“…This is free art,” said James Top, as we gazed at a fence blocking our view of the People’s Wall. The wall is about fifty feet of tags and portraits, with a centerpiece of the silhouetted Harlem cityscape, sprayed onto the back wall of an old school building, P.S. 90, on 147 Street between 7 and 8 Avenue. From one end to the other, the wall is painted with the names of various neighborhoods and boroughs – “Queens,” “Staten Island,” “Bklyn,” and “The Bronx.” On the left is a landscape of Egypt, with yellowed pyramids and a caption reading, “The Original People.” On one end is a portrait of Malcom X, and, on the other, Mohammed Ali and a memorial piece to the late James Brown.

The wall is repainted every year by The Graffiti Artists for a Positive Cause, of which James Top is the current artistic director. It has included themes such as Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Black History, as well as portraits of Coretta Scott King, Biggie Smalls, and Charlie Parker. But, without scaling the tarp-covered fence (which only surrounds the side of the building with the art), one cannot see the People’s Wall or the only portrait of Malcom X in all of Harlem.

The fence was put up on Monday, 19^th of May, 2008, while Top and others have been painting the wall since 1999 with permission and a permit from the community. “They always promise us that there is going to be affordable housing here,” Top told me with a disappointed (not to say discouraged) face, “and [now] they’re going to build luxury condos.”

The LNN, which plans to develop the thirty years dormant PS 90 school building, has stopped updating Top, and erected the fence without notifying him, even though he is the wall’s creator. While they deliberate about the future of the building, James and his supporters will continue to gather in front of the wall on Saturdays to raise awareness and collect petition signatures. Top also said he was not trying to fight gentrification, but simply wanted to preserve the People’s Wall, which, in the last nine years, has turned the area from a crack block into “the street with the picture of Malcom X.”

Karen Woodson, a local supporter of The People’s Wall, pointed out to me a high ledge of the building’s façade where a family of hawks used to live. “They ran our hawks out,” she glumly muttered. Ms. Woodson went to school at P.S. 90, and though this asbestos-ridden building has been out of use for so many years since, Top and his friends made use of it with the simple construction of a public space where the community could be represented. Now, without further ado, plans are being made to whitewash ten years of art that have lifted up that community.

Words by Joshua Fishbein. Image courtesy of http://gettinup.homestead.com