I read about the potential of demolishing 5 Pointz Graffiti Park in LIC. It's a whole block of warehouses and factories covered in expert graffiti. It's a really big deal. I checked on GE to see if anyone had built it– a user named Chris Sardinas built a lot of stuff in that neighborhood, including part of the 7 train, and someone else made the Citibank Building (incorrectly identified as the citicorp building – that's in Manhattan,) but no 5 Pointz! It could be mine!
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| No Pointz |
All I could think about for days was 5 Pointz! I went down there on a weekend and took photos of every surface. There are huge walls, rooftops, slopes, ledges, a hidden courtyard, smokestacks… I walked around the whole thing and took photos of every thing I could see.
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| Crane Street on Street View |
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| My Crane Street on Google Earth |
If I couldn't see it then I scroured the internet, google images, flickr, picassa, the 5pointz Web page… I wanted to keep everything as accurate as possible. No made up shit. Which was really hard.
All those little roof tops and half walls and what not had to be discovered and photographed. I had to have an accurate picture of every part. In the end there were a few hard to get spots that I found only through endless, eye-burning searching online.
There is a characteristic crunkyness to the roof of the garage portion which I modeled. Every building has a character and I decided that I could risk the extra polygons to make an important feature.
I learned that the art on the building is constantly changing, every day it seems. There is an artist, Meres 1, who curates the whole showcase. People from all over the world come to "burn" 5 Pointz. Burn is Graffiti talk for paint! I learned!
A food cart repair shop along Davis Street. This image is not very heavily compressed so you can see the detail.
There was so much to make, I needed to break the model up into about 7 parts. It covers the whole block after all, and they are technically separate addresses.
The 5 Pointz complex project involved me researching these individual buildings, and I discovered neat shit. Part of it used to be the Neptune Water Meter Factory.
The Neptune Meter Building as it appears in GE. I really compressed the images on this facade, i think too much. I was really stressing getting the models down to about 100 Kb. I thought it would make GE more likely to accept it.
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| 5 Pointz |
This is the Crane Street Facade of 5 Pointz on GE. If you've never been to 5 Pointz, I fully demand you check it out. It's off the 7 Train in Queens, you barely even have to walk a block. You can see my model on GE – just type in 5 Pointz and zoom in to the place mark.
