Modern graffiti rode New York subways before going global
Writing on walls is ancient—from Egyptian and Greek scratches to Rome—but modern graffiti style bloomed in New York City’s subways and Philadelphia in the early 1970s before spreading worldwide. Tags came first, with names like TAKI 183 and Cornbread; throw-ups and train pieces followed until the metro painted over the cars.
The Italian graffiato means “scratched,” from Greek graphein, “to write.” Astypalaia holds the oldest known written graffito around 500 BC. Safaitic Arabic survives almost only as desert rock inscriptions spanning roughly 100 BC through the 300s AD. Sigiriya’s mirror wall in Sri Lanka gathered over 1,800 tourist comments between the sixth and eighteenth centuries. Renaissance painters even scratched names inside Nero’s Domus Aurea before launching grottesche decoration.
Early modern writers called the practice “writing”; Norman Mailer’s 1974 essay The Faith of Graffiti helped fix the word “graffiti.” Advocates clashed with officials such as Mayor Ed Koch, who treated it as blight. Style Wars in the 1980s filmed Skeme, DONDI, MinOne, and ZEPHYR inside hip-hop culture. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 carried the look to Paris and London on the 1983 New York City Rap Tour. In Paris, Blek le Rat’s early-1980s rat stencils sped figurative images onto walls—a method Banksy later refined. Lord Byron left his name on a Temple of Poseidon column at Sounion, and French soldiers of the 1790s carved monuments during the Egyptian campaign—tourist marks in a long continuum.
Commerce followed: IBM’s 2001 “Peace, Love, and Linux” sidewalk campaign cost the company $120,000 in damages and cleanup across Chicago and San Francisco. Sony’s 2005 PSP murals paid building owners instead. In Dakar, Docta (Amadou Lamine Ngom) pushed African street art in the early 1990s; FESTIGRAFF now celebrates the scene. Cape Town’s post-apartheid walls, and Munich’s ISART legal wall under Brudermühl bridge from 1996, show how contested paint can become civic conversation—still distinct from permitted murals. Luis Medina’s 1980 Westside, Chicago photographs archived Latino gang walls northwest of Wrigley Field, sometimes after rivals had whitewashed them, and later portraits of members before their own writing.
Source: Graffiti
