Original subtitles

The Vandals were a tribe of people who invaded Europe

in the 4th and 5th Century and for no apparent reason

destroyed much of what they found there.

Sometimes it seems as if the vandals live again

and have invaded the United States of America.

♪ [MUSIC]

[BREAKING GLASS]

[SIRENS BLARE]

ROCKY 184: I'm Rocky, and I grew up here

in Washington Heights, 188th, 546, Apartment 3.

Washington Heights was the birthplace of graffiti.

I haven't thought about it, my God, must be 30-odd years

I have not thought about graffiti

and now like everybody wants to know about it.

Where did it start? Who did it?

It was like,

in a way, maybe it's the past comes back to haunt you?

I don'’t know.

ROCKY 184: I was a tomboy.

I think I put my first tag on

the train going downtown to school

and I did it 'cause I could do it.

You know. If they could tag I could tag.

SNAKE 1: It started out as fun.

It was something to do besides just sitting

on the stoop, bored.

MIKE 171: Washington Heights.

This is where the movement kinda started.

This is the Mecca.

Working-class people, mostly cliques of kids, gangs,

roaming around, having fun.

Gotta be the cool kids on the block,

you know, go play hooky the most, just see girls

and try to get things going.

We were young. It was fun.

You could be on the basketball team,

you could be in a gang,

or you could go out here and write on the walls.

THE JOKER: I can't say politics were involved.

We were too young and self-absorbed.

ROCKY 184: For me, it was nothing political.

I understand it was the Vietnam War and all that.

To me, it was expression.

I thought I was ROCKY 184 and I'm doing it.

We were not writing to make any political point at all.

We were just vandals.

[PAINT CAN SPRAYING]

NARRATOR: Graffiti is the largest art movement

in the world, a global phenomenon

that can be seen on the walls of every major city.

However, graffiti is no longer relegated to the streets

and has made its way

into galleries and museums around the world.

It can also be found on commercial products,

from t-shirts to automobiles

and many of the world's biggest brands

commission graffiti artists to create special products

or design marketing campaigns.

There is even an industry dedicated to the production

of graffiti supplies which generates

millions of dollars each year.

But there was a time before graffiti,

a time when marker tags and spray-painted murals

did not exist.

There was a time when the walls were bare,

the tile was clean,

and lampposts were just lampposts.

Well these are the-- My tools of the trade.

What I first started out with

but these are not the original ones like these.

These are from probably 1971, '72, I would say.

And I don't have any of my old pilots

but these were the pilots back then.

It was only tags and magic markers, that's it.

This is one of the first brands we started using, Red-Devil.

And then they had the wet look paint.

And then this is some cheap paint

from a store like Home Depot,

we used to get these also.

NARRATOR: As graffiti crews evolved so did their supplies.

Most of the writers were young and poor

so they acquired their tools by any means necessary.

LA ZAR: Pearl Paint was the Mecca where you could get

the large markers, the ink,

the pilots, the midi-wides, the Niji wides,

and, you know, all sorts of colors.

GREG 69: I had to buy it and then if I could

I'd sneak one in my pocket.

The way we got the markers and the spray paint

wasn't the usual way.

We actually went out and stole that stuff.

No, you steal a car, you don't steal a marker.

[CHUCKLE]

Steal a marker?

That's crazy.

NARRATOR: In the early days,

writers used whatever they could get their hands on

from shoe polish to markers intended for industrial use.

Now, they added spray paint to their toolset.

COCO 144: A marker was a lot easier

to go in a store and steal.

Spray paint, now, that'll put you in a different division.

Long trench coats, you put your hands in

and you take your hands out.

So you could take cans of spray paint and fill them in.

They write their name around so they could be known.

It don't make no kinda sense.

They want to be known,

they don't have to spray their name around, you know?

HOST: So they're really-- You think

they're trying to be famous?

-Yeah. -HOST: Yeah, you think it works?

Yeah, I think, yes.

HOST: What about you? You use spray paint cans?

-Who, me? -HOST: Well, anyone who does.

Yeah, I use spray paint cans.

CHILD: Or magic markers.

-HOST: Magic markers? -CHILD 2: Or shoe polish.

-HOST: Or what? -Or shoe polish.

HOST: Now, you seem to know, are you an expert?

-Yeah. -CHILDREN: Yeah.

We were like the celebrities

and if I hit a big clean wall, 30 names would follow.

TAKI 183: Names tended to be clustered.

If you wrote underneath a wall

the next guy wouldn't write around the corner,

he would probably write right next to you.

And they became bigger.

They became more daring and I was really amazed

at some of the feats, at some of these kids.

The more dangerous the situation was

the more your name would be recognized.

COOL EARL: It was a sign of the times.

It was a sign of our youth,

our lack of funds and possibly the lack of paternal guidance.

We didn't care about people, what they would say to us.

You know actually, some of us wanted to be seen doing it.

We were trying to get reputation that, you know,

oh my god, there's Henry161 writing his name again

or Mike171. We were very, very reckless in the way we did it.

JOE 182: See, well, my shit was hit and run.

Hit and run.

See, these fucking guys, they are--

they had all the time in the world, go at night time,

take their time and shit, you know?

A lot of the times I was in the fucking subways,

motherfucker be moving,

I was hitting the motherfucker, you know what I'm saying?

And the girl, she'll pull this shit out

and start tagging in front of everybody.

COCO144: But I felt that the women

that were out there writing,

whether it be Eva62, Barbara62, Michelle62, Charmin65, SPat,

Rocky184, you know,

they had a lot more balls than a lot of guys had.

When I was doing it, I was the only female that I knew about

and as I faded out Barbara62 was all over,

our crime partner was Eva62.

You couldn't see one name without seeing the other.

My first impression of other writers

and why they were writing it

and it was getting more popular, it was like people were angry.

SJK 174: We wanted to be known. That's why we wrote our names.

Anybody writing anything like "Marty was here 69"

or "Joe was here 72," he wanted to be known, he was there.

But we did it in a different way we wrote our street numbers.

We didn't really realize that we were developing a style

that nobody's ever done before

that would blossom into more graffiti.

Seeing numbers behind tags started from the beginning.

You see Taki183, I started writing Snake1 88,

it was just as simple as possible

where you could read it.

I used to write, "Snake1, King of all snakes."

Because there were too many snakes around

and I couldn't take it.

And one time I went to Snake2 train station,

145th Street on number one and we were good friends,

we went to junior high school together.

But I went to where he lived and I wrote on his subway wall,

"Snake1 king of all snakes," you dig? "You got that George?"

His name is George.

NARRATOR: There was a time on the New York subways

when without a newspaper,

you could ponder the advertisements.

Well, you can still ponder them

but you can hardly read them

because of the graffiti covering.

It's even hard to read the graffiti for the graffiti.

Now you'd think that with all this effort

something passively important or even beastly was being said,

or something clever as some of the old graffiti

comments on life and the world. No.

Now it's mostly just an attempt to identify oneself,

with code names and numbers. Coco4, K-55,

Super Kool 223. Sonic 53. Friz171.

And much of it in inglorious color.

Legibility was important

and the thing is you could throw it up quick.

Simple, just black letters, that's it, J-O- E.

JEC#*: I wrote JEC star and those were just my initials,

J-E-C.

and the star was just a squiggly I did at the end.

BAMA: The whole idea if you had a nice handwriting

and they saw your name there, there, there, there, there,

that meant you were there.

It was not all about being fancy and that came later on.

Just spread all over the place like a fungus,

bathroom stalls, buses, inside subway cars.

Everything was pristine one day

then all of a sudden you see all these names written.

You're wondering, who are these people?

And the more I saw of it the more intriguing it became.

HENRY 161: Graffiti was entertaining for me.

