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Spelling it out: Artist tapes his anti-Yards message onto buildings

By Dana Rubinstein
The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper / Adrian Kinloch
Artist Scott Witter has covered two buildings in Wallabout with anti–Atlantic Yards screeds. It’s not graffiti, though; it’s blue painter’s tape.
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The Brooklyn Paper / Adrian Kinloch

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Scott Witter — the curator of Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn (a.k.a. BOMB) — has covered an entire brick wall with a caustic message to Mayor Bloomberg protesting the controversial 16-skyscraper-and-arena Atlantic Yards project, warning that the project would result in a neighborhood getting “raped.”

Witter, who opposed the destruction of the historic Long Island Rail Road Terminal that made way for Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Terminal Mall in the 1990s, told The Brooklyn Paper that Atlantic Yards “is the same thing all over again.”

To register his anger, Witter erected the message to “Mayor Moo Moo,” covering a wall of his own home with blue painter’s tape. It took him eight hours and countless rolls of tape (no, really, he lost count).

Brooklyn Bridge Realty

In his message, Witter calls Ratner’s plan a “gated community” and says “there is no reason to give more of Brooklyn to Bruce Ratner.”

Witter, a reformed Dumpster diver, runs BOMB, a collection of modern artifacts, at his building on Steuben Street, between Park and Myrtle avenues in Wallabout.

The latest screed is one of about 20 enormous blue-tape messages Witter has erected over the years.

“It was the mayor who taught me to use painter’s tape,” smirked Witter. “I [once] went out [with] a can of green paint and started painting. I got arrested right on Flushing Avenue. I spent 22 hours in jail. [And I learned that] tape is not considered graffiti because it’s temporary.”

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper

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