Transcript
A (0:00)
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B (0:31)
Now the rest of the story. Nelson Graves is a good reporter, but his job became a burden the other day when he stepped from the comfort of his own world onto the red hot cadaver cold pavement of Mean Street. Mean Street. It's an avenue not unlike a thousand others and yet distinguished by the very openness and magnitude of what goes on there. Mr. Graves returned from this land of walking dead to to pound its bleak images through the keys of a word processor so that you could see them too. And never forget, for example, the grinning drug hustlers who surrounded passersby on their way to work with a greeting. Coke or smoke. You could have your choice. And over there, an elderly narcotics peddler dressed in a warm up suit answers the pay phone of his his office outside a porno playhouse. And look there, an adolescent boy calling to his buddy. Hey Charlie, you've got my beeper. The beeper is a paging device they use for making drug deals. This is Mean street, Otherwise known as 14th street, just another byway off the one way road to hell. A momentary detour with the same destination. Oblivion. It's the middle of the morning, mid morning, and a man enters a CD arcade marked Live Girls. There he may play pinball or for $2 watch from a booth with a window while a stripper strips. And that other shop there, that's porno video. The walls inside are lined with media booths for viewing at your leisure. Across the avenue outside the crowded subway station, hookers beckoned commuters landing. John's is a dangerous game on Main Street. One hooker found shot dead in a nearby alley last month. She was the city's 128th homicide thus far this year. And since then there have been 40 more. And park officials have their hands full too, combing hypodermic needles from the grass each morning. And you'd never know from looking what Mean street used to be. A business and entertainment center where elegant clubs hosted the likes of Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. A clean, thriving neighborhood before its death by strangulation in the 1960s. Somehow straining reporter Nelson Graves could see the ghosts of that bygone era which made the ugly reality all the uglier. The sex shops more decadent, the drug traffic more horrible, and the crime somehow more criminal. The very dreams on which our ism is based reside strangely on Main Street. You have seen the tawdry neighborhoods on television, and yet so often what is missing from those televised images is a sharp contrast. Sharp enough to draw blood for Main Street. 14th street is a neighborhood shared by lawyers as well as junkies, by real estate developers as well as prostitutes. It's a patch of torrid turf in in the capital of the United States of America, Washington, D.C. indeed, the drug peddlers are pushing their product on the steps of the very building that houses the headquarters of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. For this sad stretch of cement and sin, the Main street you've just visited is just around the corner from the White House. And now you know the rest of the story.