When I used to see a clean wall and I had a marker on me,

that was like, "Oh, wow, man!"

And I would go and start writing my name.

COCO 144: The dynamic of writing your name

of doing something that's illegal,

of having other people guess "Who's this person?"

is one of the many things that attracted me.

We noticed that everybody was talking about

Friendly Freddy, Fantastic Eddie, Super Goldie,

and me and my guys

we wanted the girls to gush over us as well.

At the time I didn't really think that it was illegal,

I thought that it was just fantastic.

I felt, "These people must be just somebody special."

We were like movie stars to some of these people.

I would see other people tag there and go, "Oh, my god,

if my name was up there with their names, man

that would be a great wall."

JON NAAR: They called themselves "Writers."

I do not recall any of them calling themselves artists.

FEMALE REPORTER: And who are the culprits?

Not surprisingly, they're kids, mostly male,

mostly around 15-years-old,

mostly poor,

and mostly what psychologists would call "neglected".

The words are rarely obscene or racial.

Mostly it's just "Mike this" or "Coco that"

and the numbers are usually the streets on which they live.

The first graffiti names, Taki183,

Phil T Greek, Joe182nd,

Babyface86, Stitch1, but Julio204....

NARRATOR: The writer in New York who was thought

to have started it all was a teenager named Julio204.

Most writers count him as their first influence

but few actually knew him.

PHIL: The first graffiti I remember seeing

was a personal mark, the bottom of a lamppost,

his name was Julio, Julio204.

Julio204, yeah, he definitely hit those lampposts first

Julio came out of the blue. We started seeing about 1967,

it was nothing in big size, it was just noticeable because

there was nothing else up on the walls

and nobody really knew what it was.

We thought something was going happen

on July 20th at four o'clock.

Then we realized there's a guy going around

writing his name and his street number.

JAG: Julio was like a little Colombian guy

and he says, "Yeah,

I can put Julio on that but it's no big deal

so I'm gonna make mine more known,"

so he started putting "204."

So the girls and everybody would know who he was.

Well, when I kept seeing his name, you know,

you hear the mythology of him being perhaps a gang member

and just like a cat marks its terrain,

Julio was marking his terrain and his people's terrain.

You'd see him a lot up there Fort Tryon Park,

Washington Heights area.

Columbia University marked their C

for the football team on this huge rock.

We were hanging around there one day and

friend of mine said, "Let's climb to the top of this thing."

So when I got up to the top there,

I saw it, on a rock this guy tagged his name, "Julio 204",

I go, "This guy is everywhere!"

You know? In my own childish way I was impressed by that.

Felt, "I'd like to get my name everywhere too."

NARRATOR: No one knows why Julio 204 stopped writing,

or what happened to him after.

But by the late '60s his marker tag had stopped appearing.

♪ [MUSIC]

In the 1960's America was in a state of social upheaval,

caused by issues like

Civil Rights and the Vietnam War.

Political leaders were being assassinated

and it seemed like everyone's lives were threatened.

In the midst of all the chaos, the country's urban youth

started to speak up with markers and spray cans.

Meanwhile, in Upper Manhattan,

in a neighborhood known as Washington Heights,

a small community of Greek teenagers

picked up where Julio 204 left off.

I grew up in between Inwood and Washington Heights.

I met Greg, Phil and Taki because

I was affiliated with a Greek Orthodox Youth Association

and we all played basketball together.

That's how I met them.

So my father was self-educated and he...

He exposed me to a lot of things

and part of that was, you know,

trying to be an individual of some kind

and you know, I wanted to do something different, you know.

I wanted everyone to know who I was.

So my first name was "Phil",

my last name began with a "T"

so my moniker was "Phil T Greek."

It was unusual, it was unique. I wasn't Puerto Rican, you know,

I wasn't Irish, I was Greek.

So I wanted to make a Greek mark, you know.

Julio 204 was very legible

and I wanted mine to be even more legible.

I felt that it was necessary

for my name to be in block formation.

I didn't want it to be script, I wanted them to see it,

and see that it was done almost mechanically.

When Phil started writing in the Summer of '68,

it made it more personal

'cause all of a sudden we knew who the guy was.

Once it was like an inside thing.

LITTLE PHIL: I saw Phil T's name

and my friends would ask me,

"Is that you writing that name?" And I would take credit for it.

LITTLE PHIL: Even though I wasn't even tagging at the time.

LITTLE PHIL: 'Cause it fit my name so perfectly.

And then we just kinda tagged along,

me and little Phil started doing it too.

PHIL: I didn't like when they started writing because

that's my thing, you know?

We kinda wanted to be like Phil, you know,

in our regard like with music

and graffiti, I guess.

Even the drugs.

I don't remember him being unhappy about it,

certainly he didn't voice it

and what I do remember is how we thought it was pretty cool

that we could both write the same name

and get twice as much traction for it.

He piggybacked on my name and I didn't like it.

But I stopped by then and Phil started

and he became known as Phil T Greek, actually,

he developed more notoriety.

But there's no way you can beat Taki.

He was everywhere, you know.

TAKI 183: I've always been called Taki by everyone.

Taki is a real name, it's derived from Demetrius

because when you're a little kid it's hard to say Demetrius,

so you had to say Taki,

it's a very common nickname in Greece

and it either sticks with you or it doesn't.

But only a Greek would know that it's a name basically.

I never thought of getting anything out of the graffiti.

It was just something you did for the summer.

I was either with Phil or Greg

and they were writing

and I said, "Oh, let me try that."

And I just put Taki and I said, "Oh, let me put 183,"

'cause they're putting the year, they're pretty Greek,

I'll just put the number, like Julio.

The graffiti was also part of the friendship,

I mean, it was the sports, it was the friendship.

TAKI 183: You moved as a group

so let's go up to the bus terminal

that had nice smooth walls.

We'd hang around the church steps.

We'd hit the church steps.

When we'd go to basketball games we always carried a marker

cause you gotta tag along the way.

You kinda-- You marked your territory in a way.

But during the summer of '70, I was working as a messenger

and the way you made any kind of money is

they'd give you the car fare for the delivery and you'd walk it.

So if I had to walk from 57th Street to 86th street

with a package I would just zig zag

and every time it was a red light

I'd stop, put my name on a pole,

you know how much you can cover?

NARRATOR: Taki183 started writing his name

in neighborhoods outside his own

and people around the city started to take notice.

Well, the first graffiti that I noticed

and that I admired a lot was Taki183.

Taki was top dog.

Taki took it to the max, I mean,

I think this kid lived to write his name.

You started out with a marker, right,

because Taki183 started with a marker.

Then I seen him hit with paint. "Oh, look,

now that's not a bad idea."

I didn't start it but that was just the next step.

WICKED GRAY: The word got out.

There's no denying that every place

you looked you wouldn't see Taki.

All the neighborhoods had Nazian graffiti

but especially in a pristine neighborhood

it was much more evident.

You could walk for 40 blocks and see my name on every pole,

Park Avenue, Lexington Avenue, Madison Avenue, Sutton Place,

all the cross streets, and I just hit them all.

And your name would be there and people would say,

"How do you write it and nobody saw him?"

That was the big mystique of graffiti.

LITTLE PHIL: Taki was original

and to watch him in action was funny.

He had a leather jacket that he liked to wear

and he had a hole in the pocket

and he became good at being able to put his hand in the pocket

and tag a door on a train,

you know, then he'd walk over to another door

and do that one and you'd never know he did it.

Part of the rationale

of not thinking you were that destructive is because

politicians would put up Nixon tags,

and you knew they weren't gonna come back

and take it off at the end of the campaign.

So I said, "If they can do it I can do it."

My parents thought it was pretty terrible

that I was writing everywhere

but then I think they got the joke of it that

they knew who I was but nobody else knew who I was.

