Chapter 01

Before the shops: Native New York, sailors and the port

Tattooing in Native New York

Tattooing in this region is far older than the city. In 1710 four diplomats, three Mohawk and one Mahican, sailed from New York to London to ask Queen Anne’s government for help against the French.^[10][13] Their portraits, painted by John Verelst and issued as mezzotints by John Simon, became some of the earliest Western images of Native tattooing. One of the envoys, Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, is shown with bold linear designs across his chest and lower face.^[10][14]

The New-York Historical Society, which owns a set of those prints, also points to a 1706 pictograph in which a Seneca man drew his own serpent and bird tattoos as a personal signature. It is one of the earliest records of its kind in Western accounts.^[10] Tattoos here were identity, status and authorship long before anyone sold them across a counter.

Sailors, protection papers and the waterfront

By the early 1800s, many of the most heavily tattooed people in New York were just passing through. Sailors marked themselves with souvenirs of far-off ports, good-luck charms and designs that could help identify them. Those marks were sometimes written into seamen’s protection certificates, papers American sailors carried to prove citizenship and avoid being forced into Britain’s Royal Navy.^[10] According to the Historical Society, some sailors earned cash on shore by exhibiting their tattooed skin at makeshift sideshows.^[10]

Until the mid-1800s, though, Western tattooing was mostly private: shipmate to shipmate, soldier to soldier, among cellmates and friends. Historian Matt Lodder argues that New York’s contribution was scale. Its harbor took in more passenger ships than every other American port combined, which put enough potential customers in one place for tattooing to become a public, paying trade.^[15]

Chapter 02

Martin Hildebrandt and New York’s first professional tattooer

The first name in New York’s professional tattoo history is Martin Hildebrandt, a German immigrant who learned to tattoo from a fellow sailor while serving in the U.S. Navy in the 1840s.^[15][16] The New York city directory for the year ending May 1859 lists him under one word, “Tattooing,” at 361 Water Street, a rough boarding and drinking house near the East River piers.^[15] Lodder suggests that this modest entry may mark the moment tattooing stepped into open commerce in the Western world.^[15]

Marking the Civil War

During the Civil War, Hildebrandt worked as a traveling tattooer in army camps. Years later he told a New York Times reporter that he had tattooed the names of hundreds of soldiers, and that many of those marks later helped identify men who were killed or wounded.^[17] A popular story says he also crossed the lines to tattoo Confederates, and even charged them less. Michelle Myles of Daredevil Tattoo, who has researched his life in depth, has never found a primary source for it, so treat it as legend.^[17]

“During the war time I never had a moment’s idle time. I must have marked thousands of sailors and soldiers.”

Martin Hildebrandt, interviewed in his Oak Street shop by The New York Times, 1876^[17]

A saloon studio on Oak Street

After the war, Hildebrandt settled on Oak Street. The 1870 directory lists him at 43 Oak Street as a “painter,”^[15] and by 1872, Lodder writes, he was tattooing from a studio inside a drinking saloon.^[15] The Bowery Boys, the New York history podcast, describe the country’s first documented tattoo parlor as a modest upstairs room near the East River docks, close to where the Brooklyn Bridge now stands.^[18] When a Times reporter came looking in 1876, he found a sign reading “Tattooing Done Here” on a stretch of Oak Street between Oliver and James. That block has since disappeared under a housing development built in the 1950s.^[17]

The press treated him as a celebrity. The Sun called his work “beautiful,” and the Times described a design book full of flags, religious scenes, dancers and pin-ups for customers to choose from.^[15] His tools were simple: a bundle of fine needles bound to a handle, dipped in India ink or vermilion and pricked into the skin at an angle by hand.^[17]

Oak Street is often called the first tattoo shop in America. That is a fair shorthand, but the paper trail is thin, and some accounts give different addresses and dates.^[13][16] What is clear is that by the 1870s New York had a recognized, advertised tattoo trade, and Hildebrandt was its best-known practitioner. He died in 1890.^[16]

Nora Hildebrandt, a “first” tattooed lady

In the early 1880s Hildebrandt tattooed Nora Hildebrandt, who went on to exhibit herself as one of America’s first professional “tattooed ladies.”^[10][16] She toured with circuses, including Barnum & Bailey.^[13] She took Martin’s surname and was often presented as his daughter or his wife, but the South Street Seaport Museum’s research finds she was born in England and was “neither married nor related to Martin.”^[19] Her career pointed to where tattooing was heading next: the stage.

Chapter 03

The electric revolution: Edison’s pen and O’Reilly’s 1891 patent

An office gadget with a needle

The machine that changed tattooing started out as office equipment. Thomas Edison developed his electric pen, or autographic copier, in Newark in 1875 and patented it the next year as U.S. Patent 180,857, “Improvement in Autographic Printing,” issued August 8, 1876.^[9][20][21] Its job was duplicating documents. A small electric motor on top of the handheld stylus drove a needle rapidly up and down, so that writing over a sheet of paper punched lines of tiny holes. The perforated sheet then served as a stencil: ink pressed through the holes printed copy after copy.^[9][20] Sold as a kit with a battery and a press, it was a hit at first but was replaced by better copying methods within a few years.^[20] Its reciprocating needle, though, was exactly what a tattooer needed.

Samuel O’Reilly at Chatham Square

Samuel F. O’Reilly was a Connecticut-born tattooer who said he had learned the trade in the Navy.^[4] By the late 1880s he was working in New York, and newspapers of 1888 to 1890 place him at the Chatham Square Museum, a dime museum near the foot of the Bowery, as both tattooer and attraction.^[4] Before his patent he reportedly worked with a modified dental tool.^[22]

On July 16, 1891, O’Reilly applied for a patent on a “tattooing machine”: a hollow handle with a built-in ink reservoir, a needle bar driven by a small electric motor and an adjustable guide that set how deep the needles went.^[3] U.S. Patent 464,801 was granted on December 8, 1891.^[3][21] The link to Edison is direct. O’Reilly took the pen’s motor-driven, reciprocating needle and added what skin needed: an ink reservoir and a depth guide. Like Edison’s pen it was a rotary design, with the spinning motor geared through a lever into the needle’s up-and-down stroke.^[3][22] The Edison Papers at Rutgers describe it as the electric pen with an ink reservoir, and the Smithsonian and the Tattoo Archive both credit it as the first tattoo-machine patent.^[9][23][4]

Speed changed everything. Faster tattooing meant cheaper tattoos, and cheaper tattoos meant more customers. As the New-York Historical Society puts it, the machine made tattoos quicker and less expensive almost overnight, and far easier to find. Parlors spread along the Bowery and into Brooklyn,^[10][13] where sailors could find small shops at Coney Island and around the Brooklyn Navy Yard.^[18] The press treated all this as news. On December 12, 1897, the New York Herald ran an illustrated page headlined “The Tattooing Fad Has Reached New York via London,” even though, as the Bowery Boys point out, professional tattooers had been working in the city for more than thirty years by then.^[24][18]

A patent war on the Bowery

Success brought rivals. O’Reilly held the first patent, but other tattooers were tinkering with machines in the same years, and in 1899 he went to federal court in New York claiming that fellow tattooer Elmer Getchell was infringing his design.^[4] The feud was public enough that the Times covered it in 1900 under the headline “Tattoo Artist at War.”^[4] The 1901 city directory shows the two men a few doors apart, with O’Reilly at 5 Chatham Square and Getchell at No. 11.^[4] After Getchell left the city, O’Reilly moved into No. 11 and worked there until his death in 1909.^[4][22]

