An old buddy of mine was in town for a brief moment while drifting the rails from coast to coast. He had hitchhiked in from Syracuse a few days before and was crashing at the crib. He had never been to an art museum so I figured I was required to take him to at least one. We walked into rooms and rooms of gold leaf encrusted religious paintings and within seconds my buddy came up on a camera. We checked out some Primitive sculptures but then wandered out after searching for the modern section in vain for a few hours. We hit the streets and he wanted to check out some graff.











We knew a general description of where the Freedom Tunnels were located and wandered around the muggy streets trying to find a good entrance. It is called the Freedom Tunnels because it used to be painted by a guy who wrote Freedom. He would do black and white paintings. He did mostly black and white classical studies (the Ted Williams card is my favorite though). We scoped the spot and finally reached what looked like a good entrance. A basketball game was in full swing on our right and we nonchalantly walked over to a hole in the fence. We had to pause a moment as a young sunburned bum pulled his bike (which was overloaded with empty cans) past us while swearing to himself and sweating profusely. We were finally were able to get into the cut right before the tunnel and were able to chill out for a second.















I told him that I didn’t know how far the tunnel went but we decided to go in anyway. There were no trains running along the tracks and it looked chill. It was the most beautiful thing that I ever had the good fortune to see with my own eyes. We came to find out later that it was about forty full city blocks of graffiti underworld. There are many ancient pieces that have lasted decades. I noticed remnants of murals from Spraycan Art and other old graf books. Not knowing how far it went, we ended up going about 30 blocks and then we turned around. As we neared the entrance that we had came in at an Amtrak jumped out onto us from out of the blackness. We had to run across the tracks and decided to exit out through a bum hole rather than risk going out the front and getting popped. I didn’t want to go through the hole but had no choice when my buddy did. We walked home as the sun went down with the grime and grit eating away at our skin.