After a dark ascent up six flights of stairs, two young men walk out into a huge, ruinous hall open to a gray sky. A thin rain is falling.

They stop and stare. Pigeons flutter and coo. It is their first pilgrimage to "the temple" and the young graffiti artists are awestruck.

All around them they see delicate tendrils of frost, jagged flames of red and orange, swollen psychedelic bubbles pocked with pastel polka dots. Hundreds of cashed-out spray paint cans litter the moss-covered floor.

After a moment of silence, one turns to the other and says approvingly: "Sick."

The teens have seen writing before, but nothing like this.

"They call it vandalism like it's damaging the property. It's really not damaging the property at all," says one of them, a junior who uses the tag — or pen name — State.

"It's making it beautiful." They walk out to the roof, where the other writer, a guy with blue hair who calls himself Live Free, climbs onto the ledge of the building and walks it like a balance beam. From the ledge, he can look down on the wings of the Rhode Island State House across the street.

State says he is going to come back tomorrow, this time with some spray paint.

IT'S ART

VACANT FOR 74 years, the Masonic Temple is a gray and decrepit hulk in the midst of the Renaissance City. From Route 95, passing motorists can see the words TEMPLE OF JUNERISM in white bubble letters on its face — the calling card of Juner, an ambitious writer.

Far from being a casual pastime, graffiti writing has spawned a significant American subculture with a specialized vocabulary and code of conduct, as Joe Austin shows in his book Taking the Trains, about graffiti culture in the New York City subway system.

He calls graffiti "perhaps the most important art movement of the late twentieth century." A sizeable number of artists with roots in graffiti command mainstream respect in the art world, according to Judith Tannenbaum, the curator of contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"They feel really strongly that art belongs in public places, and they're doing fairly ambitious projects," she said.

According to Austin, modern graffiti writing began in Philadelphia, perhaps as early as 1959, and flourished in the New York City subway system in the 1960s and '70s. It has since metastasized around the world. Indeed, some of the most stunning works in the Masonic Temple are the extracurricular efforts of RISD students from places such as Japan and Canada.

The Masonic Temple has become one of the most popular Rhode Island graffiti sites, and attracts artists from around the Northeast.

"There's so much space here, a lot of people can get down, you know?" said one writer, a RISD student and experienced writer whose tag is Okto. "It's probably one of the only illegal places where you won't get caught."

THE SUBCULTURE

UNWRITTEN RULES govern who paints what in the temple, and where. Novices like State and Live Free are expected to learn the language of writing and the code of respect that governs the temple's walls. (Like the other graffiti artists in this story, they spoke to The Journal on condition of anonymity.)

The day after State first explores the temple, he comes back with a backpack full of paint. Live Free isn't with him — he has to work today.

State brings another friend, a kid with a red mohawk, and they write in various places around the temple. On their way out, the boys run into Okto.

"Why did you go over that?" Okto asks State.

On a nearby wall, State had scrawled his tag over the letters DFM. It turns out that DFM is the name of a "crew," a group of writers who work together, and Okto is a friend of the DFM crew.

State has broken a rule: he painted over the work of his artistic superiors. "I had black [paint]," State responds.

"You had black. Why did you go over that?" Okto asks again, raising his voice.

State has no answer.

Okto continues: "You shouldn't go over people you don't know. If my homey was here, he'd kick your ass."

State looks surprised.

"Do you have any paint on you?"

State doesn't.

"The proper procedure is that I take that [paint] from you." Everyone was silent, looking away from each other. The kid with the mohawk tried to cut the tension by reading aloud a few legible words on the temple wall: "Drink beer, Poke Smot."

Nobody laughed.

A DAY IN THE TEMPLE

ON ANOTHER afternoon, a 22-year-old man stands on the roof of the temple with 10 cans of Krylon, a military-surplus olive drab flashlight, three plastic bags of spray nozzles, a latex glove, a surgical mask, and a CD player. He is listening to an album by Control Machete, which he describes as "Mexican alternative hip-hop."

Every good wall space has been painted countless times, so finding a blank canvas is not an option. He looks for "something I would be able to top," finally settling on a crossed-out expanse of red paint on an exterior wall facing the roof.

The writer's tag is Cren. Although a tag is consummately public, scrawled on mailboxes, utility poles and road signs, for many writers the meaning behind the letters is a secret.

But Cren denies any deeper significance to his tag. "I like the letters," he says. "For me, it's just the letters I first started using." It is a sunny day, and not far away, men are working on the roof of the State House.