NARRATOR: Taki183 became an urban legend

and remained a mystery to the public at large

until an enterprising reporter

fromThe New York Times tracked him down.

In early '71, I was impressed

by an article in The New York Times

about Taki183

being the first of a new type of graffiti writer.

TAKI 183: Taki183 Spawns Pen Pals.

When this was published we really saw that

it was becoming a citywide news

and it was a good story for a slow news day.

The Taki article gave what we were doing credibility

'cause now we knew we were being noticed.

I didn't have any hesitation about speaking to the Times

because basically it was all a goof to begin with

and over here you got this

legitimate paper interviewing you,

you know, they interview Kissinger

and they're interviewing me.

You know, how ridiculous can it get?

BAMA: When I read that article I was writing but I just thought

"Wow, they blew him up, yo! I'm gonna do his wall!"

'Cause I wanted to get an article.

I don't remember seeing

any article about Taki in any newspaper

back then in those days.

All I remember about Taki

was a commercial they used to show on TV.

It was filmed inside the Statue of Liberty.

HENRY 161: And they would show the persons walking

up the stairs inside the Statue of Liberty

and as they were walking by you see the name Taki183.

TAKI 183: The Statue of Liberty commercial

was a result of editing.

Actually that was at the A-Train station.

I think, on 181st, with the long steps.

Whoever made the commercial

filmed the family with my name in the background,

I have to hand it to this guy, he like,

he gave me so much publicity.

When I was photographing graffiti in New York

Taki was already a legend.

After Taki was everywhere there was an explosion of taggers.

Summer of '71, they interviewed me for Interviewmagazine,

Andy Warhol's magazine, which was pretty cool,

told me to come down and meet Andy Warhol, I said,

you know, "I got no time for this guy."

[LAUGHING]

NARRATOR: Taki183 was the face of

the graffiti movement in New York.

But just 100 miles to the south, Philadelphia had its own star.

♪ [MUSIC]

[SHAKING SPRAY CAN]

CORNBREAD: I was established in 1965 at a reform school

and Mrs. Swanson was the head cook,

used to always prepare white bread with our meals.

I used to always remember how my grandmom used to bake cornbread.

So, I used to get outta line and go in the back and say,

"Mrs. Swanson, how come you don't serve cornbread

on the menu?"

And she gripped me by my shirt,

and took me out to my counselor and told my counselor,

"Keep this cornbread out my kitchen."

And all my peers at the table started laughing,

"Cornbread, Cornbread,"

and throughout the institution, which was infested with gangs

who wrote their names all over the walls of the institution,

to recognize-- To be recognized by their gang name.

I wanted recognition too.

So I wrote "Cornbread" in real big letters

right by all the gangs' names.

But I took it a step further than that.

I wrote my name in the visitor hall,

in the chow hall,

in the bathroom, in the school, in the church, everywhere.

When I came home in 1967,

I took that same concept to the city walls

to establish our reputation.

And I wrote my name everywhere.

People started talking about it. and it wasn't long before

other teenage juveniles began to spray-paint their names.

NARRATOR: In North Philly, Cornbread was joined

by the likes of Titty and Dr. Cool,

while in West Philly there were writers such as Chewy,

Cool Earl and Kool Klepto Kidd.

[FREEWAY TRAFFIC]

KIDD: My name is Edward Leatherary,

A.K.A. Kool Klepto Kidd, A.K.A. The Kidd.

When I first started writing graffiti

it was I believe, in '67.

Small tags with magic markers

and it escalated into spray paint.

It started out as a small band of us

that hung together and that was myself,

Cool Earl, Chewy, we came from the hood,

so to speak, the ghetto, you know,

rat, roach infested areas, people not having very much

and we went out and pretty much put our names out

and it was like, "We're here."

Well one particular day Chewy, Kidd and myself

and a few other guys was writing on an L's in Philadelphia

and Eddie decides to write his name on the L's.

He wrote "Kidd".

And I'm sitting on an L, on a seat,

and I'm looking at him write "Kidd" and I'm thinking,

"Well, get me. Write my name up there."

And to my surprise instead of just writing Earl,

he wrote "Cool Earl".

So, Kidd was the first person that wrote Cool Earl, for me.

I chose to use my real name

but because of that little art flair in me

I knew I could come up with something special.

So, you know, and to this day it's only one dude

I know that could really do it like me,

and that was my man, Joe Cool.

I got the name Joe Cool from this cartoon character, Snoopy.

When I turned 13, my parents sent me to Karate school

and, you know, at first everybody used to tease me

and call me Karate Kid and stuff like that

and as time went on, you know, I just, I couldn'’t shake it.

And here I am now, and still can't shake it.

I have people right now, right now,

that, that they don't know my name.

KIDD: It was just more of a vandal type thing,

we were just on the subway

writing on the cardboard advertisement,

you know, like a Zorro type of a signet.

We were going over South Philly, North Philly,

we was going all over the place.

Everybody wanted to be cool just like us.

LEWIS: Everywhere,

I see these guys' names, I say, "How did they do that?

How did they get it here? How did they get up there?"

We were just having fun, you know,

cops chase us, they couldn't catch us,

you know, it was a cat and mouse type of thing,

you know. When we were hitting and they'd pull over

and jump out and try to catch us,

all of us were pretty fast

and, you know, we was having fun.

We went on excursions at night, in the bus terminals.

When we thought that no one would see us

and we hit every bus we could hit.

KARATE: I used to live with my aunt

and my aunt used to tell me,

"Look, if you're not in the house by nine o'clock,

you gotta sleep in the hallway."

Every night we would go out

and write and I never got home at nine o'clock,

so I slept in the hallway for many nights.

COOL EARL: We didn't want to be a part of the gangs,

that's why we broke off into different clubs,

Delta Phi Soul, Cornbread was a part of North Philly

and then in West Philly, me and Kool Klepto Kidd

was a part of a club, Odigma Experience,

meaning cool experience.

NARRATOR: Writers from both sides of town

belonged to crews modeled after fraternities,

with names like Phi Odigma Experience and Delta Phi Soul.

The crew's main focus was to throw parties at social clubs.

So, it was only a matter of time

until both groups of graffiti writers met.

KIDD: Let's say we'd hit a wall, a clean wall,

and we'd come back at a later date and Cornbread and his crew

would have hit that wall. So, we started leaving messages.

you know, and finally we did connect.

We met at a dance hall, Shanahan on Likus Avenue.

West Philly used to fight North Philly,

so we knew that was gonna be some trouble outside

when we went to North Philly.

So, I seen Cool Earl in a cool cap

so I tagged him, I said, "Cool Earl."

He said, "What's up, man?" I said, "What's up, Cool Earl?"

He said, "What's up with you, who are you?"

I said, "I'm Cornbread."

He said, "Nah, you ain't Cornbread."

I put up my marker.

I got the felt with me and I went to the wall,

"Cornbread."

And he just says, "Yo, Chewy, Bobby."

He started calling the whole gang.

"He called Cornbread."

And they're just hugging it.

we recognized each other, by reputation.

COOL EARL: And we introduced ourselves and it was like,

you know, it was great.

You know, finally I meet Cornbread

and Titty and Dr. Cool and Took,

but when we met it was just,

"Let's go tag some walls together."

You know, that set the party in tune.

NARRATOR: With North Philly and West Philly writers united

graffiti in Philadelphia spread like wildfire

and the media picked up the story.

SANDY: I think the name that got me the most was Cornbread

because it was so unique.

It said so many different things, you know.

All of us had good names but, you know, Cornbread just was

a easy name to stick in your mind and easy to remember.

And the more we got into it

the more publicity we kept getting.

There was some imposters during that period also.

