The column first appeared in Looped In NYC, a newsletter to help New Yorkers make sense of the city. Sign up to get the email which also features event listings, NYC news to know and a reader photos.
My dad grew up in New York City in the 1960s and ‘70s. The crime rate was high, as was drug use. The economy was in shambles, and he watched as many of his friends and family disappeared to fight in the Vietnam War.
It was during that time that he picked up something called wall writing, later to be known as graffiti.
His tag was Junior 161, a simple moniker that combined his nickname with the street he lived on. And he wrote it all over the city: on building facades, billboards, and especially inside and outside of subway cars.
Junior 161 was certainly not alone in tagging up the city. Many young people, particularly in Washington Heights and the Bronx, were left to fend for themselves, forgotten by society and haunted by bleak surroundings. Signing their names for all to see was their way of reclaiming space.
And people started to notice. In 1971, the New York Times profiled TAKI 183, often credited as being the forefather of the artform in New York City. The headline reads “‘Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals.” My dad was one of them.
The profile brought the practice out of the shadows. Graffiti writers famously do not reveal their identities, mostly because what they were doing was a crime, but also because it added to the mystery and fun of it all. TAKI 183 did reveal his first name to the New York Times — Demetrios — but never his last name. Fifty-five years later, when I interviewed him about his past escapades, he still refused to give his last name.
In 1974, journalist Norman Mailer and photographer Jon Naar published a book called “The Faith of Graffiti,” a compilation of stories and photographs documenting those early days. I brought a copy of the book when I met up with TAKI, who these days owns an autobody shop in Yonkers. As he flipped through it, he noted his tag on the very first page.
“I was writing a lot when I was a delivery guy. I used to deliver the whole East Side, basically,” he told me when recounting how he got started. “It made me walk around a lot, and I was just writing on poles and anywhere that was out there.”
Poles and building walls were one thing, but I was really interested in TAKI’s subway work. Some of the most iconic photos of 1970s gritty New York City are those where train cars are covered in graffiti. It’s high art now, but considered an ugly nuisance back then.
“We'd go to Rockaway on Sundays, which is like, I don't know, two-and-a-half hours or something with the A train, and nobody would be on [the train] Sunday morning,” TAKI told me. “So we'd be like writing everywhere. We'd jump out of stations in the middle of nowhere, write our names, get back on the train. That's how we were doing it.”
During the early days of graffiti, it was not about getting fancy, that came later. In the beginning, it was quantity over quality, TAKI explained. The goal was to get your name out there as many times as possible, as quickly as you could. The stranger the location, the better.
The subway was a solid canvas for the young writers. It not only had flat walls with a lot of surface area, but it was also mobile, so your art got to travel.
“You'd be like waiting for the train and you say, ‘Oh, my name's already on it.’ That's kinda cool,” TAKI said.
TAKI laughs when recalling the subway days, even at the times he got in trouble for doing it, or came close.
“I remember during the summer going down the elevator down from I think 191st Street. A bunch of us were in the elevator going down to the number 1 [train], and the elevator used to be like aluminum. It was really cool. But there was one guy in the elevator but we said, ‘Ah, the hell with it. What the hell?’ We'll just write our names in front of the guy. What's gonna happen? So, we wrote it everywhere, all four sides. I don't know, on the ceiling. And the guy's, like, looking at us. But it was four of us teenagers. Guy's not gonna say anything,” he said. “So, when we get down to the bottom, the door opens and there was a cop standing there. And the guy, all of a sudden he says, ‘These guys just wrote their names all over the thing.’ And the cop kinda, like, looked at it. He says, ‘OK.’ So, what's he gonna say? ‘Don't do it again?’
At the time, New York City was just starting its “war on graffiti,” then-Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at cracking down on graffiti in the subways. TAKI narrowly avoided legal trouble.
Both New York City and New York state now have strict laws banning graffiti writing, and the city even has an anti-graffiti task force, established well after the prime of TAKI’s wall writing career.
TAKI has many stories about getting away with graffiti before enforcement was cranked up, including a time where he tagged a police car as officers were busy escorting a woman of importance (he doesn’t know who she was).
These days, TAKI is in his 70s. He gave up tagging walls decades ago, once he got a girlfriend, a car and a new job that didn’t require so much trekking around the Upper East Side, he said. Every once in a while though, he told me, he takes out his marker and tags for old time’s sake.
“If I write it now, are [the cops] gonna come after me?,” he jokes. “I'll just say ‘Uh, somebody copied me.’ It's not like I'm so fancy that nobody can copy it.”
