This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

I grew up mainly in Ohio and in the 80s I only knew about New York City from the movies

and all the movies every single one of them had this one establishing shot that said,

audience, we are in New York City. It was a graffiti covered subway. For me, a suburban

kid from Ohio, that graffiti was exciting, but it didn't seem artistic or complicated.

It was just scary, hooliganism. The graffiti was a total mystery to me too.

The user and heppermen grew up in Nebraska also far, far from New York City.

It was like technical or hieroglyphics.

He doing the forward Z, he doing his back in front.

All of these intersecting lines and colors, I mean I knew that they were letters, I just

never knew what they said. New York was another planet and graffiti was its language.

There's only 26 letters to the alphabet, but somehow graffiti writers manipulated and

they make it theirs.

And those trains looked so cool on the outside, but the inside was a whole other story.

You would not have gotten on that subway. The place where filthy, the train smelled, they

were dirty. The floor, you stuck to the floor and you got stuck in the tunnels and the

car spilled up with smoke and I mean it was a scary place to be.

In the 1970s and 80s says this guy David Gunn, the New York City subway was like some kind

of daunting and hellscape, the fire and bloodshed and gangs.

Run! Just get out of here!

And there was definitely a sense that you know this subway was totally controlled by wild

gangs of teenagers and kind of were.

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