Made by Prof. Chas. Wagner

Charlie Wagner’s twin-coil machine

Charlie Wagner patented a design that shaped the modern tattoo machine. He built on Samuel O’Reilly’s machine and in 1904 received his own patent, U.S. Patent 768,413, granted August 23,^[5] for a device with its coils standing upright, in line with the tube, the layout most coil machines still use.^[5] The machines he made and sold helped turn him into one of the best-known tattooers on the Bowery, where he worked for roughly half a century until his death in 1953.^[6][25]

Chapter 04

Chatham Square and the Bowery: a working tattoo district

For the next seventy years, the few blocks where the Bowery meets Chatham Square, today the edge of Chinatown, were the center of American tattooing. Tattooers worked out of storefronts, dime museums and, very often, a rented corner of a barbershop. A clean chair and a steady stream of male customers made the pairing natural. Reviewing the Historical Society’s 2017 exhibition, the Observer named the tattooers who made the area famous, among them Charlie Wagner, Samuel O’Reilly, Bill Jones, Lew the Jew Alberts and “Electric” Elmer Getchell.^[26]

From the 1880s to the 1961 ban, the few blocks where the Bowery runs into Chatham Square worked like a small industry. Tattooers rented corners of barbershops and sat in dime museums. Some performed as attractions themselves. They tattooed sailors, laborers and sideshow performers, built and sold machines, drew and traded the design sheets called flash, and moved from one address to another as rents, partners and luck changed.

A New York Times writer in 1887 called the Bowery “the realm of the dime,” a strip of concert halls, dime museums and cheap meals. By then tattoo shops sat on the same street.^[8]

Small rooms and rented corners

Most of these shops were tiny. The Tattoo Archive notes that old-time tattooers set up “in closet-sized locations in arcades, under stairways, and even in horse-drawn wagons.” A barbershop offered a clean space, male customers and a corner to rent, and Millie Hull’s 16 Bowery shop was one of them.^[7] Bob Wicks described Charlie Wagner’s room at 11 Chatham Square as “a 5×8 corner in a barber shop,” rented from Louis Alteresi, who owned the barbershop and was also a bail bondsman. Wicks later worked in the back room of another barbershop at 9 Chatham Square.^[27]

Number 11 Chatham Square was a training ground for the first American-born generation of tattooers. One account of the period lists Bob Wicks, then 19 and advertised as the country’s youngest tattooer, alongside Charlie Wagner, Joe Van Hart and Adam Ogent as working out of that one shop.^[28] In the 1930s and ’40s the trade lived in barbershops that served day laborers from the area’s cheap hotels. Millie Hull, Apache Harry and Sailor Ralph all worked that way, and at one point nearly every barbershop on the square had a tattooer renting a “bench,” a corner just big enough for a few chairs and a kit.^[28] The elevated trains overhead, running there since the 1920s, kept the street in half-darkness for much of the day.^[28]

The pairing of barber chair and tattoo stool was familiar enough that the painter Reginald Marsh made it the subject of his 1932 canvas Tattoo and Haircut.^[18]

Performers and dime museums

Tattooing on the Bowery grew up alongside the dime museum. As Chapter 03 notes, Samuel O’Reilly worked at the Chatham Square Museum as both tattooer and attraction.^[4] In 1882 Nora Hildebrandt made her debut at Bunnell’s Dime Museum on the Bowery, showing 365 tattoos.^[19] Tattooed performers were also customers. Wagner is credited with tattooing many sideshow attractions, among them Betty Broadbent and Millie Hull.^[6]

Customers and prices

Tattoos here were cheap. A timeline drawn from the Historical Society exhibition puts the typical price after the electric machine arrived at about a nickel.^[13] In McCabe’s oral history, Stanley Moskowitz recalled Wagner still charging 10 and 25 cents in the 1930s, while a shop down the block got a dollar for the same design.^[8][28] Sailors were steady trade: Martin Hildebrandt, the city’s first listed tattooer, was a Navy man who tattooed soldiers in the Civil War.^[2] Our archive photograph of Wagner tattooing a U.S. Navy sailor is in the World War II chapter.

Machines

The district was also a workshop. Chapter 03 tells how O’Reilly’s 1891 patent led to a public court fight with Elmer Getchell. Wagner filed his own “tattooing device” on April 19, 1904, and was granted U.S. Patent 768,413 on August 23, 1904. One of the two witnesses who signed it was Albert M. Kurzman, the man the trade knew as Lew the Jew Alberts.^[5] Wagner sold machines and supplies from 208 Bowery and by mail.^[29]

What changed, in plain terms. O’Reilly’s patent put a motor to work on skin. Wagner’s replaced the motor with the coil-and-armature action of a doorbell, the principle most coil machines still use, with the coils standing upright, in line with the tube.^[5][6][23]

Design sheets and flash

Shops sold from the wall. Flash, the sheets of ready-made designs, let a customer choose from a set of drawings much like a menu, and Lew Alberts is credited with developing and popularizing it.^[10][30] How his flash was sold, traded and copied is told in the next chapter, Flash and Lew the Jew Alberts.

Moving between shops

A typed map in Michael McCabe’s book New York City Tattoo (2026 reissue) plots the square between about 1930 and 1959. It marks Wagner’s shop at 11 Chatham Square; Millie Hull, Phil Duane and Leroy at 15 Bowery, on the block where Sailor Ralph worked and Willie Moskowitz started; and a spot on the Bowery near Canal and Bayard streets where Moskowitz later moved and where his sons Stanley and Walter were the last to tattoo on the Bowery.^[31] The map gives Hull’s address as 15 Bowery, while her business card and the shop-window photograph in our women in New York tattooing chapter both read 16 Bowery.^[31][7]

Tattooers rarely stayed put. They shared rooms, split up, moved a few doors down or left for Brooklyn and New Jersey. The table lists only addresses a source documents, with years where a source gives them. Where a source gives no date, the table says so.

Charlie Wagner

Charlie Wagner tattooed on the Bowery from the 1890s until his death in 1953, and he became the trade’s most quoted figure.^[6] He applied for a patent on an electromagnetic “tattooing device” on April 19, 1904, and U.S. Patent 768,413 was issued that August 23.^[5] Tattoo Archive credits it as the first tattoo machine patent with the coils standing upright, in line with the tube. Most coil machines are still built that way, and the Smithsonian notes that most modern machines run on electromagnetic coils like the ones Wagner pioneered.^[21]

Wagner never worked from just one address: over the years he ran several shops around the Bowery and Chatham Square, some of them at the same time (see the table above). At 11 Chatham Square he worked in O’Reilly’s old space for the rest of his life. He also ran a mail-order supply business that sold his machines to other tattooers.^[6] His real fame came from performers: he is credited with tattooing dozens of sideshow attractions, including Betty Broadbent and Millie Hull.^[6] The work ran in his family, too. A 1914 sideshow photograph shows Stephen Wagner, his back and arms covered and labeled as tattooed by “Prof. Charles Wagner,” promoting the Hagenbeck-Wallace and Ringling Bros. sideshows.^[18] The Bowery Boys identify Stephen as Charlie’s brother and a tattooer in his own right.^[18] He was also known for covering up ex-partners’ names on regretful customers^[13]. Tattoo shops still offer that service today.

