I moved back to my parent’s house a couple years ago after being left in the lurch in Florida by some girl who didn’t know what she wanted. I worked my ass off for a couple months, saved up and moved back to San Francisco. But while I was here, I sweated under the hot summer sun from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM for a subcontractor of Norfolk Southern Railways, weed-whacking small trees to oblivion with metal blades and clearing the “blight” from some of the most depressed neighborhoods my eyes had ever laid eyes on. Damn! Those neighborhoods next to the tracks on the East Side are downright scary…sometimes we had to get out of there at noon – when the local thugs began to run their rounds.
“What you white kids doin’ down here - YOU GONNA GET SHOT!”
- spoken by a child riding by on a BMX in the summer of ‘06 on Manhattan Ave.
I used to clean-up this remote train track valley, which connected with the Rapid Redline, with an industrial sized weed-whacker slung around my neck (I could clear a yard faster than any mower…and knock down 6 foot high trees too!). Took some pics down there last month…the graf art’s seen quite a few winters…its worn and seems forgotten – no longer a hot-spot of activity…just like the city of Cleveland itself, a beautiful lost place.
