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)
“Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick.... They can only bring you the scores.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)