PHOTOS: Street Artists Turned 4 World Trade Center's 69th Floor Into A High-Rise Gallery

On a recent visit to 4 World Trade center, the raw, currently unoccupied 69th floor was buzzing with activity. Instead of contractors getting the space ready for the floor's announced tenant, Spotify, artists were spray painting, installing finishing touches on sculptures and pasting posters to the wall. But far from a rushed and secretive attempt to tag up a space without getting caught, these artists, and others who've completed their work on the floor, were creating a gallery in the space with the blessings of building owner Larry Silverstein.

The artwork that now blankets the 69th floor covers a range of styles, featuring works from Mr. June, Chris RWK, Stickymonger, Lauren YS, fanakapan, and many more. Large installations and wood cutouts, traditional spray paint graffiti, posters stuck to the wall with wheatpaste and even a piece made of vinyl that winds its way around most of the floor-to-ceiling windows. And while artwork on empty floors of Silverstein properties isn't a foreign sight, Robert Marcucci, a creative consultant for the Silverstein Group explained that the presence of street art was a big change from how the company usually does things.

"Silverstein Properties, for the last 15 years or so, has had a artist residency program, where we bring artists in the community over to our raw space within the buildings, space that hasn't been taken up by a tenant yet. And we give them an opportunity to create art," Marcucci explained to Gothamist. In the case of the 69th floor, company executives told Marcucci they were interested in "something more contemporary and more cutting edge," so he teamed up with a number of other curators to recruit street artists and graffiti artists to add life to the empty floor.

The result, according to Marcucci, was "a gallery in the sky on top of one of the top corporate buildings in America. A gallery that has some of the most cutting-edge, fusion street art." It's also a gallery that should remain in place even when the floor's tenant moves in. "As far as I know, Spotify is very interested in keeping that floor the way it is," Marcucci said.

Marcucci, along with curators Dough Smith, Izzy Church and Marten Kayle, recruited artists from around the city and the world to come get involved in the project. Smith is the owner of a nearby gallery, World Trade Art, and told Gothamist that the talks to invite artists up to the 69th floor started a little over a year ago and that the work began during the summer of 2016. Smith said that the project has work from almost 50 artists at this point, and even when 15 people at a time were working on the floor together, there was so much space that "it still felt empty."

"Who has ever had this opportunity?" Smith asked about the chance to turn what could be a staid office building floor into a multi-colored, cross-disciplinary gallery. He added that as far as an end to the project, "We will fill every square inch if we're allowed. We'll go on every plate, every beam. We won't stop."

Most of the artwork ties back into New York in some way, from references to apples to a mural of the Statue of Liberty riding a tiger to text Hamilton lyrics painted in the form of a ten dollar bill on a wall that looks out to Alexander Hamilton's grave. Church, who was working on her piece, a series of satirical stamps that she was wheatpasting on to an inner wall, said that the concept behind the galley was "to bring positive growth to Lower Manhattan." She also told us that beyond the excitement of getting a new raw space to work in and curate, the size of the floor was something she'd never worked with before. "When I walked in I was overwhelmed by the how large of a space it is. When I walked in here I thought 'How are we going to fill this space?'"

There are also sculptures, like a spray painted door with woodcut letters reading "Always In Our Hearts 9/11" on one side and images of the city captured by photographers in the 1980s on the other. The artist behind the sculpture, Savior Elmundo, told us that he'd found the antique door near his home in Queens, and explained that "To me this is a New York door. It represents Downtown, 9/11, graffiti, New York and street art."

Dru Blumensheid, another artist who was working on the floor, was adding a painted layer to the base of a welded piece full of plaster faces of friends and family in New York that she had been working on before she was invited to be part of the gallery.

"I'm really excited about the opportunity, and it's an interesting topic to have in such a historical place. I hope it brings light to the background here, and the facility, with it being a new building. I'm honored to show here," she told Gothamist.

Other artists on the floor echoed the sentiment that it was meaningful to be invited to work in such an iconic piece of the city. Brolga, an Australian artist whose contributions were a couple of large illustrated characters representing Adam and Eve, told us that it was "a massive privilege" to be invited. "New York was always a really surreal place when you’re from far away," he added, so it was a thrill to be involved in the arts scene in a city that had had such an impact on the world.

Ben Angotti, a painter and sculptor who was spray painting what he called "a happy and colorful piece to uplift the human soul" said he'd lived in Brooklyn for the past 17 years, and had watched Tower 2 fall on 9/11. "It feels great to be able to visit the spot, and do something positive, where 16 years ago there was such a tragedy," he told us.