As Gothamist and Curbed have pointed out today, workers up on the High Line have begun removing one of the elevated track cum park’s dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of graffitos, as seen in the picture above. Everyone seems to be worried about this one mediocre piece, but it’s our sorry job to report that the tragedy goes far deeper than that.

When we took our tour of the High Line a few weeks ago, one of the most striking things was the impressive graffiti covering the neighboring buildings. With the exception of all those shiny new buildings, it seems every spare brick and beam within arm’s reach of the High Line had been coated in decades worth of Krylon.

Having glimpsed all this hidden treasure, the obvious question to our journalistic minds–after we got over being awestruck by it all–was what’s gonna happen to all this, well, art? One of our chipper tour guides answered something to this effect (and we’re paraphrasing here): “As you can imagine, the city doesn’t look too kindly on graffiti, so it all has to come down. We’ll be painting over it. The city doesn’t want to be seen as condoning or encouraging graffiti here. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

It’s probably too late to save the graffiti, so the best we can hope is that someone’s documented it for posterity’s sake. We’re sure it would make a nice coffee table book, seeing as how it’s been deemed unsuitable for public consumption.