Over the last two months, there have been street murals painted in each of the five boroughs to commemorate the Black Lives Matter movement, with inspiration taken from the gigantic Black Lives Matter street painting near the White House in Washington, D.C. Below, you can watch a mesmerizing 10 minute drone video showing all eight murals in the city—that includes three in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, and one each in Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.
The video was created by @mingomatic, who has been taking drone videos of each of the murals for weeks now. The videographer told Gothamist that it was a great experience getting to see how they fit into each neighborhood.
"The murals are very different in each neighborhood," he said. "Some are next to central areas such as by the Staten Island Ferry or Trump Tower while others are deep into a neighborhood that most people would likely not go through unless they lived in that area."
He said that he was delighted by how friendly everyone was when he went to document each mural: "I was greeted with smiles and friendliness as I made my way through each of the boroughs," he recalled. "Even some of the police officers seemed to get along well with the community from what I saw. Overall, I saw a lot of constructive energy first hand which is a contrast of the clashes I see regularly in the news. I think those clashes are likely happening but not at the time I was documenting these murals. I hope that good things come to each of these communities as the country works through all of the inherent present problems today."
The first BLM street mural was painted on a 375-foot-long stretch of Fulton Street outside of the Billie Holiday Theatre in Restoration Plaza in the middle of June. The second mural completed is located in Richmond Terrace in Staten Island, between Hamilton Avenue and Ferry Terminal Viaduct.
Another one went up in Brooklyn along Joralemon Street between Court Street and Boerum Place in Brooklyn Heights. That street has also been co-named “Black Lives Matter Boulevard.” There's one in Queens in front of the Family Court on Jamaica Avenue, between 153rd and 150th streets, and one in the Bronx outside the Bronx Hall of Justice on Morris Avenue between 161st and 162nd streets.
One Manhattan mural is located on Centre Street between Worth and Reade streets; another is in Harlem on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, located between 125th and 127th streets, and it is painted on both sides of the boulevard. And there's one up on Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets, facing Trump Tower which the president was not too enthusiastic about.
The Trump Tower mural in particular has become the site of confrontations between Trump protesters and supporters, and has been vandalized several times already. You can see a few of those incidents in the videos below.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and city officials skipped the public art application process to bring these murals to the street, and the mayor has said he would not allow a Blue Lives Matter street mural near One Police Plaza. Civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel pointed out, "Once the government allows one message, one expression on a public street to be painted, they’re opening the door for other groups or individuals to want the same equal right. If you have a position that no expression [can be] on the public streets, that’s one thing, but the government can’t pick and choose which messages, which expression they approve of and which they reject based on the content of the message."