So, I'm going to work one day,

I got a job at Nabisco Baking Factory

and I open up the newspapers and I read about my own death.

"The fantastic career of one of Philadelphia's

best known graffiti artists came to a violent end,

Sunday, outside a hotel and bar."

My reputation was going to this guy's grave.

I had to do something

to let the public know that I still exist.

So I had pondered countless possibilities

and came to the conclusion

to spray-paint my name on a live elephant

at the Philadelphia Zoo.

I went to the zoo, spray-paint in hand,

climbed over the fence, and came to his pit.

I walked up to the elephant. I wrote "Cornbread lives."

I got locked up that day.

When the police officers learned that I was in custody

all the cops started coming to my cell

asking me for my autograph.

My name rang like Jesus Christ.

They talked about it in the newspapers

and it just blew out of context.

Cornbread, he's the most famous that was.

He's got his name on elephants and stuff like this,

you know, and that's pretty bold.

You gonna go to the zoo

and write your name on an elephant?

You know, 'cause, again, we were always trying to find

the wildest things you could possibly find

that would get the attention of other people,

you know. And, you know, this of course this was really wild

so, I mean, this was off-the-chart,

to go over a fence and spray paint an elephant.

REPORTER: Vandalism is one of our country's

biggest problems today.

Estimates for destruction to school facilities alone

is over $100 million per year

and counting all acts of vandalism

to public and private property

some experts push the figure to over $1 billion every year.

Of course, a billion dollars is only money.

But what about the tens of thousands

of these young people

convicted of these crimes?

I had some sources in the Black community in Philadelphia

and couple of them said

they could help me find these guys.

So we set-up a meeting at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I remember May 2nd, 1971.

Todaymagazine did an article

on "“The Aerosol Aerographers and Why We Do It"”.

That was my mission as a reporter, to explain it.

But when people read it they took it the wrong way.

The Inquirer received 400 letters

and people were genuinely angry.

They took it as an endorsement and it was never an endorsement.

KIDD: I think at that point things really blew up

and a number of other writers came out of the woodworks.

LEWIS: See, see somebody wrote up there "the crew,"

I don't know who put "the crew" here.

And that happened a lot.

One person would put their name on the wall

and then, in the long run, everybody would hit,

especially the top names, and as soon as the top names hit then,

you know, following bang, bang, bang, bang,

with the names up on it.

But, you know, like when

Cornbread put his name up on the wall

then everybody would hit.

SANDY: I looked at it as an archaeological kind of a thing.

What are people gonna think

when they unearth this civilization

and they see this stuff?

BAMA: New Yorkers and cats from Philly

shared some kind of symbiotic relationship.

Yeah, I don't know what it was but it was real.

So, you know, guys from Philly who say "we were first,"

God bless 'em.

Guys from the Bronx who say,

"No, we were first," God bless 'em.

Who's to say who was first? It's not that important.

If it never went anywhere

it wouldn't have mattered who was first or last.

It's only important because

you want to establish how it started.

You know, I know guys from other cities.

They're saying, "We were first." Oh, that was good.

But, you know, there's kids that never left their neighborhoods.

If they were first in their neighborhood

and they had never been to Washington Heights,

well then they were first there.

LSD OM: I lived on a commune in 1970

up here in West Kill, New York

so after I came back from that commune in 1970

and I landed back with my own group of friends

in Central Park around the Bethesda Fountain

that'’s when I started writing really.

But I remember in '71 you could go on the number one train,

or any station like that on the way up,

every single piece of the White tile would be tagged,

like, totally bombed.

I remember the first time I went uptown

and, like, the doors opened up on a station like that,

I thought, "Oh, my god."

If you never saw anything like it, it was scary.

You didn't feel safe right away. You felt like

if people could write this much all over the place,

where are the cops?

Like, this is wild up here.

Our society has got to a chaotic state.

That's when the odds are the trains are getting hit,

and I mean, there were hundreds of writers then.

I thought, "Oh, my god,

this is a scene, this is a cultural explosion."

[DOG BARKING]

BOB: A dramatic scenario staged by the MTA

shows what can happen to a graffiti artist

as he decorates a subway car.

[DOG BARKING]

The trainers have the guard dog

handled by a private detective

is programmed to attack on command

and stop on command, but not to kill.

Even the threat of violent death

has failed to keep graffiti artists

out of subway yards and tunnels.

At least one death by fire in the past year,

one by decapitation,

and two by electrocution on the third rail.

Is it possible then that such dedicated artists

will abandon their natural habitat

to avoid being bitten by a dog?

For NewsCenter 4, Bob Teague.

NARRATOR: With walls covered in names

legibility and street numbers were no longer enough.

In order to stand out, writers had to add style.

In my world, wearing a crown meant that I became a king.

As we started adding crowns and bubbles and squiggly lines

it became even more entertaining,

more fascinating for me.

And I kept trying to so hard, but I could never come up.

Like, I just, I couldn't bring my skills up

and that's JK, you know, Mike171.

These guys were like,

in my eyes, they were like artists

and I couldn't bring myself to that level

because my level of art was taking a 45 apart

and putting it back together while I'm blindfolded,

that was my art. That's it, that's the old Henry161.

NARRATOR: Writers all around the city

started to embellish their names

with arrows, stars and even characters.

BAMA: You know, style didn't become an issue

until like, end of 1970, '71.

Then all of a sudden it became who had the best style,

who got this, who did this? I might blow up.

Everybody had their own unique style,

just like a signature on a check or something.

After I started writing my name

I started putting designs around it

because I kinda liked these things.

I used to put like a little flower on top of it

and the peace sign underneath mine.

First, it started with just eyebrows

and then if Earl hit on the wall

next to me I would draw eyes

like I was looking over at Earl.

It was an art form that "I got your back, I'm watching you."

I definitely started the eyeballs, the stars on the side,

and I may have started the eyebrows,

I'm not really sure. I don't want

to take credit for something

that I really didn't do,

but I really do believe that I may have started that.

Yeah, I did invent the crown

and then other people tried to portray that

and make their own crowns but it wasn't the same.

I was the one who first started it.

Babyface86 started the crown.

You know some other person say it was him

but it was not, he lied.

Cornbread started hitting, Cornbread King of the Walls

and started putting a crown up

and everybody started following suit.

So no question Cornbread started the crown, to my knowledge.

REPORTER: Commissioner, what part of your manpower

and how much of your budget is devoted to

cleaning up after vandals?

Well, the direct cost of vandalism

we figure at about $1,100,000 a year.

The indirect cost is very much higher than that

because we're constantly having to divert men

who could be doing constructive work

in the green parts of the park

to doing-- To correcting antisocial

and often very vicious acts.

At the moment we are dealing with it with a program

that tries to act on the principle

that if you can catch vandalism quickly

you prevent that further deterioration which sets in.

And we've organized the squads and trucks in each burrow,

which are going to be able to go out

and do the minimal but necessary repairs on the spot.

When that's done, they leave a sign

saying "We've been here in a preliminary way"

the vandals have done their work but PRCA will be back.

I became attached to it, it is like, a disease, I guess.

I never left home without my magic marker.

I used to get home late at night from the morning at school,

all full of paint. All hell over my hands, you know, like,

then go home, eat, take a shower,

back the same shit next morning.

It was an escape route. I would forget the streets.

I didn't think of no violence,

I didn't think of my mother getting beat up.

I didn't think of anything bad.

In my mind it was just focused on the graffiti.

Well, you're treacherous, you know what I mean,

you're like, Gulliver-- Gulliver-- Gulliver--

what is it, Gulliver'’s Travels, you know what I mean,

you just wanna go on an adventure, you know,

get outta your neighborhood, see something different.

