The Zoo York Wall was a graffiti wall in Manhattan's Central Park, where subway writers and other street artists "made their marks" in the early-70s. It was a temporary wall, erected in 1971 by the New York City Transit Authority to block unauthorized entry into the site of a new subway extension running underneath the Central Park Zoo. An excellent photograph of the wall is prominently displayed on the second page of The Faith of Graffiti, the noted 1974 photo essay book on New York City graffiti, documented by Mervyn Kurlansky and John Naar, with text by Norman Mailer. (Praeger Publishers, Inc.)
Its name originates from the subway tunnel it was supposed to guard, then called the "Zoo York Tunnel," which still runs below the area of the Central Park Zoo. During its construction (1971-1973), the tunnel provided a subterranean gathering place for very early subway artists who hung around together in Central Park, and was named Zoo York for obvious reasons by ALI, founder of the SOUL ARTISTS graffiti crew.
Armored with polished aluminum in the futile hope of resisting spray-paint and permanent marker ink, the wall did little to dissuade teenage graffiti writers from climbing over and descending into the tunnel during its construction. There, extensions of both the BMT Broadway and IND Sixth Avenue subway lines merged below Central Park on two sub-levels, then curved underneath the zoo grounds and out under Fifth Avenue to the east, connecting there to the new 63rd Street Line. Upon completion of the subway project in 1973, the "Zoo York Wall" was torn down.
Famous quotes containing the words zoo, york and/or wall:
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“And you’re too fired up to go to sleep, you sit at the kitchen table. It’s really late, it’s really quiet, you’re tired. Don’t wanna go to bed, though. Going to bed means this was the day. This Feb. 12, this Aug. 3, this Nov. 20 is over and you’re tired and you made some money but it didn’t happen, nothing happened. You got through it and a whole day of your life is over. And all it is—is time to go to bed.”
—Claudia Shear, U.S. author. New York Times, p. A21 (September 29, 1993)
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)