His 1904 patent, US 768,413, is the first tattoo-machine patent with the coils upright and in line with the tube.^[5][6] He sold machines to other tattooers by mail, and he tattooed many of the performers who made the Bowery famous, Betty Broadbent and Millie Hull among them.^[6] His room was also a school. Bob Wicks spent five years in his corner at 11 Chatham Square, and the two tattooed each other.^[27] Willie Moskowitz learned the trade from him.^[37]

More Bowery profiles

Willie Moskowitz and his sons, and Millie Hull and the other women of the Bowery, have their own chapters: the Moskowitz family and women in New York tattooing.

Chapter 05

Flash and Lew the Jew Alberts: the designs on the wall

Flash is the sheets of sample tattoo designs that still hang in many studios. The New-York Historical Society credits Lew Alberts with developing and popularizing it.^[10] A hundred years ago, as Don Ed Hardy described it, a customer walked into a shop and was handed “a menu-like set of designs to choose from.” Alberts drew new designs for that menu, and other tattooers hung them in their own shops.^[30]

Sold

The Contemporary Jewish Museum describes Alberts as the first to design printed design sheets and market them to other tattooists.^[40] Tattooers of the period used their business cards to offer machines, pigments and needles, and Alberts also sold his work through ads in publications like the Police Gazette. The Tattoo Archive adds that there is no record of him forming a supply business, and that he may have sold his flash through Wagner’s supply business.^[35]

Traded

The tattooers at the top of the trade stayed in close touch even though they were spread across the country. Alberts’ letters to the Bay Area tattooers “Brooklyn Joe” Lieber and C. J. “Pop” Eddy carry finished flash, and the museum says they show how these artists influenced each other’s styles.^[40] Hardy, whose collection supplied most of the show, called it a tightly knit, secretive community in which Alberts swapped designs and techniques with West Coast tattooers.^[30]

Copied

Alberts’ all-American designs were “later replicated by numerous other tattooers all across the country.”^[30] Copying cut both ways. Bert Grimm told a different origin story: that Alberts caught the Portland tattooer Charlie Western on a drunken spree, bought all his flash and sold the designs in New York as his own. The Tattoo Archive, which reports both versions, says “the true version of this story may never be known.”^[35]

Shaping a style

Because the same sheets hung in shop after shop, they set what an American tattoo looked like. The museum says Alberts’ flash “codified the repertoire of American tattooing, and many are still in use today.”^[40] His subjects included the flag, the bald eagle and cartoon characters, along with designs from Japanese mythology.^[30] That repertoire is what we now call American traditional.

Other New Yorkers shaped the look too. Bob Wicks, billed as “America’s youngest tattooer” in the late 1910s, painted carnival banners at Coney Island and spent time at Wagner’s shop.^[13] His flash mixed patriotic imagery with cartoon figures. Work by Wicks, Ed Smith and the Moskowitz family filled the walls of the 2017 exhibition.^[10]

The style these shops produced became a national language: heavy black outlines, a few bold colors, solid black shading^[13] and stock images like eagles, roses, daggers, ships, hearts and pin-ups.

Chapter 06

The Moskowitz family: from a barbershop basement to Long Island

For three generations the Moskowitz family showed how the trade passed from hand to hand on the Bowery: through barbershops, through teaching family and friends, and finally out of the city when the 1961 ban arrived. Much of what follows comes from Gabrielle Birkner’s 2003 article in the Forward, built on interviews with Walter, Stanley and Marvin Moskowitz.^[37]

Walter and Stanley: yeshiva by day, tattooing by night

By day, Willie’s son Walter studied Torah and Talmud at a yeshiva in Brooklyn; at night he learned tattooing in his father’s shop. “Yeshiva taught me the value of putting in a long day’s work,” he told the Forward. When Willie died in 1961, the Bowery shop passed to Walter and his brother Stanley. “I worked 10 hours a day, six days a week for 50 years,” Walter said. Stanley, who had 25 tattoos, remembered the Bowery parlor as rough: “Never a day went by without a fight.”^[37]

They worked cheaply. NYC Tourism reports that the brothers charged 10 to 25 cents a tattoo and made their own line of colors, Bowery Ink, in the traditional hues.^[13] In McCabe’s oral history, Stanley recalled Wagner still charging 10 and 25 cents in the 1930s.^[8][28] McCabe’s map of Chatham Square marks a spot on the Bowery near Canal and Bayard streets as the last place the brothers tattooed before the ban.^[31]

Step back in time: a Bowery tattoo shop, 1950

Out to Long Island

The ban shut the Bowery shop in 1961, the same year the brothers inherited it. Instead of quitting, they reopened as S & W Tattooing in Amityville, Long Island, and the business did well as tattooing went mainstream, even after the city lifted the ban in 1997. “If it hadn’t been for the Moskowitz brothers, tattooing might have died out altogether,” McCabe told the Forward. “These were the guys that hung in there before tattooing was popular.” The brothers sold S & W in 2000, when they went into semiretirement.^[37] By 2003, Walter was freelancing from Ronkonkoma, and Stanley split his time between Tamarac, Florida, and Bar Harbor, Maine.^[37]

Marvin, the third generation

Walter’s son Marvin joined S & W around 1973 and worked there until the sale. In 2003, at 48, he was tattooing at Pat’s Tattoos in East Northport. “There’s a little celebrity in being a Moskowitz,” he said. “I can go to virtually any tattoo shop in the country and they’ll give me the red-carpet treatment.” He also said he did not want the trade to continue in the family: “The Moskowitz tattoo dynasty will end with me.”^[37]

A Jewish tattoo family

The family worked against a religious prohibition. The Forward quotes Rabbi Joshua Cypess tracing the ban on tattooing to Leviticus 19:28, and notes that after the Holocaust many Jews associated tattoos with the numbers forced on prisoners at Auschwitz. Marvin’s right forearm carries a small red, white and blue Star of David with the words “Never Again.” Walter has only one tattoo, with the names of his sons.^[37]

“I came in contact with every type of personality, from the highest to the lowest — and sometimes the highest was the lowest.”
Walter Moskowitz, to the Forward, 2003^[37]

Chapter 07

Bowery tattoo legends

Nine New York tattooers, most of them from the Bowery and Chatham Square, the center of the trade.

