A Decade-Old Invader Mosaic Sat Above a Greenpoint Pizza Shop. Two Men With a Ladder Chipped It Apart Before Dawn.

July 5, 2026

A mosaic can survive fifteen New York winters, a change of pizzeria ownership, and a decade of foot traffic underneath it. It cannot survive two guys with a ladder and twenty free minutes before sunrise.

the intact Pizza Invader mosaic mounted above the pizzeria on Nassau Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Image: greenpointers.com.

The mosaic that outlasted the block

The piece is known locally as the "Pizza Invader," a tiled mosaic by the French street artist Invader mounted above Nonna's Pizzeria at 253 Nassau Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It had been up for more than a decade before anyone touched it, according to Greenpointers. That changed early on Sunday, March 1, 2026.

What the cameras caught

Surveillance footage shows two men scaling the side of the building with a ladder and carving tiles directly out of the mosaic. Hoodline and News 12 Brooklyn both reported the pair ran off down Nassau Avenue after prying loose close to 20 tiles. Neighbors caught the whole thing on camera. Nobody stopped them in the moment.

A kid's window, ten feet away

The mosaic sits directly below the bedroom window of a 7-year-old who lives in the building, a detail that drew particular alarm from neighbors once the footage circulated, per Greenpointers. About ten minutes after the mosaic theft, police received a separate 911 call describing two men using a ladder to bang on a resident's window at 35 Nassau Avenue, just down the block. It was not immediately confirmed whether the calls involved the same two men, and it was not clear at the time whether anyone had been arrested.

This isn't new for Invader

Invader's public mosaics get torn apart for parts more often than most street art, precisely because the tiles are small, portable, and worth something on the resale market the moment they are pried off a wall. GraffitiStreet has documented the pattern across cities where his work is installed: pieces get chipped, stolen whole, or ripped off entirely and resold to collectors who know exactly what they are buying. A mosaic bolted to a Brooklyn pizzeria for ten years without incident was never protected by anything but luck.

a different Invader Space Invader mosaic installed on a street wall in Paris. Image: www.gannett-cdn.com.

Who is doing the tiling

Invader has worked anonymously since the late 1990s, installing small mosaic portraits of the blocky aliens from the video game Space Invaders on walls in cities around the world, each one logged and numbered as part of what he calls an ongoing "invasion." The scale of the project is no longer a niche joke among street art collectors. Invader has now installed more than 4,000 of these mosaics globally, a milestone Artnet covered when he marked it with an installation in Potosí, Bolivia, a city sitting more than 4,000 meters above sea level.

the French street artist Invader wearing his signature mask in public. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

None of that history makes the Nassau Avenue mosaic replaceable. Invader's pieces are only worth stealing because they have sat untouched long enough to become part of a block's identity, the kind of thing a kid grows up looking at from a bedroom window. Two men with a ladder took about a minute to prove how thin that permanence actually is.