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It took nine hours over two nights along with the help of a few friends for Tron Love to execute his stories-high graffiti pass on the frontage of the abandoned St. Mary’s Infirmary in midtown St. Louis. The first night, beginning at midnight and running for three hours, was nothing more than a readying step, as he removed windows, window frames and dozens of feet of vines, which have long climbed up the brickwork of the decaying hospital. Occasionally he came into contact with the full-time, very unofficial residents of the venue, of which there are a few.
On the second night, about three gallons of white paint were applied to St. Mary’s via roller and pole, as Tron Love and his smoked-out associates traveled from the second-fifth floors in a pinpoint attempt to put the lettering into the exact spaces that Tron had outlined prior. He used Photoshop to develop the piece, which stretches across the entire, main structure of the hospital. While his friends were of only moderate help in the process, he says, without their occasional aid, he wouldn’t have had a chance to lean out some of the windows with any degree of safety.
“I needed someone to hold me,” he says. “I went in with three other guys and two were supposed to be lookouts. They were awful, I had to yell at them, ‘cause they just spent their time looking around. From the second floors through the third floors, it was less visible. But by the time we got to the top of the building, the Ameren guys were yelling up at us. I had it in my mind that I was going to stay there that night and finish, or get arrested. Some people have been in, I’ve heard, and gotten hit with felony trespassing. Others haven’t had any problem. I guess it was just the guys on that shift, but they were just like, ‘We’ve been watching you doing that all night.’”
(As a quick bit of digression, a few months ago, I stopped at the hospital while driving south, out of Downtown, via Tucker. The light was interesting, and I pulled over on Papin to grab a few pics of St. Mary’s; the security force of Ameren, which has its HQ nearby, pulled alongside my vehicle, requested information and generally behaved as if they were working on a national security issue, instead talking to a driver parked on a public, city street. Reflecting that experience, Tron says that the Ameren vehicles were “out every 10 minutes. They were circling, dude. You could count on it.” The St. Louis City Police? “We never saw them.”)
In the process of the work, Tron Love committed four letters to the front of the building, T, R, O and N. In different mock-ups, he also worked in the names of other local graf notables, like Bang and Rat Fag, but he wound up working apart from them and the project became more self-driven as it went. A month, or so, after the paint was affixed, Tron’s still irritated by a few things.
“I’m upset because I messed up the R,” he says. “It was perfectly spaced originally. There were eight windows, but seven rooms across. I knew that, but went into the fourth room and expected the fourth window. I had to improvise. So the R gets extended there. It fades off a little bit and what’s ridiculous is that me and my boy went back and hit it with another coat. But it was cheap paint and barely covered anything. You can’t even tell it was painted again. I really want to go back and finish off the N, too, and any little bits that we might’ve missed.”
That extra application of paint might not get done, at all. Or it might’ve gotten done between the time that this piece was written and published. And the variety of possibilities lies in the fact that Tron Love is moving out of St. Louis. He might be gone by the time this gets published, or... well, you get the idea. He’s “bouncing,” and he says that his personal odyssey in graf is part of the reason that he’s leaving town, likely to follow an old running buddy, Amore, who’s now living in Texas.
“I’ve sacrificed a lot here,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time and energy. For all the bumps you get when you’re unmotivated, you want to work with somebody, but you find all these douchebags that are uncool. It’s about constantly growing, wanting to leave your mark for the normal people that can appreciate you and your style. You want to say that you did this. It’s different for everybody. And for me, it’s definitely all changed.
“The big question,” he figures, “is whether you’re willing to be arrested. I was sitting in jail once, did 16 hours in the overnight, and thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do this again.’ People have to get passionate about it, because you’re always going to be hitting a roadblock, always. So you’ll either go through the wall, paint it, or go around it. I’ve painted it and gone on to the next wall.”
Tron Love contacted me, initially, some months back, after I’d written up a note about the seeing the work of the now-retired H8 Tank around St. Louis, in some unpredictable spots that only graf artists, the homeless, first responders and urban explorers come across. When you start seeing a name over and over, it starts jumping out, calling attention to itself, and pretty soon, you’ll find that name repeatedly, on overpasses, in alleys, on abandoned bricks citywide. The blog piece, which indicated certain sympathy for the graf cause, was met with an assortment of miffed-to-angry comebacks, but Tron Love wanted to meet up, to chat about his experiences.
