THE STREET WHERE SOMEBODY OR OTHER LIVES

My upbringing was both weird and boring. And one of the weirdnesses was that I’ve ended up with a strangely extensive knowledge of the lyrics of dreary show tunes.  (Stick with me here.)

And some of the lyrics that always confused me as I was growing up were in the song “On The Street Where You Live.”  It’s by Lerner and Lowe, from My Fair Lady though I didn’t know that at the time.  Lyrics run:

I have often walked

Down the street before,

But the pavement always

Stayed beneath my feet before.

All at once am I

Several stories high,

Knowing I'm on the street where you live.

I was baffled – because all the streets I knew consisted of two up, two down terraced houses.  If you were “several stories high” you’d be floating around somewhere up above the rooftops.  What was good about that?  What street DID this woman live on?

In fact the only people I’d ever met who didn’t live in a terraced house were Uncle Oliver and Aunty Kath who lived in this block of flats in Hillsborough,  in Sheffield.  It’s Regent Court, now regarded as a classic of (admittedly rather watered down) modernism.

It was built just before the war, and during the Sheffield Blitz people used to run there to take shelter, because metal plates were supposedly used in its construction, and it was therefore safe.  I only ever had my mother’s word for this.

If you walked a few hundred yards from Regent Court you’d be in Penistone Road, and it says much for the innocence of those times that nobody I knew ever referred to in as Penis-tone Road, which everybody surely would these days.

In Hillsborough there was also Dyke’s Hall Road, though as far as I knew there was no dyke.  And for that matter there was Swamp Walk, again with no evidence of a swamp. 

But I suppose it’s in the nature of being a kid that you accept whatever’s in front of you, and I walked those streets without much surprise or curiosity about the names.  Well, times and sensibilities change.

The fact is – and I admit this is not a very serious psychogeographic reason for walking anywhere – I find there is a certain thrill that comes from walking along a street with a cool or odd or curious name, even if the street itself is fairly ordinary.

I can hardly tell you how much I enjoyed walking along Tinderbox Alley in Mortlake:

And in Lewisham, there's the very wonderful-sounding Fossil Road – it did no harm that the street sign itself looked a bit fossilized.

Walking anywhere in Guadalajara was pretty interesting, but things perked up even more when I got to walk along Cometa, Astros, Atmosfera, Nebulosa:

And right now this is my current favorite – Uranium Avenue, in Moab, in Utah:

I did walk along it earlier this year, and it was  a very ordinary street to walk on, no evidence of uranium, running between a supermarket and a tourist information center, but even so wouldn’t it be great to be able to say this was the street where you lived? 
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Oh and just so we don’t forget that this is in fact the Hollywood Walker, here’s Cosmo Street – a very short street that runs south off of Hollywood Boulevard. I’d lived here for years and walked along Hollywood Boulevard scores of times before I noticed it.

WALKING AND SNEAKING

For a little while now I’ve had that song “Sneakin’ Sally through the Alley” stuck in my head, the Robert Palmer version, written by Allen Touissant, though Lee Dorsey did a cracking version as well.  The words run:

Sneakin' Sally through the alley

Trying to keep her out of sight

Sneakin' Sally through the alley

When up pops the wife

The sentiments, and even some of the words, are borrowed from Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally.

Well, I saw Uncle John with bald head Sally

He saw Aunt Mary comin' and he ducked back in the alley

 But hey all’s fair in war and appropriation, right? I’m pretty sure that sneaking is a form of walking, ducking perhaps less so, and I have in fact been doing a bit of walking in alleys lately.

In San Francisco I went along Jack Kerouac Alley which runs from Columbus Avenue, home of the Beat Museum, City Lights Books, and any number of Italian restaurants, through to Grant Street, which is part of China Town. 

It’s not a long walk, but there’s a surprising amount to look at, some murals of course, some paving stones with lines of poetry and prose set in them. There was also, when I was there, a man sitting in a doorway with a walking frame in front of him.  He was looking at me with suspicion, and a Chinese man was looking at him with even more.  I of course was looking at the two of them thinking, "There's a picture in this."

The alley also contains some rather spectacularly hand-crafted electrical wiring.  Do the city’s health and safety inspectors say to themselves, “Forget it Jake, it’s the edge of Chinatown.”

The day before I went to San Francisco, I’d been in Berkeley, op cit, where I found and walked along Jeronimus Alley which runs between Virginia and Cedar Streets, between 5th and 6th. 

This was a long alley, several times the length of Kerouac, but here was an interesting thing: down at the southern end which has a lot of anonymous industrial fencing and walls, the graffiti crowd had gone nuts (not necessarily in an altogether bad way, though not the greatest):

But up at the northern end, there was this building, this wall, completely graffiti-free.

Now for all I know, it’s perfectly possible that the wall had been painted just the day before I got there, and maybe by now it's covered with tags and slaps, but I like to think not.  I prefer to imagine that some sort of truce has been arrived at, that even the least sophisticated street artists recognize the joys of a color field when they see one.  I know I could be wrong about that.

And I realized I’ve done a fair amount of walking in alleys in my life.  There’s something about them that draws me in.  Part of it, of course, is that they’re usually free of vehicles and traffic, and a lot of the time they’re pretty free of pedestrians too.  There’s something intriguing and not quite reputable about them (hence the sneaking), and if there’s also sometimes a vague hint of danger or threat, well that’s always good for sharpening up the wits of the pedestrian.

Here’s an alley in Hollywood.  If there’s one thing that can that makes an alley even better, it’s a metal building, especially if it’s Quonset style:

And here’s one in my old home town of Sheffield, right in the city center, little considered and little trod, but I had to go down it.

And here’s one in London.  I went out of my way so I could have the pleasure of walking down a street named Tinderbox Alley, this one is in a suburb rather than a city center.  

I can’t really understand why you’d dump a dead tree, roots and all, in a suburban alley, but at least it’s biodegradable.

And here’s one in Ventura, California, and again it’s the name that makes it.  I sometimes wonder if rest and aspiration are opposites, but maybe not.  Sometimes it’s good to rest before you aspire, and sometimes maybe it’s good to take a rest from your aspirations.