Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
The Daily Photoist: November 23, 2009
Toronto's rash of shoe abandonment is still going strong, and this Big Fish tribute has been dangling next to an Annex park for months now. Is there an ineffective Robin Hood-style shoe bandit on the loose, stealing from the shod, distributing to the shoeless (if this is the case, Shoe Bandit, TOist would like to point out that those without shoes are also unlikely to own a ladder)? Or are Torontonians just such slaves to fashion that we can't bear to wear a pair of shoes for more than a season?
Send us your own errant shoe sightings and crackpot theories.
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Last year I posted this and my readers gave me their stories. Crackpot doesn't seem far off the mark.
http://www.photojunkie.ca/archives/2004/07/20/hung_shoes.php
just in case no one saw in the metro theatre post, i certainly wear shoes. red ones even.
At least in the U.S. military, it was fairly common for people being discharged from service - getting out - to leave their boots behind in this fashion. It's a symbolic gesture, saying "I won't need these anymore."
In San Francisco (where I moved here from), it was fairly well-known that dealers hung shoes from the wires outside their houses to indicate you could buy nearby, and if you stood under them someone would come out.
Sort of puts a damper on romantic notions, sorry.
ditto in florida, where i grew up. shoes on wires meant crackhouse nearby.
What, pray tell, happens when lace-less shoes like Royal Elastics take over the world?
But surely if it's that well-known a code for drug dealers, that makes for an easy police bust?
probably more urban myth than anything else. in nyc, there's a patch on 11th or 12th, somewhere in the east village, where there are hundreds of them hanging in a giant, rather beautiful clump.
I think shoes found in alleys behind what may be crack houses are the most likely candidates for the shoes = drug dealing theories.
If that's the case, I think it's telling buyers approximately where drugs are sold. If they hang in the area, the dealers will come to them one the dealer feels confident that the wanderer is not a cop.
Just a theory. No proof.