The words are everywhere.
They have been writ large on the walls of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, plastered on Walk-Don't Walk signals in Bay Ridge, wheat-pasted on fruit stands in Forest Hills and tattooed on the templates of Lincoln Center.They have been sighted in advertisements for Donna Karan clothes and they make a cameo appearance over Bruce Willis's shoulder in his latest movie, "Die Hard With a Vengeance."
For years, New Yorkers have found the enigmatic graffiti seeping into their field of vision at every turn. Two words, sometimes separately, sometimes together: "Cost" and "Revs."
But on Wednesday night, one half of the doodling duo was put out of business by a Queens County judge, who may have ended the career of the person who may be New York's most prolific graffiti-ist.
Cost - a k a Adam Cole of Rego Park, N.Y. - was sentenced in Queens Criminal Court to a tag artist's worst nightmare: 200 days of cleaning up graffiti.
"This is not a slap on the wrist, this is a serious sentence," said Judge Joel Blumenfeld, who also sentenced Cole, 26, to three years' probation, $2,180 in fines and psychological counseling. "This is so that you can be an example to anyone who thinks that they can get away with this."
To some, the move marks the end of an era. "He is sort of like the Abby Hoffman of the movement," said Zephyr, a Manhattan man who calls himself the "elder statesman" of graffiti artists. "He's sort of a merry prankster, with a sense of humor. He's been around a real long time."
"Putting your name up is the object of all graffiti artists, and they've managed to do it more than anyone else," said Martha Cooper, a self-described urban folklore photographer and graffiti documentarian.
The sentence, a fairly tough one as graffiti cases go, is a measure of the lightning rod that such "quality of life" issues have become, especially in the middle-class cul-de-sacs of Queens County.
In December, a 19-year-old graffiti maker named Robert Mor-ris-sey, whose tag was "DESA" and who, unlike Cole, had a prior criminal record, received an even stiffer sentence: one to three years in jail.
Since his arrest in December, Cole has attracted a storm of invective from community boards, citizen patrols and neighborhood beautification committees - all of which Queens County has in great abundance.
Community Board 6 passed a resolution calling for a strict sentence. Councilman Karen Koslowitz wrote the judge a two-page letter urging that Cole be sentenced to jail for what she has estimated to be millions of dollars in damage to property in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The judge denied the prosecutor's request for a 60-day jail sentence because he said he did not want taxpayers to foot the bill for Cole's punishment.
Another great blow to Cole on Wednesday was the lifting of the veil off his closely held identity. Because the police had only been able to catch him in the act making non-Cost graffiti, Cole was hoping that nobody would be able to tie him to his larger body of work.
But the prosecutor had copies of newspaper interviews with Cole and the circumstantial evidence that, during one of his recent court appearances, he had apparently scratched the tag "Coster" into the wood paneling outside two courtroom doors. Cole reluctantly conceded to the judge that he was in fact Cost.