Fashion designer directs Graffiti fest in New York

NEW YORK -- It was a high-tech, pricey setting for what was once considered low-tech vandalism: Mackie speakers blasting rap while artists spray-painted graffiti on fake subway cars.\nFashion designer Marc Ecko, who earlier this week won a court battle against Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the right to host the stylish street party Wednesday, led a team of 50 graffiti specialists, wielding 600 high-end cans of spray paint with customized nozzles.\n"Thank you, Mr. Bloomberg, for the promotion. You can't shut us up," said the one-time graffiti artist, referring to the mayor's battle to quash the event. The mayor had claimed that the graffiti-fest could encourage New Yorkers to deface the real subway.\nWith a summer breeze carrying the acrid odor of paint and police barricades keeping order, eight subway car sides lined an art gallery-dotted street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. On one car, huge green and yellow zigzags crawled across the metal -- a more lighthearted splash of paint than the dense, violence-tinged images that once assaulted New York's subways.\nNearby, people young and old lined up for the video games Ecko had set up in a parked truck.\nThe city initially granted a permit for the event, but ultimately revoked it. Ecko went to Manhattan federal court, where a judge on Monday ordered city officials to allow the exhibition, citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech.\nWednesday's graffiti team, some wearing gas masks, included the Bronx veteran known as Terrible T-Kid 170 -- whose day job is city painting supervisor.