Mercer

Some surprisingly stable handheld footage taken in Recoleta during my recent trip to Buenos Aires.

Anyone who’s been over to the Queens lab has seen this MTA sign, from the 241 Street station in Riverdale in the top of this photo. No, it’s actually not stolen. I bought it from a “junk shop” that used to be on Houston street. They had hundreds of these subway signs from all over the city.

The guy who sold this to me explained the MTA auctions off decommissioned signs once a year. The only catch is you have to buy the entire lot from them, then try to sell them off one by one and and turn a profit. Popular stations like Grand Central can fetch top dollar.

2789 Crew, AKA Pittsburgh Bomb Squad, 1996

Level 13, Mercer, Ldog, Rev, Dyno Myke, Billy, Oba (R.I.P.) & Wes

It all started in the fall of 1996, when I moved to Pittsburgh to attend the Art Institute. On my first day there, while moving into Allegheny Center’s student housing I met Ldog. He’d started at the Art Institute earlier that summer. Trying to hustle for pinch profits, he asked if I wanted to buy weed. Long story short, game recognize game, and we joined forces to find some fellow freshmen to hustle. 

An hour or two later, we ended up on the elevated tracks between Allegheny Center and the bridges. As we rolled up the proceeds of our first joint business ventures, and sparked with some of the squatters up there we got on the subject of graffiti. They showed me some pieces Ldog, and some other art students had done that said “Crazy Ray”, and “Mike The Spike” They were shout outs for two of the guys that living up up there that would buy 40′s of Blue Bull for art students.

Down the wall I scoped 3 distinct pieces I’ll never forget: a Clear, a Bim (by Necs), and a Prism. They had crisp, precise outlines, fresh colors, and wild letter styles that could only have been gilded during Pittsburgh’s golden age of graffiti. I tried to imagine how they layered the paint to get those perfect lines. I’d been tagging and drawing bubble letters for years, but had only ever seen graffiti like this in books. Seeing burners like this, up close for the first time actually changed my life.

Ldog and I, along with a few other kids from student housing all started painting graffiti together that fall. How we met up originally was funny, each one of us was trying to get with one of the “901 girls”. They were student housing’s coolest, most desirable female roommates, and the four of them lived in apt 901. The name 2789 actually came from a drunken attempt at adding together some of the original member’s apartment numbers from Allegheny Center, while chilling in apt 901.

Admittedly, we all started out pretty toyish, as most art school crews do. Eventually though, our skills & status improved over time. We had a pretty good run for a few years, even though none of us really made it past local infamy. Years later, I was stoked, and a bit surprised listening to some of Pittsburgh’s next generation of writers talking about seeing 2789′s work when they were growing up. They described it in much the same way I talk about the graffiti I saw on the North Side, the first day I moved to Pittsburgh.