Steve Powers is almost finished with his love letter to Brooklyn.
For the past three weeks, the renowned graffiti artist has painted giant axioms on a decrepit parking garage on Hoyt Street — a project he calls a “Love Letter to Brooklyn” that is part of the city’s plan to spruce up the rapidly gentrifying Fulton Mall.
But the artist, who works at night to avoid Fulton Street crowds, is staying mum on the project till it’s complete.
“Like opening a restaurant or a bar, you don’t share it with the world until its finished,” said Dave Villorente, a Downtown resident who worked with Powers, a Manhattanite, to craft the painted epistle.
In May, officials at Macy’s announced they would transform the ugly garage into a work of art befitting the new retail face of the Fulton Mall, including H&M, Shake Shack, Aeropostale, and Express.
Macy’s hired Powers and his band of a dozen local artists to paint the garage, covering its Hoyt, Livingston, and Fulton Street facades with text featuring “community catchphrases.”
Villorente, a native Brooklynite, is behind much of the painting’s sentiment. The mural currently includes in the all-capitalized “Born busy as a Brooklyn-bound B” and “I am made to leave, I am made to return.”
He said that as a kid, he took photos with Santa at the Fulton Mall and had his first stitches at nearby Brooklyn Hospital on DeKalb Avenue.
“The phrases are based on my relationship with Downtown,” Villorente said. “Any bus or train takes me home to Fulton. This is home.”
This isn’t Powers’s first stab at a love letter.
In 2009, he colored cryptic, but tender, words across 50 rooftops and walls in his hometown of Philadelphia.
Those heady murals, including “Your everafter is all I’m after” in bright pink, green, yellow and blue letters, coated entire facades.
If that and other prior work is any indication, the dilapidated city garage on Hoyt Street will soon be high art.
