Zoo York

Zoo York is a style and social philosophy inspired by the New York City graffiti art subculture of the 1970s. Its name originates from a subway tunnel running underneath the area of the Central Park Zoo. This tunnel, called the Zoo York Tunnel, or simply "Zoo York," was a haunt of very early "old school" graffiti writers who hung out with the hippies around the Central Park Bandshell in the late-1960s and 1970s.

Dubbed "Zoo York" by graffiti pioneer and rapper ALI (Marc Edmonds), founder of the Soul Artists, the subway tunnel provided a "scene" where crews of Manhattan graffiti artists gathered at night. The tunnel itself was a cut-and-cover subway construction project which ripped through Central Park from 1971 to 1973. Extensions of the BMT Broadway Line and IND Sixth Avenue Line, continued north from their former 57th Street – Seventh Avenue (BMT) and 57th Street (IND) terminal stations, merged just south of the City Zoo, then snaked underneath the zoo grounds and out under Fifth Avenue, where they connected to the recently completed 63rd Street Line and bellmouths for the Second Avenue Subway.

During construction, the site was left unguarded at night. Unauthorized entry was discouraged by a tall aluminum-sheathed wall erected around the open ground by the New York City Transit Authority—but this hardly deterred local graffiti writers from boosting one another over it and climbing down into the tunnel below. Down inside the tunnel, there were four subway tracks (uptown and downtown IND and BMT tracks on two levels; downtown tracks on upper level, uptown tracks on lower level) constructed on two levels about 100 feet (30 m) underneath the park, creating something of a subterranean monkey-house environment for invading street kids to climb around and scrawl graffiti on.

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