A Busy Tuesday

  Tuesday began with a bang ! First I sold several prints that I printed and have ready to go tomorrow. Then I took the regional rail and then the subway to the Melrose Diner and a good but sad conversation with an 82 year old man who moved to Florida ten years ago to live with his daughter. Robert was born in South Philly and spent 72 years of his life in the same Hick Street house. He was disappointed in the rapid change and lack of community pride now in his old neighborhood and was brought to tears just thinking about it. This is the third time in the last couple of months that I've had this kind of conversation at the Melrose.


After breakfast it was time to ride the subway for a couple of hours and while I was able to get a few photos I could feel the tension rise on the platforms and trains. December has always been a month where people are set off for no reason but this year it seems a lot worse. Even with the added police and hired security things are out of control. You would think with the amount of Cheech and Chong pot smoke at every station on the Market Street Line that people would be nice and calm.




I began reading Subways Are For Sleep from 1957. 

" Journalist Edmund Love, Subways Are for Sleeping chronicles the day-to-day lives of a handful of transient New Yorkers that Love met during a year he spent living on the street. “I was caught up in a whirlwind,” Love wrote in the introduction. “When it all ended, I found myself walking the streets. I needed more than just a job. I needed to reassess life … So I drifted.” The books is essentially Love’s personal list of subterranean eccentrics, the mid-twentieth century’s brand of atonal jazz masters, perfume salesmen, and tourism tourists. He dubbed them Twilight People, which he defined as a transient class of city wanderer distinct from the downtrodden lonely types that have come to be associated with the notion of homelessness. Twilight People, as Love described them, were hopeful and intelligent, living “by and large, by their wits … most of them have no regular job; only a few of them have a normal home.”



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