Strange Attractions: The Loathsome Tag

The loathsome tag: the hastily sprayed graffito marring some public place--bridge, phone both, mail box, trucks, wall, window--that says, "I marred this because I can."

The loathsome tag undermines urban renewal. It kills off our hope that we can have anything nice. It tells the company our children don't know how to behave.

There are tags all over the gentrified section of South Norwalk, Connecticut--formerly a run-down and dangerous section of a run-down harbor side town on the Boston Post Road and Interstate 95. As a kid, I knew Norwalk as a place to put the boat in the Sound. In the 1970s it was old and seedy, a thing to get through to get to the water. The ancient wooden buildings that housed variety stores selling everything from beer to bait on the little byways that led to the harbor ebbed and flowed with the heave of 100 frosts. The place looked ready to gasp its last breath.

On the other side of the drawbridge near the harbor were the brick buildings where long ago fish was processed and employees lost fingers and arms in the name of profit and progress. We never went there.

Now, though, it's the only place to be in South Norwalk if you arrive like an alien with weekend dollars in your pocket (more)