now accepting donations

Thanks to all this good press, Graffiti Archaeology has become more popular than I ever would have expected. Four million hits in the month of May, from over forty thousand visitors. I’m psyched to see that there are so many other people out there who dig this stuff enough to click through it all.

The downside is that our bandwidth usage has gone through the roof. We’re serving up hundreds of high resolution images, to the tune of around 5 gigs per day, and the cost of this is substantial. So, as an experiment, I’ve added a PayPal donation button to the site. It looks like this:

If you enjoy the site and feel it in your heart to help us cover the costs, then by all means, use it!

New layer: 19th Street

Tonight’s new layer is a production on the legal wall at 19th Street and Mission, from November 6, 2004, featuring TENFOLD, JASE and BLISTER.

New layer: Harveys

I’m finally starting to get through my backlog of photos. Tonight’s addition? One new layer for the harveys wall, dated December 26, 2004, featuring GIANT, BLISTER and JASE. Word on the street is that there’s something new there already. With any luck I’ll check it out this weekend. Stay tuned…

Three new layers on Belmont building

The Belmont Art Park continues to get hit up on a regular basis, and people keep taking pictures of it and putting them up in our Flickr group. I’ve added three new layers on the old electrical building there. Thanks to Steve Rotman, Caspar van Ette, and Jonathan Tobin for the flicks!

Also, be sure to check out Caspar’s site, Art in Cities, for an impressive collection of photos of street art from all over the world.

GRAFARC gets a blog

I’ve updated the “news” section to be a proper blog using Movable Type. We are expecting a lot of changes over the next year as we incorporate new material into the site, and add features to the interface. We hope this blog format will make it easier to keep you informed of everything new as it happens. Feel free to subscribe using your favorite aggregator.

Two new spots: Belmont and Bluxome

I’m pleased to announce two new additions to the site.

Belmont, aka the Belmont Tunnel or the Toluca Train Yards, is our first spot in the graf mecca of Los Angeles. This spot has a tremendous history: it began in 1925 as a station for one of LA’s first public transit lines, the Pacific Electric Railway. The train lines were shut down in the 1950’s, and the abandoned tunnel was used in the 80’s as a set for the sci-fi TV series “V”. Around the same time, the tunnel and the walls around it became a focal point for graffiti writers from LA and beyond. It has remained a prime spot for at least twenty years. Now many of the walls are being illegally destroyed by a big condo developer, and residents of the neighborhood are fighting back. You can read more about it on the Belmont Art Park website.

Bluxome is another long-running favorite. This San Francisco alley has been the domain of the BA Crew and friends for many years now, a permission wall where the writers can take their time, and the work shows it. Expect more walls and more layers over the months to come.

Meanwhile, gigantic props are due to the Graffiti Archaeology group on Flickr! Now running 130 members strong, the group has contributed over 500 amazing photos, from four continents and an island. It’s going to take quite some time to process them all, but one way or another, we will! In the meantime, check out some of these tags for a preview:

Bunker by txmx .2

Kelvinbridge by duncan

25th and Mission

New wall: 25th and Mission. This is a permission wall on the side of the Golden Gate Market on Mission Street. There was an old mural there for more than a decade (it went up in July 1993), and I believe some of the people who painted the original mural were involved in this new production, which features pieces by TWICK, ZORE, SKEW, and others. I was lucky enough to catch this one as they started it last July, and stopped by several times over the following week to capture the work in progress. (Sorry it took me so long to put together the layers, I had literally hundreds of photos to sort through!)

19th Street and Harvey’s Place

New wall: 19th Street. Five layers. This is a legal wall in the Mission, with some beautiful new work by APEX and NEON. I was lucky enough to capture this one in stages over four consecutive weeks, so this is a rare behind-the-scenes view of how these artists work. Stay tuned for a similar treatment of the recent production on 25th Street…

Another new legal wall: Harvey’s Place. Three layers, three big productions by APEX, NEON, ZORE, DELAY23 and others.

Three more layers

Added three more layers on cavern/westB.

new layers on cavern/eastA

Added three new layers on cavern/eastA (two of them courtesy of Buck Austin), bringing it to a total of 12 layers. Buck’s photos are beginning to fill in some critical gaps in 1999 and 2001. More to come.