(1963– )
(1966– )
(1967– )
Members of Tats Cru, graffiti artists
Nicer: In my family, I’m the first generation born here in the United States. That’s how I’m from the Bronx. My family came over from Puerto Rico. My mother came over when she was fourteen in 1950-something. They didn’t speak much English, so when I was learning English, like in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, my mother and other relatives hovered over my homework books. They were learning English as I was learning it. So it was, like, a group session.
We didn’t think we were poor because we had everything we needed right there on the block. You had your friends, you had your family. I also had grandparents who lived two blocks over. And I had great-aunts and great-uncles there too. Doors were never locked. I would go over to a neighbor’s house and open the front door and say, “Is José here?” Every tenement building was like its own little community. A little city within a city.
My mother also went to school to learn English. You know, she always struggled with having that real strong accent. It was very funny. It took me many years to figure out that the Yankees didn’t start with a J.
BG 183: I remember lunch hour when I was in second and third grade. Everybody was fighting. The teacher had no control over the kids. Kids just kicking and girls getting their hair pulled. It was like chaos. During that time you had the era of the karate movies so everyone’s trying to kick, trying to imitate Bruce Lee. It was a real crazy time. But at the same time, you know, I enjoyed it. It was my exercise for the day.
Bio: We all grew up in different areas. I grew up in the Bronx River projects on 174th Street. We’d play mostly in the buildings. We’d go to the top of the elevators and jump from one elevator to the other elevator.
We were just kids. We’re running free in the streets. So we would get creative, and these were our games. As one elevator was passing, we would jump from one to the other.
What you would do is, as soon as the elevator would pass a floor going down, you could see it through this little window on the door. You would jimmy the door and it would automatically stop, once that door was opened. And then you’d be able to get on top. When the door closes it begins to move again. Remember we had nothing but time, so we played in the building.
Nicer: We had to be more creative from having less available to us.
Bio: We’d get off the same way. As the elevator was passing by the door, there’s a little latch you could push, and the door would open from the inside. But there were some of them where you would get shocked. Like if you touched the wrong spot, you’d get like a small shock. Those were part of our games.
I once also fell out of a window, playing in an abandoned building. I was on the second floor when I grabbed a window. The window gave way but the garbage below was piled up so high, when I landed, that’s what saved me. That was just part of the day. Playing in abandoned buildings is what everyone did. I used to come home …
BG 183: With a nail through the sneakers!
Nicer: Yeah. Nail through your sneakers. ’Cause we had either PF Flyers or a pair of Pro-Keds, and the rubber soles would wear out. If you had a hole, you’d put a piece of cardboard in there. But the thing was, everyone always stepped on nails. There were always these abandoned buildings, so you’d step on pieces of wood with nails that were rusted.
Bio: We never went to get any tetanus shots. We had the ghetto treatment. Your mother would put some purple stuff on you, and she’d be like, “You’ll be okay. if you just stop jumping in the buildings.”
Nicer: Or she’d wash it and put alcohol on it.
BG 183: My mom had this remedy from Puerto Rico. After stabbing myself a couple of times with rusty nails, I already knew what to do. My mom said the first thing to do is to take out the blood. Start squeezing the blood out. Then I’d go home and my mom would put garlic on the wound and then a Band-Aid. That was the only remedy she had.
Abandoned buildings were like our playgrounds. You got to remember, this is what it boils down to. You’re born with this creative energy of wanting to play. We used creativity back then as opposed to the kids nowadays. We would find stuff and make things.
Nicer: You’d find a round rock that was smooth enough that you can create a game with it. You get as creative as you can because of the things that are set around. That’s why they were able to invent, like, jumping up on the elevators.
We saw a lot of families displaced during the times when the buildings burned. All of a sudden when the building went they were gone.
