn't do it. That led to a confrontation between me and my parents and words were spoken. I left the house. I was 17 and kind of bumming around living on the streets at that point.
And to paint it more pictorially, the streets I was walking on where the same streets that had happened after the ’77 Blackout. So there were still being all these boarded up things, broken glass rubble.
My homelessness was it's odd that I would eventually get tied in with the homeless. But I I've always said, and always said that to them, that mine was a sort of dilettante homelessness. In other words, my parents had enough trust in me to know that I wasn't going to die. I wasn't going to get killed out on the streets.
I knew enough about the streets. I had enough friends that if I needed a place to go, I could go there. And more importantly, I could always go back home. That option was always available to me. We didn't speak for a year, but my brother was in touch with my parents, certainly. And you know, that would always be an option.
So to say that I was homeless is, is a little bit, I was homeless with benefits
And there were times when I would sleep in. Not because I was homeless, but because I liked to, so I'd sleep on a park bench on 96th street, the sun would be coming up. You'd have the sun beaming down on you and it was nice. I had nothing but time on my hands.
And I noticed on the trains, guys that started writing again, like guys that I knew from when I was 14, so that who were all 13 or 14 at the time, and we're hitting buses and stuff like that, but now they were adults and they're out of school and they were like, I can go into a train tunnel and just paint and I'm an adult.
So that kind of got me hooked into it again. And so I started writing FREEDOM and I hooked up with CHRIS217, who was one of the most notable writers of the time. And CHRIS and I became writing partners and we just got along really well. So we would, you know, we would roam the city and do street tagging, and then it kind of came time to paint my first train.
And luckily CHRIS217 stole a lot of paint. He had one scam going where he used to call Martins Paint on 3rd Avenue in the eighties and he would say, “Yeah, yeah, this is Vick here. I'm calling from 72nd street and Amsterdam, listen, we need, uh, five cases of silver spray paint, then I need five flat blacks.” And Chris would show up at the front door with his Martin Paint shirt and he'd sign a little thing and they give him the 10 cases and walk out of the store.
And he did that the third time he did it, I was across the street. And he was slamming the door against these employees who were trying to get after him. And he left the hand cart and left everything and then took off as fast as he could.
We were doing blockbusters, so big silver and black end-to-end cars that would say CHRIS, and I would outline it and he would start filling it in. And then he would go off and go tagging like a thousand times, which I didn't really do. So that was his thing, but we both shared the name. So it made sense, and that was weird and just wonderful and, and done terribly, but it didn't matter.
And that was great fun and then eventually I'd have to go to the one tunnel at 137th Street, which is sort of like you're going from the minor leagues, that 103rd Street, they kept the trains there when it snowed out. And you didn't really bump into other writers there because they were all at 137th.
But going into 137th was a whole different thing. I mean, that's where the big boys played and eventually I made it up there with CHRIS and we kept painting trains. And one day when I was doing that, I started breaking the letters. Which was not an innovation that I came up with. Everybody had broken letters before me, probably for five years prior to when I was doing it.
But I started giving them these gray tones with the black and I realized that by getting gray tones that I could actually paint realistically. So now the question was what to do with it.
I was walking out of the park one day, Riverside Park, same park with Freedom Tunnel and murder express and all that. And I noticed these people looking into the tunnel, they were looking down into a grating. And so I sat on a bench and I thought, what are they looking at? I mean, why? And I walked over and I realized that that particular grating, as well as two others that were vertical gratings actually made a giant frame of light that was about 15 feet by 15 feet.
And they were just fascinated by the fact that they can now see down there and see what the tracks looked like. And I thought that was interesting. So I would come back at different times and watch just to see that people did this.
I’ve got to paint something there. I had to figure out what, and I thought the Mona Lisa would be the, like if I could tuck the Mona Lisa away, then that would be great.
Luz Fleming:
What's up everybody, this is Luz, the producer of Yard Tales. I want to take a minute to ask you for a favor, a show like this takes a lot of time and effort to produce. We're not a big team. It's mostly just me. We don't have any sponsors contributing money or influencing what I make or what I say. This is independent media.
If that's something you support, please help me to keep making this show and providing it to you for free by donating to Yard Tales. Even one dollars helps, but if just a small percentage of listeners gave the price of one of those fancy Upper West Side frappe-a-lattes, well, you get the picture, just go to yardtales.live/donate and click on the button that says “donate”.
Now that's yardtales.live/donate. Any amount is really appreciated. Thanks so much. And now let's get back to the first painting FREEDOM ever did in the tunnel that would ultimately be named after him.
Chris Pape:
It took two days and it was kind of a scrawled mess. And, and I painted the Mona Lisa down there.
