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To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Under Mayor Giuliani,
street artists were arrested.
Under Mayor Bloomberg,
their art is destroyed!

Zero Tolerance
for
Street Artists

by Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
April 28, 2002

[Note: the term street artists as used here follows the 2nd Circuit's ruling in Lederman et al v City of NY/Bery et al v City of NY, i.e. those creating, displaying or selling paintings, prints, sculptures and photographs". Other forms of expression being sold on the streets of SoHo may also be entitled to First Amendment protection.]

The air in lower Manhattan has become a toxic stew of heavy metals, asbestos and undisclosed gasses from the 9/11 WTC disaster. Thousands of New Yorkers died in the WTC collapse and hundreds of thousands of Downtown residents now face major health problems. The City's economy is a shambles with unprecedented budget cuts to schools, hospitals, the fire department and the police. The rate of murders, rapes and shootings is steadily climbing in the City. Half of all NYC High School students fail to graduate and many are functionally illiterate.

Yet, what remains the number one obsession of SoHo's most outspoken residents or as they like to depict themselves, "community volunteers"?

Street artists.

Calls to SoHo's First Precinct of, "Help police! There's a street artist in front of my building!" are at an all-time high. Thanks to former Mayor Giuliani's statistic-based policing policy in which the NYPD's response to all conditions is robotically predicated on the number of complaints received, a handful of chronic complainers who've set their speed-dialers to the First Precinct number are once again misusing police resources to pursue their favorite agenda, trying to eliminate the area's street artists.

This sick game has gone on without interruption for more than eight years. Ironically, it is thanks to these same community vigilantes - led by the dredges of what was once proudly called The SoHo Alliance - that street artists won their First Amendment rights. The incessant whining about street artists "ruining" their quality of life led Mayor Giuliani to create an ill-fated artist arrest policy based on an unconstitutional license requirement.

Five hundred or so false arrests later we street artists won our first Federal lawsuit and with it full First Amendment protection. In 1998 when the City tried a second round of arrests based on an equally illegal permit requirement the result in 2001 was winning our second Federal lawsuit, Lederman et al v Giuliani.

Is there any validity
to the complaints about
street artists in SoHo?

In 1994 when the artist arrest policy began, local street artists used the walls - and at times even the windows of galleries and businesses - to display their art. I spent more than a year convincing the members of A.R.T.I.S.T. to conform to the NYC Vending Ordinance - and common sense - that the curb, not private property, was the appropriate place to show one's art. Long before we won the first lawsuit in 1996 the vast majority of SoHo' s street artists had already voluntarily complied with this requirement. It is worth noting that the police had nothing whatsoever to do with this compliance.

Did that satisfy SoHo's speed-dialer contingent? No. They began demanding that the police enforce the most minute and obscure details of the vending ordinance against artists. First it was the 20' from a door and the 8' in length rule. Police began making daily measurements of every artist's display. If it was 19' 11'' from a door or one inch over 8', a summons was issued.

When that didn't decrease the number of street artists they began resorting to even more obscure rules. The latest and most absurd effort at regulating street artists out of SoHo - the City's only district specifically reserved for artists - was cooked up in the local City Council Member's office on April 5th, 2002.

The new master strategy goes like this: If an artist momentarily walks away from their display, these legal geniuses opined, the display could be categorized as 'abandoned property", seized by police and crushed in a Department of Sanitation garbage truck. The next morning they gave their new anti-art policy a trial run, crushing approximately 20 artist displays. This resulted in a major embarrassment for Council Member Gerson and Mayor Bloomberg, both of whom had made great efforts to depict themselves as "friends" of the arts community before being elected.

A lawsuit is already in the works over the new policy. The First Precinct is weakly defending their actions while fully understanding that they will be successfully sued for each and every incident of destruction. One need only look at the legal definition of abandoned property to see it has not the slightest relationship to an artist or vendors display that is momentarily left unattended.

Why do the police keep responding
to these absurd requests to
purge the area of artists?

