Sleeping on the Street (Various Neighborhoods in Manhattan)

Near Union Square.

About a week ago, I felt as if I was constantly seeing people asleep/passed out on the street. I don't know if they were all homeless but I assume the person in the doorway (photo above) nestled among various belongings was. Perhaps the others were too drunk or too tired to go home. I'm not sure what the point of taking their pictures is. I wondered if it was an invasion of privacy. One could argue that if they're going to sleep in public, they've surrendered their privacy, but then if they don't have a space of their own in which to guard their privacy, perhaps the right thing to do is create the illusion of privacy by ignoring them. Except I couldn't ignore them. Seeing them left me feeling upset, fearful, anxious. I decided to snap photos of everyone I saw, but then I skipped a few people... and then I stopped seeing them.

Did they go away? I'm not sure, although I find it hard to believe people stopped sleeping on the street. I'm afraid that after a brief moment of seeing them, I once again simply stopped noticing them.

Near Port Authority on 9th Avenue.

Amsterdam Avenue near 98th Street.

Near Port Authority.

Ramps without Rhizomes (Union Square, Manhattan)

The folks from Northshire Farm leave the rhizomes in the ground when harvesting ramps. They say that this allows the plant to grow back next year, and is an antidote to over-harvesting. However, an even better idea might be to just snip a few leaves from each plant. In 2011, The New York Times wrote: "How to harvest ramps sustainably is a controversial subject. Seeds take 6 to 18 months to germinate, and the plants take 5 to 7 years to produce seeds."

Ramps are back (Union Square Green Market, Manhattan)

I'm not sure why I love ramps so much. Taste alone doesn't explain it (although they're delicious). I think it has something to do with the fact that it's unusual to find food that's grown and harvested in the wild which is edible from the tip of its roots to the end of its leaves--and that ends up in a farmers market, so I don't have to tramp around the wilderness myself to find it.

I've seen this particular man with a table full of ramps every spring for the last several years. He's in Union Squre most Saturdays, selling potatoes and homemade potato chips, but only in April and part of May is he hawking ramps. So the seasonality of ramps is also appealing--knowing that I only have a few weeks to enjoy them.

And now that I've said all that, I want to point out that it's important to collect ramps responsibly. As soon as I posted this photo on Instagram, I searched for other photos tagged #rampseason and found this photo by besupstate, which explains that "it takes a ramp plant 5-7 years to fully mature before it drops its seeds" and urges ramp lovers to "consider cooking with the stems and greens only, leaving the bulbs in the ground. Let's forage sustainably so we don't deplete them." That led me to the ramp entry on Wikipedia, which has a section on conservation, which reads, in part:

Allium tricoccum is a protected species under Quebec legislation. A person may have ramps in his or her possession outside the plant's natural environment, or may harvest it for the purposes of personal consumption in an annual quantity not exceeding 50 bulbs or 50 plants, provided those activities do not take place in a park within the meaning of the National Parks Act. The protected status also prohibits any commercial transactions of ramps; this prevents restaurants from serving ramps as is done in the United States.... Ramps are considered a species of "special concern" for conservation in Maine, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. They are also considered "commercially exploited" in Tennessee. Ramp festivals may encourage harvest in unsustainable quantities.

So I hope this man, and anyone who makes a living from collecting and selling ramps, doesn't let them go the way of the dodo or passenger pigeon or any of these extinct plants. And I hope that my enjoyment of them--and my extolling them here--doesn't contribute to an unsustainable demand. I'd be happy to eat them without the bulbs, so I hope vendors start selling them that way.

Stop Being Fearful (Union Square Subway Station, Manhattan)

It took me two days to read this note. On the first, I was carried along by the rush hour crowd, and anyone with sense never stops on subway stairs at such a moment. The crowd is unforgiving (because it's composed of individuals like me who are very unforgiving when someone blocks the flow). The next day, however, I was ready with phone in hand. I waited for the surge of people to pass and then paused long enough to take a snapshot. Although I'm posting this under the date when I took the picture, I'm actually writing this several weeks later and can report that while graffiti often lingers in this city for months and years, this little bit of advice was was scrubbed away a couple weeks ago.