The Vewer Avenue Tunnel
Inside Manhattan's Graffiti Tunnel
It started the way most things do these days: with a phone in my hand and nowhere particular to be.
I was scrolling through the usual digital noise when a video stopped me cold. A crowd of people spilling into a tunnel, its walls erupting in color so dense and layered it looked less like concrete and more like the inside of someone's fever dream. Tags, murals, massive bubble letters stacked ceiling-high. My thumb hovered. I watched it again.
That was the Park Avenue Tunnel, buried under one of Manhattan's most recognizable thoroughfares. And from what I could gather online, it had become something of an open secret, a once-busy vehicle artery turned accidental gallery. Legendary names were showing up on those walls. Local favorites, too. I'd heard of mob bombs before, those spontaneous, loosely coordinated art invasions where writers descend on a space and leave it permanently changed. But this felt different. This felt like a farewell party.
I knew I had to get inside before it was over.
Vewer Discretion Advised
The entrance didn't exactly roll out a welcome mat. A No Trespassing sign. Traffic cones, orange and fat, arranged with bureaucratic certainty. No NYPD traffic enforcement in sight, no DOT agents, no security guard, no one at all. Just me, the sign, and the opening of the tunnel swallowing the daylight ahead.
I walked in.
The first wall piece hit me before my eyes. A colorful, notebook-patterned background, the kind you'd doodle on during a boring class, except this one carried a worldly, almost philosophical observation about life. The author was Vewer, a name I'd seen mentioned online in the same breath as "legendary." I moved deeper and kept finding his work. All along the tunnel, then another. Vewer here, Vewer there, Vewer on a stretch so long it almost felt like a residency.
At one point, a large blue-and-white piece settled the question definitively. Block letters. Unmistakable. "The Vewer Tunnel."
I laughed out loud in the lit tunnel. You can't argue with that kind of confidence, especially when most of the tunnel's real estate backs your claim. Sprinkled among his work were pieces by Nice, Skam, UFO, Tony, Jio, Ves, ADB, Ollin, Phaser, and a handful of others whose names I couldn't pin down but whose craft was impossible to ignore. Certain styles you can feel even when you don't know the hand behind them.
Scattered along the sides of the tunnel floor, propped against walls or just heaped in corners, were black garbage bags. I assumed they were full of Home Depot/Lowes paint cans, the ghost inventory of a long session. There were also Heineken bottles, potato chip wrappers, numerous beer IPAs, and fast food takeout such as Chick-fil-A, the kind of collection that accumulates when people are working hard and vibing at the same time. It was the aftermath of long nights and early morning sessions.
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| Graffiti artist UFO |
Closed for Repairs, Open for Business
Then the scooters arrived.
From the far end of the tunnel, a group of riders appeared with blaring music and the kind of raucous, shoulder-rolling energy that says, "we own this." Scooters, bicycles, a few skateboards thrown in for texture. They were there for stunts, wheelies spinning out in the middle distance, boards grinding in looping arcs across the concrete. For a second, alone in the middle of all of it, I felt the particular, specific thrill of being somewhere you're not supposed to be.
But there was no threat. These weren't predators; they were participants, drawn to the same void I was. We shared the space without exchanging a word, and about twenty minutes later, they were gone, their music fading into the crosstown streets above.
Other visitors trickled in after that. Hipsters with camera phones. Curious tourists. A couple who seemed to be on a date. We all moved slowly, heads tilted back, taking in walls that told the story of a city that can't stop making art, even when it's technically illegal, even when the location is a tunnel that smells like aerosol paint cans, wet paint, and the cold air of an underground tunnel.
What I didn't fully understand until later was how long this particular tunnel had been sitting available, waiting to be claimed.
The Park Avenue Tunnel, also called the Murray Hill Tunnel, has one of the stranger biographies in New York City infrastructure. It was originally built to carry trains for the New York and Harlem Railroad, one of the oldest rail lines in the country. Those trains eventually gave way to streetcars, which gave way to automobiles. For most of the 20th century, it served as a two-way car tunnel, a quiet shortcut that shaved time off the commute by bypassing surface traffic and the shuffle of stoplights. Northbound drivers in particular understood its value: on Park Avenue, the lanes split at 40th Street, one feeding the elevated viaduct and one dropping down toward Grand Central. Drivers unfamiliar with the street often scrambled at the last moment to get into the right lane. Inside the tunnel, that problem vanished. One clear path to the viaduct, no jostling required.
The tunnel's two-way traffic became one-way in 2008, and then no-way, as the city turned its attention to a massive rehabilitation project in February 2017. A $24 million overhaul was executed. It was then supposed to reopen in 2019.
It didn't open until November 2023.
The "Vewer" tunnel sits in one of the most densely observed cities on earth. For a time, the walls went from bare to barnacled with layers of aerosol and ambition. Somewhere in that gap between the planned reopening and the actual one, the artists moved in. And Vewer, wherever he is, apparently decided to make it his.
There's a version of this story that's easy to tell, the one where graffiti is vandalism, the tunnel is public property, and the whole enterprise is simply people breaking the law. That version exists. It's not wrong.
But there's another version. Cities are full of spaces that fall through the cracks, literally in this case, spaces that planning and budgets and bureaucratic delay leave dark for years at a time. In those gaps, something happens. Always. New York has never been good at leaving a blank wall blank. It's almost constitutional.
The Park Avenue Tunnel still carries cars to this day. The graffiti is presumably gone, or covered by the fresh surfaces that $24 million buys. But for a window of time that nobody planned and nobody authorized, it was something else entirely. It was a gallery, a skate park, a beer garden, a stage for stunts. It was a place where a writer could claim an entire tunnel and have the spray paint to prove it.
I got there just in time. Or maybe just before time ran out, which, in New York, is usually the same thing.
Were you one of the artists who painted the Park Avenue Tunnel walls, or did you explore this space before it was reopened to traffic? Do you have photographs, videos, or memories of the tunnel during its brief life as an underground gallery? Share your stories below.
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