"We're getting a
lot of complaints",
they explain.

Many First Precinct officers will candidly admit they know two things about these complaints.

The first is that while there may be hundreds of them each month, they originate primarily with a handful of misguided people with far too much time on their hands. The second is that most of these obsessive complaints are either wildly exaggerated or outright false.

"Help, there's an artist in front of my building!" often means there's an artist around the corner or a block away. "An artist is blocking my doorway and I can't get into my building!" usually means an artist is set up by the curb, 15-20 feet from the nearest doorway, leaving enough room for a semi and a team of elephants to enter the premises.

Anywhere else in NYC making false complaints to the police is considered a serious crime. In SoHo it has been transformed into a leisure activity for landlords, disgruntled former artists jealous when they see real artists selling pictures and wealthy residents who moved into an exclusive arts neighborhood and are now shocked and outraged to find artists there.

The horror!!!

I suspect the police precinct in Harlem gets similar calls from White people who moved into the newly gentrified ghetto and are shocked to find so many Black people on the street. Likewise the blizzard of complaints from residents who recently moved into the now upscale 14th Street Meat District - known around the world as a nighttime center for gay socializing and prostitution - who are horrified to find gays and prostitutes outside their $3,000 a month lofts.

What's next?
Complaints that there are
too many trees in Central Park?

The complaints by SoHo residents are almost as creative as the varied works of art seen on the street. Complaining to the police has become for many their chosen medium of expression.

A recent whine is that artists park their cars on the street, thereby inconveniencing longtime SoHo residents whose idea of ownership goes far beyond their property line. This includes demands for a reserved parking spot in front of their home and proprietorship of the entire sidewalk, the entire street and the whole neighborhood.

When they are not agitating against artists the targets of their ire include tourists, bar patrons, the homeless, trucks, film crews, tour busses, student housing, outdoor cafes, any restaurant where music or dancing is allowed, Chinese vegetable wholesalers, outdoor advertising and certain kinds of retail stores that do not come up to their exacting standard of excellence.

SoHo Alliance frontman Sean Sweeney has allegedly told reporters, "I'm afraid to go outside of my house on the weekend!"

Is a resolution to
this conflict possible?

There is, but the real question is do the SoHo complainers want a balanced resolution of interests or do they really want the elimination of artists from "their" streets?

What I've proposed to the First Precinct and the SoHo Alliance for eight years is to use common sense in dealing with this issue.

If an artist is violating a resident's or store's rights by using their property for selling art then the police should act. If an artist has a fifty foot long display - rather than one that's a few inches longer than officially permitted - that's an objective problem that even other street artists want to see dealt with by the police. If an artist is blocking a crosswalk, obstructing vehicular traffic or if they are set up in someone's doorway they should be asked to move and if they refuse their display should be removed by the police. One hundred percent of the area's street artists would fully agree with this kind of enforcement.

On the other hand, we view complaints about us parking on the street or preventing entrance to a building when we are 15' from the door to be absurd. Crushing our property in a garbage truck because we left it alone for 20 minutes to go to the bathroom or buy a cup of coffee is viewed by us all as nothing other than a provocation by our long-time enemies. We will deal with such efforts as we have for eight years with protests, signs and lawsuits.

The vast majority of SoHo's street artists already go out of their way to be good neighbors. They aren't blocking anyone's doorway, they are not showing art on anyone's walls and they clean up any refuse before leaving the area. We have as much right to park on the street as anyone else. There are no reserved parking rules on any public street in NYC and we see no reason why the police should entertain such an absurd idea in SoHo.

The bottom line is that we are here to stay. Artists are the reason that the people who call in these complaints now own multi-million dollar properties they bought for a few thousand dollars. We are why they can rent out loft spaces for $5,000 a month in what were once abandoned warehouses. Artists are why the stores in SoHo can charge $1,000 for a pair of shoes or $50 for a sandwich. At this point in time, street artists are the only real art scene in SoHo and are a prime reason why the area has not economically collapsed.

