Related story: Secrets of the Temple

By ZACHARY MIDER
Journal Staff Writer

I'd been itching to write a story about graffiti for years. My imagination conjured up a secret, international society that communicates via mysterious messages written for everyone to see, like a Pynchon novel.

The truth turns out to be pretty similar to my guess. There really is a secret, international society that communicates via mysterious messages written for everyone to see.

I met my first graffiti artist at an East Greenwich graffiti contest, and the organizer of the event hooked me up with some more artists. My original plan was to learn about graffiti all around the state, but once I visited the abandoned Masonic Temple in Providence, I decided it would be a fine story all by itself.

It was easy to report. Most of the people I met were willing to talk to me, even though they suspected I was a police detective. I told them if I were a police detective I'd be driving a nicer car.

The hard part was the writing. I had to try to get across the idea that this is a regional graffiti mecca, and that the graffiti world is governed by its own unwritten set of rules.

There are few authorities or statistics about this kind of thing, so I had to stick to the only things I knew for sure: What the walls looked like, what the artists said to me, what they said to each other.

After the story ran, I got a handful of indignant e-mails from graffiti artists, saying that I'd ruined their fun.

But I also received this one, from one of the sources in my story: ``Its CREN. I just picked up a copy of todays Journal. It was nice to see something different other then who is bombing who and so on.''

On the afternoon of the day the story ran, I saw a kid up on the roof of the Temple, spraying away.