Martin Hildebrandt

Active 1859–1885 · Oak St

A German-born Navy sailor who learned to tattoo at sea in the 1840s. The 1859 city directory lists him under “Tattooing,” and he later worked on Oak Street near Chatham Square, tattooing Civil War soldiers and early dime-museum attractions. He died in 1890.^[16][15][2]

Samuel O’Reilly

Active c. 1875–1909 · Chatham Sq

A Connecticut-born Navy veteran who learned to tattoo at sea and received the first U.S. tattoo-machine patent in 1891, for a machine adapted from Edison’s electric pen. From Chatham Square he sold machines and took rivals to court over copies. He died in 1909.^[3][4]

Charlie Wagner

Active 1890s–1953 · 11 Chatham Sq

The most quoted tattooer of his day, he worked from several shops around the Bowery and Chatham Square, longest at O’Reilly’s old 11 Chatham Square. His 1904 patent set the coils upright, and he tattooed many of the era’s sideshow stars, among them Betty Broadbent and Millie Hull.^{[5][6][25][29]}

Mildred “Millie” Hull

Active 1930s–1947 · 16 Bowery

A former burlesque dancer and tattooed performer whom Wagner tattooed and trained. Around 1939 she opened her Tattoo Emporium inside a barbershop at 16 Bowery, the best-known woman tattooer on the strip.^[7][25]

Lew the Jew Alberts

Active early 1900s–1950s · Bowery

Born Albert Morton Kurzman in New York in 1880, he learned to tattoo in the Army and trained in wallpaper design. His eagles, flags and cartoon designs helped define flash, and tattooers across the country copied them.^[30][10]

“Painless” Jack Tryon

1885–1959 · Chatham Sq

A Michigan-born vaudeville magician, wire walker and fire-eater whom Charlie Wagner and Lew Alberts covered from neck to ankle at Chatham Square. Billed as “The World’s Most Handsomely Tattooed Man,” he became a tattooer himself and later worked seasonally in San Antonio.^[41][43]

“Apache Harry” Loryea

Active 1920s–1940 · 22 Bowery

Born John Harry Loryea Jr. in California, he toured carnivals as a long-haired “tattooed terror” before opening a tiny studio at 22 Bowery in 1935. During the Depression he made much of his living tattooing customers’ Social Security numbers.^[25][38][44]

Willie Moskowitz

Active 1930s–1961 · 12 Bowery

A Russian-born friend and student of Charlie Wagner who tattooed in the basement of a Bowery building with a barbershop upstairs. His sons Stanley and Walter carried the family trade to 52 Bowery and, after the 1961 ban, to Long Island.^[13][37][25]

Mike Colantuono

Active until 1961 · New York City

One of the last of the pre-ban tattooers, photographed at his New York City shop a few days before the 1961 ban. Our print of his “Mike’s Tattooing” stand, with a Woody Woodpecker “Artist Mike” sign, is labeled Coney Island, 1950, though its sign names Long Beach Road, Oceanside.^[45]

Chapter 08

Bowery tattooed ladies

The tattooed women who toured dime museums, circuses and Coney Island, many of them tattooed by Bowery and Chatham Square artists.

Nora Hildebrandt

Toured 1880s–1890s

Often called the first professional tattooed lady in America. She debuted at Bunnell’s Dime Museum in 1882. South Street Seaport Museum research (January 2026) finds she was not Martin Hildebrandt’s wife or relative, though he tattooed her.^[13][10][16]

Irene Woodward

“La Belle Irene” · 1880s

Billed as “the original tattooed lady,” she was a dime-museum star of the 1880s. Her publicity claimed a sailor father had tattooed her as a child out West, a tale later writers doubt; some accounts credit New York tattooers instead.^[10][46]

Lady Viola

Toured 1920s–1970s

Born Ethel Martin in Covington, Kentucky, in 1898, she was tattooed in the 1920s by Frank Graf, who worked the Bowery, Brooklyn and Coney Island. Billed as “the most beautiful tattooed woman in the world,” she wore portraits of Washington, Lincoln and Wilson and was still performing at 73.^[47][48]

Maud Wagner

1877–1961

A Kansas-born circus aerialist and contortionist who learned hand tattooing from her husband, Gus Wagner, and is considered the first known woman tattoo artist in the U.S. She toured the country rather than the Bowery, and she was no relation to Charlie Wagner.^[49][50]

Stella Grassman

1909–1977

Edith “Stella” Grassman toured as a tattooed attraction in the 1920s and later tattooed alongside her husband, Samuel “Deafy” Grassman, who did her bodysuit. She performed with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey in 1938 and at Hubert’s Museum in New York in 1939.^[39][51]

Betty Broadbent

Performed 1920s–1967

Tattooed largely by Charlie Wagner and Joe Van Hart in the late 1920s, she became one of the most photographed tattooed women of the century and entered the 1939 World’s Fair beauty contest.^[52][6]

Trixie Richardson

Tattooer & attraction, 1920s

A flapper-era star tattooed by Charlie Wagner, she toured with Ringling Bros. and became a tattooer herself. In the mid-1920s she worked the New Jersey shore, giving women thousands of small butterflies and forget-me-nots, and she was later listed as a tattoo artist in New Jersey.^[14][53]

Mae Vandermark

Performed 1920s–1930s

A Pennsylvania stenographer who came to New York in 1924, picked up two butterfly tattoos at Coney Island and was persuaded by tattooed performer Victoria James to go professional. Wagner tattooed her, and as “Miss Artorio” she went on to the Ringling show.^[54]

Chapter 09

Women in New York tattooing: on the stage and behind the needle

Women show up in early New York tattooing in two different roles, and the record often blurs them. Some were tattooed performers who earned their living being looked at in dime museums, circuses and sideshows. Others were tattooers and shop owners who did the work. A few did both. This section keeps the roles apart and marks where they overlapped.

Performers

Performers who became tattooers

Working tattooers and owners

Tattoo artist · 19 Bowery · 1930s

Stella Grassman

Edith “Stella” Grassman (1909–1977) worked both sides of the needle. She toured as a tattooed attraction in the 1920s and tattooed professionally alongside her husband, Samuel “Deafy” Grassman. In the 1930s the couple shared a shop at 19 Bowery and advertised it with a two-sided card for the “Original Deafy & Miss Stella.”^[39] They also tattooed on Race Street in Philadelphia and in several other port towns.^[39][51]

Stella kept performing as well, with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey sideshow in 1938 and at Hubert’s Museum in New York in 1939.^[39] Her own bodysuit was Deafy’s work, as the hand lettering “Tattooed by ‘Deafy’” on a photograph of her back records, and it included a dragon and tiger battling across that back.^[51][39]

Watch Millie Hull at work

Beyond the Bowery, and after

Maud Wagner (1877–1961), a touring tattooer and no relation to Charlie Wagner, is widely regarded as the first professional woman tattoo artist in the U.S. She worked the road with her husband, Gus Wagner, rather than in New York.^[19] During the ban the Historical Society singles out the fine artist Ruth Marten, who took up tattooing.^[10] Michelle Myles began tattooing in 1991, when the work was still illegal in the city. In 1997 she co-founded Daredevil Tattoo with Brad Fink.^[56][57]

Hull’s world looks very different from today’s. In New York now, women own studios and lead the field. Michelle Myles, co-owner of Daredevil Tattoo at 141 Division Street on the Lower East Side, where a small in-shop museum displays historic tattoo artifacts^[18], is also one of the leading researchers of the city’s tattoo history.^[17] Women artists, including several at NYC Tattoo Shop, shape the styles people ask for across the city.

Chapter 10

NYC’s Tattoo Business Cards

Long before tattooers posted their work online, a Bowery reputation traveled on paper. Business cards, stamped trade cards, souvenir photographs and mailed price lists did the advertising, and many survive in collections like ours.