BG 183: There was a time that the building I was living in actually started burning. But a lot of people didn’t move out because we still had lights that worked. The only thing, in the winter, you didn’t have oil. There was no landlord to take care of things, so because there were lights you could live there for a while. Just in the wintertime you suffered. My mom would put up the stove every night. We slept in one room because it was much warmer to stay together as one unit. But for me, it was like, “Hey, it’s cold!”
But at night I would see these abandoned buildings burning, burning, burning. That was my entertainment of the night. Then, the next day, you’d hear like five firefighters got hurt and two got killed, but I didn’t know what was really going on. For me, it was like, “Look at this fire.”
Nicer: Probably it was the late seventies, we would be moving a lot. A few years later, I asked my mother, once I became an adult, “Why did we move so much?” She said, “Because after a while once the landlords would disappear and no one was putting heat in the building and there was no one for us to pay rent to, then there was panic in the building.” We had family in the neighborhood and they would be like, listen, come over here and we’ll get you an apartment.
When there weren’t landlords, there was panic. Like, since the landlord stopped coming around to get the rent, that means this building might be next to burn. So let’s prepare ourselves. Let’s get out of here. There was a lot going on, but as kids we didn’t worry. As a parent you always make it safe for your kids, provide the best shelter you can for them.
We lived in the Bronx all our lives, except for probably about eight months. My mother finally got a nice gig in some office downtown, big raise, starting to manage an office. “I’m going to move out of the Bronx and bring my kids to a safer neighborhood. I’m moving to Jamaica, Queens.” So we move out of the Bronx. I’m like, “Out of the Bronx? Are you crazy?! Our grandmother’s here. Our other relatives are here.”
We were going to move to a better neighborhood, where there were trees. It was like what you see on TV, nice little houses with trees. So I finished out that first year in the Queens junior high school, like in seventh grade or something, and six months into living there they break into our apartment. They rob all the money we had for our rent, our bills, like the television. They rob us! I come home from school and I see my door in half, ’cause they kicked our door in. Right after that, around eight months after we got there, we were back on the train moving back to the Bronx. Coming back to where it was safer. It was funny, ’cause I remember going to school in Queens and people were like, “Where you guys from before?”
“Yeah, I grew up in the Bronx.”
“Oh, the Bronx is dangerous.”
You hear all this stuff. Oh, get out of here. And we move to this so-called fancy neighborhood and we get robbed.
In all that traveling on the subway from Queens to the Bronx on weekends to be with our family, and back again from the Bronx to Queens, I started realizing that a lot of stuff was being painted on the trains. My curiosity was piqued. As a kid, I was always interested in art. I was always sketching and drawing and tracing. So all those train rides really opened me up to a lot of stuff that was going on, which started me asking around: “Who’s doing that? How do you do that? Who does this?”
Bio: We all met in art classes when we were in high school. As a kid, I would always try to re-create the Beetle Bailey comics, the Sunday comics. And I was, like, playing with letters. In the fourth grade, a teacher gives us an assignment to do a project with our initials, to create a logo with our initials. I did it and kind of enjoyed that exercise with my letters. From then on, I always had a notebook where I would sketch my name and sketch comics.
BG 183: When I fell into art, I was really young, like four years old. I remember seeing my sister drawing, so I went to my room and started sketching. When she noticed me, I tried to hide it. She saw what I was doing. “It looks good. I like it. Keep it up.” When she said that to me, from then on I just kept drawing. For Christmas, instead of getting a toy, my mom would bring like a painting set or crayon books. So that was my introduction to art. And I just kept on from there. I learned what I could: drawing, finger painting, charcoal, anything that was related to art I got into. The one thing I was never taught in school was graffiti. That was something you had to learn from the outside.
Bio: Once when I was coming from downtown and getting off the subway car, when the doors closed, I saw these huge top-to-bottom cartoon characters on the outside of the train. So I was like, “Whoa! I like this. I want to do that.” I went back to my neighborhood and started asking questions: “I saw this stuff on the train. What was it? Oh, that’s graffiti?” You got to learn. You got to get up. I didn’t know about any of that. When you first start out, you are considered a “toy.” So nobody really deals with a toy. So you hang out with other toys who are maybe a little more than you, or maybe nothing at all. Then you continue, you start learning how to go to the trains, where they laid up at night, the schedules. And then you realize, “All right, I don’t have paint.” So then you got to go stealing paint. And it’s been thirty-one years since.
