| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Stanley "Bowery Stan" Moskowitz |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | The Bowery & S&W Tattoo, Amityville · New York |
| Date | 1946 CE |
| Style / Technique | Bowery American traditional, bold-line nautical flash in the Charlie Wagner Chatham Square idiom |
| Connected to | Charlie Wagner, NYC Tattoo Ban, Mildred "Millie" Hull |
Archive Note
Stan Moskowitz did his first tattoo at twelve, on his own father's leg. The year was around 1944, the place was the Bowery, and Billy "Jonesy" Jones stood there and watched it happen. By fourteen Stan was tattooing full-time, working a Lower East Side chair next to his father Willy and his younger brother Walter. He was born into the trade the way other kids are born into a family deli.
The line ran straight back to the top. Willy Moskowitz came off the boat from the Russian Empire in 1918, landed on the Lower East Side, and opened a Bowery barbershop in 1928. He cut hair, gave shaves, and rented the back chair to drifting tattooers. When those men stopped showing up, his good friend Charlie Wagner taught him the work himself. Wagner held the 1904 patent on the vertical-coil machine and ran the Bowery. Willy soon figured out there was more money in tattooing than in haircuts, and became the only barber-tattooer on the street.
Stan grew up inside that world and never sugarcoated it. He called Bowery tattooing "blood money," a brawling trade where drunks tried to get covered for free or just to start a fight. A heavy wooden chair from the 1930s shop did double duty, a place to tattoo a customer and a weapon when one swung first. "You get hit with that chair, that's a strong chair," he said. When a man sucker-punched his father, Stan beat him and threw him in the back "with the rats."
Then 1961 closed the door. Willy died that year, the same year the city banned tattooing after a Coney Island hepatitis B outbreak. Stan and Walter inherited the family flash and the family business and worked underground for a short stretch, alongside Tony D'Annessa, before reading the writing on the wall. By 1962 to 1963 they had crossed into Suffolk County and opened S&W Tattoo in Amityville, widely called the first tattoo shop on Long Island. The brothers worked side by side there for close to four decades.
Stan's work was pure Bowery: bold lines, hard nautical flash, the Wagner Chatham Square idiom he had soaked up as a boy. His signature was a fish run through by a ball-peen hammer, a design that carried both a family story and his taste for small things that could still hit hard. He kept that 1930s chair into old age and hauled it out to conventions, a piece of the old Bowery he would not let go. "We're the last of the Mohicans," he said of himself and Walter.
Walter died in 2007. Stan kept tattooing, taking guest spots in Manhattan once the ban lifted in 1997, sitting for long video interviews, and working with Intenze to build "Bowery Ink," an eight-color pigment set matched to the exact colors he had used on the Bowery in the 1940s and 50s. He died in April 2020 at eighty-seven. The line he carried is one of the longest in American tattooing: Charlie Wagner to Willy to Stan and Walter to Walter's son Marvin, who still runs Bowery Tattoo, with Stan's grandson Nicholas Cutignola named to keep the name going. Four generations, straight off one Bowery barber's chair.