With all due respect to the NYPD - some of whose members according to the New Yorker magazine sell their own art from sidewalk stands on West Broadway - you could not get rid of us when daily arrests were the norm. You certainly won't get rid of us now by writing bogus summonses, enforcing non-existent laws or running around in the street with tape measures. Thanks to your past efforts we are now very adept at defending our legal rights.

As far as those making the complaints what can one say other than, "get a life". If the obsessive community volunteers in the SoHo Alliance really cared about "sidewalk congestion" they wouldn't be encouraging people to illegally install giant concrete planters on the public sidewalk - which create a 24 - 7 obstruction to pedestrians and a real public safety hazard in the event of a fire. And by the way, aren't those illegal planters "abandoned property"?

If the police are really interested in enforcing law they might start with the thousands of building code violations in properties owned by the same pathetic complainers who call in their daily false complaints about street artists. They might also start demanding the name, address and phone number of anyone calling in a complaint to the First Precinct and then investigating to see if it was genuine and prosecuting them for filing a false police report if it was not.

In the past I have offered to address any legitimate issue involving street artists. I make that same offer now. Let the police deal with the serious problems facing NYC and stop wasting their time with these ridiculous complaints.

Street artists are one of New York's greatest cultural assets. It's time to stop treating us like we were dirt.

From: The Villager
April 10, 2002

Police descend on Soho

The incident came a day after Councilmember Alan Gerson met with police officials and local residents who were complaining about Soho street vendors. Sean Sweeney, director of the Soho Alliance, who attended the meeting, recalled that police said they would remove any unattended street vendor displays...Several witnesses reported the police Saturday said they were confiscating the displays because of regulations stating that the vendors must be near their displays at all times.
Berger, who sells oil paintings of New York street scenes, said she had stepped away from her table for a minute when her table was confiscated...Sweeney said artists have a First Amendment right to sell their wares but called them "a nuisance." "I would certainly not want one of them in front of my building because they create a crowd," he said. "But then I wouldn't want Picasso selling in front of my building.

Excerpt from the 30 page brief filed in 1995
by Sean Sweeney's SoHo Alliance in
Lederman et al
v City of NY/Bery et al
v City of NY:

The sale of artwork does not involve communication of thoughts or ideas....the dangers...of allowing visual art full First Amendment protection...An artists' freedom of expression is not compromised by regulating his ability to merchandise his artwork...the sale of paintings and other artwork does not reach this high level of expression (guaranteeing First Amendment protection)...

NY Daily News
4/12/2002

Peddlers Take Stand
Vs. Cops for Art's Sake

Street art peddlers doing business in SoHo vowed to keep their work from being trashed by the NYPD tomorrow. It's not that the cops have suddenly become art critics, explained Robert Lederman, a painter who has been at odds with the city for years. Lederman heads a group that says police commandeered a sanitation truck on West Broadway last Saturday to throw away 20 art sales displays that were considered abandoned under the law. The trashing infuriated artists who had left the displays only for a few minutes to buy coffee, or to use a bathroom. Dozens of the painters, writers and sculptors planned to be back tomorrow, watching to make sure the police don't repeat last week's cleanup...treading on their First Amendment rights. "If they think they want to come and destroy some more displays, come on down," said Lederman, president of a group known as Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics. The NYPD has launched an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation to examine how last week's enforcement was carried out...The disposal harkened back to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's failed attempt to force street art peddlers to get licenses. Lederman won a ruling from the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that found licensing violated the First Amendment rights of artists. Lederman charged that the city is resorting to desperate measures by calling unattended art displays "abandoned" to justify disposing of them. "The police see these displays every weekend," he said. "They clearly knew that they weren't abandoned.

To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum website

His essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.

Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net

For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htm

If you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
No Spray Coalition
PO Box 334
Peck Slip Station
NYC, NY 10272-0334
or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.

Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
and this work are greatly appreciated.

Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.

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