“Professor” of tattooing

Self-promotion came with a title. An 1889 Harper’s Weekly engraving of a South Street tattooer was captioned “The professor of tattooing at work.”^[58] Charlie Wagner adopted the honorific and signed his letters “Prof. Chas. Wagner.”^[6] Even a 1914 sideshow photograph of his tattooed brother, Stephen, credited the work to “Prof. Charles Wagner.”^[18]

Addresses on the move

The cards also trace how the trade moved up and down the Bowery. Wagner alone used several Bowery and Chatham Square addresses over the years (see the address table in Chapter 04), and his advertising followed him from shop to shop. Our card from his supply shop gives 208 Bowery, “Opp. Rivington St.,” with the line “Formerly of Bowery & Chatham Sq.,” and the signs in photographs of him at work give his studio at 223½ Bowery.^[34][25] Millie Hull’s stamped card gives 16 Bowery, the address of her Tattoo Emporium.^[7][25] Not every card stayed in Manhattan: Lew Alberts advertised “Electric Tattooing in Six Colors” from 87 Sands St. in Brooklyn, and his card also offered to make black eyes look natural and to remove tattoos. In the 1930s, Deafy and Stella Grassman promoted their shop at 19 Bowery with a two-sided card for the “Original Deafy & Miss Stella.”

Bold claims: Getchell and Brooklyn Blackie

Cards made big promises. Elmer Getchell’s card, from 11 Chatham Square, bills him as “Prof. Elmer E. Getchell” and the “Inventor of the vibrating electric tattooing machine,” and offers machines, designs, stencils, inks and needles by mail. That was his own advertising. The first tattoo-machine patent went to Samuel O’Reilly in 1891,^[3][4] and in 1899 O’Reilly took his onetime partner Getchell to federal court for infringing it.^[4] A 1901 city directory lists Getchell at 11 Chatham Square and O’Reilly at No. 5.^[4]

Half a century later, Coney Island had its own card-carrying star. Brooklyn Blackie, “The Electric Rembrandt,” promised that there was “no finer tattooing done anywhere” from his shop at 3046 Stillwell Avenue. Eddie Funk, who went on to fight the 1961 ban and to help found the National Tattoo Association, started out working for Blackie in 1952.^[59] Blackie’s own story, and the rest of Coney Island’s Tattoo Alley, is told in the Coney Island chapter.

Machines, inks and designs by mail

Cards and letters also sold supplies. Wagner ran a mail-order business in machines and designs. A price list he mailed to the tattooer Fred Marquand in the 1920s was a plain mimeographed inventory with no pictures, while rival suppliers such as Waters and Miller printed thick illustrated catalogs.^[6] In a 1925 letter, Wagner insisted that customers would come to him anyway, because he was “the only one having a U.S. patent tattooing machine.”^[6] He signed it with his card address, 208 Bowery.

Photographs as advertising

Studio portraits worked as ads, too. A studio photograph from Obermüller & Son at 26 Cooper Square, shown in the Chatham Square chapter, poses a heavily tattooed young man beside a sign reading “This tattooing was done by Prof. Chas. Wagner, 223½ Bowery.” Tattooed performers sold souvenir cards of their own. Betty Broadbent’s postcard told buyers that her tattoos were “done for professional reasons only.”^[46]

Chapter 11

World War II: wartime work on the Bowery

World War II filled the Bowery shops with servicemen. A tattoo was a send-off ritual and a badge of service, and for some it was practical identification. When the city’s tattoo ban was later argued in court, the trial judge noted that during the war countless servicemen and civilians had asked to have their blood type or religion tattooed in case other identification was lost.^[1]

The war also created an odd specialty. U.S. military recruiting rules dating back at least to 1909 barred nude tattoos^[60], so after Pearl Harbor, would-be recruits lined up to have their pin-up girls given skirts, bras and swimsuits.^[60] In 1944 Charlie Wagner was hauled into Magistrate’s Court for violating the sanitary code. He argued that he was serving his country, dressing up nude designs so young men could meet Navy standards.^[60][61] He was fined $10 and told to clean up his shop.^[61]

It was a small case, but it showed where the city’s attention was turning: to tattoo-shop sanitation.

Chapter 12

Brooklyn: Sands Street, the Navy Yard and Coney Island’s Tattoo Alley

Brooklyn had two tattoo districts, and each grew up around a crowd. One was Sands Street, the road to the Brooklyn Navy Yard gate, where sailors came ashore. The other was Coney Island, where summer crowds came for the rides and the sideshows. When The New Yorker surveyed the trade in 1925, it sent readers to both.^[62]

Sands Street and the Navy Yard

Sands Street ran through Vinegar Hill and was a main commercial street leading straight to the Navy Yard’s western gate. The Brooklyn Public Library notes that it “housed tattoo parlors, bars, gambling houses, and brothels,” which vexed both city planners and the Navy Yard’s commanders.^[63]

Lew Alberts was one of those tattooers. After his years with Charlie Wagner at Chatham Square he settled at 87 Sands Street. After World War I, Jack Red Cloud, Bill Donnelly and Jim Wilson were all working within a short distance of him, and the competition became too much.^[35] His card, from the Sands Street shop, advertised “Electric Tattooing in Six Colors.” See the card in the business-cards chapter.

The Navy tried to pull sailors away from the street. In the 1920s the Navy Yard commandant closed the Sands Street entrance to discourage sailors from visiting its establishments. In the 1940s much of the area was demolished, and in 1952 the Farragut Houses opened on three city blocks, including those at Navy and Sands streets. The library estimates the project displaced about two hundred businesses and eighteen hundred residences.^[63] By the late 1920s Alberts had moved his shop to his home in Newark.^[35] Our sources do not link that move to the gate closing. Tattooing near the Yard did not end with Alberts: in 1956 Jack Dracula went to work at the Grecco brothers’ shop near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.^[64]

A 1908 Brooklyn Daily Eagle photograph shows the corner of Sands and Navy streets, with wood-frame buildings and signs for “Michaels Bros.” and “Elliott’s Curio Tavern.”^[65]

Coney Island: shows, crowds and shops

The crowds came for the amusement parks. Coney Island already drew some 200,000 visitors on a summer Sunday in the 1890s.^[28] George C. Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park in 1897, Luna Park followed in 1903 and Dreamland in 1904. Dreamland was said to burn more than a million light bulbs on an ordinary night, with a glow said to be visible fifty miles out to sea.^[28]

At Coney Island, tattooing grew up inside the entertainment business. Bob Wicks painted shooting galleries and show banners there before he started tattooing in 1916 or 1917, at a time when many tattooers worked the island.^[27] Mae Vandermark got her first two butterflies at Coney Island, and the tattooed performer Victoria James talked her into going professional.^[54] From 1953 the old Childs restaurant building at 1208 Surf Avenue held both David Rosen’s Wonderland Circus Sideshow and, the Coney Island Museum says, a parlor run by Coney Island Freddie.^[66] In 2011 Coney Island USA honored Eddie Funk, noting that he had tattooed in the building that now houses its sideshow theater.^[67]

By the 1950s so many shops crowded Stillwell Avenue that locals called the strip Tattoo Alley, and the names over the doors were as loud as the rides: Brooklyn Blackie, Coney Island Freddie, Crazy Eddie Funk, One-Eyed Max Peltz.^[69]

In 1961, in the weeks before the ban took effect on November 1, Irving Herzberg photographed the strip’s storefronts: Brooklyn Blackie Tattooing, Freddie’s Tattooing at 3007 Stillwell Avenue, Eddie’s Tattoo Artist at 1208 Surf Avenue and Grecco Bros. at 3057 Surf Avenue.^{[70][71][72][73]} His prints are now at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Center for Brooklyn History.^[71][73]

