Possibly mildly NSFW in parts.

I can see it from my kitchen window, across Jackson Ave.

Meres, the guy who runs 5Pointz, is a really friendly guy; a buddy of mine was shooting a music video and we hung around there for a couple days while his camera sat on a tripod taking stop-motion shots of a young woman tagging the wall. Also there was that Joan Jett video another buddy shot on the 5 Pointz roof, or maybe it was a video for some new girl group that featured Joan Jett, anyway another friend played one of the cops, so he got to chase Ms. Jett with a billyclub. Good times.

An exterior staircase fell off the side of the building within the past year, I think it resulted in an injury and so there wasn't a lot of activity for a while, but things seem to have picked back up a bit. On weekends there are always clusters of people around the building, working, watching, whatever.

In my neighborhood I get about as many drivers calling me over to ask where 5Pointz is, as I do ones who want to find PS 1 (MoMA's Queens branch, right across the street from 5Pointz and even closer to my kitchen window). The Noguchi museum is nearby too, talk about a cool art space.

It used to be that there was an interior staircase that was always open, so when I first moved here I'd take a friend and a six-pack up to the 5 Pointz roof and watch the sun set, admire some aerosol art, dig the view of the skyline, or the taxi depot, or the LIRR tracks, or the big aluminum bellies of the new Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant over in Brooklyn.

Sometimes I'll be at the diner on the corner and a few guys will come in with Meres -- they might all be veterans of the TD4 crew -- and take a corner booth and talk shop. My eyes glaze over whatever book I'm reading and I just sit there and soak up their raucous yarns about who was that kid they caught tagging and where was it, oh how we ran from this crew or that cop, the good old days when it was still art but it was on someone else's wall and it meant territory, or beef, or some youngster was gonna get roughed up and taken in for expressing himself in the wrong spot.

A lot of laughing, some real interesting personalities, and real honest-to-goodness art. Definitely worth the trip.

Awesome. I love graffiti so much.