Welcome back to Horror Street, an ongoing journey in search of awesome yet spooky graffiti art on the streets and little-traveled corners of New York City. I kicked off this occasional series back on April 27 with a visit to the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Williamsburg, where I found the ominous Brooklyn Vampire.
Today, we’re back in Pan’s home borough of Queens, New York—specifically the neighborhood called Astoria, where you’ll find the Welling Court Mural Project. As the story goes, back in 2009, the residents of Welling Court—a backward-L-shaped street that runs all of two blocks—decided they wanted to spruce up the area. And so they invited the grafitti artists of Ad Hoc Art (a gallery in Brooklyn) to have-at-it with any blank wall they came across and let their creativity run wild. It didn’t take long for the project to spread beyond Welling Court into the neighboring streets, creating a unique gallery of amazing graffiti murals that’s accessible to the public 24/7.
Of course, since it’s street art, and since the project boasts new murals every year, it means the art you see today in all likelihood won’t be there next year, replaced by a new piece. Such is the case with today’s photo from my 2018 visit to Welling Court: a portrait I’ve dubbed “D-Rod,” since the face of this demon reminds me of a young Alex Rodriguez, aka former major league baseball player “A-Rod.”
The resemblance is probably intentional. For a borough that’s home to the New York Mets, Queens at times seems overflowing with Bronx Bombers followers. Pan’s boyfriend, die-hard Yankees fan Javier Maldonado, would no doubt be pleased with “D-Rod’s” presence in Queens; Pan and her best friend, Sheena McCarthy, on the other hand, being Metsies, would be looking for a bulldozer to borrow so they could knock down the wall…
Stay tuned for further installments of Horror Street—there’s plenty of macabre graffiti art to be found on the streets of New York, if you look in the right creepy places!