We would travel to get our paint because in our neighborhoods we were already coming in late in the game. Writers from the seventies, they had already “killed”—what they called “burnt”—all the spots where you could steal paint. “Burnt” means you couldn’t go in and steal. The stuff was either in cages or locked up. So you’d have to travel far. You’d have to go to Queens or Jersey or different areas that weren’t as hip to the graffiti game where they would still leave the spray paint out right on the shelf.
Nicer: Most of that was done in the winter, when we had these huge down jackets. You’d get the bubble jackets from Alexander’s department store. Then you’d set up a system. You’d learn it from other graffiti artists. Asking around.
Bio: Wear a long shirt tucked into your pants and leave an opening so you could then push the cans in.
Nicer: There were so many different ways. But you start getting creative here. Remember, we didn’t come from families that kind of embraced this art form. Or any art form, or had any extra money to buy you supplies. We believed in it and wanted to participate in it so much that we would risk even being incarcerated.
BG 183: And for us, we didn’t even see it as being like shoplifters. It was just part of that culture.
Nicer: That’s what you had to do.
Bio: Obviously paint is expensive. We needed hundreds of cans. So you’d spend the whole day doing that. And hopefully by the end of the day you’d have twenty, thirty cans. Same thing with markers, to draw. We would go to Pearl Paint, which was like one of the biggest contributors to graffiti art.
Nicer: You’d go in and steal the markers, the designer markers.
BG 183: It was like getting out. You had drugs going on. You had the gangs during that time. Everyone was doing their thing. So you became a graffiti artist. People were going to clubs, like hanging out on a Friday, dressing up, going to jams, but we dressed all dirty on Fridays going into the subway. That was our mission. Our thing was subways. We didn’t notice that people didn’t like it. It got our name out there for other people to see it.
Nicer: When you got your name out there you became a ghetto superstar. It’s a very competitive art form, so you’re always trying to outdo what someone else did. We basically did it for the attention of each other. But the way a person takes a tag, it’s a form of calligraphy, but brought into modern times, two or three hundred times forward. It’s a stylized writing and it has a certain movement and certain flow that someone that’s into the art of calligraphy can appreciate. Like even the name we painted and the colors we used, they gave birth to a lot of the culture of design nowadays. It’s kind of like the guideline or introduction to a lot of designs.
The best part since we’re from the Bronx? So the thing was, we would paint this train, a number 6 train in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. And our paintings would roll through the Bronx into Manhattan, all the way through Manhattan and end up in Brooklyn. And then all through Brooklyn graffiti artists there would see it. And all through Manhattan graffiti writers would see it. So, in a way, it was our communication to other graffiti artists, throughout the city. It was like how Indians used to use smoke signals to kind of send a signal to say they were existing. It was our way of having this rolling gallery of our work go to the other boroughs. Then we’d also see what others were doing on their end. It was competitive.
BG 183: That’s why I think that people born and raised in the Bronx come out, you know, being good. Because there’s always a competition going on. That’s why I think we became real good artists after a while. Because of the competition, we wanted to be good.
Nicer: Those creative juices we have are like the eight-year-olds running around playing street games and being creative. That carried into our teenage years where still, though you didn’t have much, the energy came out in music, in fashion, and in what we were painting.
A lot of people see graffiti as a crime, but considering where we come from and what we were around? A lot of friends are sitting in jail right now, doing thirty years, life. A lot of them went on to become armed robbers, murderers, contract killers, stuff like that.
Bio: We were doing graffiti and although it was a crime we didn’t see it as a crime, and it kind of kept us away from what was going on. Like, this guy’s going to rob a bank. I’m going to go steal spray paint to go paint a train.