Anna Kodé
New York Times
May 31, 2024
Standing in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street, a person can easily experience a multi-sensory overload — red double-decker tour buses, tourists asking which way the M&M store is, flashy neon-colored billboards and the clanking and whirring of construction sounds.

Yet sandwiched in between two buildings — both over 10 stories tall with large glass windows — a sliver of a mural offers some tranquillity, peeking through the noise and the lights.

The mural, which depicts a New York cityscape through venetian blinds, is the work of SuZen, a 78-year-old multimedia artist who received a $10,000 public grant for the piece in 1984. At the time, the building was home to the notorious Show World Center, one of the city’s largest sex emporiums that offered adult DVDs and peep shows. The shop has been described as “the McDonald’s of Sex,” and for decades stood as a vestige of Times Square’s gritty past.

SuZen never stepped foot inside, never saw a shimmy or rented a video, but because “the image has these blinds that you’re looking through,” a business that hosted peep shows “seemed like a good match,” she said. “It made me chuckle.” The piece — based on a photograph SuZen took from a beauty salon in Manhattan and translated into a mural by Jeffrey Greene, the founder of EverGreene Painting Studios — stood as a faux window on Show World, even after owners began converting the building into offices in 2018.

Then last fall, SuZen noticed that a taller building went up directly adjacent to it, rendering her mural nearly invisible.

“I was sad and heartbroken and upset. No one even notified me that this was happening,” SuZen said. “Do we really need more glass buildings? There are so many empty buildings that I pass.”

In the ever-changing urban landscape of New York City, where real estate is in extremely high demand, there are myriad examples of development — or the tastes of the wealthy and powerful — overtaking public art. At the 5Pointz complex in Queens over a decade ago, 45 murals — the work of 21 graffiti artists — were whitewashed by a developer that was later fined $6.75 million for violating the Visual Artists Rights Act. In 1989, a 120-foot-long rusting steel sculpture in Lower Manhattan by Richard Serra, the renowned sculptor who died earlier this year, was torn down, following backlash from employees who worked in the federal office building the piece was in front of. Last month, New Yorkers mourned the loss of “Sherita,” a pink dinosaur-esque figure on a billboard on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn.

But SuZen’s mural wasn’t painted over or removed. Its existence today is nothing short of miraculous — glimmering through the cracks of the city’s towers, a reminder that some ghosts of public art are around us. Just look closer. I did.

‘Much Protest and Not Much Success’
The Visual Artists Rights Act, which was passed in 1990, grants artists “the right to prevent any destruction, distortion, mutilation, or other modification” of certain publicly displayed works. SuZen got in touch with a lawyer to see if her mural would be protected under the law, but she was told that because her mural went up in 1984, it didn’t apply, she said.

“I don’t know if it’s possible, but it would be wonderful if we could relocate the mural,” she told me.

Richard Haas, an 87-year-old artist living in Manhattan, estimates that more than half of his works have been lost to shifts in the built environment over the years. Known for architectural and trompe l’oeil murals, Mr. Haas has created works in New York, Washington, Cincinnati, Boston, St. Louis, Miami and more.

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