Universal City Red Line train platform, early March, right after the Covid-19 response, social distancing, and "shelter at home" rules went into effect.
As things worked out, I was homeless, and living primarily in the Studio City/North Hollywood area of the San Fernando Valley, when the Corona virus/Covid-19 pandemic struck Southern California. This photo above is the first train stop north of Hollywood and Highland, the hotspot for Hollywood Hollywood tourists these days. It's also the train stop where people get off to go to Universal Studios, one of the biggest tourist attractions in this area. I travel through this station nearly every day now, and there are usually a couple dozen people on this platform, at any time. Mornings and evenings, there are usually several dozen people here. When I shot this photo, in early March, 2020, it was just me and a pigeon.
The rule came out in early March, 2020, to close "non-essential" businesses, and for people to "helter at home," to reduce the spread of this new, deadly disease. It's hard to shelter at home, when I don't have a home. In addition, as businesses shut down, us homeless people lost most of the bathrooms and small businesses we frequent for a whole bunch of reasons. I've survived about ten years in various forms of homelessness, working most of that time. But the Covid-19 business shutdowns was a hit I seriously wasn't sure I'd survive. I literally thought I may die, not from the disease, but from the reaction and shutdowns due to the disease.
Homeless people do without most of the things most people call "necessities," every single day. That's the nature of the situation. We survive by using aspects of our world that have the things we need to simply survive day to day. I didn't go to McDonald's for breakfast in the mornings just because I like their sausage biscuits. For me, my favorite McDonald's was warmth from the morning chill, a shelter from the rain, a decent (usually) bathroom to use, a table to work on my laptop or draw the pictures I sell, a place to simply sit down, AND breakfast. I suddenly lost all of those things, overnight. The same happened to thousands of other homeless people, overnight. Trying to turn my art slowly into a legit small business is hard, especially while homeless. Trying to simply keep working when I lost my workplace, bathrooms, power plugs (the library) and wifi, has been one hell of a little adventure. I'm alive, simply ALIVE today, because a bunch of friends online have stepped up to help me get by, and because I'm fucking relentless, and keep going no matter what I get hit with. Some friends bought a drawing (or several), some simply loaned/gave me a little money to help me eat, or buy a metro pass. One made me some great stickers to start selling.
This was a very unplanned additional adventure. You know, as if trying to continue building a small business from homelessness wasn't challenging enough. That story is a post for another day. But something else happened. To simply stay warm, and out of the rain in the mornings and evenings, I had to ride buses or trains around. Yes, that's the opposite of what everybody is supposed to be doing. But us homeless were literally left out in the cold to die when the Covid-19 pandemic hit here. The other option was trying to get into a homeless shelter, but because of the nature of this disease, it was obvious that homeless shelters would soon turn into death traps. Living in a homeless shelter right now means 100% chance of being exposed to the virus, and a much greater chance of getting sick, and possibly dying, then continuing to live outside. Check out the Cook County jail story in Chicago, for an example of how the virus explodes in a place where large numbers of people live in very tight quarters. So I rode buses and trains to avoid the rain and chill, which hit right as the virus response hit. I could keep a few feet away from other riders, most of the time, and stay reasonably warm.
Because I was moving around the city and county of Los Angeles, and had an old iPhone5 as a camera, I soon realized that I was one of the few people who could document what parts of L.A. county looked like, as most businesses shut down, and the always busy streets suddenly emptied. So I started taking photos of some of what I saw in March 2020, and now April, as the shelter in place rules continue. These next few posts are those photos... so far.
The other side of the Universal City train (subway) station, empty. March 2020.
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