Cren lays out his paints and nozzles in a pile below the wall and snaps the latex glove on his right hand. Wearing the mask to avoid the fumes, he blocks out his name in purple paint, then fills in behind the letters in black. Now and then, he leans back away from the wall and examines the whole piece, then he leans in close.

If the paint goes on too thick and looks ready to pool and run, he pulls off his mask and spreads the paint out with rapid breaths. The only sounds are the ping-ping-ping of the ball at the bottom of his spray can and the shhhhhhhht of paint.

Cren lives in the West End works as an industrial roofer. He learned how to "graff," as he calls it, growing up in southern Los Angeles. He expresses contempt for many of the other writers in the temple, who he said are often well-off students from the Rhode Island School of Design who know little of his "gangster"-style work.

Writing, he says, is a deeply personal, almost religious activity. A writer is a "prophet," like the Biblical prophets of old.

"It's like God and his disciples," he says. "The prophets used to have visions, that's what it's like. You're a prophet of graffiti." Although he is literally writing his name on the rooftops, he says his main audience is himself.

"My reason is, I'm doing it for myself. I'm not doing it for anyone to see, if they do, I don't care," he says. "I come here and paint when I got things on my mind, to take my frustration out. It's something I've always done and I'll probably never quit doing."

He finishes the piece with light purple and white, then he marks his name and the name of his crew, AWCF, in one corner. He writes numbers in each corner of that sign: 213, 323, 818, 401: the area codes of his crew members. Juner, the artist who wrote "TEMPLE OF JUNERISM" high above Route 95 on the building's north wall, created perhaps the most visible graffiti in Providence.

To create it, he lowered himself onto a narrow ledge, six stories in the air, to leave his mark.

"It's about catching fame," he told The Journal, calling from a pay phone. He wouldn't say where he lives.

"What I tell people, it's almost like an addiction." But if no one knows his real name, what's the point of fame? "It's in the graff world, that network, people who know you."

THE OTHER AGENDA

THE MOST recent plan to rebuild and develop the Masonic Temple went belly-up this spring, when a New York developer was unable to obtain the financing necessary to turn it into a luxury hotel.

The plan was just the latest in a long line of schemes for putting the site to use. As the years go by, more holes appear in the temple's floors, and rain falling through the broken roof reaches down all the way to the basement, six floors below.

In 1926, the Scottish Rite Masons began work on what was meant to be a $2.5-million temple. Less than two years later, on June 27, 1928, workmen were told not to return to work the next day — the Masons had run out of money, and had only enough to build the shell. (Embezzlement was suspected, but never proven.)

The state bought it in 1944, along with the conjoining building, which became the Veterans Memorial Auditorium. For more than 50 years, state officials tried to find something to do with the temple.

One study, commissioned in the '60s, said that the building "invariably induced deep despair" in any official trying to find a use for it. The Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation recently solicited more proposals from developers for the building, but it is not ready to divulge them.

IT'S TRESPASSING

AS THE ARM of state government charged with finding a use for the Masonic Temple, the EDC has also been responsible for securing the building, according to spokeswoman Clare Eckert. But the EDC was not aware of how easy it is for people to get into the building until it received an inquiry from The Journal, she said.

"I can say that when the most recent offer to develop it began, we put a new lock on the front of it," she said.

It is illegal to enter the building without state permission, Eckert said. Furthermore, "it's unsafe. That's the biggest reason why you wouldn't want to go in there."

Writers enter the temple through the parking lot of the Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, across from the parking entrance to Providence Place.

Climbing the stairs outside the church's nursery, they scuffle up a slope strewn with rocks, and slip through a break in a chainlink fence.

They emerge on a platform overlooking a deep well, pull back a piece of sheet metal, and climb inside. The floor is littered with broken lumber. Never-used bags of concrete lie hardened into rounded rocks.

Without a flashlight, writers have to rely on the holes in the walls to guide them across nail-ridden studs and puddles of water and up the wooden stairs.

Each story is slightly lighter than the one below, as more and more windows are exposed on the upper levels. Here and there are the remains of campfires. Elevator shafts stand open from the roof to the basement. Many of the roof's tiles have cracked and fallen in, opening the upper stories to the sky. Saplings sprout from the walls.

In recent years, Eckert said, the EDC has tried to avoid spending a lot of money to secure the property, while it looks for a private developer to take over the site.

But now, she said, "We're in the midst of making sure that the building is secured. .. It's going to be soon."