Graffiti artists learn early not to get too attached. Ephemera is as central to their medium as spray paint. Some works last months, others don’t make it through the night. Even the most famous pieces are not guaranteed to last. Many of the defining works of the late 1960s and 1970s in New York City—“DONDI” wrapped around the side of an entire subway car, “TAKI 183” sprayed on a brick facade—have been lost, painted over, or torn down entirely. So much of what is enshrined in the iconic 1983 graffiti documentary Style Wars cannot be found in the urban landscape today.

All of that made the demolition of 5Pointz, a legendary graffiti venue in Long Island City, Queens, an unlikely battleground for the soul of the art form. In the early 2000s, the derelict warehouse at 45–46 Davis Street became a haven for graffiti artists, thanks to an unusual arrangement. With the five-story complex in sparse use since the 1970s and entirely empty since 2009, the artist Jonathan Cohen—whose tag is Meres One—struck a deal with the building’s owner, Gerald “Jerry” Wolkoff: Artists who wanted to paint big, intensive projects could do so on the building’s exterior without running afoul of anti-graffiti laws, which had been ratcheted up during Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s reign in the 1990s. That pact created a flourishing street artist community around 5Pointz: The building featured work from some 1,500 artists from all over the world, earning it the title the “United Nations of Graffiti.”

The arrangement went belly up in 2013, when Wolkoff decided that the building would be razed and converted into ritzy condominiums in the increasingly posh neighborhood, the cultural cachet of its painted exterior converted into a high-dollar payout.

Graffiti artists, including the British artist Banksy, clamored for the site’s preservation, while New Yorkers lamented the sacrifice of another cultural artifact on the altar of the city’s real-estate development machine. Under cover of darkness in November of that year, Wolkoff took advantage of a stalled court injunction to have the building whitewashed—over a decade’s worth of artwork gone overnight.

Then, in 2018, a court found that Wolkoff was liable for $6.75 million in total damages. The settlement, which is under appeal, was hailed as a victory for the artists. But it also signaled a strange new chapter in the history of graffiti. In the early days, by creed, a graffiti artist would ask neither for permission nor compensation. Now, after courting the former, artists at 5Pointz were receiving the latter. Graffiti was once a countercultural threat that conservative forces roundly maligned as a racially coded stand-in for urban delinquency. It was an archenemy of both the New York Police Department and real-estate developers for the supposed downward pull it exerted on property values. Now, graffiti had not only helped catalyze gentrification of one of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods, but was also being handsomely rewarded for it, with legal recognition by a judge and jury.