At the time, he and Amore were running regularly, working with stencils, a craft that Tron was busy with until deciding that his paint control had grown enough to start working freehand with Montana Gold paint cans as his tools, and buildings and structures all over St. Louis as his canvas. With the audacious hit of St. Mary’s and with a move out-of-state on the way, he reached out again last week and sat down to talk; we met at the outdoor patio of Meshuggah, the bohemian cafe and coffeeshop in the University City Loop.
Unsure of who would roll up and whether we’d recognize one another, I told him of my attire, to make an easy spot. When he said “Hello,” I was greeted by a good-looking young guy in his mid-'20s, with a modern haircut, a ball cap and some just-off-work clothes. He’s lightly tatted, and speaks in a kind of curly-cue style that weaves and wanders and comes back to the original point all in its own time. Within the span of 10 minutes, he can touch on how squabbles boil up between graf crews, who among them live in what town and how he’s dealt with an in-progress SLU security stop while on the roof of the in-demolition Pevely Dairy. While he never names names and lets me guess as who this, or that, character might be, there’s a detail to it all that’d be fascinating to any, true St. Loiusan who appreciates our town’s underbelly.
Any personal charm aside, it’s no surprise, though, that some advocates of architecture and preservation aren’t enamored of the Tron Love signature.
Ironically enough, on the day that we were set to chat, the prolific local blogger and architectural historian Michael R. Allen posted about the Tron marking of St. Mary’s, via his popular Preservation Research Office blog.
Writes Allen, in his inimitable style: “The lonely red brick hospital that looms over the downtown railyards, St. Mary’s Infirmary, has withstood the troubles of time since its earliest section went up in 1887. The recent arrival of a giant white block cipher sprawled across the beautiful facade is an unfortunate attention-grabbing feature that would be horrific if it were not so badly done. The white-paint graffiti seems to be rolled on, and also seems to be an abortive attempt at a message to ScottTrade Center’s patrons. The ending letters could be ‘OSO’, as in ‘o so stupid.’ The lazy pole and roller artist even dared to mar the front elevation of the eastern building at the hospital, designed by Barnett, Haynes & Barnett, architects of the great Cathedral on Lindell Boulevard.”
Two points made by Allen really seem to stick with Tron Love. The primary one being the idea that the work was done lazily.
“Lazy is kinda insulting,” he sniffs. “But that’s people’s view of it. His complaints are invalid, that the message is askew. People get in a bind about the stupidest things. That’s all silly. I don’t even know what OSO means. I messed up on the R and it’s not completely finished. But I don’t see an OSO, at all. He’s an uneducated journalist, writing about aspects of this that he has not idea about. The half-assed thing, that it’s horrific, that it’s worst... dude, it’s the biggest graffiti in St. Louis. It’s not hidden somewhere. You can see it getting off 40 at 14th, you can see it from all over Downtown.”
The quality aspect also rankles Tron Love. And in that conversation lies a really interesting subtext, as the young cat goes into different corners when discussing his evolution as a graf writer. On one hand, he’s self-deprecating, saying that he’s got a lot of work to do, but that no one in St. Louis, working at high-level of quality will work with him, or others, to develop a collective sense of identity. But he also says that he’s an impatient sort; if there’s a wall that’s not hit, he’ll find a way to get there first.
“I’ve gotten to a sign on 70, right by the bridge and stuff,” he says. “It’s not the best. But I wasn’t going to wait. When you’re not meeting a lot of people that you want to work with and emulate, you lose faith in it. Of course, you do it for yourself, for a while. It’s not just about writing with a crew. I started out by doing stencils, no one showing me the ropes. I started learning on my own. Then people are hating on you real bad, because you’re not part of a crew. I just feel that I have a different perspective than a lot of the people in St. Louis.
“I love St. Louis,” he adds. “But my passion has changed. I feel put down here. It’s like, I could do something in St. Louis, but there’s no one here to see it. Everything here is hidden. It’s in abandoned buildings, it’s on underpasses. It’s not like anywhere else in the world. Oh, there’s a mural and there and a couple public places, but that’s not where you want to be. And with other people here, you look online and you see their stuff and then you meet them in person and they’re weird, they’re dickheads, nothing like you’d imagined... I’ve got some sloppy stuff up in good spots. Everybody thinks they can do better, but nobody writes. Rat Fag says you gotta be good. ‘Good and fast’ is what he says. He’s not gonna do it unless he can do it good. And he is good. I’m about practice, but I’m gonna get up, if the spot’s good, before anyone else does.”