They know me as Mike171, Mighty Whitey,

Downtown Mounty Maker, Downtown Heartbreaker,

from the city with no pity so nice

they have to name it twice, New York, New York.

If you mess with me you will see how much trouble I can be.

Always with .38 and .45.

But they were my spray cans, that's how I express myself.

That's how we grew up man, you know.

My father died when I was 12 in '68,

October 19th. Steve's father left his family.

Steve's the oldest of four kids.

And we had to go out in the streets

and provide for our families.

You know, and this is where graffiti came in

because we kinda started to let loose.

You know, I was angry at the government,

you know, my father taken away,

my younger brother just died a few years ago.

I had an incident that happened to me I really don't share.

I was pushing robbery, guy pushed me in the hole,

when he beat me with the gun,

put me in the closet, ransacked the house.

And what he did, he undressed me and raped me.

And he put a knife to me, gun to me,

he penetrated me, I blacked out.

Thirteen years old, and at that point in life,

you know, I share this because this is something

that I have to reveal of who I am today

because of that made me close down,

I put a steel casing around my life,

I put a brick wall around that.

And I just went on the suicidal homicidal mission.

You know, I was graffiti all the time out in the streets,

drugs, gang banging, the whole nine.

And I don't care if I lived or died.

You know, the gangs came to us and said,

"Listen, you guys live here,

we got a gang, you want protection,

you want nothing happening to you,

you got to join with us."

The older guys that were like 15, 16, 17 years old,

they were starting to wear their gang jackets.

And that caught my attention 'cause it was more violent

and I liked the violence, more than I did the graffiti.

HENRY 161:So I started being a gangster

but a graffiti gangster with my jacket.

NARRATOR: The new gangs were more vicious

than ever and heavily armed.

Most writers wanted to avoid them,

but others were ready to join.

SAVAGE NOMADS: They tried to take over one of my divisions.

But they didn't quite make it and we killed two of their guys.

They tried to burn down my clubhouse,

we killed two of their guys

and five of their guys rolled up on

one of the Savage Nomads, know what he told them?

"Oh, we gonna give you hell, baby,

we gonna get you hell." And they didn't even kill them.

At that time we had this little group

called The Latin Lords,

was me, Babyface, a cousin of mine from the Bronx,

couple of other brothers though, you know, he told me,

"Why don't you guys become Savage Nomads?"

so I say, "Yo, Babyface, let's became Savage Nomads."

And--

We can't be Savage Nomads 'cause this was the beginning, you see.

This is a new club. Then after we got established,

before you join the club

you gotta go through some different shit.

Get initiated, get your ass kicked and whatever.

I was affiliated with the Hellafied Sisters.

It was a group of girls and we would hang out

and a lotta times we'd go to 184th Street

and we'd get together with the Savage Nomads.

SPANKY 132: It was a good time back then with the gangs.

Back then, you'd get into your fights,

you'd have your stabbings, you're fighting with the chains,

fighting with bottles and then the next thing you know,

a month down the road you guys are friends again.

UNDERTAKER ASH: When I was kidnapped by the drug stompers

I was DJing a party and they came to the party

and there were guns and knives and they took me

to their headquarters, made me sign a treaty to join them.

HENRY 161: Back then, the initiation for the gang

that I was gonna get into, the Galaxies,

was 10 whacks with a Garrison belt,

Army Garrison belt.

And 10 people would take one shot each

at your ass with your pants down.

But in my case I didn't have to do that because

the night before the initiation I went out to a school dance

with Cay161 and we had to take the girls to 125th Street

where they lived in the Projects

and we got approached by some gangsters

called The Black Spades.

And even though we didn't have jackets

they still wanted to beat on us

and one of them grabbed an antennae

and swiped it across my face.

So, the next day when I went for my initiation

I had to get walked into the clubhouse

'cause my face, my eyeballs were too swollen and I couldn't see.

So my friends that walked me into

the clubhouse to get my initiation

after they seen me the president of the gang said,

'Oh, no, no, it's okay,

Henry doesn't need to be initiated,

he got his initiation last night."

NARRATOR: Just like we'll never know if New York City

or Philadelphia was first with graffiti,

we'll also never know which had gangs first.

What we do know is the effect the rise of the gangs

had on wall writing in each city.

KIDD: '69 and up until the '70s was really the hard gang era.

The drugs swept through the neighborhoods like a plague

and it was the heroine

and all this social activity went to the wayside,

a whole lotta my good friends started dying.

JOE COOL: Philadelphia was like Vietnam.

The gangs were so bad, it was, it's a wonder I'm still alive,

a lotta guys that I grew up with are dead or in jail.

Certain neighborhoods you couldn't even write in

'cause the gangsters

didn't want you to write in their neighborhood.

Gangs only wrote on walls in their turf

to identify their turf.

LEWIS: That's one thing I didn't mess around with,

I never put no gang stuff on walls.

See, because that was trouble.

You asked for trouble when you put--

You write gang stuff up there,

you rivaling a gang, and that, then you get in trouble.

you know? You write gang stuff, they're gonna that--

We got in trouble, remember, we got in trouble,

yeah, when we was on 60th and Market?

One day?

-When it was the-- Remember? -Oh, right, right, right.

The Moon was chasing us all over.

LEWIS: Oh, "we heard you wrote your name

on our turf" and all that.

Yeah. [LAUGHS]

Oh, man, I told them, remember, I say

I wrote my name in a whole lotta turfs.

[BOTH LAUGHING]

One thing I didn't back down from.

But I knew when to get outta dodge and things got crazy

'cause you knew most of the town

at night was gonna happen.

I could sense, "It's time to go."

NARRATOR: Writers who were also gang members

faced the difficulty of a dual life.

This is our area, Young Galaxy's area, this is our territory,

we still were gang oriented,

even though we were doing the graffiti.

'Cause, yeah, thing is you'd get busted, right,

then they had "Joe182, Savage Nomad" you know.

This is the same fucking guy, though, no?

I don't wanna get no banged for bullshit,

get busted, Joe182, it's a different story.

I get busted doing gang shit

it's a whole different story, you know?

So I keep it like that, keep it apart.

NARRATOR: Most writers were not in gangs

and hung out in small unnamed groups

that lacked organization. But in the summer of 1971

that started to change.

SPANKY 132: If it was in this book

it had to be before '74

'cause that's when I went into the Navy.

SJK, the other Greek fella, he's a nice guy too.

Writers Corner, that's a very interesting corner,

that Writers Corner.

That corner right there is where Snake1 used to live, my nephew.

My sister had an apartment there.

Writers Corner was a corner that was developed,

I believe by Snake1 and Stitch1.

Stitch1 is the one who invented Writers Corner because

his girlfriend used to live

about maybe 50 feet away from the corner.

Before it was Writers Corner, it was Stitch & Rocky's Corner.

Stitch and I were in love

and he was-- He treated me like gold.

His parents, I'd go over there

it was like Christmas anytime I went over there.

They treated me really well.

There's where my father had a problem.

He wasn't very fond of Stitch.

SJK 171: Stitch1 was the tough guy,

the master at arms of the group.

He would take care of us.

Anybody messed with us Stitch took care of them.

And I was so much a little bit of that too also.

ROCKY 184: Stitch was tall, dark and bow-legged.

His family came out of Cuba

and he just had that face that'd just hang

and just wait to see who came up.

Then SJK 171, myself, and Jax5 met

Snake1, Stitch1 and Cat87.

They asked us to be members of the Writers Corner 188.

Now that was kind of a borderline

between the gangs of Washington Heights.

Now this was a meeting place, the safe haven.

Used to sit there, spray painting that corner.

There used to be a Writers Corner truck that everybody hit

and the guy didn't seem to mind

cause he gave up cleaning the truck.

