Long Island City, an area once home to little more than industrial parks, factory milling and warehouse-ery, is now a bustling neighborhood of young professionals, Queens hipsters, and creative types. So it stands to reason that somewhere among the converted warehouses and cookie-cutter high rise apartments someone would have the idea to preserve a bit of the urban charm that brought on so much change to this nook of a hood.
It so happens that some of that “charm” is graffiti, and the person with the idea was Meres One, a Queens native and graffiti artist. The idea turned out to be the 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center, a 200,000 square-foot converted factory building, which is now an outdoor art exhibit space dedicated to the idea of graffiti as art. The walls of the building are curated and pieces of graffiti can expect to stay on their wall from as little as a single day to as long as two years. The organizers behind the building also offer tours in season.