In his comments about the Tron piece on St. Mary’s, Allen invokes the name of a legendary St. Louis graf writer, alternately known as Red Fox, Ed Boxx, Rex Ram and other aliases. He finds that the reclusive artist, who also hit the front of an affiliated, but less historically relevant portion of the hospital next door, has a different validity than that featured in Tron’s work.
In making the case for some degree of critical gradation in the works, he writes: “Yet before one read my words as a screed against hapless philistines, I will note that I bow to the inevitable nature of urban graffiti. So long as there are surfaces unguarded, shall there be painted messages sent to the city. Most graffiti is easily removed, and once a vacant building is returned to productive life, never returns. The larger problem is one of abandonment of buildings as great as St. Mary’s. Yet the ‘broken window’ theory deserves some consideration. A vacant building may gain special notoriety once adorned with a giant dab of hideous art. Special notoriety is never good for historic buildings.”
“I think he’s using a bias of architecture,” Tron responds. “Why do we look at a brick and think it’s perfect?”
Interestingly, one of Allen’s favorite abandoned spaces in the metro region—and one, in the interests of disclosure, that Allen and I have explored together—is the Spivey Building in downtown East St. Louis. A 13-story structure, it was touched by the paint rollers of Boxx within the past half-decade, leaving a massive “Red Fox OFB” mark on the back of the building.
“That’s what gave me the idea,” Tron says. “When I saw that, I knew that I could do something like it here.”
The criticism that he faces - whether the blasts come from people inside or outside the game—“doesn’t bother me,” Tron says, though you get the feeling that it does, on some level.
“It’s funny to me,” he says. “It’s people’s crazy views. I’m an art fag, you know? I don’t go to galleries, I see art in the streets. People get upset by graffiti, but there’s advertising everywhere. There’s an ad for Honda, on the front of that car. No one gets upset by that. It’s primitive to view things as perfect as they are. Even if it’s the worst scribbles, it’s still art. They expressed something with that, you know. It cracks me up how people get so offended by the destruction of property, really. How long’s that building going to be there? How long’s this one? A lot of the mentality behind graf is destructive. But lot more is [about] putting your name on it, no different than the ancient cave drawings in France, right? They just used a bone to spray their paint. They put their name on it. I’m just leaving my trace, my signature. It’s just that the time’s changed, you know?”
No doubt, though, there’s zoom factor. In fact, all it takes is for me to start a question that starts, “The thing about the rush, though...”
“At St. Mary’s, going up to the second floor, people have made makeshift stairs,” he says. “There’s another one that stops and starts over. I’m pretty agile, I’m a climber and that stuff doesn’t affect me. But, dude, it’s totally an adrenaline high. I dunno. It’s funny. I like day painting, it’s cool. But ‘I creep when you sleep.’ That’s a phrase that Supa uses. It’s fun being out, it’s fun having an alter ego, it’s fun seeing your own stuff. The big aspect stuff, I like. Keeping the rush is hard. It changes you. If you want to do a piece, a big, powerful one, they’re in the abandoned buildings. That isn’t about rush, it’s about doing a piece, artistically. I really like spots, getting up into an awesome spot, like the back of a highway sign, stuff like that.”
If Tron’s caught some stick from other graf writers to date, a press interview might cause more problems. But he’s bouncing. He’s onto new adventures, new rooftops in a new city. And probably that’s a good bit of timing.
“It could have to do with an alpha male effect,” he figures. “I’m not an alpha male. It’s not a 24/7 mentality for me like that. I’m a peace-out guy...I was the runt of the litter. I hated roller coasters and heights and now I’m jumping onto buildings and it’s changed me. Maybe I just had to prove something to myself. But I’m not getting better here, there’s nothing for me to grow on here. I could get caught up in other stupid stuff while I’m here, but I can’t take it personally, any more. I gotta leave.
“They hated on me until St. Mary’s,” he figures. “And at this point, they’ve stopped running their mouths. I made a mistake on a letter, but I’m not gonna defend myself online. I’m done talking about it online and I’m done punking anybody else out. They can say what they want, but I’ve got the biggest piece in town.”
