Brandon Mohoney has always taken it for granted that he will see ugly tags and graffiti every day on the walls underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, just a block from his home.

On a recent day, however, he was surprised to find the graffiti washed out and walls painted snow white.

"This is the first time in 37 years that I'm seeing nothing written on those walls," said Mohoney, 60, a retired subway construction supervisor. "It looks better, of course, although we don't know how long it's going to last."

The walls under the elevated portion of the expressway at 31st Avenue and 68th Street were painted in mid-June after some local residents and business owners complained to Queens Borough President Helen Marshall about the "eyesore."

The re-painting was carried out as part of a $245 million expressway reconstruction project, which is slated to to be completed by the end of this year.

The graffiti "was a shame. Unlike some other graffiti that looks like art, this was just the names of some people and didn't make any sense at all," Mohoney said.

Many business owners and residents in the area, however, seem to be cynical about city and state authorities' anti-graffiti efforts, questioning how long the painted walls would actually remain clean.

"The good thing is they repainted the walls. The bad thing is there will be more graffiti tonight," Anthony Piccolo, 31, who runs a gardening shop two blocks from the repainted walls, said a few days after the wall was painted.

Bobby Grevener, 53, who runs a gas station with his father right by the repainted walls, agreed. "Some people might say it's good, but I'm sure it's going to come back," he said of the graffiti.

But nearly a month later, the wall is still graffiti-free.

State transportation officials are currently testing seven different types of protective coatings to apply to concrete walls, which will make it easier to remove graffiti. The repainted walls in Woodside will be covered with the most effective coating and eventually will have a deep gray finish, according to Marshall's office.

Police surveillance of the area has begun following a request by the state Department of Transportation to stop future "tagging" of the highway's walls by graffiti vandals, Marshall said in a news release.

During a briefing given to Queens community leaders last month, Queens North Police Chief James Tuller said each precinct is compiling data on its top five graffiti "tags."

"Nothing makes a good neighborhood look bad like graffiti," said City Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Sunnyside), whose district includes Woodside. "We need a multi-faceted approach to combat graffiti."

Gioia introduced an anti-graffiti bill to increase penalties and fines for repeat graffiti offenders. He also sponsored another bill to prohibit the sale of etching acid cream -- used by graffiti offenders to leave their marks on glass -- to anyone under 18. Both bills passed in January 2003.

Gioia has a four-step anti-graffiti policy: "Stop graffiti before it happens, paint as soon as we see it, make the clean-up a community effort; and prosecute offenders," he said.

To further discourage teenagers from tagging, Gioia proposes instilling in them a sense of pride about their neighborhood and giving them positive extracurricular activities that keep them off the streets.

Still, only three blocks from the painted walls, graffiti is all over the glass windows of a laundry.

Yuqin Hu, 40, who has worked at the laundry for a year, said graffiti vandalism by teenagers has gotten worse during the last six months.

"I wiped out graffiti outside twice before, but there was always more and more graffiti the following day," she said. "So I gave up cleaning it up."