Alley on West Superior (black and white photo without flash, scanned)
This writer seems to have a similar view of alleys as your humble narrator:
Chicago Tribune | Danger? We can't resist the dark side
If the world didn't have alleys, Freud would have invented them.
Alleys are a literal version of the dark subconscious: Largely hidden from the world most of the time; brimming with the things from which we normally recoil; the repository for what we think we've finally -- finally! -- discarded; incubator of shadows; nesting place for grisly intentions.
... Our language about alleys betrays our unease. “I think he's OK,” we say, “but I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley.” The traditional slang for a harrowingly unsafe medical procedure which some desperate women feel they must undergo, a ghastly last resort, is “a back-alley abortion.”Alleys reek with menace. Downtown, the fire escapes clamped to building backsides can resemble, in the dusky dim light, medieval torture devices, an excess of cruelly stubborn iron twisted into diabolical shapes. In the neighborhoods, alleys at night are tunnels of unknown peril; lined by the backs of houses -- the neglected, forgotten parts -- and by thrown-out couches and overfed garbage cans and flecks of glass from smashed beer bottles that wink in the moonlight like precious gems.
..And yet if you stand at the mouth of an alley, just at the point where it intersects with some saner, more public place, and you stare down that lane of unknown nastiness and sordid complication, there is this: Alleys are irresistible.
For all of their darkness and demonic ickiness, for all of the garbage and narrow nefariousness, they're also undeniably fetching.
Alleys are like the bad boys in high school, like the hoodlum girls. The rule-breakers. The ones who wear black and sneer at authority. Alleys are like geographical Goth.
Well, similar anyway. I do think alleys are evocative slices of city life - there aren't many alleys in the suburbs.
Alley on North Broadway.
Alley in Andersenville.
(click for larger versions)
