Easier to talk about borough graffiti than to clean up the mess

By P.A. Sévigny , August 15th, 2012

    
Following years of intense debate about the plague of graffiti that's making its way through the CDN/NDG borough, local residents are finally beginning to realize that there's nothing left to talk about and that it's up to them to clean up the mess. To be fair, the borough is doing everything it can to help, but in the end, the borough also expects everybody to do their share to get rid of the borough's ubiquitous graffiti. Following local Councillor Susan Clarke's mid-summer initiative, the borough now offers its residents a cleaning kit which includes a bucket with a plastic scrubber, some detergent and a pair of latex gloves but it's still up to borough residents to find the time they need to clean and wipe the graffiti off their walls.          
 Following a request for one of the new cleaning kits, it took almost an hour for The Suburban to wipe at least one of South Side Bad Boy's tags off one of walls in the borough's well-used Melrose Tunnel. As one of the borough's more prolific taggers, Bad Boy's tag also alludes to the fact that he belongs to the borough's CPW (Crime Pays Well) crew because of the similarity between the 'S' in his own tag and the one to be found in the CPW tag. While it took him [Bad Boy] no more than a few seconds to leave a tag which didn't cover much more than a couple of square feet on the tunnel's wall, it still took more than an hour for The Suburban to get rid of it. After giving the tag a good spritz with the cleanser, it didn't take long before we realized this wasn't going to be as easy as it looks. Bad Boy had used a permanent marker with a one inch nib, and each and every inch of his tag had to be generously covered with cleanser before anything could be done to wipe it off. Though tedious, the work still required a bit of concentration after which it took almost an hour to reduce the tag to nothing more than a smear on the tunnel's original paint job.n