Talk Bronx New York

A T-Shirt Brand for Bronx Lovers 

Shorty Hip-Hop, a character created by Anthony Cabezas that he hopes will help launch his T-shirt brand, Beond69.

Shirts made by Anthony “Beond69? Cabezas. He no longer makes shirts with the heart logo.

For a while last year, Anthony Cabezas’s most popular T-shirt design was one that declared “I?BX.” He printed 600 of them in his South Bronx studio and sold them wholesale for $10 apiece. Not long after they hit the stores, he said, thousands of cheaper ones hit the streets.

“I made $1,000 and then it was over,” he said. “Then it just took off over the five boroughs, when the stores on 27th Street and Broadway started making them and flooded the market. Those guys do everything that is popular and they sell them cheap, 3 for $10. I?BK, I?DR, everything.”

He is no longer fretting about losing that market. New York’s State’s tourism board most definitely does not ? BX, BK, DR or anything else that violates the trademark it holds on its iconic logo. The state agency recently announced that it was taking steps to warn violators to stop cranking out unauthorized shirts, bags and anything else with the heart.

“It’s not something I’m making anymore,” said Mr. Cabezas, 39. “I’m not getting emotionally involved with it. It was just something for the street.”

Instead, he is focusing on becoming a brand name. Tags emblazoned with Beond69, his logo, dangle from T-shirts with hip-hop themes and sketches. His brand started out as a different kind of tag, the kind he spray painted on walls as a teenager. Now he makes his living making drawings of fancy awnings for a sign company active in Manhattan’s pricier neighborhoods.

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South Bronx: Graffiti, Underground and Above

BEGINNING in the 1970s, city kids swept up in the new trend of scribbling graffiti on the outside of subway cars gathered on a bench in the 149th Street-Grand Concourse station in the Bronx to appraise each other’s work as trains rumbled by on the tracks. The site became known as the 149th Street Writers Bench, and it is legendary in graffiti lore.

“You would sit there watching for new talent,” recalled Freddy Miteff, 48, a former Bronx graffiti writer. “If you saw something real exciting, you’d chase the train to see who it was.”

Mr. Miteff was among the many young people who were arrested for defacing subway cars, and the spray painting of trains largely ended by the late ’80s. But two decades later, there is a continuing dispute over graffiti — and its center is at Hostos Community College, directly upstairs from the fabled 149th Street station.

The setting is a fall seminar on graffiti taught by James Cade, a graffiti writer who himself came of age spray-painting subways in the ’70s.

On Tuesday evening in the college’s white-walled art gallery, Mr. Cade explained the importance of teaching graffiti to today’s students.

“A lot of students are young and didn’t see the trains back in the day,” said Mr. Cade, now a graying man in his 40s. “This gives them a chance to learn about the first element of hip-hop, which is graffiti.”

Mr. Cade stopped spray-painting illegally in the ’80s. He has since been a tireless booster of graffiti as a legitimate art form, even urging that the subway bench be declared a landmark.

But in the eyes of some, like City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who has criticized Hostos for offering the course, graffiti is part of a ragged image that the borough is trying to shed.

Others say graffiti deserves attention — especially in the neighborhood that some consider its birthplace.

“It’s an important part of this area’s cultural history,” said Wally Edgecombe, director of the Hostos arts center. “Graffiti style has been appropriated by Madison Avenue. It’s in museums around the world.”

SOURCE: NYTimes.com

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