Graffiti Pier Can't Last, and That's Exactly Why We Love It

Allie Volpe at Curbed wrote a wonderful piece about Graffiti Pier and the allure that may soon escape us. Of course, the fact that Graffiti Pier is being written about in the mainstream media is perhaps proof that its allure will not endure. The fate of the space, properly named Pier 18, has been mentioned in more than passing by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation. It's included in the master plan for the riverfront and the Director of Communications, Emma Fried-Cassorla, has mentioned that the DRWC plans to incorporate the pier's popular namesake into that plan, in some way.

Creating a legal space for ongoing graffiti wouldn't be unheard of. The Writerz Blok in San Diego was the first park of its kind and there are other similar spaces throughout the country. Considering Philadelphia's proliferation of street art, it makes sense. In North Philadelphia, at 5th and Cecil B. Moore stands an ever changing wall of some of the city's most astounding graffiti. Passing by one afternoon to shoot photos, I ran into the wall's owner who was lamenting over the "shit job" an artist had done overnight. In the background, in broad daylight, a man kneeled down surrounded by paint cans, toiling away on something fresh. "I hope it's better than this shit," the owner said, pointing to a hackneyed series of silver smiley faces on a shiny, solid black background.

He was busy so he didn't linger long. His attitude towards the graffiti seemed more resignation than pride. If artists are going to continue to tag his wall day after day, it might as well look cool. After all, it's just a concrete wall. The owner is clearly more interested in the its physical purpose than what it looks like.

5th and Cecil B. Moore falls somewhere between what Graffiti Pier is and what it could become: a safe, publicly maintained, organized art space. But the graffiti at Pier 18 is only part of its allure, and what attracts photographers, explorers, and outsider tourism is what attracts graffiti artists. It is a brutal, crumbling hulk of an industrial past few can even remember. We're drawn to Graffiti Pier for the same reason we're attracted to the Reading Viaduct, the CSS tracks under Pennsylvania Avenue, and traipse through the woods to find the charred remains of The Cliffs Mansion in Fairmount Park.

Sure, there's something exciting about exploring what's off limits, telling weary friends and Instagram followers we climbed something we shouldn't. But there's more than that. Like wilderness voyagers who find solace in the forest, urban explorers find something the same in nature's reclamation of our greatest feats of engineering.

After Eastern State Penitentiary closed, numerous ideas were floated for its redevelopment, from parking to total restoration. What preservationists settled on was something unique, to preserve much of it in its decayed state and safely allow tourists to explore on their own. But Eastern State Penitentiary is as much a product of its era of preservation as it is its storied history. When it opened its doors to hard hatted visitors in the 1990s, urban decay was as much a part of the urban experience as taxes and traffic. Places like the Reading Viaduct and Eastern State weren't white elephants to be endured, they were simply expected. 

It's from this era where much of our fascination stems. From the New Deal to the Oil Crisis, American cities are a mystery to anyone under 40. You can scour the internet and find countless photographs of Philadelphia in its heyday of the Industrial Revolution, but you'll find few of interest between the late '40s and early '80s. Philadelphia was filthy, blighted, and covered with the dust of constant construction and demolition. Places like Graffiti Pier are more than evolving art galleries, they're places where we can experience an era that many didn't bother to photograph.

Sanitizing all of that has been happening since the 1980s, but those more interested in the allure of our forgotten past flock to these places because they allow us to imagine a built environment few ever documented. Change is inevitable, and preservation of that ideal impossible. Several piers have been transformed into parks, the Reading Viaduct is undergoing the same fate, and if the economy continues to bring more residents to the city, Graffiti Pier will lose its allure, either as a museum to graffiti or in total demolition. You can't fight it anymore than you can bring back the past. Even in the midcentury, these spaces were fleeting, constantly under the threat of demolition and transformation. 

I wish Philadelphia still looked like it did when I moved here in 2004, that the Reading Viaduct still ran trains through Callowhill as it did in the 1970s, and that Graffiti Pier would never change. But what makes these places so alluring, more than anything, is their complete lack of permanence. The only way to make time stand still is to take plenty of pictures. I wish I'd taken more photos in the 1980s and '90s, even when I finally moved to Philadelphia. They'll be another Graffiti Pier, and the beasts we build today will someday crumble and crack, attracting another generation to the history we're creating right now. Nothing lasts forever, and that's exactly what makes Graffiti Pier, and cities, so special.