High schoolers also marked the dives they completed with their nicknames and initials. These simplistic tags - town names, Led Zeppelin logos, Greek fraternity letters, and crudely drawn pot leaves - are visible in diving videos timestamped before the year 2000. The 1997 Quincy High School graduate also saw “locker room graffiti,” as Curran called it. The graffiti that was under the water before was somehow completely preserved.” “The water levels were always fluctuating when I was a kid," Curran said. Quincy resident Sean Curran, a regular diver in the ’90s, remembered seeing tags dated as far back as 1949. Swimmers started the graffiti trend in the mid-20th century, scaling the granite peaks to scrawl their names high above the pits.Īrchival photos from as early as 1938 show painted rocks. “We knew it was dangerous, but it was almost a rite of passage and it was a good time." “We all swam in the quarries,” said Quincy Quarry and Granite Workers Museum president Al Bina, 79. On hot summer days, it seemed the only escape from the sweltering sun were those swimming holes. Locals who didn’t dive themselves knew people who did. South Shore teens frequented the site during the decades that followed. A 1938 Life Magazine cover was adorned with young men hurling themselves into one of the Quincy quarries. By the 1930s, the defunct mines were popular swimming spots with local youth. Once the pits were abandoned, underground springs kept them flooded with deep water. Quarries in the city began to shutter in the 1920s, and the last of the town’s mines closed in 1963. But the rise of modernism and metal brought the industry’s demise. The site’s stone was used to build the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Chicago’s Palmer House hotel, and D.C.'s Titanic Memorial. Workers set off explosives and then searched the debris for dark granite. The quarries once stood as pillars for the tough-edged town, originally known as “The Granite City.” Founded in the 1820s, the mines fueled the city’s economic rise and a regional building boom. “I would spray paint that and on the label, I would put my initials there: T.T.” “My thing was this really scrappy, quick job of instant noodle cups,” Thai said. She remembers wading through shrubbery and across uneven wooden planks to find the perfect spot for her creations. "They left their name there, their artwork there.” “If you grew up in that area, you just knew that was something people did there - they tagged things,” said Thai, 21, now a Los Angeles-based film producer. Graffiti covers the granite rocks at Quincy Quarries Reservation.
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