Word: sidewalkers
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...price is easy; finding Forss is something else again. The line forms somewhere in Manhattan. He is a street vendor, one of about 7,500 who pay New York City $25 a year for a license to sell their wares on the sidewalk. No one knows how many more ply the same trade illegally, or how much of their merchandise "fell off a truck," i.e., was stolen. But marketplaces are in plain view nearly everywhere. Weather permitting, and especially on fine spring days, certain blocks in midtown and the Wall Street area take on the pace and color of oriental...
Amid all this pitching, hawking and haggling stands Forss, a bearish, balding man with a neatly trimmed beard. His photographs rest on the sidewalk, propped against an available building. They do their own selling; Forss merely watches while passers-by stop to look. They see remarkable things: a velvety image of a contemplative black child, a serene study of a well-fed cat and an undernourished house plant. The much photographed Verrazano Bridge can be found in Forss's display, but this time with a small starburst of sunlight piercing one of its uprights. And, yes, there...
Forss calls his existence "living off the land in modern life," and he is clearly not in it for the money. Precarious as the sidewalk trade may be, he still feels free to take a week off with his cameras and haunt the urban landscape, waiting and looking for a particular shot-the confluence, say, of the liner and the towers -that seems worth saving. Selling his own work gives him quality control and a flexible schedule, but Forss barely notices the potential customers who cluster around his display. He keeps looking at the light and wondering whether...
...surge of applicants has made the embassy in London the busiest U.S. visa office in the world. Lines of 100 or more British and other, primarily Third World, nationals spill down the steps and onto the sidewalk outside the embassy building on Grosvenor Square. Inside, 60 employees process as many as 6,000 applications a day. At any moment, some 60,000 to 80,000 British passports are in the embassy's hands. Boxes and baskets overflow with applications. Harried staff give hurried glances before rubber-stamping approval. Applicants, once thronged inside, now wait mainly outside. Says Visa Unit...
...battle-hardened toughness that only two days after the attacks, stores reopened, trade flourished and the bars and restaurants were once again jammed with pleasure-seekers. The flower shops that proliferate in almost every quarter of the city were filled with carnations and snapdragons that spilled over onto the sidewalk in elegant displays. At countless intersections, the fruit and vegetable stands that sell the best fresh food in the Middle East were doing a thriving business. All the city's 86 banks -more numerous than before the civil war-were open for business. The British embassy went ahead with...