Joseph Sciorra, an urban folklorist who wrote a book on memorial walls, cautions against seeing the walls as remembering just dead drug dealers or gang-related deaths. "We've found memorial walls for 60-year-old men who had heart attacks, infants who died of diseases, people who died in car accidents," he says. "This is a communal art form and not just about one group of deviant people."

Memorial walls also serve a practical purpose. Cemeteries are not readily accessible by public transportation in New York City, says Sciorra. Further, victims often are immigrants from Latin American countries and their bodies are flown home for funerals and burial. For the family and friends who remain in New York City, the walls serve as a local gravesite. Candles, flowers and other offerings often are laid near the walls on anniversaries of the deaths. Sciorra even recalls attending a birthday party at one site.

People dealing with death -- especially youth -- need symbols they are familiar with when they don't have access to traditional forms of ceremony, such as funerals or cemeteries, says Dr. Alan Wolfelt, director of the Fort Collins, Colo.-based Center for Loss and Life Transition. "When the people who've been affected see the symbol, it makes them embrace the reality that someone who was alive and living is no longer alive and living."

That was the case with Jonathan "Toby" Guaman. His body was flown home to Ecuador after Guaman died in a November 1998 motorcycle accident in the Bronx. A Tats Cru-commissioned mural behind a carpet store on Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights shows his round, smiling face against a backdrop of palm trees, a sunset and the flag of Ecuador. Tats Cru's BG 183 says elements like those personalize the murals and make each one distinct from the next.

Personalization has its price; the murals cost between $900 and $1,800. "We're actually just painters for hire," BG 183 says. But sometimes, even a tough-talking man like BG 183 admits, an artist feels a family's pain and tries to release it through the paint of his aerosol can. "It's hard. The families, while we're painting, they come up to us and start crying. They say, 'Don't forget to paint this scar or this other detail.' You want to just hug them."

Usually, BG 183 says he does hug them and assure them he will remember the scar, the mustache, the signature baseball cap. But he quickly gets back to work. "A memorial wall is just for the family," he says. "They're the ones who treasure the wall."

Half-empty beer and liquor bottles are often added to memorial sites."He used to get a little drunk when he was alive," Sonia Rodriguez says of Big Pun. "That was his entertainment, you know, to get a little drunk with his friends."

	Icons of Jesus and the Virgin Mary adorn the memorials, a practice rooted in Latino Catholic traditions
Puerto Rican flags represent represent Big Pun's ancestry.

Additional links:

Tats Cru, graffiti artist

Joseph Sciorra, urban folkorist

Photo montage from Sciorra book

Graffiti as an art form