On June 13, 2021, I photographed “Uncle Susan is a Wolf” graffiti in Gowanus, Brooklyn. I turned that photograph into an investigative Uncle Susan article on December 29 of the same year. While conducting research in the spirit of a prior project I undertook regarding BLOB Dylan tags, I ascertained that Uncle Susan and Uncle Susan is a Wolf tags have popped up in many places. A reader who read my article tipped me off to an Uncle Susan sighting in Montana.
Prior to the afternoon of March 21, 2026, I had not seen any “Uncle Susan” tags since June 2021 (the Uncle Susan tag I documented in my article had been cleaned up at some point before publication). But that streak, like others, came to an end. I present “UNCLE SUSAN” scribbled on a signpost.
Or to be more precise, the signpost for a Truck Loading Only sign.
I documented this Uncle Susan on Hicks Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. While Carroll Gardens as a whole is a scenic residential neighborhood, its scenic qualities are not apparent on Hicks Street, which was infamously bisected by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (“BQE”) in the first half of the twentieth century. See my article on the Summit Street Bridge, my first and second articles on the Hamilton Avenue Footbridge, and my article on a random Stop/One Way Sign on the other side of Hicks Street looking across to Carroll Gardens for additional context.
Returning to the matter at hand, this “UNCLE SUSAN” differs in several respects from the Uncle Susan I documented in 2021. Setting aside the different canvas, the new Uncle Susan comes to us just as Uncle Susan, without commentary about his, her, or its animalistic nature. One possible reason for this is that Uncle Susan is not alone on the signpost. In my photo, you can see a “JULES” tag under UNCLE SUSAN. I have seen many JULES tags in the area (I suspect he may be a rival of KING BABY), which leads me to believe JULES is local. However, as I noted in my original Uncle Susan article there have been many reported variations of the tag, including the Uncle Susan-only version we see here.
While I am not expert in the area of graffiti letter forensics, there are some obvious differences between the tag I photographed in 2021 and the new one featured in this post. The 2021 tag had a lower-case “e” in “UNCLe” and an ambiguously-sized “us” in “SUSAN.” The new tag appears to clearly be all caps. Given the large number of UNCLE SUSAN sightings and the fact that my two sightings are separated by almost five years, I suspect that the “taggers” behind the two Uncles Susan I have documented are not one-and-the-same.
I doubt much has changed in the field of Uncle Susan research since 2021, so I will refer readers back to my original post for the results of my investigation. But having published a lengthy Uncle Susan essay in the past, I felt obliged to publish a follow-up covering my brand new UNCLE SUSAN sighting.
(For the record: I do not hope to see too many more Uncle Susans or any hard-to-remove tags.)
