Ever since dog-friendly Park Lafayette opened – two new towers built atop a former green space a block and half away from our building – we have a lot more pups in our neighborhood. Big, small, pedigreed, mutts: they are everywhere now, chasing balls on the beach, sauntering past sidewalk cafés, waiting for their owners outside the market.
It never occurred to me to take their pictures before, but with this installation of “Sidewalk Series” – photos of things I find on City of Milwaukee sidewalks – I’ve begun. In addition to canines, you’ll find fall leaves. Heartwarming graffiti. Heartbreaking graffiti. An intact, left-behind McDonald’s meal. A country-fried steak sandwich still in its wrapper, sitting outside the District 1 headquarters of the Milwaukee Police Department.
There’s Homer Simpson. A page from a very old book written in Spanish. White paint tracked down Brady Street. Hairbands and hot peppers, the two objects I find most often. I wonder why so many bands fall out of hair without their wearers knowing it. The hot peppers – peperoncini and jalapeños mostly – are always strewn about as if someone, upon opening his or her to-go container on the way home from one of the dozens of restaurants on the East Side, was so repulsed as to discard them immediately.
One of the more interesting objects is a clothespin with “Eric Sommer.com” stamped on it. Turns out Eric Sommer is an East Coast musician who’d just played in Milwaukee at The Up and Under on Brady Street and uses the clothespins as business cards.
I have a Tumblr now! It’s where the pictures I don’t use here live.
For more photos of fall leaves on sidewalks, see “In the fog”
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