I don't remember anybody's legal name,

we all knew each other by our tag name.

After a while all the writers from all around the city

from Brooklyn, Bronx, they would all come up there.

JEC#*: We hung out there, we'd go to Writers Corner

to see who else was on Writers Corner,

what other graffiti writers we could meet,

what other styles we could pick up.

ROCKY 184: It would get packed in a matter of seconds.

Their markers, their cans, where they're gonna go,

what they're gonna do.

And we kinda combined everybody together,

you know, like opened up.

BAMA: Number one question when you met a writer was,

"Do you write?"

And when they said "Yes," it was, "Let's go."

And it wasn't looking at them for what they looked like,

or who they were or how they spoke.

SNAKE1: So the gangs, the colors started coming off

so graffiti kind of broke down the barrier of the gangs.

BAMA: It was that unification of "We are all writers."

ROCKY 184: It was our spot, our moment,

it was a way for me and Stitch to always be together.

I look back at it as people say

that you gotta be a certain age to love and feel

I really loved Stitch.

I think I-- I put him so far in the back of my head

but when we talk about him, he was

one true love

and that's how I look at graffiti.

Stitch1, Rocky184 equal graffiti.

That's how I look at it.

NARRATOR: Writers Corner was the hangout spot in Manhattan,

but across the Brooklyn Bridge

writers Friendly Freddy, Fantastic Eddie,

Super Goldie, Flowers Dice and Undertaker Ash

as well as the gang, The Vanguards,

developed a local style

complete with loopy letters and lots of flair.

The Brooklyn writers that, that I experienced,

seen the most and it was maybe as I took several trips

down to Brooklyn were like Flowers Dice, Undertaker Ash,

and their styles were so much more unique

that it sorta created a--

A need to go back to Brooklyn more often

to see what was happening.

I just, the best I can remember Flowers Dice

as being something like that.

It was fairly simple 'cause they were very, very early.

I just remember him looping the F a bit

and, you know, Friendly Freddy with a bit of a flourish

but not, you know, like the subsequent Brooklyn style,

you know, 'cause Brooklyn style was always very fancy,

you know, for example, you can do a simple N like this

or you could do the, I think the knoll N like that,

or the vanguard fancy Brooklyn style N.

The style changing from straight letters to script, if you will,

or designing was an evolutionary process, I would say.

Sometimes you had to write quicker, faster,

you start incorporating art into it.

LA ZAR: Personally I love the Brooklyn style.

It had much more flourish to it

and pizzazz than any other

before and since other than maybe the Philadelphia guys.

There are no 120's or 161's

or anything like that in Brooklyn,

you know, all the streets have names and I think it's perhaps

a more individualistic place than some of the others.

Undertaker Ash, Undertaker Ash is a good friend of mine,

been a friend of mine for almost 40 years

and at one point in time, in Brooklyn,

and if you ask real people who have real memories,

Undertaker Ash was everywhere and probably was

the number one graffiti writer in New York City.

My name's Undertaker Ash, it's my tag name.

I started writing from 1969 to 1970.

Well, everyone wanted a tag name, that's original,

so I always look at the undertaker

as a very mystical person

and, you know, he never dies in the movie,

he's always the last guy in the movie to live.

So I said, "Well, I'm gonna use that name, the Undertaker."

WICKED GARY: It was a social thing, you know,

but then hanging with the guys,

it just elevated to another step.

There ended up being a core group of us

that were hanging all the time that were doing that.

And one Friday after school

we decided to go to Dino Mars house

and sit down and actually have a meeting.

There were a lot of people there,

there were about 20 or 30 guys there.

and Dino and I had had a brilliant idea

to try to bring graffiti artists under a banner,

and the organization was the Ex Vandals.

They would soon become probably the most popular

graffiti name out there, at least in the Brooklyn scene.

What he did was convince everybody,

you know, also from a marketing standpoint,

"Let's take a period of time, you know, at night,

go to all the place that everybody's going to see

and bomb the shit out of it.

But let's not write our names next to Ex Vandals,

let's get Ex Vandals out and create a buzz."

WICKED GARY: For like the first month

we stopped tagging our own names

and we strictly only wrote the group name.

Ex Vandals was the beginning and end-all of everything.

Our names came second.

WICKED GARY: The buzz was, "What the fuck is an Ex Vandal?"

THE JOKER: People thought the Ex Vandals was a gang.

They didn't realize that it was just a graffiti movement.

So we figured out a way that we could actually come out

and see what our reaction was.

So everybody painted Ex Vandals jackets

and we had a plan where the first day of the week

Nard would wear his in the school.

The next day two more cats. So by the end of the week

we had all revealed ourselves and it was like, "Whoa!"

You guys are the Ex Vandals?

"Yo!" And just the reaction, everybody went crazy.

Riders on New York City subways are offended daily

by graffiti sprayed on subway cars

and station walls in an incredible profusion.

It's not funny. Cleaning off the mess is expensive.

Over the years New York has become known

for just about everything a city can be known for

its crime, its wealth, its filth, its slums,

its architecture, its art museums.

And now it's rapidly becoming known

as the graffiti capital of the country

a title Philadelphia's held for years.

Believe it or not we had morals then.

A lot of these guys just write on anything,

anybody's house, property,

I never wrote on anybody's property.

That I know of, you know,

other than big businesses, no one home,

I'm not gonna go up on their door

and write my name on their door

and stuff like that, maybe in the Projects and in the hallways

I might do it, you know. I'm not justifying

but you know you did have some morals about you.

Some guys did, some of them didn't care,

they'd write on your dog if it'd come by them, they don't care.

You know, but that dog oughta walk from here to there

and they'll see, somebody'll see that name.

We just wanted to get in the paper.

So what would happen we used to call, you know,

the paper and let them know that we were gonna give it up.

So what we would do is,

you know, they would arrange a meeting

and we would come down there

and we would turn over our spray paint cans

and tell them that we retire,

you know, that's it, we wasn't writing no more.

And it would be in the paper the next day.

But just as soon as we left out of there

we started writing again.

I mean, we never gave, we never quit.

I mean, it was just a thing

where we just wanted to get in the paper.

REPORTER: People that say this explosion

is not clever graffiti, just childish and ugly scrawl.

Whatever it is, street art or vandalism,

it's costing millions to rub it off.

SANDY: I do remember this bubbling anger

in Philadelphia

at so many things. There was anger at the police,

there was anger at the police commissioner,

there was a tremendous amount of violence.

NARRATOR: At the height of wall writing

Timemagazine estimated

there were 10,000 more graffiti writers

in Philadelphia than New York

and this did not go unnoticed.

Then mayor Frank Rizzo issued a full scale war on graffiti

with an anti-graffiti campaign.

His ultimate goal was to put

as many writers in jail as he could.

The Philadelphia Art Museum responded with the DUO,

Department of Urban Outreach, which gave positive options

and brought new opportunities

for Philadelphia's wall writers,

ranging from mural projects to sponsoring a city bus

to be painted by the vandals.

CORNBREAD: The graffiti attended the workshop

invited all these kids

to do graffiti in a constructive way and possibly get paid

as opposed to doing graffiti damaging people's property.

SEPTA gave us a bus to paint and we had a multicolored bus.

We had paint-- you know, there was a design

we put on paper first

and then we took this bus and we painted it,

it rode through our neighborhood and anytime that bus came

around we were allowed to ride on it.

Free. Free of charge.

And the funny thing about it,

out of respect, nobody never rode on that bus.

This is the graffiti workshop's bus.

NARRATOR: There was a certain purity

to what the first generation of writers did

because there was no payoff to it other than local fame.

That changed in 1972.

HENRY 161: What happened was we're hanging out

at 174th and Fort Washington

and we're hanging out on the wall,

there's this big wall

that we used to sit on and the entrance

to the park was like in the middle.

