5 Pointz
A 3D reconstruction of 5 Pointz, the graffiti mecca in Long Island City, Queens, demolished in 2014, built from 480p YouTube footage upscaled to 4K 60fps with Topaz AI and processed through Polycam.
Why This Matters
The Building
5 Pointz was a 200,000-square-foot factory complex in Long Island City, visible from the elevated 7 train. For over a decade it ran as a curated open-air gallery where thousands of artists from around the world painted.
In November 2013 the building was whitewashed overnight without notice, then demolished in 2014 for luxury condos. A federal jury awarded the artists $6.7 million under the Visual Artists Rights Act. What remains are photographs, memories and reconstructions like this one.
Why Preserve It
Street art is ephemeral by nature. 5 Pointz was not gradual decay but deliberate erasure of a recognized cultural site, faster than any preservation effort could respond.
Photogrammetry captures spatial context: how pieces related to the architecture, how they read from the street and the train, how scale and position carried the impact.
Technical Pipeline
01: Source & Upscaling
480p walk-through footage from YouTube, roughly 20 years old, upscaled to 4K 60fps with Topaz Video AI to recover graffiti detail and remove compression artifacts.
02: Image Extraction
The upscaled video became an image sequence of high-res stills. Overlapping coverage from the moving camera and the dense graffiti detail gave photogrammetry strong feature-tracking points.
03: 3D Reconstruction
Polycam turned the sequence into a dense point cloud and textured mesh, with enough resolution to identify individual tags and pieces.
04: Visualization
Rendered from the iconic views: the street-level approach, the 7 train angle, the aerial. Animated fly-throughs move through the building from angles impossible when it stood.
Cultural Context
5 Pointz had a waiting list, a code of respect governing what could be painted over, and a global reputation that drew aerosol artists from every continent. Emerging writers painted alongside legends.
Hundreds of thousands of 7 train commuters saw the art every day, a changing exhibition that was part of daily life in Queens: unavoidable, democratic and free.
Its replacement with luxury condos fits a broader pattern of cultural displacement in New York City. This reconstruction keeps a dimensional record of how 5 Pointz occupied space.
Interactive 3D Scan
Explore the full photogrammetric reconstruction. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, right-click to pan.
The View From the Train
The side of the building as seen from the elevated 7 train, reconstructed from upscaled YouTube footage. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.
Upscaled Frames
Before and after: low-resolution archival frames through AI upscaling.
Reflection
Growing up in Queens, 5 Pointz was part of the daily landscape, proof that creativity could be public and loud. Reconstructing it felt like the right use of the tools I'd been building with.
A 3D model is no substitute for the original, but it can be explored, studied and shared in ways photographs can't.
You don't always have time. Capture what exists now, before it's gone.
Tech Stack
Topaz Video AI
Upscaled 480p archival YouTube footage to 4K 60fps for photogrammetry
Polycam
Point cloud, mesh and textures from the image sequence
Blender
Mesh optimization, polygon reduction, UV refinement, camera animation and final renders
Archival Video
Walk-through footage from ~20 years ago on YouTube, converted to image sequences