A typed map of Coney Island’s tattoo shops in the 1940s and ’50s, from Michael McCabe’s book New York City Tattoo, puts the names on the ground. It places Brooklyn Blackie on Stillwell Avenue near the Bowery walkway, along with the Grecco Brothers and Coney Island Freddie, dated 1953. It puts Max Peltz (spelled Pelz on the map) and Mikey Colantuono together near Surf Avenue and Nathan’s, and Crazy Eddie, dated 1959, near Surf Avenue and West 8th Street.^[74]

Brooklyn Blackie, “The Electric Rembrandt”

Brooklyn Blackie billed himself as “The Electric Rembrandt,” and his card, shown in the business-cards chapter, puts his shop at 3046 Stillwell Avenue.^[70] One tattoo-history database gives his real name as Emil Jonika, also spelled Jonica.^[75] We have not found a primary record that confirms it. Plenty of Coney Island careers started in his chair. Jack Dracula, later famous for his tattooed face, wandered into Blackie’s shop on impulse in 1954 and came out with his first tattoo, a hinge on the inside of his right elbow.^[64] Eddie Funk began tattooing in Coney Island in 1952 with Blackie’s help.^[59][76] Funk later remembered Blackie shrugging off the police: the shop expected to be raided three or four times a year.^[77]

Accounts of Blackie’s last years don’t agree. The same database says he stepped away shortly before the 1961 ban, and a recent history of the underground years says he retired and moved upstate.^[75][78] Yet Herzberg photographed Brooklyn Blackie Tattooing on Stillwell Avenue in 1961, with a note on the back dating it to before the November 1 closing, so the shop at least still stood that fall.^[70] The database also credits Blackie with starting Dracula’s full-body suit, while Dracula’s own account mentions only that first hinge and says he had about 30 tattoos within a year.^[75][64]

Jack Dracula, “the Marked Man”

Martin Semnack grew up in Brooklyn and became known as Jack Dracula. He started collecting tattoos in Coney Island in the 1950s, beginning at Brooklyn Blackie’s shop, and soon learned to tattoo himself: he worked at the shop run by Blackie’s brothers, the Grecco brothers, and later for “Flatbush Stan” Farber and for Eddie Funk.^{[64][99][100][101]} Alongside the shop work he exhibited in shows, including the sideshow of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and he ran tattoo shops of his own in Connecticut, New Jersey and Philadelphia.^{[64][102][101]} Diane Arbus photographed him in 1961, and her portrait Jack Dracula, the Marked Man, N.Y.C. 1961 is now held by museums including the National Galleries of Scotland and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.^[103][104]

His own account starts at Blackie’s shop: in 1954 he walked in on impulse and came out with a hinge tattooed inside his right elbow. In 1956, at the Grecco brothers’ shop, he joked that he could do a tattoo, passed the test, and went to work there, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.^[64] Farber, Walter Moskowitz’s brother-in-law, ran his shop in Flatbush; see the Moskowitz family.^[99][100] He was best known for his face: an eagle across his forehead, cheeks and chin, and a mask around his eyes.^[64]

He worked the sideshows as well as the shops, including Hubert’s Museum in Times Square, where Arbus first photographed him in August 1959.^[64][105] By May 1961 he was tattooing in New London, Connecticut, and Arbus took the train up to photograph him there. She ran his profile in “The Full Circle,” her five-person portfolio in Harper’s Bazaar that November, counting 306 tattoos.^{[105][102][106]} Notes from the Arbus archive link his move to Connecticut to New York City’s ban; the ban itself was adopted that fall and took effect on November 1, 1961 (see the 1961 ban).^[105] New London banned tattooing in 1962 and did not allow it again until 2009.^[107] He went on to shops at 315 Broadway in Camden, N.J., and on Race Street in Philadelphia, and died at a Philadelphia nursing home on January 18, 2011.^[64]

“The Dracula Story” is a folded souvenir pamphlet with six photographs, a sideshow souvenir of the kind sold as a “pitch book.” An auction record for a copy titled “The Jack Dracula Story” dates it to about 1960.^[108]

Coney Island Freddie

Fred Grossman worked as Coney Island Freddie. Herzberg’s 1961 photograph, catalogued by the Brooklyn Public Library, shows Freddie’s Tattooing at 3007 Stillwell Avenue.^[71] Our own print of the storefront shows the signs “Sanitary Tattoo Parlor” and “Modern and Sanitary” and the phone number CO.6-0719. The Coney Island Museum says Freddie also ran a parlor inside 1208 Surf Avenue, the old Childs restaurant building, which from 1953 it shared with David Rosen’s Wonderland Circus Sideshow.^[66] The building is now home to Coney Island USA.^[66] The sources don’t say whether he ran both shops at once or moved from one to the other.

When the ban came, Grossman put his name on the lawsuit against it, Grossman v. Baumgartner (see the legal challenge). What he did next depends on who tells it. The Court of Appeals opinion notes that at the time of the 1963 trial he was working as a laborer.^[11] Eddie Funk remembered Freddie tattooing inside a gated housing complex, where a guard phoned ahead to announce every visitor, and the underground history places him tattooing on Staten Island.^[77][78]

Crazy Eddie Funk, “Coney Island Eddie”

Edward Funk was born in Queens in 1936 and started tattooing in Coney Island in 1952.^[76][77] In 2011 Coney Island USA honored him as “Crazy Philadelphia Eddie (a.k.a. Coney Island Eddie),” noting that he had tattooed in the building that now houses its sideshow theater and had once tattooed Jack Dracula’s face.^[67] Herzberg’s 1961 photograph of Eddie’s Tattoo Artist gives that shop’s address as 1208 Surf Avenue, the same building the Coney Island Museum links to Freddie’s parlor.^[72][66] McCabe’s Coney Island map instead places Crazy Eddie near West 8th Street in 1959, so he may have moved between the two.^[74] Funk joined Grossman as a plaintiff against the ban and went on to open shops in Philadelphia. His supply company dates that move to 1961, right after the ban, while another account places it in the 1970s.^[76][79] Dracula’s face is disputed, too: the Tattoo Archive says he took it to Junior or Jimmy Colantuono to be fixed and that there are “several stories” about who did the work.^[64]

The two men were still in touch nearly twenty years after the ban: our archive has a photograph of Funk and Blackie shaking hands beside a motorcycle around 1980.

The Grecco brothers

Grecco Bros. Tattooing stood at 3057 Surf Avenue. When Herzberg photographed it in 1961, its signs promised “World famous experts” and “Sanitary, guaranteed, no waiting,” beside a handwriting reader offering readings in seven languages.^[73] The brothers also gave Jack Dracula his start as a tattooer. On a slow night in 1956 at their Coney Island shop he joked that he could do a tattoo, passed their test and was soon working at their shop near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.^[64] None of our sources names the brothers individually. One Coney Island memoir guessed that a Grecco was Brooklyn Blackie’s brother, but a reader who said she was married to Blackie’s son replied that he had no such brother.^[80]

One-Eyed Max Peltz

Max Peltz is remembered mostly by other tattooers. The Coney Island History Project’s oral history lists “One Eyed Max Peltz” among the characters of Tattoo Alley,^[69] and Eddie Funk named him with Brooklyn Blackie and Jack Redcloud as the men who came before him.^[77] When Coney Island USA held its 2011 tattoo festival, Carlo of Studio Enigma was booked to share memories of him as a tattoo pioneer.^[67] McCabe’s map spells his name Pelz and places him with Mikey Colantuono near Surf Avenue and Nathan’s.^[74] We have not found dates or an address for his shop.