There were two things that I kind of established, which was. I was painting like a graffiti writer, which meant that while street art existed then, it was, I mean, Keith Haring had come up with the Radiant Child, but he hadn't hit the subway systems yet. He hadn't found chalk yet. So he really hadn't become Keith Haring yet.
And I could point to a number of street artists, people I admire like John Fekner, who was around. Dan Witz was around then. Jenny Holzer was around then. So people like that, but it wasn't a thing. And sometimes I get lumped into this street art thing and I'm like, “No, no, no. I was graffiti writer.” And the difference, I think is that street art people are, are kind of laconic in their work. Like, “I think I’ll wheat paste here.” And I’m just ultra paranoid.
You know, because I'm remembering the gunshot from 1974. So I'm painting down there and freight trains are going by, you know, and there's not that much clearance and I'd have knocked the ladder over and lean up against the wall, stuff like that.
So I established, one, that I was still a graffiti writer who was painting realistically and still maintain that sense of speed and trying to work as quickly as possible. So that was the first painting that I did in the Freedom Tunnel in 1980.
You would think that after painting the Mona Lisa, that, that I would have been hooked. I mean, I'm kind of competitive and, and it did come out well, and there was a great sort of underground current on the Upper West Side of people who knew about it because they would look down on the grating and, you know, they say, “Hey, Tommy, look at this! This is kind of a secret. Look at this. Come check this out!” And I would watch, and my head would just get bigger and bigger.
And so that led to a number of paintings. There was a matchbook cover. This was a series of them. There was a Bazooka Joe, there was a Sprite bottle cap. That was great.
But then I went to the tunnel one day, now the Mona Lisa was on 99th. These paintings were now. I now know to be between 95th and 96th Street. These paintings disappeared. The Mona Lisa was there, but the other ones were gone. I knew I had painted them. I didn't hallucinate. I stopped doing drugs in 1974 so I was very sober and I thought, “Where the hell my paintings go?”
So now I learned another lesson, which was that the parks department guys were cooping down there. They were getting pissed off that I was coming down painting. So they had some paint and they painted over the paintings and the paint was similar to the wall color. So as I made that sort of bend between 96th and 95th Street, five of my paintings that had taken over a year to do. They were gone.
So I let it go and I was done and then in 1982, a friend of mine named Adal, who I had gone to Music & Art with who was sweet as the day is long. I know that's an expression a lot of new Yorkers use. We, she, we were hanging out one night and we were talking and I was telling her my sad story of my life.
And like a week later she had come up with this handwritten book that was illustrator. And it was just all written in prose about FREEDOM and CHRIS217 running through the park writing and stuff like that. And I thought I have a perfect spot for that. And there was this long, long stretch of the tunnel in between, I guess, 96th and 97th that had not just one grating, but had about 15 gratings.
So it, it gave it a really pictorial sense and I thought I would hand write each page and illustrate it. Now, the only problem with that is that when you do something like that, you can't make a mistake because you're painting in silver and black on a porous surface, and nobody had ever heard of white washing a wall, like who would do that? That was stupid.
I mean, you wouldn't even think of it, let alone decide whether it was stupid or not. So if you, if you did a painting. You got to get it right. If you don't get it right, then you have to just paint over it and make something bigger that, you know, you hope works.
So anyway, it was a nine, eight or nine page story. I wrote it out it’s about a city block long and then illustrated it. So each one had an illustration and I got to page three and I had invited Marty Cooper down there because she was sort of a neighbor. She lived just a few blocks away and she was shooting.
Just as I expected, the illustration just went off the rails and it was terrible. And I thought I've just ruined this entire wall. And I can't paint here again because what am I going to do? The character was based on me. So I thought, all right, I'll paint myself. And I asked her if she had a little pocket compact, which she did, she had a mirror.
And so I took that and really within five minutes had painted this very quick portrait of myself that that was surprisingly good. And I say that because when I do surprisingly bad things, I say that as well. And then I was just super inspired and I kept on going and there were still some mistakes, but.
That was maybe when I was really excited. And that was when I began to think there's more to this. They may paint it over, but there's more to do down here. And now I just have to figure out what it was.
So at that point I had three things going. I was a graffiti writer, painting in my little Freedom Tunnel, which wasn't known as the Freedom Tunnel then. I was showing at galleries downtown. I counted Jean-Michel Basquiat as a friend as well as Keith Haring, although by my own ambition, my Basquiat thing was somewhat tenuous at best.
