Chris Pape: Freedom Tunnel

Yard Tales

First generation NYC graffiti writer, author, documentarian, archivist, and historian Chris Pape, AKA FREEDOM, tells his own surreptitious stories around the Upper West Side Manhattan train tunnel that was ultimately named after him. His decision to live on the streets and paint in the "Freedom" tunnel propelled him toward a career that he never could have imagined.

"So, what we did was we kind of herded along some of the tougher guys on our block. We had a lower income housing thing next to right next to where we lived and we got those guys and we went down there, we went into the bathroom and sure enough, just as it was told, there was a plank of wood there and there was a blown out hole in it.

And you slide down to this embankment that, you know, it's just dirt and rats and stuff like that. And then you'd have like a six foot drop down to the train tracks eventually. And then there, they were five tracks across and freight trains and stuff like that. It was exhilarating. So we did that. We bought spray paint with us cause we were just getting into our graffiti thing.

And this was a much, it just seemed like a much safer place to write than actually going to a real train yard where real kids could rob you and stuff like that.

We actually did try and open some of the freights and there was nothing in them. They were just empty. One time we open them and there were some boxes and we're all, “Boxes! We've got boxes!” You know, this is so great and there were cans of Carnation instant milk, aluminum cans of Carnation milk, kind of like soup cans.

And so we had a battle of those. We would throw them at each other because that's, which weren’t the swiftest bunch, and they would hit the wall though and crack open and just go, “Plssssh!” This white powder everywhere.

Then the next time we went down in there, somebody fired a shot at us. So there was a track security guy who had a salt gun, and we had been warned of this, and he fired it at us. I fell, I hurt my knee, and then that kind of turned into the story that I got shot with a salt gun, which wasn't really true. But it was a great story, you know, when you're 14, so yeah, I got shot.

You know, but yeah, they dragged me out. We got home, cleaned the whole thing up, and then we never went down there again."