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Published: September 17, 2010
The thin orange line of paint traces a winding path though downtown Manhattan neighborhoods like SoHo, Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Uneven and wandering, the stripe runs up major avenues and across narrow streets, sometimes prominent, at other times so faint and worn that it is barely visible.
Although it has existed for four years, the paint line has escaped most people’s notice. And among those who have paused to register its presence, few have probably spent much time contemplating its origin. It is, after all, just a simple bit of paint: one more arcane marking in an urban landscape filled with street art and random splashings; a small-caliber mystery in a big city rich with secrets.
“The orange drip that flows through the East Village,” Sharon Jane Smith, 57, mused on Sunday as she gazed at the section of the line that meandered past her East Village shop, A Repeat Performance, on First Avenue near East 10th Street. “I have no idea where that orange drip came from.”
In August a young blogger named Nick Divers posted an essay online revealing that there is more to the paint than immediately meets the eye. He was not the first to figure out what the line signifies, but his posting was circulated through the blogosphere, bringing new recognition to what began as an intentionally quiet statement.
Over the last four years hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have walked by or on top of the orange lines have unwittingly passed what is possibly the biggest graffiti tag in the world. The tag, which is so vast that all parts of it cannot be viewed simultaneously, was created in 2006 by an artist known as Momo and consists of a paint line that he said runs about eight miles long and spells out his name.
It runs from the East River to the Hudson River and extends north to 14th Street and south to Grand Street. The line runs over curbstones and subway grates and zigzags around lampposts and manhole covers. Its route begins at the edge of a West Side pier and ends after crossing a footbridge over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.
“I wanted to make a trail that people could follow,” Momo said recently by telephone. “And I realized that I could write something if I planned it out with the street grid.”
Momo, a 35-year-old artist from the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, agreed to talk about the project only on the condition that his actual name not be revealed; it is unlawful in New York to place paint messages or symbols on the streets and sidewalks.
The project was inspired by a series of purple footprints that were painted on Manhattan sidewalks in 1986, stretching from the Upper East Side to Foley Square. Those mysterious markings led to a spot on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, where the city had bulldozed an elaborate community garden called the Garden of Eden that was created by a squatter named Adam Purple. Momo said he glimpsed the footprints as a child and was captivated.
“It was a really ephemeral, strange sight,” he said. “And it felt like those footprints created a path that was all mine.”
Years later he experimented for months with a way to make his own paint trail and eventually lashed a homemade funnel-shaped bucket to the back of a bicycle. He fitted the bucket with a hose that was controlled by a ball valve of the sort used in swimming pool plumbing systems. The line was created with 15 gallons of paint dispensed over the course of two covert sorties, Momo said, carried out between 3 and 6 in the morning.
“Everyone was oblivious except for one guy who chased me,” he said. “But I think he was trying to be helpful, believing I was heading to a job site and had a legitimate leak.”
In many neighborhoods the paint is still easy to see. Sometimes the line runs on concrete sidewalks, as it does along Stanton Street or Broadway. At other times it runs on macadam roadways, as it does on Seventh Avenue South, where the tires of countless cars have nearly erased it. In certain areas — along Prince Street, for instance — the line can no longer be seen at all, scrubbed away, maybe, or lost when sections of sidewalk were replaced.
After finishing the tag, Momo made a short, impressionistic film about its creation. He told friends about the project but decided not to publicize it widely. Although street-art and graffiti insiders noted the tag, few others did.
That began to change somewhat last month when Mr. Divers posted a description of Momo’s project on his blog, Best Roof Talk Ever. Mr. Divers said that he first became aware of the tag in 2007, when one of his friends, Aaron Cahan, figured out that the paint line spelled the name Momo, then got in touch with the artist, who confirmed that he had created the markings.
In a short essay, which was reposted about 1,500 times, Mr. Divers wrote that he was intrigued by the fact that Momo had created a tag so large that it was, in effect, hidden, because it could not be viewed in its entirety.
“It’s simultaneously the biggest and smallest artistic statement I have seen,” he wrote.
Despite the new attention generated by Mr. Divers, people who recognize the tag are still in the minority. A recent trip along the paint line’s path found that nobody among more than a dozen asked knew the story of Momo’s creation. But the trip did reveal, perhaps, that the paint line had found a place in the city’s collective subconscious, with people who said they had barely noticed it before quickly proposing a range of purposes.
Some thought that it marked the site of future excavations by utility workers. Others suggested that it was part of a code between drug sellers and users. On Avenue B, near Tompkins Square Park, three young men, including one carrying a knapsack and a sleeping bag speculated that the paint marking might reflect public policy toward the homeless.
One, Antoine Fisher, 23, said, “Maybe this line tells you where you can sleep on the sidewalk, since you aren’t allowed to sleep inside the park at night.”
Informed of the true purpose of the line, the three paused to look again at the ground.
“Oh, that’s pretty cool,” said Ryan Sowulski, 22. “You know how hard-core that is?”
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