We had met at the solo artist meetings before he was Basquiat and we would both sit there and listen afterwards, we would go up to Ali's house. It was Ali was this incredible great figure in everybody's life and he would make spaghetti and he would talk. And if, because he was more brilliant than Jean-Michel, and he certainly knew it and he felt he was a better painter and Jean-Michel wasn't really doing anything. He was painting these jumpsuits, which were big at the time and he was charging, I think, 15 or 20 bucks. That's what he was doing with that.
And I got to know Keith because he was at the same meetings and that was nice but more importantly. I mean, I got to know guys like LEE, Lee Quiñones, who was the greatest graffiti artist ever.
And I say that hands down, I mean, he just changed the entire dynamic of what graffiti should be and Lee's own paintings today, reflect that in my opinion, out of that school, he's it he's the best. So I have great admiration and a very good friendship with him.
You know, here's the problem we all faced, which was. All right. You've been painting trains and that's great. And we want to kind of exploit that, although we're not going to say we want to exploit, but could you do a little graffiti and then they give you a canvas that would be maybe eight feet by five feet and say, “Okay! Boom paint. You're you're now a painter!”
And some people freaked out and ran the other way. Some people painted exactly what they painted on the train. Some people made the transition seamlessly because they were just artists. And I was somewhere in between. I settled on doing illustrations generally borrowing from Martha Cooper imagery, a great deal, and then kind of painting it with spray paint, but it was sale-able.
And so people like that, they like money in the art world. And I, you know, I'm just thankful I had a, a great time back then. I had CRASH and DAZE are two other guys who were so pivotal in my life back then LADY PINK was around certainly. And we got to watch as each other, you know, the others grew.
So that's how those things happen.
And then by 1987, when the market crashed, that was it, it all ended. I mean, all those little, there were five hundred galleries on the Lower East Side that opened post 1982 and in 1987, I think there were six left. That was it. And people like me who were, you know, bought in and could make some money for myself and for a gallery were just, there was nowhere to go.
Which of course begged the question then, “What are you?” I mean, you just defined yourself as an artist and now you don't have a place to art. So, what do you do? Well, the answer was easy for me. I mean, I went down into the tunnel and I painted there. Gaining a more legitimate voice
And if there's a key to this entire story of my life, it's that my first go round in the art world, they were nice illustrations and anybody who owns one, I think is lucky to have them, they were pretty good, but it wasn't my voice. And now I was, I had time to go back into the tunnel and paint and then a tricky thing happened as all the things do, I, I wound up with the Epstein-Barr Virus.
The Epstein-Barr Virus is basically Mono and then. If it's not resolved after three months and that sort of mutates into the Epstein-Barr Virus. And I had that for then about a year, but at that point I had met the homeless people in the tunnel. That started in 1986. I was painting the history of graffiti and there was this guy named Bernard, who was now living across the tracks.
And every day Bernard would come across all five tracks, ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh. And ah, was so, so dirty. And he, and he hand me a cup that was just, just charred black. I mean, this thing was, you know, it was right out of the dump and he'd say, “Hey, Hey, you know, it's nice to meet you. I'm Bernard. Why don’t you to have a cup of tea?”
And I was like, “Dude, I'm not drinking out of that thing. What are you kidding me?” I mean, and I just tried so hard to be so polite and so like, you’re killing me and I finished the painting after a week and I thought I'm being rude here and I should, at the very least say my goodbyes. So I crossed the tracks. I went over, I talked to Bernard, I drank out of the icky cup and we became friends.
He told me his story. I told him my story. Bob showed up. Bob was one of the two people who had moved in with him in 86. And then Sheila came by Fran and Shorty and Tony, and this coincided with a few things I had started to take a visual journal at The School of Visual Arts and I took it very seriously, I really enjoyed it.
I loved going on location and trying to figure out ways to tell the story and the right medium. And so it meant I had some time now. I wanted to document the people who live there. So the EB virus hit, nobody heard from me for a few months, and then I showed up. I started going down there at six in the morning and drawing them, making notations, writing their stories.
Which would all be documented anyway by Jennifer Toth and Margaret Morton. And, and that was a year of my life. And there were about 600 drawings done and about 30 that wound up in the portfolio and eventually Jennifer Toth would go on to write “The Mole People” and she would use some of those drawings.
And then I think by 1988, I was kind of back to painting again. But those people had a huge impact on my life.
It was also the same time I met SANE and SMITH who are two pivotal people in both graffiti history and New York history, which I always love when they're, when they overlap, but they did the epitome of what you're supposed to do as graffiti writers. In the old days, you would hear legendary stories about TAKI183, actually hitting The Statue Of Liberty or KAY161.
