Archive Note
The prohibition, put in place under Health Commissioner Leona Baumgartner, collapsed the Bowery commercial tattoo district that had grown around Charlie Wagner and the Moskowitz family and shut down the Coney Island tattoo strip, driving the trade underground in Manhattan and pushing established tattooers out to Long Island and northern New Jersey, where tattooing remained legal. The working trade in the city was kept alive by a small underground cohort across separate neighborhoods, most prominently Tony D'Annessa in Hell's Kitchen, Thom deVita on the Lower East Side, Mike Bakaty at Fineline Tattoo, and Jonathan Shaw in a basement off the Bowery. The ban was upheld in the courts in Grossman v. Baumgartner and survived a First Amendment challenge by Spider Webb, who tattooed publicly outside the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 as a test case and lost in 1978. The city legalized and regulated tattooing in 1997 under the Giuliani administration, replacing the ban with a licensing regime, and the first post-legalization NYC International Tattoo Convention followed at the Roseland Ballroom in May 1998.