Brooklyn's Progress
August/September 2007

BY JILL SHEEHY

For all the hard work you put into your small business, having it vandalized always comes as a blow. For Brooklyn brick-and-mortar business owners, graffiti is a very real issue to contend with. Luckily, both the City and Brooklyn Borough Hall are hitting full stride in their attempts to help combat the problem, which business owners say is annoying, unnecessary – and just plain unsightly.

Both Brooklyn and the City administrations have put together initiatives that help to lessen the scourge and perhaps even show vandals that their efforts are in vain.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation initiated the Graffiti-Free New York City in 1999. It is the first and only full-time, street-by-street graffiti removal service in the City. The program, which began in Brooklyn, was quickly a success, and aided its expansion to the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Manhattan. All it takes is a call to 311 to request a form to have one of the City’s 23 vans, equipped with two high-pressured paint sprayers and one power washer, dispatched to clean the graffiti from your business. The cleaning method will depend on the wall itself – a painted wall will be painted over while a stone or brick wall that has no paint on it will be power washed.

The request, which can be filled out by the owner or the tenant business, will typically take about a month to be addressed.
 
The fleet operates five days a week, as well as two or three weekday nights, according to the NYCEDC, which operates the initiative under their quality of life program. Businesses on main commercial strips are usually cleaned at night so that the roll-down security fences are lowered for cleaning, and the process does not disrupt the operations of small businesses.

“The Bloomberg Administration’s successful efforts to combat New York City’s seemingly intractable graffiti problem has helped make the City a better place to live and do business in all five boroughs. The City’s investment in a new fleet of 23 specialized vans retrofitted for graffiti-removal and continued outreach to community groups, businesses and residents will enhance our efforts to irradiate this insidious blight on our neighborhoods,” said Giovanni Tafa, Vice President, Asset Management, NYCEDC and head of the Graffiti-Free New York operation.

In keeping with the program’s goal to help create jobs for low-to-moderate income residents, the majority of Graffiti-Free New York employees come from Project Renewal, a social service not-for-profit organization whose mission is to renew the lives of homeless men and women in New York City, focusing their efforts on the neediest and least-served of the city's indigent population.

Since the program’s origin, about 100 million square feet of space has been cleaned by Graffiti-Free New York, and between 500 and 600 sites were cleaned just in 2006 alone.

Sprucing Up Brooklyn
Not to be outdone, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s office acquired two state-of-the-art graffiti-removal trucks in 2002, which have since cleaned more than 1,000 sites across the borough.

With the demand at an all-time high and a wait time of a month, you can request a specific time for the cleaning, which the office tries to oblige with.

In the case of power washing, a site visit is conducted prior to cleaning to ensure that the building is structurally sound and the pressure from the power-washing will not harm the building. The paints used, however, are acid-free and should not harm facades.

If you would like to be notified of the exact time and date of the cleaning, please check the appropriate box on the authorization form on the reverse side of this document and we will try our best to oblige.

The best part about both these services? They’re completely free. These initiatives are there to keep small business owners happy and storefronts gleaming, promoting goodwill throughout the borough and with the community.
For more information, or to get a copy of the Graffiti Free Brooklyn work order, call 718-802-3875 or log on to www.brooklyn-usa.org/Pages/graffitifree.htm.