New York — THE canvas was a neglected 19th century building on the edge of SoHo, its brick exterior layered with spray paint and wheat-pasted images: a robot, a smiling heart, a series of red lipstick smudges, a man with menacing eyes aiming a gun, a life-size confused-looking Waldo.
For the last three decades, the five-story building on Spring Street served as an outdoor museum for graffiti and then illegal street art -- contrasting forms of expression that involve vandalizing public spaces.
In the 1970s, the walls had been claimed by graffiti crews made up mostly of poor kids who christened the building by tagging their street names.
Two decades later, artists had moved into this industrial area called Nolita and created lofts. It was one of the few affordable places left for them to live in Manhattan. A new class of graffiti known as street art began showing up on the building and elsewhere in the city's gentrifying neighborhoods.
It was practiced by art school students and others from middle-class backgrounds. Using stencils, posters, stickers and wheat paste, they left intricate portraits and images on the building's splashed-up facade, often covering graffiti tags.
Last year, a developer bought the 11 Spring St. building to convert it into condominiums that would sell for millions. The message to the artists seemed clear: In this city caught in the grip of gentrification, affordable neighborhoods had become as impermanent as the graffiti.
The building on Spring Street would be forced to shed its storied skin, erasing the street art and tags. But before it did, dozens of street artists from New York and across the world agreed to convene there in December for a final tribute. With the new owner's blessing, they spent two months covering the inside and outside with provocative, sometimes beautiful images.
One artist created a poster of two women sewing. Someone put up an image of a wrinkled, obese baby with a leash around his neck. Another artist painted a dollar bill with George Washington's face replaced by a skeleton with antlers.
The art would be displayed for four days. The show's opening day came. In a few hours, the public would begin lining up to see the art. As the sun rose, some uninvited guests arrived.
They obscured their faces with hooded sweatshirts. They dipped rollers into buckets of silver paint. One climbed a ladder. Another pulled out a can of spray paint. They went over the street artists' work in gigantic block letters, covering one wall almost completely as passersby shouted at them to stop.
