Philadelphia, the Last Stand for Urban Murals

In fact, mural extinction seems unlikely here, not least because Golden, a dark-haired, fast-talking ball of kinetic energy, stands guard. To drive with Golden, as she steers a city-issued jeep up the old streets of Mantua and Fishtown and Kensington, is to sense her passion.

Look!

Golden hits the brakes and points to a mural of a child reaching for a star, painted across every inch of a three-story tenement wall. "All the neighbors talked about when the neighborhood was so safe that they could go up to the roof on a hot night and eat dinner and look for stars," she said. "When people can hear and see themselves, they reach a state of grace."

Golden came to her avocation by accident. She was a mural artist fresh-arrived from Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Graffiti artists were tagging -- or defacing -- walls, and Mayor W. Wilson Goode (D) formed the Anti-Graffiti Network, which hired Golden.

"They handed me a cardboard box and said: 'You'll have 1,000 kids. Good luck!' " Golden shakes her head. "The kids would draw with me for two hours and then they'd go and spray-paint all over the building."

Gradually that changed. The kids came from graffiti gangs such as the High Class Lunatics and told her they shoplifted fine-art magazines to rummage for ideas. So Golden hauled them to museums and gave them books and eventually let them paint a mural -- only if they agreed to stop spray-painting. The kids found a wall near the subway tracks, and set a fire burning in a garbage can to stay warm.

"It was completely overrun with drug dealers," she said. "Guys would come up and say, 'Lady, you're standing on my stash.' "

In the years to come she and her artists -- who come from all over the nation, and Ecuador, Mexico, Japan and Germany, and from local juvenile homes and maximum-security prisons -- would paint thousands of walls. They dodged shootouts and gang wars and negotiated boundaries in this territorial city.

No mural came harder than one on Lehigh Avenue, where the Fishtown, Kensington and Port Richmond neighborhoods intersect. Three years ago a local artist, Cesar Viveros-Herrera, had in mind a 300-foot-long "healing" mural against a railway wall, to be illustrated with the faces of local youths, some dead, some alive. It would be multiracial and multiethnic, and in Kensington that did not go down well.

"I had a neighbor who ragged how it was going to attract dealers," recalled Eileen Blair, 55, whose Scottish grandparents moved to Kensington in 1915. "I'm like, 'Where have you been, honey? We've had drug dealers here since the Vietnam War.' " A mediator called a meeting, and 200 neighbors walked in. Blair felt sick to her stomach, and Golden wasn't feeling any better. A local pol blasted away. Then a 12-year-old girl with a terrible stutter stood up.

Blair recalls the moment: "This girl takes the microphone and says, 'This mural is like a puzzle. If you take the pieces out, the puzzle won't work anymore. And this puzzle is our lives.' "

Blair's voice slides thin -- she's crying.

"That was it," she said. "One person after another got up and said what a great idea this mural was."

The last trace of conflict washed away as they painted. "I don't know how to describe it -- it's like ice-skating or combing a child's hair," Blair said. "You pick up the brush and your defenses come down."

Golden drove to the dedication of the "Healing Wall" months later. She expected 20, maybe 30 people. She saw a crowd of 250. She scooted around the block just to collect herself. "I saw all the people we'd argued and laughed with and I felt chills all over my body," she said. "This work is a metaphor for change. Nothing good -- nothin g -- happens just like that."