Having a 250th birthday may be nice for America, but for New York City, a semiquincentennial is old news. Literally. New York City was founded — depending on who you ask — about 360 years ago, more than a century before the United States. In all that time, we’ve been busy.
New York is widely acknowledged as a hub of industry and creativity, as it should be. Yes, this is the land of Wall Street and Ellis Island, of Stonewall and the Statue of Liberty. But alongside the city’s big landmarks are smaller ones, ones you can't necessarily visit, the quirky ideas that emerged from New York's melting pot and spread across the country.
For the next month, we’ll be celebrating the concepts that came from the city (and our beloved neighbor, New Jersey), talking to experts about how the United States would not be what it is without New York City. You’re welcome, America.
Tattooing used to be illegal in New York City, if you can believe it.
The city outlawed the practice in 1961, citing an outbreak of hepatitis B. Some believe it was actually because city officials wanted to “clean up” before the 1964 World’s Fair.
Either way, tattoo artists weren’t having it. They continued to tattoo clients covertly, until the City Council acknowledged it was ridiculous to maintain a ban that was never properly enforced. The council passed a bill in 1997 legalizing and regulating the art of tattooing.
You can’t stop New Yorkers from expressing themselves. Especially not when their craft was popularized here: The first patent for an electric tattoo machine, an early iteration of what artists still use today, was awarded to Bowery tattooer Samuel O’Reilly in 1891. Historical experts also claim the first professional American tattooer worked on the Lower East Side. (This statistic doesn’t account for hand-poked tattooing among indigenous communities, which dates back centuries.)
“I used to tattoo cops all the time. It was no big deal,” longtime New York City artist Michelle Myles said of working during the 36-year ban. She and her business partner Brad Fink co-founded Daredevil Tattoo as soon as the trade was legalized in 1997. Their LES shop doubles as a tattoo museum, as they display old machinery, photos and fading flash sheets in glass cases near the front desk.
Myles, a Midwest native who started getting tattooed as a high schooler in the late 1980s, worked as a tattoo artist in New Jersey before moving to New York City. She recently joined Gothamist for a conversation on the Bowery’s rich history of tattooing.
Michelle Myles: I started tattooing in ’91. It was illegal in New York City, so I worked underground for six years before it was legalized in 1997, which is when we opened up Daredevil. More often than not, people are really shocked to hear that. It just seems like New York City would be the last place to ban tattooing. But honestly, when I started, none of the tattooers I knew wanted it to be legal because, if anything, it kind of kept our competition out. The ban was pretty much unenforced. It was just a health code violation. It wasn’t a criminal offense.
It’s pretty crazy how far back tattooing in New York City goes. The first professional tattooer in the United States worked on the Lower East Side. This man named Martin Hildebrandt, he was actually listed as tattooing in the New York City directory in 1858. So our tattoo history goes back to even before the Civil War.
The first tattoo customers really came out of sailing culture. Martin Hildebrandt was right on the riverfront on the East River. He started tattooing in 1846 when he was serving aboard the S.S. United States, which happened to be the same ship that Herman Melville served on only two years before him. Back then, these sailors were sometimes out to sea for years at a time, and there wasn’t much to do on these ships.
Hildebrandt was a hand-poke tattooer. Then these devices started coming out that used electricity. O’Reilly’s patent specifically was based on Thomas Edison’s [electric] pen, which was patented in 1876. Right after Edison’s patent, there was actually an editorial in a newspaper imploring Edison to invent an electric tattoo machine.
O’Reilly’s patent from what we can tell is pretty much exactly like the Edison patent, but we don’t even know that it worked very well because he never put it into production. There’s only one that I know to exist. O’Reilly got into a fight over his patent. He worked with another tattooer named “Electric” Elmer Getchell and accused him of infringing on his patent, and the two of them ended up in court. There was a headline in the New York Times that said, “Tattoo Artists at War.”
There’s a big tie between circus sideshow culture and tattooing. There used to be these things called dime museums, which were an offshoot of P.T. Barnum's American Museum. Barnum saw that there was this real need for family-friendly entertainment on the Lower East Side because a lot of the first theaters were on the Bowery, but by the mid-1880s they started to have a very unsavory reputation and were associated with drinking and prostitution. So Barnum opened up the American Museum. At its height, it had over 800,000 different things on display [including historical dioramas, outlandish performers and various oddities]. Barnum was able to give it an educational veneer, though we all know he was more interested in making money than anything else. The educational value of some of these things was questionable. Like, “Oh, here’s the Fiji mermaid” [which was a mummified monkey torso with a fish tail attached].
The dime museums were a knockoff of Barnum’s museum. They got into a price war and dropped their price down to a dime. What differentiated these dime museums and Barnum’s museum from a properly endowed museum like the New York Historical Society, which was the oldest museum in New York, was that they had live performers and they called them freak shows. One type of freak was the self-made freak.
You would have contortionists and fire eaters and snake handlers and things like that – and also, tattooed people. Pretty much every self-respecting dime museum would have a tattooed man, a tattooed lady on display as part of their show.
It was another Bowery tattooer, Charlie Wagner, who actually picked up where O’Reilly left off. When O’Reilly passed away in 1909, Charlie Wagner took over his location on the Bowery in Chatham Square. He scored the first patent for the twin coil tattoo machine, which more closely resembles the coil machines that we use today. Wagner was also the first to have a supply company. He was the first one to sell tattoo flash to tattooers. He was hugely influential and had a very long career on the Bowery.
The coil machines, they still look the same. They’re very similar. It’s funny because the Edison pen is more of a rotary machine and now there’s been a return to using rotary machines. Coil machines look like a doorbell, if you’ve ever seen the mechanism of an electromagnetic doorbell. The rotary machine, they’re kind of like pens. They don’t even have to have a cord. They can just be battery charged and they’re also silent.
I still use the same tattoo machines I used when I first started. There are other options now, but I still use coil machines that are more of an older thing at this point.
One thing that’s really cool about New York City in general is, there are still so many remnants of the past. Even though New York is always building on top of itself, there’s still a lot that’s intact. You can be walking by places all the time and not realize what went on there. It’s fun to see what remains and to have an idea of the stories.