His claim to fame was hitting the angel in Bethesda Fountain, which was put there after the Civil War. And of course they did the ultimate, which was just boom. They climbed out 280 feet up in the air on these little tiny ledges about that big and painted their names on the top of the Brooklyn Bridge.
And even better was that the media picked up on it and ran with it and the city was outraged. So I had to meet them because they had kind of been wanting to meet me. And I had been very reticent. I was kind of staying away from writers, but I had a lot of journalist friends, and they wanted to meet them.
So went back to the SRO hotel where I kept a studio to paint and where I always thought when all of these cards came tumbling down. I would wind up sleeping and again for $130 a month. And they came by and they were interviewed. SANE as usual, would talk. SMITH didn't say a thing and that's just the way they are.
And I got to know them. And then I got to paint with them a number of times. SMITH and I seem to have more in common, even though SANE was the more artistic of the two, but SMITH and I both did the New York times crossword puzzle. So you see the only graffiti writer I knew who did that. And we used to argue over it too.
And then it just tragically, just very sadly SANE fell off a bridge and died in 1990. And I remember his funeral was up in Washington Heights, the birthplace of graffiti. And I remember as I was getting out of a cab, I was with CHRIS217’s brother, Tony, who was a really nice guy and more of SANE’s generation than mine.
And Henry came by Henry Chalfant, famed graffiti archivist, and said, “Do you want to be a pallbearer?” And I thought, “Well, I don't. I mean, I know SANE well, and I know his brother well, but a pallbearer that, odd.” But you know, I quickly jumped out and grabbed the casket and we carried it in and then it dawned on me.
I was 30 years old. I was like the old man. And I was, I mean, I, boy, if I was 30, I don't know what Henry was, but he must have seemed ancient, he was a pallbearer. SANE, he's 20 years old and that gave me a sense of perspective about age and what I was doing.
And the gift that those two brothers gave me was the gift of archiving. And it came about one day where JEAN13, who was like a local neighborhood writer who was kind of legendary, had great style. He left off his photo collection with me. Now, I didn't know photos were a big thing. SANE and SMITH saw them and they said, “Ah, these are incredible. This is, this is amazing. This is all great stuff from the late seventies. Can we macro these?” Meaning, take static shots of them.
And I said, “Sure. You know, by all means, take them with you. Do what you want to do with them.” They macroed them. They then traded them to other people and stuff like that. And as a gift back, I said, you know, if you ever find any shots by CLIFF, who is a guy who was, I mean, to me, that's an old writer, or PHASE2 or something like that, let me know.
And they started giving me these shots as they came across them. And I just became fascinated with that part. And I started my collection, which now I think as you know, has about, you know, 10, 15,000 images in it. And and I've written many books on the subject as well, including the BLADE biography and the STAYHIGH biography.
And so I will always be thankful to both SANE and SMITH for that gift that they gave me because it could have gone in a completely different direction.
SMITH and I would argue kind of endlessly about painting around where the homeless people live. And I was arguing for Guernica. He was arguing for Goya's 3rd of May and he won out. It turned out there was a serendipitous piece to it, which was that Goya's 3rd of May showed the peasants being shot by the Napoleonic forces.
What it doesn't show is a light source and in the painting, there's this light on the peasants as they're being shot, no light source for it. So what we did was we positioned it so that we knew where the fire was that the guys would sit around. And so when they stoke the fire, the fire then became part of the painting because that was the light source.
And it was to me, the best painting we did down there and maybe the best piece of artwork I've ever done.
And then not long after that, as Amtrak, as the trains were rolling through. And I was sitting there watching, looking across at that wall that had the history of graffiti on it, which was now kind of dogged and old and stuff. I thought it's time to put together an epilogue.
Really a goodbye and I sat there with Bernard and started dissecting it with them and we came up with different ideas. So the portrait of Bernard was appropriate. A portrait of Bob was appropriate. The Coca-Cola reference was a reference to crack cocaine. Certainly SANE was involved, he wasn't there, his brother did the painting.
And afterwards we scattered part of his ashes there. “The Nuclear Family”, which was from amazing photograph by Margaret Bourke-White was something that I used to see all the time in junior high school, these Depression era photos. And it never once dawned on me that we would go back to that route again in the late 1980s, where you had homeless people everywhere, how could that happen?
So that became the anchor to it and then The American Way was also part of it. Dick Tracy drop “The Gun Mole” the reference to the mole people. I was actually there for when that word was invented. If you can imagine. And I argued against its usage in the book. Bernard overrode me and said, “I’m not offended by it.” So that became the title of that book.
