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Documentation of New York City subway graffiti history. Featuring graffiti artist biographies, interviews and artwork.
FAB 5 FREDDY: By the late 1970s, every square inch of practically every subway train in New York City, almost every station, was completely blitzed with graffiti—along with buses, trucks, walls. At this time, I was also following the developing punk and New Wave movements and the excitement around bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols in ...
@149st derives its name from the last existing writer's bench during the New York City subway graffiti movement. 149th Street Grand Concourse, a subway station in the Bronx located on the 2 and 5 lines.
Writers from all over the city congregated at a bench located at the back of the uptown platform. They came to meet, make plans, sign black books and settle disputes. The main activity was watching art on the passing trains (known as benching).
Chalfant’s iconic photographs of graffiti-covered subways helped launch New York City’s graffiti movement of the 1970s-80s into an international phenomenon. This book presents never-before published images and new essays from some of the most celebrated voices of the height of New York subway art.
The bench at 149th St. and Grand Concourse is one spot where graffiti writers would gather and watch trains in the 70's and 80's when graffiti ran on the subway trains in New York.
This passageway has mosaics that say “N.Y. Central Lines” and was completed in 1920 as part of a platform extension project and designed to connect with a never-built 149 Street Super Station that the New York Central Railroad (that crosses over the subway platforms in this area) planned to build.