Well, here comes this old gentleman, beard, glasses

and he's asking for names of writers

and he comes up with my name.

He says, "I'm looking for Henry161,

for Snake, Joe182."

And he's asking do we know Stitch1?

Older gentleman. Says his name is Hugo Martinez.

We didn't know who he was, we maybe, you know,

thought he was a police officer so we didn't tell him anything.

He told us he wasn't a police officer

he said he wanted to do some things,

wanted to get the graffiti off of the street,

put the graffiti on canvases,

make the graffiti known to people.

He called it art.

COCO 144: My understanding is that

Hugo was a student of Sociology at City College,

he wanted to mimic what was going on

in the streets and the subways

in the college art room.

The word got around

that "We're gonna meet this day at City College"

and so we still didn't know if we should trust this guy.

So me, Stitch, I guess Cat, Web2

we went to City College

but we couldn't find the building

where this was taking place.

So we just kept walking in all the buildings.

Finally we walked into this one building

and all we smelled was spray paint,

we said, "Yep, this is the place."

It was like walking into Heaven

because we had all this beautiful white clean paper

and all these markers.

And-- We used to have to rob our markers

and our spray paint.

So, for us to see all that there for free was fascinating.

And we just went to work

and started draw-- We spent about two or three hours

in there just writing and painting

and by the time we were done

Hugo was like, "Oh, my god, that's beautiful!"

NARRATOR: Martinez organized 20 of the top graffiti writers

and founded United Graffiti Artists,

UGA in an attempt to take graffiti off the streets

and into galleries.

UGA included writers such as Coco144,

SJK171, Phasetwo, Snake1, Bama, and Mike171.

LA ZAR: UGA brought together some of the best at the time

and enabled them to start to transcend

the former criminal activity into a accepted format

and started the movement of so called "graffiti art."

COCO 144: It was actually a creative environment

where you could pretty much write, paint, draw

what you always wanted

to write, paint, and draw on a train.

MIKE 171: Hugo works it with big city

that if we stop hitting city municipal buildings

and trains, buses, they'd give us a workshop

and they would give us canvases and spray paint

so we made a contract not to go out there

and put our art on canvases.

REPORTER: This group is called Graffiti Artists United.

They meet in the apartment of a sociology student

who has encouraged them to go straight.

Everyone who's a member

has given up subways and public walls

and has turned instead to canvas or paper

or the sociology student's bathroom walls.

Although these particular graffiti artists

paint legit now,

they still remember the good old days, last week or so.

REPORTER: Did you ever get arrested?

Once.

REPORTER: Did you do it again after that?

COCO 144: Couple of times.

REPORTER: How come?

Because I just wanted, you know, I wanted to get known

and, like, then I made a lot of new friends.

You know, after you go out,

you know, after you're in the yards

and you write your name on every train like the day later

when they come out you just sit, you know,

in the station the whole day

and just watch the trains going by

in different colors in your names.

WICKED GARY: Well I give him a lot of props for his concept,

to put 20 of the top artists together

and have it be formed by the peers.

It took a lot of things to conceptualize.

We had meetings, you know, we decided where we wanted to go,

what we wanted to do, what kind of materials to buy.

Pretty much everybody took on a responsibility.

He started selling a lot of our paintings

and he said that he was selling our paintings

so that we could have more materials to do this.

So we said, "Okay."

We agreed to it. We were young,

we didn't know what was going on.

All we knew was that we was getting free markers

and spray paint to do graffiti.

We were getting paid. We thought we were getting paid.

He had people that wanted their apartments graffit'd

but I don't mean people from the Heights,

I mean people from Downtown, Park Avenue, 5th Avenue.

People inviting us just to write on their walls and stuff

while everyone's partying

and we're exposed to like this high society.

UGA was the first group

to actually sell graffiti on canvas.

UGA is what ground broke

the writing culture into the art world.

BAMA: Bill Hart from the Reza Gallery

walked up and handed me my check.

And I went, "What? How much do you get?" He goes, "I got mine"

I said, "Oh? This is mine? Thank you."

When we did the Joffrey Ballet,

you know, here I'm a kid I'm 15, 16-years-old,

I'm getting a standing ovation

in the City Center, New York City,

I'd never imagined this was gonna happen.

And how good it made me feel about myself and how good

it made everybody else that participated in it feel.

I can't even explain it in words, man,

it was just living, it was grand.

NARRATOR: UGA introduced graffiti to the world at large

and it was a positive experience

for many of the writers involved.

Some, however, have different opinions.

ROCKY 184: Hugo capitalized.

Nobody cared about the money, but you know,

you talk about people that we need money,

we're getting older, want to do things,

so, yeah he caught your ear, caught your eye, the green,

and I feel he sold a lot of pipe dreams.

Hugo wasn't promoting them, you know, the writers,

Hugo was promoting Hugo.

MIKE 171: But after you're doing galleries, you're doing shows,

money's coming in and we're not seeing a penny

red lights go up, the flares go up, you know?

That he's not the one out there spray painting,

he's not the one spending the whole night up in the yard

getting paint on you.

Then we come back all soaked

and peeling shit off for hours off our hands

and faces and changing our clothes, you know what I mean?

We're the foot soldiers that did all this stuff.

And he comes over and becomes a glory hound.

And he wants it all for himself

and you know, New York, don't go that way.

So one day we confronted Hugo,

Russ and the guys, me, Henry161, a few other guys.

We bum rushed inside and we just tore the place up.

I told Hugo, "You got our money, what are you doing?"

Blah, blah, blah, you know, "You come in our neighborhood,

and you do this to us, you can't do that,

we're not allowing this."

While everybody was trashing the place I was trashing Hugo

because I didn't care about none of the materials.

All I wanted was to crack his head.

And I really did. Good too.

Henry161, myself, Joe all these guys came with bats, chains,

stickball bats, stuff like that, and they went upside Hugo's head

and a couple of the other guys that stood in the way.

ROCKY 184: Yeah, I feel graffiti lost a lot of its purity

with Hugo, yeah.

People were, you know, saddened and, you know,

everybody just broke away.

NARRATOR: No matter what the writers' experiences were

UGA changed graffiti forever.

It marked the beginning of a multi-million dollar industry

but as some would say, the end of graffiti's innocence.

Remember Kilroy the peripatetic G-I of World War II

who was always there?

Well, he's not here now.

And anyway, he'd never made his mark

where the graffiti experts of today.

That's because he didn't have a spray paint can

and a felt tip pen,

for these are the real villains of the graffiti explosion.

Quick and easy to use and difficult to erase.

REPORTER: It occurred to us to interview

some of these people, those who leave their marks,

but that would be giving them

too much of the recognition they seek.

They have their medium and their medium is perhaps the message,

a callous disregard for society

and a vain attempt to be somebody.

WICKED GARY: Moments like New York magazine are key

because cats were only getting props from other writers

and the people in their neighborhoods

who knew what the deal was.

The minute it came out in the Magazine

it was like media coverage

and that took an awareness to a whole 'nother level

and gave the press that much more juice

and it became a whole 'nother ballgame after that.

The fame and the article and once the newspaper

and television picked it up really hurt the graffiti

because then everybody started doing it and it got out of hand.

Graffiti is a fancy word for an old custom,

writing things on walls.

The thing that really made me crazy

is when they made Turk 182,

the movie, it was like, you know, did the guy just said

"Let's call it Turk 182?" I mean, he had to base it on me,

the name, obviously the movie wasn't based on me."

Three weeks ago he hit the Battery Park,

a week later the super train, now it's everywhere.

GREG 69: I remember the movieTurk 182

and right away I thought of Taki,

you know. And I hadn't seen Taki in years

but right away I went right to Taki.

