A Love Letter For You

A Love Letter For You is a series of fifty text-based murals painted on walls facing the Market-Frankford Elevated subway line in Philadelphia. The murals were painted by a team of forty painters led by New York artist Stephen Powers, who was a graffiti writer known as ESPO while growing up in the city's west side. They required 1200 cans of spray paint and 800 gallons of bucket paint.

The love art has inspired a documentary film, a sign school/shop that provides training for area youth and free signage for local businesses, a tattoo parlour, a Valentine love train tour, and two books. I like its title: aloveletterforyou is one of the names for the attachment that carried the I Love You Virus back in 2000.

The project is part tribute to Darryl McCray, a.k.a. Cornbread, an early Philadelphia graffiti artist who began painting messages of love on the walls in the late 1960s for a pretty girl named Cynthia. McCray told Philadelphia Weekly:

"I was released from reform school in 1967," Cornbread, 48, recalls. After spending ages 10 and 11 in what he alternatingly calls "school" and "jail," he was returned to the public school system. "While I was introduced I was scanning the class looking for the prettiest girl. I spotted her but I didn't know how to talk to her because all I knew how to talk was gangbanger-jitterbug talk."

So he says he set in motion what was surely one of the more determined wooing projects of the latter 20th century. He stole a look at her roster and arrived to all her classes before she did, writing "Cornbread loves Cynthia" on her desk. He also wrote it all down the block where she lived, and all along the bus route she took to school.

He befriended her as Darryl, which is why for a while she was dumbfounded as to who this Cornbread might be. He walked her home from school but had to stop a block short. Cornbread was something of a jitterbug himself, and Cynthia's father didn't want him around. One day she saw on one of his schoolbooks the same declaration she'd seen on her desk, and it was then she knew that Cornbread was one Darryl McCray.

"That's when she fell in love with me," he says.

Philadelphia is known as "The City Of Brotherly Love" (Modern Greek: [filaˈðɛlfia], "brotherly love" from philos-φίλος, "love", and adelphos-αδελφός "brother"), and is also home to "Rosalie, I Love You," and Love Park. Now that I think about it, The Phillies translate as "The Lovies"...

Thanks to the always wonderful Michael Tweed for the tip.