FIRST GRAFFITI

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

As best as anyone can tell, graffiti really began not in New York, but in Philadelphia in the 1960s. It migrated to our urban shores shortly thereafter.

In the late ’60s, teenagers began scrawling on buildings — often writing their name and home street with a magic marker (later to be supplanted by spray paint). The first recognized writer was probably Julio 204, who tagged buildings in Inwood between 1967 and 1969, says Roger Gastman, co-author of “The History of American Graffiti.”

A couple years later, a tagger who went by Taki 183 became the first graffiti artist to go citywide. His name began to appear on buildings, subway trains and schools.

Taki, a Greek kid named Demetrius, had a job delivering cosmetics; as he walked around the city, he often stopped to write his name.“You’re walking around, you have nothing to do — what do you do when you’re sixteen?” Taki says in “The History of American Graffiti.” “You were hanging around, unless you were an altar boy, and we weren’t altar boys.”

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