One day in 2000, I got out of my car near on Lancaster to photograph a man who regularly picketed the incoming traffic with an indecipherable sign. Computer manipulation of the image revealed an unexpected message.  I wanted to learn more about the places this man promoted with his faded sign. I became a tourist on my route to and from work.

Over the next six years,
I returned more than 40 times to photograph Lancaster Avenue between 39th and 63rd Streets.

The Lancaster corridor of West Philadelphia is revitalizing.  Many of the buildings and some of the murals I photographed are gone. Most of the store front churches and the taverns remain.

In 2003, a boy on the street asked me, "Why you taking pictures of the ghetto"

"Because Lancaster Avenue is my ghetto."

I commute to work along Lancaster Avenue between my home in one of a string of Main Line suburbs just west of the city and one of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia.

The communities at both ends of my commute are wealthy and influential. In between, the West Philadelphia neighborhoods of Powelton, Belmont, Mantua and Overbrook are poor and dangerous.

For years I drove through those places with doors locked and windows raised, immersed in National Public Radio and oblivious to my surroundings.

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