A short Greek-American kid named Demetrius who lived on West 183rd Street in the late 1960s was by no means the first teenager to think of writing something in indelible ink on someone else’s property. He never considered himself an artist, and his illicit career of leaving his name and street number on hundreds, maybe thousands, of surfaces throughout the five boroughs of New York City ended after only a couple of years, when he put aside his Magic Marker and went off dutifully to college.

But the sheer ubiquity of his neatly written signature — TAKI 183 — and an article about him in The New York Times in the summer of 1971 combined to transform him into a kind of shadowy folk hero, inspiring hundreds of emulators and, by general agreement among urban historians, making him responsible for starting the modern graffiti movement.