July 1971
Names on trains: subway art in New York City
By Sylvia Ulloa
There was graffiti before Taki 183. After Taki 183, there was art.
From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the World War II-era “Kilroy was Here,” humans have sought notice and notoriety by writing on walls. That was Taki 183’s reason for markering subway stations and trains throughout New York and it was getting noticed that changed graffiti from delinquency into an art form.
Graffiti art in New York City had it roots in the 1960s. Teens tagged their nicknames on the walls around their neighborhoods, some later adding their street number to the monikers. Demetrius, a Greek kid from 183rd St. in Washington Heights, started to write Taki 183 all over the city while going about his deliveries on the subway. When a New York Times reporter noticed the ubiquitous signature and tracked the teen down for the 1971 article titled “Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals,” it touched off a graffiti revolution.
Other writers began using the subway to spread their names and to find fame. As Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant describe in their seminal book “Subway Art,” (1984, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London), the subway was “a communication network on which the names and messages of graffiti writers circulate around the city.” The street artists’ medium was a 60-foot-long by 12-foot-high subway train.
To stand out, writers’ tags became more colorful and elaborate. In 1972, a writer named Superkool discovered how to use the caps from starch cans to spread spray paint over a larger area. His name was big, stylish and took up the length of a subway car. The masterpiece, or “piece,” was born. Writers began to work with aerosol cans, they shaded their work, added cartoon characters, clouds and three-dimensional effects. Many writers developed stylized script, including bubble letters and complicated interlocking letters called wild style. Using fat and skinny caps, quick and fluid body movements, artists worked under cover of night, in cold rail yards and hanging from the sides of subway cars.
A vocabulary developed to describe subway art – windows down, top to bottom, end to end and whole car. Smooth trains were “flats,” perfect for a piece; “ridgies” had corrugated sides, good only for simple two-color “throw ups.” If you bombed a train, you were “getting up” and if that train traveled through multiple boroughs, you had gone “all-city.”
It was underground art — but rising quickly.
At the same time New York Mayors John Lindsay and Ed Koch were cracking down on graffiti artists, gallery owners in New York, the United States and overseas were inviting the best writers to put their names on canvas and show their work in Europe. Movies like Charlie Ahern’s 1983 “Wild Style” or Chalfant’s 1985 documentary “Style Wars” turned some writers into stars.
Graffiti’s train era ended in 1989, when the Transit Authority stopped putting painted trains into service.