A former 5Pointz graffiti artist from Long Island City has become an unlikely hero in fighting the recent surge of antisemitism in New York City and around
Graffiti vs. Property Rights - LewRockwell lewrockwell.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lewrockwell.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The artwork was always changing but the looming presence of 5Pointz felt permanent. Rumors swirled as gentrification advanced but “The Institute for Higher Burnin’” would outlive it all… or so we thought. I’m not sure how many others documented its last couple of months but, since I was a frequent visitor to 5Pointz, I felt […]
Clockwise from top left: Stanley Chera, Sheldon Solow, Peter Hauspurg, Gerald Hines, Jerry Wolkoff, and Bianca Yankov
In a year when so many lives were lost, real estate was not spared. The industry mourned both legendary figures and those who died too soon.
But it was the death of Stanley Chera, the 77-year-old patriarch of Crown Acquisitions, that epitomized the year. The real estate titan had decamped New York City for Deal, New Jersey, early in the pandemic at the behest of his longtime friend, President Donald Trump. But on April 11, Chera died of complications from Covid-19. When Trump contracted Covid later in the year, he reportedly asked an aide, “Am I going to go out like Stan Chera?”
New York graffiti
When a housing complex owner in Queens destroyed the graffiti on his property, he ended up paying $6.7 million to the artists whose work had been covering his walls for years.
This was some years back when a federal judge ruled that Jerry Wolkoff, the owner of the legendary 5Pointz graffiti complex in Queens, had to pay 21 artists who contributed 45 graffiti works to the space that were considered to be protected by law under the Visual Artists Rights Act.
Wolkoff destroyed the works in 2013, triggering the lawsuit in question. Before that, he had for decades allowed artists to tag the Long Island City structures, turning it into one of the city’s coolest art havens. When significant stretch of the murals at 5Pointz was whitewashed, lawyers defended the artists and called it “the world’s largest open-air aerosol museum.”