Graffiti Eraser Winning Battle Of Wills
It Isn't As Ubiquitous Anymore, But An Arch-Foe Can't Rest Until It's Gone
November 27, 2006
By HILDA MUÑOZ, Courant Staff Writer NEW BRITAIN -- Fighting graffiti successfully means being more stubborn than the vandals - painting or scrubbing the same wall over and over until the person "tagging" it gives up.

Mark Melechinsky, head of the New Britain Anti-Graffiti Group, is familiar with this battle of wills. He started painting over graffiti 12 years ago, before there was an anti-graffiti group, and continues the fight even though the number of members has dwindled to a handful.

"I think at some point I became fixated on it," he said. "I can't see a [television] program shot in New York City without looking at the graffiti in the background and trying to read it."

Police Chief William L. Gagliardi said Melechinsky's knowledge can bring insight to the police department.

"In the past there have been pseudo-gangs or gangs that mark an area to indicate that they're around. [Melechinsky's expertise] tells us what some people in that neighborhood are doing," Gagliardi said. "It's valuable to have someone like Mark go out and do these things. I have his number in our Rolodex."

Different members of the anti-graffiti group, which at one time boasted 30 people, gather on weekends to clean up graffiti on walls, telephone poles or traffic boxes.

"They may come back, and then we come back, and eventually they give up," Mark Fortin, a member of the group, said of the taggers.

He and Melechinsky, 57, recently visited a building at the corner of Chestnut Street and Columbus Boulevard, where someone had sprayed ":simple" on the side of a dumpster.

Melechinsky snapped a few pictures of the lettering for his records and then sprayed it with a transparent liquid called Graffiti Master. Using a piece of cloth, he rubbed the letters away.

Melechinsky keeps a log of every site visited and descriptions of the graffiti - done in either spray paint or marker - that he erased.

There are tags - nicknames like "Vent" and "Primo," two tags Melechinsky says he's been encountering. There are symbols related to tagging culture - a dot inside a circle inside a rectangle, for example, represents the nozzle on a spray can. There's what Melechinsky calls nuisance graffiti, a "Maria loves Joe" scrawled on a bus bench. Once in a while the group comes across gang graffiti.

"I don't think there's anything you could mention, any object, that I haven't seen graffiti on ... gravestones, traffic boxes," he said.

There was a time when Melechinsky barely noticed the names and symbols blemishing the city. Then one day in 1994, a cement wall near his home was covered in a nearly illegible scrawl.

At first he just took care of that one wall. But then Peter Bosco, who had seen Melechinsky cleaning the wall, approached him about organizing a group. Melechinsky thought the idea was crazy, but then agreed.

Bosco raised funds and coaxed church groups, students, residents and people who had to do community service to volunteer. They broke up into teams and swept through the city - the gazebo at Walnut Hill Park, Osgood Park and the walls of businesses.

Melechinsky poured the paint for the volunteers. Sometimes, he was already painting by the time Bosco arrived.

"I was the mouthpiece. Mark is a low key guy. He doesn't say much, but he works hard," Bosco said.

Melechinsky also did research. What he initially thought were meaningless scribbles turned out to be part of a graffiti culture. He learned the crews taggers belonged to and how the complexity of the graffiti ranged from stick letters to more elaborate productions.

One guy, Melechinsky said, wrote his moniker backward and upside down.

"It's a little bit deeper than I had first imagined. In a proper venue I could see where `graffiti art' might apply," he said.

He studied photos on graffiti websites and visited highway underpasses in the city to learn about the crews in the area. One weekend someone spray-painted Melechinsky's portrait in the underpass.

That was a while ago. Graffiti is not as visible as it used to be, but it's still around, he said. And when he knows of a spot that has it, Melechinsky - who tried retiring from this hobby twice - gets fidgety until it's gone.

"His resolve has been incredible, almost an obsession," said Bosco. "Mark is a real warrior, a silent warrior."

Contact Hilda Muñoz at hmunoz@courant.com