Spoil Spurt

"There's always only one or two venues for kids to try to express themselves, and this thing [at the Next Space] I've seen happen again and again," says Collins' friend Jeremy McConnell, who, as a member of the Flavorpak collective, organized graffiti and hip-hop events in the '90s. At age 33, McConnell has a perspective that could be considered grandfatherly. "It's like, there will be a show, and during it someone will sneak out and paint a wall, and it's youthful and fun, and it's also ignorant, and it's just them pissing in their own drinking water."

"Of course, Newa and Pants said they were totally unaware of any of it [vandalism] going on, and they genuinely acted surprised that it happened," Collins says. "But I don't know -- from what I know of Newa, he's kind of a con."

The Next Space sits on the eastern edge of the Crossroads. A few blocks to the west, art galleries and their festive, once-a-month openings have drawn attention to the once-deserted neighborhood of old brick warehouses. Many Crossroads dwellers date the area's inception as an artists' enclave to the mid-'90s, when Kansas City Art Institute professor Jim Leedy opened the Leedy-Voulkos Gallery at 20th Street and Baltimore and encouraged his fellow artists to take advantage of the other vacant buildings. Over the next few years, ten to fifteen galleries staked claims in the neighborhood; today there are more than forty galleries in the area. Florists, home-accessory shops and restaurants are slowly opening up. Developers are putting in lofts. It would appear to be the kind of creative community that might appreciate Newa's work -- after all, pop artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring started out writing subway graffiti in New York, Haring having been inspired by the rebellious, unelitist tinge of Christo's public art.

But here, graffiti isn't screwing the man. It's just screwing other artists.

"I love graffiti. I think it enriches a neighborhood," says Mike Dalena, director of the Cube Gallery at 1922 Baltimore and associate director of the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom in Overland Park. "I love walking down an alley or a side street and seeing even simple tags. They make that environment beautiful, something besides weeds growing between bricks and broken windows, something that is the mark of a human being. It shows that the area is not abandoned, it is inhabited, someone has been there. It adds something, atmosphere. You can't expect a place like this to be sterile."

What frustrates Dalena about the graffiti in his neighborhood is not that it exists but that its perpetrators aren't more selective about their targets. "We just got hit last week with the lamest, most heinous, no-style, no-class tag," he says of his gallery on Baltimore. "I'm not upset that it got tagged, but it's like, do it nice or leave it alone. I'm a huge supporter of the graffiti community, and I'm the one that defends them, and I get this no-aesthetic, first-year-tagger thing on my wall."

Other property owners are tired of having to pay for art they never asked to buy.

In 2002, developer Brad Nicholson, who by his estimate has rehabbed dozens of buildings in the Crossroads (the Pitch leases office space in one of them), decided to restore the old TWA corporate headquarters at 18th Street and Main. The three-story building, with wide belts of red and white wrapping its blocky exterior, straddles the alley between Baltimore and Main and has a total of three entrances and addresses on both streets. According to the National Register of Historic Places, the TWA building enjoyed a "period of significance" between 1950 and 1974, until the late '70s, when it was covered with a stucco "skin" that masked its kitschy '50s architecture. The 3-D TWA logo used to stand proudly on the roof beside a space-aged, rocketlike aircraft model.

Nicholson's group started by peeling off the stucco, revealing a chipped and scuffed version of the building's former glory. Nicholson says that effort cost more than $100,000. As he worked to get the building on the National Register, though, another group went through with its own plans for resurfacing the old airline headquarters.

Early in September of last year, intruders broke in one night and climbed the stairs to the third floor, spraying their names in paint as they went. Then they wrote their tags backward on the inside of each window, so that the names Poser, Visie and Elk appeared in rolling, graffiti-style letters from the third-floor windows facing Main Street. And the words "Boys vs. Girls" appeared, enormous, one letter taking up each third-floor window facing 18th Street.

It cost more than $12,000 to get the visible spray paint off the windows, Nicholson says, and that's not including damage to the interior metals and other surfaces.

"The 'Boys vs. Girls' was just part of it. There was stuff all over," Nicholson says. Amid that other stuff, one name stood out. "Oh yeah, it said 'Newa' in big letters."