Living on The Street

Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens—shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023

Whether Lee Stringer is describing "God's corner" as he calls 42nd Street, or his friend Suzy, a hooker and "past due tourist" whose infant child he sometimes babysits, whether he is recounting his experiences at Street News, where he began hawking the newspaper for a living wage, then wrote articles, and served for a time as muckraking senior editor, whether it is his adventures in New York's infamous Tombs jail, or performing community service, or sleeping in the tunnels below Grand Central Station by night and collecting cans by day, this is a book rich with small acts of kindness, humor and even heroism alongside the expected violence and desperation of life on the street.

Rhino Handmade's There's a Riot Goin' On: The Coasters on Atco, a four-disc box set that contains all the key recordings from the group's peak (including sides by the Robins) and noteworthy tracks from the '60s, plus a disc's worth of rarities. If that title carries a threat of violence seemingly atypical for the guys who sang "Yakety Yak" and "Charlie Brown," it's not wrong, either, as the Coasters were a rock & roll band with all the excitement and danger that implies.

For those watching meters, there’s always a dip in voltage around 6 o’clock. When workaday folks get home and start turning on their televisions and firing up their microwaves, the hum of electricity goes crackling down the power lines, lighting up the windows of house after house, street after street, mile after mile. But when the moon has been high for hours and, slowly but surely, the nearby world starts to fall asleep — that’s when workanight folks, like Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown, come alive. As the voltage begins to spike, current flows like a high tide flooding through the transformers and wires that stack well into the thousands at TBSD’s musical headquarters, “The Lily Pad” in Nashville, Tennessee. In a fast-moving, increasingly digital world, vintage tube gear is considered obsolete by the majority, but for those still living on the fringes of time, there’s a quality of magic when pieces of gear from a different age power up — the dim glow of vacuum tubes purposefully burning and generating heat in the close quarters of a control room.

For those watching meters, there’s always a dip in voltage around 6 o’clock. When workaday folks get home and start turning on their televisions and firing up their microwaves, the hum of electricity goes crackling down the power lines, lighting up the windows of house after house, street after street, mile after mile. But when the moon has been high for hours and, slowly but surely, the nearby world starts to fall asleep — that’s when workanight folks, like Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown, come alive. As the voltage begins to spike, current flows like a high tide flooding through the transformers and wires that stack well into the thousands at TBSD’s musical headquarters, “The Lily Pad” in Nashville, Tennessee. In a fast-moving, increasingly digital world, vintage tube gear is considered obsolete by the majority, but for those still living on the fringes of time, there’s a quality of magic when pieces of gear from a different age power up — the dim glow of vacuum tubes purposefully burning and generating heat in the close quarters of a control room.