By 1984, according to a 1990 account in the Security Journal by Maryalice Sloan-Howitt and the criminologist George Kelling, graffiti covered every car in the New York City subway.
The city had tried almost everything. Police kept files on the roughly 500 people responsible, but a juvenile justice system swamped with more serious offenders kept releasing them. Making offenders scrub trains backfired: it taught them how to make graffiti that lasted longer. Fences around the train yards got cut. In 1983 the Transit Authority painted cars white to resist graffiti. “It was like putting out a rolling canvas,” a spokesman later told The New York Times.
In April 1984, David Gunn, the authority’s new president, announced a Clean Car Program. He called the job of turning the system around a “suicide mission.” The fleet had about 6,000 cars. In May, two trains went into the program: new cars on the No. 4 line and 20-year-old repainted ones on the No. 7. Crews waited at the end of each line. By Sloan-Howitt and Kelling’s account, a program car that came in tagged had to be cleaned within two hours or it came out of service. Police rode the trains. The yards where the clean trains were stored got better lighting, cleaners around the clock, and fences mended within a day of any damage.
A. Richardson Goodlatte, the chief mechanical officer who ran the cleanup, had a theory, as The Times described it in his 1997 obituary: writers who never saw their work in motion would soon get discouraged. Pulling cars was a drastic step for a system that was already unreliable. Over five years, the authority told The Times, trains were taken out of service in rush hour 10 times.
Then the writers started to change their behavior. In yards where program cars and older cars were stored together, people who broke in painted the cars that were already covered and left the clean ones alone. Sloan-Howitt and Kelling called it the authority’s “first taste of ultimate victory.”
The program grew as it held. Yearly targets rose from 1,720 clean cars by May 1985 to 5,946 by 1988, and by Sloan-Howitt and Kelling’s count the program beat them every year. They credit regular meetings, a strong mandate, goals tied to the work, and “noteworthy early successes” with keeping the 15 departments on Gunn’s task force working together.
On May 12, 1989, the last graffiti-covered car was taken out of service and cleaned, and the authority marked the end with a celebration. Reactions were mixed. A lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a riders’ group, said the clean cars made him think “somebody’s in control.” A union safety director was less impressed: “Big deal, if you can’t get to work on time and you don’t feel safe.” Years later, Gunn said in a podcast interview that “the clean train became sort of symbolic of the fact that the thing worked.”
In January 1990, Gunn announced he would step down. That year, hits on trains doubled, from 23,000 to 46,000, though only 700 of them were major. The authority reconvened its graffiti task force for the first time in 18 months. Officials said they couldn’t explain the rise; some writers and a riders’ group pointed to budget cuts. “It’s an insidious thing, this graffiti,” said an assistant chief mechanical officer, “and we don’t intend to let it get away from us.”