Demetrius aka TAKI 183 is a New York based Greek-American who lived on West 183rd Street in the late 1960’s. He was by no means the first teenager to think of writing something in permanent 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 or 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 to college. But the sheer ubiquity of his neatly written signature —TAKI 183 — and an article about him in The New York Times in 1971 combined to transform him into a kind of shadowy folk hero, inspiring generations of emulators and, by general agreement among urban historians, making him one of the few responsible for starting what is now known as the modern graffiti movement.