And in 1990, one last serendipitous thing happened, which was that SMITH had a can of paint on the way out. And he wrote on the outside of the entrance the Freedom Tunnel, and then it became known as the Freedom Tunnel. It hadn't been before that, it was after that. And then if you add to that, the internet and urban exploration and everything else, I'm the luckiest guy in the world, because you could not have planned a career like this.
Luz Fleming:
Thanks so much for letting me into your home to record this episode and for sharing your amazing stories with us, Chris. Your historical knowledge and archives have given us such a deep look into a time and a place that have been all but erased. Thanks for helping keep the culture alive. And thank you so much for joining us today.
Be sure to check out FREEDOM’s Instagram page @chrisfreedompape, where you will find perhaps the most extensive catalog of early seventies graffiti images, along with notable photos through the eighties, to the present. Also be sure to check out his new book, Nation of Graffiti Artists, which you can order now at beyondthestreets.com.
The interview for this episode of Yard Tales took place on the traditional territory of the Canarsie and Lenape Nations or Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
I recorded and produced the rest of this episode on the unceded territory of the Squamish Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations, Vancouver, BC. Yard Tales is executive produced by Jacob Bronstein. Special thanks to Andy Outis, our design director, who put me in touch with Chris and also happens to live in the same building as him. Production assistance by Davis Lloyd, original music and sound designed by myself and James Ash.
Shout out to Andy Cotton for the dope theme music. Thanks for letting me remix it for this show. If you like Yard Tales, be sure to follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts and be sure to rate and review on Apple Podcasts, because it really helps to point more listeners to the show.
You can find more information, images, and additional audio at yardtales.live and check us out on Instagram @yardtales and Facebook at Yard Tales Podcast. If you want to leave feedback or reach out for any reason, send an email to info@yardtales.live. Be sure to listen to the end of each episode, where we feature audience members, own Call-In Yard Tales.
And be sure to tune in next week when I yet though Airto Morales tells his own prison Yard Tales.
Airto Morales:
And specifically crack, right at that time in the late eighties, that shit changed the whole Mission District that changed the whole city man. Folks, they went from writing, doing graffiti and break dancing to packing pistols and selling dope. You know, a lot of people just kind of, you know, overnight, almost seemingly kind of shifted and depending on where you live and what school you went to, you know, folks are drawing the lines in the sand.
Luz Fleming:
And if you're still listening, that means you might've had a real connection to this podcast. And maybe you have a Yard Tale of your own that you want to tell. if so, go to yardtales.live/callinyardtales for detailed instructions on how to do so. If we dig your story, we'll feature it in a future episode.
And now we'll let AXIS ONE, take us out with his own Call-In Yard Tale.
AXIS ONE:
I’m AXIS ONE, BVD, ARM, CVS, TOK, DD, ROT, all city San Francisco writer. At 3rd Street bus yards, me and STIR decided to hit it in the daytime thinking we were cool. We could get away with it. And it just came out with a brand new squares with the the slick ceilings.
And we got real deep into the yard, probably we're in there for about 45 minutes and we passed the gap and there was along the wall. There was about 10 of them lined up, but they were lying in a single file line. We waited because they were doing some inspections on them and we waited on a bus in the middle of the yard and watched them when they left that side, they went to the other side.
We crept on the wall. And came in down the wall between the wall and the backs of the buses and slid into maybe I think we've got three or four of them. And then they jumped on the bus with us. So we had to get out the back door. I run to the middle of the yard. I think LESS, he ran straight down the aisle towards the front and they shut the gate on him and he had to turn around and run back.
Now what's the odds of this happening. I ran to the middle of the yard and I slid under a bus. And I was waiting there, patiently, quietly. Nobody was around me. Next thing I know I hear, “Tsh, tsh, tsh, tshhh” And here comes LESS sliding under the same bus I'm under, like, “What the fuck are you doing here?” And they were just around us.
They, they, they, were around us. I came up underneath the bus, ran out the 22nd Street side, ran down a couple streets, ran down to 3rd Street and I guess they put out the yard and was chasing me down 3rd Street on a bus and some random dude riding his bicycle, going the other way, seeing them chasing me.
And back then they had a $500 reward to catch someone doing graffiti. So the guy sticks out his arm and clotheslines me right in front of the police station. They caught out to me, they walked me across the street, so humiliated, so mad. I was like, I was me and him. We went through a lot of court cases together because of that.
But what are the odds of somebody sliding up, there’s 200 buses in there. Why you got to slide under the bus I'm under. Came out of there with an inch thick of grease all over my white T-shirt, horrible. But those are the things you, you know, you, you get cocky. You go to the yard. So many times I got busted like four or five times in the yards, but you get cocky.
You think you can get away with shit that you, you just weren't meant to get away with.