Art Imitates Life In Mourning City

By S. Mitra Kalita | STAFF WRITER

September 16, 2001

Jon Vanjonson hopped off his bike as soon as he saw the spray-painted walls and dozens of lit candles. Like so many other mourners who've stopped off at this corner in Alphabet City, Vanjonson felt the need to leave his mark.

On a piece of yellow paper, he scrawled, "We love you Priscilla" and stuck it to the wall of a corner dry cleaners.

There, Vanjonson's cousin Priscilla joined scores of other victims remembered atop a graffiti depiction of the World Trade Center attack.

While makeshift memorials have sprung up across the region, the one at the corner of 14th Street and Avenue A remains one of the most extensive and frequently visited, partly because of its creator, Antonio Garcia. Everybody on the Lower East Side, it seems, knows "Chico."

Garcia began painting murals in the late 1980s to commemorate neighborhood residents who had died in drug-related incidents. As his work became better known, businesses started to commission him.

After hearing of Tuesday's attacks, Garcia ran straight to this corner. The deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa had been remembered here, now sprayed over with other memorials.

"I never expected it to change to this," he said. "This is just tragic."

As passersby lit candles into the early morning hours yesterday, Garcia sat on a plastic folding chair next to another wall he'd just sprayed: "God Bless America, Crying Hearts 911." The numbers, he said, symbolize the date of the attacks and the state of emergency in New York.

Across the street at Stuyvesant Grocery, manager Numan Hauter decided to cover his walls, which read "Grocery and Deli," with the words "Moment of Silence" over a Manhattan skyline. He paid Garcia $100 to do it.

"I'm one of those who really feel the tragedy," said Hauter, who comes from Yemen. "I know a customer who works there [the trade center]. He comes every morning, but I haven't seen him."