Mike Colantuono

Mike Colantuono is the least documented tattooer in this chapter. Daredevil Tattoo’s NYC Tattoo History collection holds photographs of his New York City shop taken a few days before the 1961 ban.^[45] The Colantuono name runs through Coney Island tattooing: Junior and Jimmy Colantuono were among those Jack Dracula turned to for his face, though we haven’t found a source that says how they were related to Mike.^[64] Our archive print is labeled “Mike Colontuano, Coney Island 1950.” The sign over the booth, however, names Long Beach Road in Oceanside, in Nassau County, so the photo may show a Long Island stand rather than Coney Island. Bruce Davidson did photograph a “Mike’s Tattoo Shop” in Coney Island in 1959, but the auction record doesn’t name its owner.^[81] McCabe’s Coney Island map does put “Mikey Colantuono” on Surf Avenue near Nathan’s, which ties him to Coney Island,^[74] but it doesn’t date this photograph. Until a directory listing or another dated record turns up, we’re leaving the location of this photo open.

Chapter 13

The 1961 ban: “unlawful for any person to tattoo a human being”

From regulation to prohibition

Early in 1959, disease investigators at the city Health Department started to connect unsterile tattooing with serum hepatitis, the bloodborne infection now called hepatitis B.^[1] Officials testified that several cases that year, including one death, had been traced to tattooing.^[11] That March the Board of Health adopted sanitary rules for tattoo parlors that required sterilized instruments and dyes.^[1]

In 1961 the bureau reported a rise in cases it blamed on tattoo parlors. At a September 5 board meeting, Assistant Commissioner Jerome Trichter said tattooing “served no useful purpose” and proposed banning it.^[1] The minutes show that he also conceded that one of the city’s tattooers was doing a good job of sterilizing his needles.^[1] After an October hearing attended by eight tattoo operators, the board rewrote Health Code section 181.15.^[1] The New York Times reported that the eight parlors were ordered shut by November 1, 1961.^[82]

“It shall be unlawful for any person to tattoo a human being.”

New York City Health Code §181.15, 1961. The only exception was tattooing for medical purposes by a licensed physician.^[1][11]

The rule was aimed at the act, not at anyone’s skin. As the Court of Appeals quoted it, section 181.15 made it “unlawful for any person to tattoo a human being, except … for medical purposes by [one] licensed … to practice medicine or osteopathy.” Doing a tattoo became illegal; having one did not, and New Yorkers who already had tattoos were untouched by it.^[11]

The ban did not go unchallenged. Two Coney Island tattooers took it to court, and the next chapter follows Grossman v. Baumgartner from the 1963 trial to the 1966 ruling, along with later theories about why the city acted.

Chapter 14

The legal challenge: Grossman v. Baumgartner, 1961–1966

Two Coney Island tattooers took the city to court over the ban, and for a while they won. The case turned on three questions that still shape how cities treat risky trades: whether a health board could end people’s livelihoods, how much the courts should defer to public-health officials, and whether a danger that could be regulated could also be prohibited.

Who sued

Fred Grossman (Coney Island Freddie) and Edward Funk had each tattooed in Coney Island for years before the ban took effect.^[1][11] Grossman testified that he had run his parlor “six days a week, all year round, from noon to midnight,” following the Board of Health’s rules until the new section forced him out of business. He said he used a sterilizer and sterilized his dyes in pyrex baby bottles. He also admitted that he wore no gloves and that tattooing sometimes drew blood. At the time of the trial, Grossman was working as a laborer and Funk as a roofer.^[11]

1. March 1959: regulationThe Board of Health adopted a section 181.15 titled “Tattooing Establishments,” requiring sterilized dyes and instruments and clean, sanitary procedures.^[1]
2. September 5 and October 2, 1961: prohibitionAt the September meeting Assistant Commissioner Jerome Trichter called tattooing something that “served no useful purpose” and proposed banning it.^[1] After an October hearing with eight tattoo operators present, the board repealed the old section and adopted the ban on October 2. It took effect in November.^[1]
3. June 28, 1963: the tattooists winAt Special Term, Justice Jacob Markowitz held the new section 181.15 “unconstitutional and void” and granted an injunction. Grossman v. Baumgartner, 40 Misc. 2d 221, 242 N.Y.S.2d 910.^[1]
4. December 1, 1964: reversedThe Appellate Division reversed “on the law and the facts” and entered judgment for the city. Justice Aron Steuer wrote the opinion, and Justice Rabin dissented. 22 A.D.2d 100, 254 N.Y.S.2d 335.^[83]
5. June 2, 1966: the ban upheldThe Court of Appeals affirmed in an opinion by Judge Stanley Fuld, joined by Chief Judge Desmond and four other judges. Judge Van Voorhis dissented “for the reasons stated in the opinion at Special Term.” 17 N.Y.2d 345.^[11]

Regulation or prohibition?

Justice Markowitz’s decision is the tattooists’ case. He found the record “strikingly barren” of any claim that tattooing done under sterile conditions was dangerous. He noted that the department had abandoned its own rules without ever enforcing them by fine or penalty, and he called that “boot strapping.” The ban, he wrote, “punishes innocent and guilty alike,” and “prohibition of an activity should not be upheld where regulation of it would serve the same public good.” He closed with a line about livelihoods: “the rights of all of us are only as secure as those of the most humble and lowly among us.”^[1]

The higher courts answered with deference. The Appellate Division held that “there is no constitutional prohibition against banning a practice that is harmful or injurious,” saw no real distinction “between regulation and prohibition,” and said the choice of method belonged to the lawmakers. Even if it were open to review, the court added, prohibition was “the only feasible one,” because sanitary rules adopted in 1959 had not lowered the infection rate.^[83] The Court of Appeals found “compelling medical necessity.” It held the rule valid “notwithstanding that it will occasion the discontinuance of an existing business,” and it upheld the board’s power under section 558 of the City Charter.^[11]

Three kinds of evidence

Chapter 15

Going underground: how tattooing worked, 1961–1997

Leaving town

The ban closed every legal parlor in the city, but it didn’t stop tattooing. Some tattooers moved just over the line to Mount Vernon in Westchester or out to Long Island.^[84] Walter and Stanley Moskowitz reopened as S&W Tattooing in Amityville, Long Island.^[37] Michael McCabe, a tattooer who wrote an oral history of the city’s tattooing (New York City Tattoo, 1997), later argued that the craft could easily have vanished without the Moskowitz brothers.^[37]

Kitchen-table studios

Inside the city, tattooing became a word-of-mouth business run out of apartments. The Times has described just eight or so artists working from living rooms and kitchen tables in corners of the city like the Lower East Side.^[87] Panaite has described those studios as safe spaces with strict house rules, where cops, businessmen and even rival bikers sat side by side.^[84] Photos of Thom deVita’s and Mike Bakaty’s home studios hung in the 2017 exhibition.^[10] It also showed flash designed to vanish during a raid, like a 1962 window shade painted with designs from Tony D’Annessa’s shop on West 48th Street that could be rolled up out of sight.^[14][13]

