| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Willie Moskowitz |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | 12 Bowery · New York City |
| Date | 1928 CE |
| Style / Technique | Wagner-era Bowery American traditional, heavy-outline barber-tattooist flash |
| Connected to | Charlie Wagner, Stanley "Bowery Stan" Moskowitz, NYC Tattoo Ban |
Archive Note
William "Willy" Moskowitz, also spelled Willie, was born in the Russian Empire, most likely in the late 1890s, and reached New York City in 1918. He was Yiddish-speaking, part of the Russian-Jewish immigrant cohort that filled the Lower East Side in the 1900s and 1910s. He came to join his own father, recorded as Wolf Moskowitz in Bowery Boogie's 2013 family history and as Lou Moskowitz in genealogical records, who had reached the Lower East Side ahead of him. His exact birth year and his origin town inside the Russian Empire have not surfaced.
By the 1920s, and by 1928 per the family's own Bowery Tattoo shop history, Willie ran a barbershop at 12 Bowery, in the Chatham Square district that Samuel O'Reilly and Charlie Wagner had built into the core of American commercial tattooing. He gave shaves, haircuts, and a well-attested period specialty, black eyes made to look natural, for Bowery clientele who had business reasons to look more or less roughed up than they were. He rented the back of the shop to a rotation of transient tattooists. Two are named in the record, Phil Duane and Al Neville.
The hinge of his life came when those tattooists kept failing to show. Charlie Wagner, described across the sources as Willie's good friend and by then working out of 11 Chatham Square and his 208 Bowery supply factory, taught Willie the trade himself. The teaching is dated to the 1920s and early 1930s across the family account, Carmen Forquer Nyssen's Buzzworthy research, The Forward, and Tablet. By one later account it ran as late as the 1930s, but that framing is the outlier. Willie reached the conclusion many shop owners of the period did, that there was more money in tattooing than in haircuts, and he became, distinctly, the only barber-tattooist on the Bowery.
Willie was almost certainly one of the working Bowery tattooists Albert Parry interviewed during the 1931 to 1932 field research for Tattoo, the canonical pre-war English-language book on the trade, alongside Wagner, Lew Alberts, and Mildred Hull. That he sat with Parry is consistent across the surrounding record. A direct page citation naming Willie in the 1933 book has not been found, so the strong form of the claim stays open.
The shop turned toward tattooing as his sons came up. Stanley, born 1932, made his first tattoo around 1944 on Willie's leg at age twelve, with Billy "Jonesy" Jones watching, and was working full-time by fourteen. Walter, born 1937, was working full-time by sixteen around 1953. The family ran as a three-tattooer father-and-sons shop through the late 1940s and 1950s, and the brothers became known on the Bowery as the Bowery Boys. The canonical chain runs Wagner to Willie to Stan and Walter. Wagner taught Willie and Willie alone in this family. The sons learned from their father.
The family address moved from 12 Bowery to 4 Bowery, beneath the old Chatham Square elevated station per The Forward, and on to 52 Bowery, the address Newsday placed the S and W studio at on October 10, 1961, on the eve of the ban. Willie also took on his son-in-law Stanley "Flatbush Stan" Farber, who started at the 4 Bowery shop in the late 1940s before going out on his own.
Willie Moskowitz died in 1961, the same year the New York City Department of Health imposed its tattoo ban after a Coney Island hepatitis outbreak, closing legal tattooing in the city for thirty-six years. The month and day of his death have not surfaced. His sons inherited the flash, worked briefly underground, and around 1962 to 1963 opened S&W Tattoo in Amityville, carrying the Wagner line out to Long Island, where the family practice has stayed.