Scratch Tag

The Bus Ride: A Scratch-Tag Beginning

I remember riding the bus to school from Senn Academy. The ride itself was like a meditative process. The engine hummed steady, a low drone that seemed to vibrate through the floor and up into my chest. Outside, the North Side blurred past—people heading to work, storefronts half-awake, the city already alive before the first bell.

As a sophomore in high school, that was my time to think. I didn’t scroll a phone back then. Instead, I studied the bus windows, etched with the scratch tags of kids who wanted to leave proof they existed. Scratch tags—raw, almost primitive, a lower form of graffiti. Not polished murals or wildstyle burners, but jagged marks carved with keys, glass cutters, or anything sharp enough to bite plexiglass.

That was the first time a “DCP” tag ever appeared. Carved into a window on a CTA bus, small and rough, but there it was—the seed of something bigger. DirtyCityPigeon wasn’t a brand yet. It wasn’t a movement, or a symbol. It was just three scratched letters on a vibrating bus window, a private message to myself, marking a place in the world.

The hum of the engine. The blur of the city. The rhythm of wheels on pavement. That was meditation, and that was the beginning.