No need to advertise. A tribute to Driggs Pizza

Published on: January 28th, 2007 | Last updated: November 6, 2015 | Written by: Bad Guy Joe

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Many years ago I was walking down this subway tunnel under Manhattan on a solo mission and had a good laugh when I came across this ‘page’ by XSOUP. (‘Pages’ in the NYC subways are paragraphs of text painted high on the walls, exclusively done by Revs & his crew (Scope, Nuke, Espo, XSoup, et al)). They all date back between 1994 and 1999.

I was laughing because the page is about the amazing pizza you could find over at Driggs Pizza in Brooklyn. This wasn’t artisan hand crafted yadda yadda foodie pizza; It was just a plain olde awesome NYC style slice, made in a standard pizza oven with killer sauce. Today, pizza like this is a dying breed.

Driggs was a regular pre-mission meal spot for me and my man C. on many an evening spent in NYC’s subway tunnels. It was pasta worthy of being the rocketfuel for our all night train dodging & tunnel photographing ways. The place was owned by this little Italian guy. So far as we could tell, Driggs had been operating out of this plain storefront in Williamsburg since at least the 1980s – making it an increasingly rare holdout against the hipster invasion that transformed the neighborhood from working class slum into a playground for trust fund kids.

Anyway: C. told the owner about this page and he was amazed it existed. I unfortunately never got around to printing the god damned photo and bringing it by though. It was on my to-do list that is 5 miles long in the back of my head, somewhere stuffed behind deleting old contact numbers and printing more books for the 5 people that buy them.

Unfortunately, I can take it off my mental checklist now. Driggs closed down sometime late last year and was replaced by a shitty hipster pizza joint. Rumor is the owner cashed out and moved back to Italy.

All of that said, here’s a few more photos from this tunnel – a tribute to another driggs-powered pasta rock fuel tunnel expedition.

Comments

NOTE: It sometimes takes a short while for comments to be approved - unfortunately there's a lot of spam comments that come in. I absolutely love when y'all share personal stories of friends relatives etc who worked in these places. It really helps capture what these places were like before they closed up shop.

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2 responses to “No need to advertise. A tribute to Driggs Pizza”

1. Phoenix says:

   January 9, 2021 at 10:07 AM

   I’ve been seeing some xsoup fills pop up in bk recently

2. Bad Guy Joe says:

   January 11, 2021 at 9:21 AM

   Yeah he’s been getting out again. Hitting a lot of trash trains too.

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