Urban Lore Links Sneakers To Drugs
A Cleveland, OH City Councilwoman decided to do something about Shoefiti in her town after hearing about the connection between hanging shoes and drug dealing from children in her neighborhood.
The post includes a series of comments from people with their own Shoefiti theories, including some people with first-hand shoefiti experience motivated by celebrating milestones in the military and summer camp.
We Did The Shoe Thing or more properly the boot thing in the Army. I don’t know if it was widespread but at my last battalion’s barracks a soldier who was ETS (Leaving the Army) would tie his boots together and toss them over the wires in front of either the barracks or the battalion HQ (under cover of darkness in the latter location) . I’ve seen hanging boots on other posts
We also did that when I was a kid at summer camp a few times at different camps. Some guys and I that had some old Chuck Taylor All Stars wrote some stuff on them and tossed them in the eaves of a lodge or over a tree branch or the like.
Both scenarios do seem to be popular. Another related one is celebrating after graduation by hanging shoes from either a tree or power line. However, this seems far different than the motivations behind hanging shoes at the intersection do and mid-block within alleys of blighted neighborhoods.
Using a comparison to graffiti, it’s fairly common to see "_____ High Class of _______" graffiti post-graduation at the start of summer. Does that make it acceptable? It’s certainly not tied to gangs, where most members are not high school graduates, yet it’s still graffiti to me. And, it’s generally removed in most cities.
What do you think? Does the fact that some shoes on powerlines have celebratory motivations somehow discount the motivation behind shoefiti?
Leave a Comment