Sidewalk Stories

“You could start at a path leading nowhere more
fantastic than from your own
front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all.”
– Stephen King

The first sidewalks made their appearance around
2000 BCE in what is now Turkey, 
and there is evidence that both the ancient Greeks and Romans incorporated roadside pedestrian footpaths in their cities.
– Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

The sidewalk as an integral feature of urban life
can be attributed largely to the career of
Georges-Eugene Haussmann,
the man behind the massive rebuilding of Paris in the 1850’s and 1860’s.
– Divya Subramanian

“A sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously …
Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on,
by watching street activity.”  
–  Jane Jacobs

“The screech and mechanical uproar of the
big city turns the citified head,  fills citified ears –
as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries,
or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart.
He is sidewalk-happy.”
–  Frank Lloyd Wright

The sidewalks were long where I grew up.
They were as veined as the backs
Of my Grandma’s hands…
– Colleen J. McElroy

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
–  Shel Silverstein

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself
from place to place,
and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Please take a look at this virtual walk-through of
my new exhibition at Polka Galerie in Paris