September 30-October 6, 2004

naked city

Etch-A-Mess

STOREFRONT SCOURGE: For many local business owners, ghostly swirls of EtchBathed graffiti are becoming a costly problem. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Getting tough on acid taggers.

by Dan Kaplan

The machine has a round head, elongated neck and circular buffing pad trailed by tubes that run into a bucket of foul liquid. When the pad presses to the glass, it makes a whirry, swooshy, grindy sound that suggests what it is: a contraption designed to remove surface damage done to storefront windows.

Right now, it is being used to buff etch-tagged graffiti—the milky white tags that are increasingly a feature of Philadelphia's storefronts—and as it whirrs away, the tag beneath it fades into translucence, then vanishes. Two years ago, Jenkintown Building Services (JBS), a company that specializes in window cleaning, used this machine about 30 times. In the past 12 months, that number has approached 500.

"The problem is worse than it's ever been," says John Tucci, an official with Philadelphia's Anti-Graffiti Network (AGN). About four years ago, graffiti artists, or taggers, started using a hydrofluoric acid cream called EtchBath—a product intended for artisans who decorate glass—to etch their tags into storefront windows.

Now, taggers citywide know that etch tags—which look as though a ghost had taken a piss—will stick around far longer than traditional spray paint. Hydrofluoric acid dissolves the first few layers of any glass surface it touches. According to a police report, in a two-month period this spring 38 windows—including those across from the Queen Village Police Precinct—were etched on or near South Street. The problem has flown so far off the handle that this year, the AGN quietly developed an expensive program to help businesses offset the cost of "buffing" EtchBathed graffiti.

The irony is that the Anti-Graffiti Network, with its 30-plus employees and $1.3 million annual budget, has inadvertently helped foster the problem. "It's chemical warfare against the buff system," says Seus, an affable, twentysomething EtchBath tagger, of the city's zero-tolerance approach to all forms of graffiti. This has given taggers, for whom ubiquity and longevity are pillars of status, incentive to find other means to keep their tags around. "If you don't have shit with EtchBath," Seus says, "you don't exist."

And so the city and the AGN find themselves in a maddening Catch-22: The more effective they are, the more the taggers use EtchBath.

Of course, those outside of the graffiti world couldn't care less about Seus' rep. "It boils your blood," says an employee of Klinghoffer Carpets, on Eighth and Bainbridge streets, whose business was recently hit, "especially because the acid is so expensive to remove." Another South Philly resident is less reserved: "I think I should be allowed to tie one of them down and carve my name in his fucking head."

The removal process, which JBS brought to Philly, is analogous to a skin peel, using a specialized machine to grind a slurry mixture over the glass, removing the affected layers. The cost of the process can range from $200 to $400 per tag—astronomical compared to the few dollars it takes to remove paint. With the problem so prevalent and the fix so expensive, the AGN quietly began giving a $300 allowance to any affected business in good standing with the city.

The only way to pre-empt EtchBath seems to be a Teflon-style glass coating, marketed by companies like 3M. The material creates an invisible sheen over windows that is scratch resistant and impermeable to the acid. But at around $300 to $400 per window, it has proven a hard sell, even to businesses that have already been etch-tagged. When the allowance program, which was never announced publicly, started this year, the AGN made this product a cornerstone of its deal with JBS and affected businesses; business owners who contacted the AGN would eat the cost of JBS's buffing service, and the AGN would pay for the film. But when almost no one went for it, the AGN changed tactics and started subsidizing the removal of tags.

The strange hitch in the story came when City Paper called to ask about the subsidies. After confirming that the program did indeed exist, the AGN then called back to alter its position and said that the subsidies were a pilot program using surplus funds for the fiscal year—a fiscal year in which AGN's budget had been cut by 5 percent—and would not go on. There was also a conflict in numbers: Tom Conway, the agency's deputy managing director, claimed that the AGN had helped around 30 businesses. Dave Rudnick, the sales service manager for JBS, estimated a figure over 100.

With or without the AGN program, EtchBath and its ghostly, storefront manifestations are not going to go away. JBS is lobbying to pass a bill to help businesses pay for the cost of the protective film (and its application service), but so far, support for the bill has not gained ground. Meanwhile, Seus and his ilk go on etching, and JBS goes on making a killing putting their strange-looking machine to storefront glass.