| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Michael McCabe |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | The Bowery · Lower Manhattan |
| Date | 1976 CE |
| Style / Technique | NYC oral-history documentation and Bowery American traditional |
| Connected to | Don Ed Hardy, NYC Tattoo Ban, NYC Lifts the Ban |
Archive Note
Michael McCabe came to tattooing through anthropology. In 1976, in his early twenties and studying the subject, he met a heavily tattooed man named Dennis outside the Bowery Hotel in lower Manhattan and asked to hear about his tattoos. That single conversation set the direction of his work. He started following names and addresses, tracing artists and the people who had sat in their chairs, and the project grew over decades.
The trade he was trying to document did not open easily. New York City tattooing was insular, guarded, and competitive, and it had been illegal since 1961. To get the veterans to talk, McCabe took up tattooing himself, working as a practicing tattoo artist in the city through the 1980s. Being a fellow practitioner is what unlocked the door. Artists who would not have spoken to an outside writer shared their stories and their trade knowledge with a man who held a machine for a living.
His method was oral history. Across more than ten years, from the 1980s into the 1990s, McCabe ran voice recorders through interviews with the last of the early-to-mid twentieth century New York scene. He paired the verbatim transcripts with photographs of shops and artists and with reproductions of hand-painted flash sheets, business cards, and the small technical ephemera that usually gets thrown out. He was saving the paper trail as much as the talk.
The result was New York City Tattoo: The Oral History of an Urban Art, published in 1997 by Hardy Marks Publications. Don Ed Hardy, who founded the press, designed and edited the volume. The novelist Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, wrote the introduction, fitting the gritty working-class Bowery to a literary frame. A reissue with expanded material followed in 2013. The timing of the first edition is the point. The book came out in 1997, the same year the city council voted to legalize tattooing again, which made it the bridge between the Bowery past and the legal present.
The ban it documented had run for thirty-six years. In October 1961 the New York City Department of Health outlawed tattooing, officially over a Hepatitis B outbreak. Historians record that the stronger motive was cleaning up the city's image ahead of the 1964 World's Fair. For thirty-six years the work was a misdemeanor, pushed into lofts, backrooms, and locked apartments. McCabe's book holds the people who kept going through that. Thom deVita worked clandestinely from an East 4th Street apartment. Tony Polito ran an underground Crown Heights shop behind bulletproof glass. Charlie Wagner had been the Chatham Square father of the older Bowery trade, and Mildred Hull the first prominent woman tattooer in the city.
McCabe did not stop at one book. He wrote Kustom Japan in 2008 for Hardy Marks, on Japanese custom-car culture, and Tattooing New York City: Style and Continuity in a Changing Art Form for Schiffer. In 2017 he served as a scholar and advisory panel member for the Tattooed New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. Across roughly thirty years of writing and lecturing, that is the shape of his contribution. Not the work on skin, but the record of the scene, captured in the narrow window before the old artists died and the ban they had outlasted came down.