Thom deVita worked on East Fourth Street between Avenues C and D. Photographer John Wyatt documented his studio at No. 326 in 1976.^[88][13] Lower East Side documentarian Clayton Patterson recalled clients ranging from neighborhood guys and Chinatown gang members to Sanitation workers coming off or going on shift, and said Ed Hardy admired and supported deVita’s work.^[88] When deVita died in 2018 at 85, the Times headline credited him with revolutionizing the art of tattooing.^[87]

Ed Hardy himself told Gothamist that he once set up for a couple of weeks in an apartment by Washington Square Park during the ban.^[84]

Case study: Fineline, from a family loft to a storefront

Fineline Tattoo dates itself to 1976. “Whether it was underground or on the street, we’ve been a presence in this neighborhood, tattooing, since 1976,” the shop’s owner, Mehai Bakaty, told WNYC on its 40th anniversary in 2016. For 21 years before tattooing was legal again, his father, Mike Bakaty, tattooed New Yorkers from a loft in the family’s apartment.^[89] The Times places that home at 295 Bowery, the building once known as McGurk’s Suicide Hall.^[90] The Historical Society counts Mike Bakaty among the fine artists who took up tattooing during the ban.^[10]

Word of mouth. There was no sign. “It was a word of mouth operation. You had to call a number,” WNYC reported. The risk. “Every time phone rang, he said his heart dropped a little,” Mehai said of his father. “He was nervous. Especially for the first couple years.” Not a choice. His father had not wanted to work underground: “It was just the climate of the city at the time.”^[89]

The storefront. Mike Bakaty got a storefront three weeks before the law legalizing tattooing took effect in 1997.^[89] That storefront was at First Avenue and First Street, and the Times later called it one of the oldest continuously running shops in the city.^[90] WNYC calls it the oldest tattoo parlor in Manhattan.^[90][89] Mike Bakaty died in 2014, and the shop keeps a shrine to him.^[89]

Michelle Myles

Michelle Myles is one of the few New York tattooers working today who learned the trade during the ban. She moved to the city from Ferguson, Missouri, in 1989 to study art at Parsons, and she began tattooing in 1991.^[56][57] Because the work was illegal in New York, there was no proper apprenticeship to be had. In her words, she “kind of fumbled along” until she got a job at a busy legal street shop in New Jersey, which is where she really learned.^[91] In 1993 she rented an apartment on Ludlow Street as a studio with no sign out front, on a block people warned her was the worst for heroin in the city. Later she tattooed from a loft above 158 Ludlow, working in the front and living in the back.^[56] She attended the Tattoo Society of New York meetings Clayton Patterson ran at CBGB, and she remembers the ban as barely enforced: she says she tattooed cops “all the time.”^[56][85]

When the city legalized tattooing in 1997, Myles called Brad Fink, a friend from high school who had been tattooing since 1986 in St. Louis. About a week later they signed a lease, and Daredevil Tattoo opened at 174 Ludlow Street.^[56][57] Rising rents later pushed the shop to 141 Division Street, at the edge of Chinatown, in 2013.^[56] Fink’s collection of antique flash, machines and photographs became the shop’s free museum of New York tattoo history, and the nonprofit NYC Tattoo History was set up to share it with the public.^[57][92] Myles researches the Bowery’s first tattooers, wrote the text of the 2016 Chatham Square historical marker, leads tattoo-history walking tours of the Bowery as a licensed city guide, and curated the City Reliquary exhibition Liberty the Tattooed Lady. She published its catalog as a book in 2024.^{[56][25][92][93]}

Artists and agitators

The ban years also pulled tattooing toward the art world. The Historical Society highlights fine artists who took up tattooing during the ban, including Ruth Marten, Mike Bakaty and Spider Webb.^[10] Panaite says that by the 1970s there was a clear break between traditional New York tattooing and what he called “new visions,” as academically trained artists drew on tattoo traditions from Japan, Polynesia and beyond.^[84]

Spider Webb, born Joseph O’Sullivan in the Bronx in 1944, got his first tattoo in Coney Island at 14 and later studied at the School of Visual Arts.^[94] In 1976 he tattooed a woman in front of the Museum of Modern Art, deliberately getting himself charged so he could test the ban in court.^[95] He lost the case^[95], but the stunt turned the ban into a public argument.

Chapter 16

1997: tattooing becomes legal again

By the 1990s, the ban was a law in name only. Shops operated anyway, with no regulation at all, and officials estimated that about 50 tattooists had been working illegally in the city in the previous few years.^[61] Councilmember Kathryn Freed introduced Intro 832-A, the Tattoo Regulation Act, to replace prohibition with licensing.^[86] On February 25, 1997, the City Council passed it 38 to 7.^[12][61]

At a public hearing on the bill that March, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani pointed out that shops were already operating without any oversight.^[86] The bill directed the Health Commissioner to license individual tattoo artists and set rules for universal precautions.^[86] The Health Department dates legal tattooing in New York City to mid-1997.^[96]

“There has not been a single documented case of Hepatitis B in New York City transmitted by tattooing in almost 40 years since the ban was enacted.”

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, public hearing on Intro 832-A, March 12, 1997^[86]

What the law requires today

Today, anyone who tattoos in New York City needs a Tattoo Artist License from the Health Department. Applicants must be at least 18, complete the department’s three-hour Infection Control Course for Tattoo Artists and pass a written exam.^[97] New York State law also bars tattooing anyone under 18, and parental consent does not change that.^[96] In effect, the city ended up where the 1963 trial judge said it should have started, with training, sterilization and licensing instead of a ban.

Chapter 17

The modern scene, back where it started

Legalization set off a boom. The first annual New York City Tattoo Convention was held in 1998 at the Roseland Ballroom.^[13][98] By late 2016 the New-York Historical Society counted more than 270 studios across the five boroughs.^[10] In 2017 its exhibition Tattooed New York (February 3 to April 30) brought more than 250 objects, from the 1710 mezzotints to Edison’s pen and Bowery flash, into a museum on Central Park West, with live tattooing in the galleries.^[10][13]

The history has become part of the craft. Daredevil Tattoo’s Michelle Myles has done some of the deepest archival research on Martin Hildebrandt^[17], and Daredevil’s Brad Fink lent Edison’s electric pen and the Ace Harlyn painting of Wagner and Hull to the 2017 show.^[14]

Chinatown, Canal Street and the old tattoo district

Geographically, New York tattooing has come full circle. Chatham Square, once home to O’Reilly’s and Wagner’s shops and the Moskowitz family’s basement parlor, now sits at the edge of Chinatown, one block from 141 Canal St. Hildebrandt’s lost block of Oak Street was only a few minutes’ walk beyond that. NYC Tattoo Shop is one of the studios working in this neighborhood today, in styles ranging from the traditional American flash that Bowery tattooers would recognize to fine line, black and grey, realism and hand poke.

Chapter 18

Styles and techniques with New York roots

New York didn’t invent tattooing, but it shaped a good part of how tattoos are made, sold and seen today. Here’s what traces back to the city’s shops.