Where murals stand tall

PHILADELPHIA -- They are the hidden gems of this old city, running up the side of down-at-the-heels Victorian row houses and dominating vacant lots with a surreal intensity. They depict a child reaching for a star painted onto a chimney, a grandmother sewing a purple quilt, six lifer inmates seeking salvation.

They are haunting and passionate, and these vast murals are like wildflowers that took root in urban decay and never died.

White-haired Marian Custus peered out her door where a row of elegant townhouses once stood. The owners fled, and crack and arson crept in. All became rubble.

Two years ago, the artists arrived, enlisted neighborhood children, and painted two radiant murals on the sides of row houses, known collectively as ''Holding Grandmother's Quilt."

''It's like waking up every morning and having a museum painting in your neighborhood. I feel so lucky to live here," Custus confided to a visitor.

No city in America has so much mural art, a brick wall poetry that reflects every mood in Philadelphia. There are portraits of Dr. J and Frank Sinatra, and a brilliant mural of Jackie Robinson sliding home.

There are also murals of neighborhood children and of a beloved police officer who died in Iraq, a ''Healing Wall" that stretches 300 feet along railway tracks, and a 50-foot garden mural that dominates a drug-ridden corner in the Mantua neighborhood.

''It's like they're the autobiography of this city," said Jane Golden, director of the city's Mural Arts Program, who searches for barren walls. ''They have the power to move the soul."

This art took flower in New York City. Disinvestment, white flight, and arson laid New York low in the 1970s, but out of that decay stepped thousands of graffiti taggers and muralists, among them Keith Haring, Dondi, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Some saw their art as brilliant and others as a scourge, but that debate does not matter anymore because most of the art is gone. Real estate is too valuable now for street art; every vacant lot has become a commodity. Probably the only murals left in Manhattan are 16-story ads for Calvin Klein and Bose speakers.

Philadelphia has gone the other way, at least for now. Its urban renaissance has burned slower and with less of a mercantile aesthetic. A half-dozen murals have been demolished recently -- including one of Harriet Tubman painted for the Republican National Convention -- and replaced by parking lots and condos. But artists are philosophic.

''It's acrylic paint, so it has a life of 25 years anyway," said Dave McShane, the Irish-Italian son of a Philadelphia plumber, who set out to be a doctor but ended up in fine arts school. ''If it lasts three years, that's OK -- it's regular everyday art for regular working people."

In fact, mural extinction seems unlikely here, not least because Golden, a fast-talking ball of kinetic energy, stands guard. To drive with Golden, as she steers a city-issued jeep up the old streets of Mantua and Fishtown and Kensington, is to sense her passion.

Golden hits the brakes and points to a mural of a child reaching for a star, painted across every inch of a three-story tenement wall. ''All the neighbors talked about when the neighborhood was so safe that they could go up to the roof on a hot night and eat dinner and look for stars," she said. ''When people can hear and see themselves, they reach a state of grace."

No mural came harder than one on Lehigh Avenue, where the Fishtown, Kensington, and Port Richmond neighborhoods intersect. Three years ago a local artist, Cesar Viveros-Herrera, had in mind a 300-foot-long ''healing" mural against a railway wall, to be illustrated with the faces of local young people, some of them dead. It would be multiracial and multiethnic, and in Kensington that did not go down well.

''I had a neighbor who ragged how it was going to attract dealers," recalled Eileen Blair, 55, whose Scottish grandparents moved to Kensington in 1915. ''I'm like, 'Where have you been, honey? We've had drug dealers here since the Vietnam War.' " A mediator called a meeting, and 200 neighbors walked in. One 12-year-old girl with a stutter stood up.

Blair recalled the moment: ''This girl takes the microphone and says, 'This mural is like a puzzle. If you take the pieces out, the puzzle won't work anymore. And this puzzle is our lives.' "

Blair was crying.

''That was it," she said. ''One person after another got up and said what a great idea this mural was."

The last trace of conflict washed away as they painted. ''I don't know how to describe it -- it's like ice skating or combing a child's hair," Blair said. ''You pick up the brush and your defenses come down."

Golden drove to the dedication of the Healing Wall months later.

She expected up to 30 people. She saw a crowd of 250.

She scooted around the block to collect herself.

''I saw all the people we'd argued and laughed with, and I felt chills all over my body," she said. ''This work is a metaphor for change. Nothing good -- nothing -- happens just like that."