graffiti grotto

Down where Brooklyn breaks into the thin rectangular fingers on maps that point to a past life of boats and gulls and docks and waves, on one side of the looming IKEA in Red Hook, a secret concrete world grows wild colors and a lake.

On a late weekend afternoon in winter, the light is kind to the monuments built here by the armies of a Brooklyn that is slowly dying. Their tags in 5-foot letters in every color imaginable oversee a reflecting pool of water collected on the scruffy ground. Nothing but the wind disturbs the water. It looks like it could be feet deep.

An old mattress, fire holes, piles of ominous hardware. Scrubby bushes and grass still fighting their way out of the earth and through the cracks in the concrete, forming a bushy urban carpet for who knows how many parties, plots and trysts. A fence of boards lines the side of the grotto on the street; IKEA rears its ungodly blue body on the other. The water, the sky are the only other boundaries.

Large as a football field, the graffiti grotto is totally silent. You can’t hear the sea, although it’s only a few streets away, or the BQE, or the hum of the millions of people waiting…Nobody comes here anymore – no freshly empty beer bottles, no food wrappers or dropped gloves. Just glass and the still water reflecting the tags of Spinner and Rip-Dog and Blake. The walls are full now; they couldn’t take any more work…and besides, who would see? Soon, this will be a parking lot full of shoppers, Ektorp or Detolf seekers, drivers, nesters from Elsewhere, people probably a lot like me – invaders, happy on a Saturday, innocent of their crime.