TAKI 183: WhenTurk 182

came out everybody said, "They're using your name."

I want to talk to you, Turk.

Because it was a subliminal thing.

People were reading Turk 182 but they were seeing Taki183.

I called up Taki when the movie Turk 182came out

and I asked him, "Did you consult

or did you get any money on it or something?"

He goes, "No" and I go "Oh, okay, whatever,"

we just laughed about it.

NARRATOR: Although Taki could laugh

at a Hollywood movie stealing his name

and inadvertently bringing him even more fame,

not everyone else was willing to take the commercialization

of graffiti so lightly.

The graffiti changed once that dollar figure came in,

Joffrey Ballet and the first painting were sold.

It took the purity of what we were doing

out of it 'cause there was no value,

there was-- It was priceless.

It was like "Mona Lisa",

you know, this was our worth,

this was from our hearts, this was our souls.

This is the life we were living,

the hardship that I just shared with you guys.

CHILD: I think if they stop placing names in the newspapers

maybe they would stop doing it.

REPORTER: And then maybe even we shouldn't be here.

No, like, ya'll throw-- When they spray their name

they want it to be shown on the newspaper,

but ya'll show it and they get what they want.

But if ya'll stop,

if ya'll won't show it on the papers no more

they won't do it, 'cause they know it ain't gonna get around.

NARRATOR: Although we'll never know

if Philadelphia or New York started graffiti,

it should come as no surprise that they both experienced

the bittersweet end of wall writing's innocence,

the ideas that appealed to the first generation of writers

to start writing in the first place would ironically

be the same ideas to sway the wall writers

as their opinions toward graffiti began to shift.

TAKI 183: See, by 1972 I had stopped writing.

It just-- There was nothing else to do.

I was a writer of convenience.

If I was there and it was easy I would do it.

But it was never important to compete.

You know, I didn't want to start hanging off bridges

and going into train yards

just like I never considered myself an artist,

at some point,

the guys that were doing it, they have such fancy stuff

and they're switching nozzles on cans to get different effects.

And that was-- That was like, over my head.

LAZ ZAR: The fact that graffiti has become

a multi-million dollar industry,

to me, is absolutely insane.

The commercialization of anything and everything

is a particularly American phenomenon

so I'm not surprised about it.

There is nothing that America as a country hasn't commercialized

and seeing as that I never made a dime

selling any canvas to anyone

I have always been a tagger, wall writer, and agree

that if you want to do this kind of stuff,

I wouldn't say break the law,

but if you want to throw something up on a wall

and appreciate it

for what it does to that wall, that's the essence of it.

You're not tailoring what you do to satisfy a specific audience

that's external to yourself.

What we did as kids had nothing to do

with anyone outside of our world.

We were just being us,

which ended up starting this movement,

which is now a culture.

Graffiti, to us, wasn't just writing your name,

graffiti was an expression of how you dressed,

how you danced

and how you reacted with the youth around you.

If you think about this art form from 1969 to 1972,

all the major innovations happened in those few years

'cause it went from simple marker hits

to massive spray paint extravaganzas.

JEC#*: It all adds up to one big story.

We were just--

Didn't have anything to do at the time, you know?

Sports, if you weren't good at it,

if you weren't involved in a gang,

you didn't have anything else to do.

"Let's go write on a subway."

And I look at it today all these years later

and I'm fascinated by new names

and I wonder if the reasons for why kids

did their writing is still the same.

If I were a betting person I would bet that it is.

So to all you people that

had to paint your walls over and over and over

dot, dot, dot, dot, etc...

I-- I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart.

TAKI 183: Graffiti is attractive to kids

'cause it's a cheap way to get notoriety.

If you're not a great athlete,

you're not a great scholar, you can always be a great writer.

You know, you walk into a places and say,

"Well, that's the guy that scores the most baskets

and that's the guy that writes a lot."

COWYBOY: Back then these were

the celebrities because they were all over.

Everybody knew them. Even if you didn't know them personally,

you knew the name.

JOE 182: Yeah, generally it was an addiction of the fame.

Before I got the job.

For me, I just live for today, you know, yesterday's history,

tomorrow's a mystery so I live it to the fullest.

'Cause the worst already happened to me,

the worse you could do is cage me up, put me in jail,

whatever, you're not gonna take away who I am.

You know, and so graffiti was a way of me expressing myself,

putting it out as you see. Mike171 to you with love.

SD Om: And I think the reason why it was never legalized

or never sanctioned was because

they're afraid of freedom, you know, not you, but, you know,

they're afraid of freedom of speech and thought.

They don't really want that to exist.

And there were no leaders

and there was no schools, no institutions.

The people themselves developed it and they got together

and found out that the differences between each other

weren't so different after all.

ROCKY 184: We were family to each other

and we made each other feel important.

We showed each other love. And graffiti did that.

LITTLE PHIL: Phil went his way

and I haven't seen him in 35 years

even though I do see Greg.

Taki we were friends, we grew up

but we didn't communicate afterwards

so it's really neat, I mean, 35 years later

I would have never imagined that

graffiti would bring us all together.

-I'm glad you came out, man. -GREG 69: Yeah.

-TAKI 183: Yeah. -GREG 69: And was full circle.

GREG 69: It was fun, it was a nice time in my life,

I cherish it, they were good friends.

You're getting me to cry, man. I'm a sensitive guy.

I'm glad that at least it spawned artists.

That, to me, I sorta like that.

JAG: And once everybody's doing something,

you're nobody, you know, you know,

even if you say "I was the first one" people are like, "So what?

Somebody's doing it bigger and better

and you're no longer the celebrity."

I had a great time with it.

And I'm proud to say I was an originator.

I was a, you know, the first ones to do it, yeah?

Yeah, I made my mark. And I did something new.

I-- We were crying out to notice me, you know,

Here I am, The Kidd!

Stop the world, let me off, you know,

or "Cool Earl is love,"

you know, "Cornbread, King of the Walls."

I had put my time in, I established my reputation,

I did things that no other body's going to do,

so my time had expired, my time is over, it's over for me.

I've been called a legend in my own time

so you can't get much better than that.

How many guys get called legends?

That's pretty cool I guess you can't get better than that.

REPORTER: What do you think about graffiti?

-WOMAN: What's that? -REPORTER: Writing on the walls.

WOMAN: I think it's pretty over there, you don't like that?

Or to make their parents pay for it.

Every one of them, lock them up, lock them up.

REPORTER: What do you think about the writing on the wall?

-I don't know. No. -REPORTER: You don't know?

REPORTER: You like it, not like it?

I don't like it.

REPORTER: You don't like it? Why don't you like it?

WOMAN: Well, because it doesn't look very nice.

WOMAN: I don't know what they're trying to say.

MAN: As long as there's no profanity around it's all right.

REPORTER: Usually there is no profanity in it,

they're usually names and...

Well, it's bad, yeah you're right, I agree with you

I do think it would be a good thing if they could catch

the culprit or the culprits who are responsible

for desecrating the walls.

WOMAN: I think it's entertaining.

I think they're very pertinent,

they're very catching and they're very truthful

and they're presented in a really good way.

WOMAN: It's conveying a socially constructive message, isn't it?

The others get a message but in order to understand it

you have to understand so much more about the people

who wrote the message.

WOMAN: If it's not channeled,

the kids are just going to continue to do it.

They have a lot of energy.

You know, take this energy potential and put it to use.

MAN: It's already legal

as long as you don't write on my wall,

you know, but it makes sense.

It does make a lotta sense.

I think that's the crux of the problem.

[LAUGHING]

♪ [MUSIC]

My life post-graffiti is

I'm glad I don't carry a marker around

because I'm always tempted to write.

[LAUGHING]