Graffitti always has a story to tell, and this old slat fence along the alley is covered with stories.

Here's a heart that says "Judy plus Pretzel", but no one still lives who remembers the short heated romance between the soft-spoken librarian and her contortionist beau.

Brooklyn Billy left his mark in the late 20s, just his name and a skull and crossbones. Some guess he was a dockside cutthroat but in reality he was an English Lit student from Columbia, and a member of that scholarly secret society whose symbol lay by his name. Two years later he contracted pneumonia on a hike through the Adirondacks and died, his last words "I had a damned good novel in me. Or maybe a symphony. Pass the mustard please."

"Free Snowden!" reads a recent addition, and beneath it someone has tagged on "...with purchase of one Snowden of equal or lesser value".

"Lefty Was GAY", the word gay being added in slapdash modern spray-paint fashion to a more formal and ancient "Lefty Was" which seems to have been recorded as a complete statement in itself. Few suspect that the man who left this was a drifting musician caught up in a Mexican border fracas who sold out his hero because he loved said hero's wife and could not abide the thought of her with him. He had lived the life of a bluesman, fast and loose, but haunted by his betrayal and by the ghost of his betrayed friend. This Mexican Bandit apparition had begun appearing at Lefty's appearances in various taverns about town, taking at first a seat in the darkest corner of the room, but gradually moving up in the seating arrangement until, most nights, he sat just at Lefty's right hand on the stage. No one else ever seemed to remark on this exotic specter, and so Lefty rightfully assumed that the ghost was visible only to him, was Pancho, and Pancho was no longer sprawled in Mexican dust, but right there with him, even picking up his harmonica once when he had dropped it.
Lefty's fortunes, never bright, took an even more bleak turn, and eventually landed him dead broke and sick in this alley. In the first twirling flakes scattered by a December midnight snow storm, Lefty had glimpsed his oncoming demise as certainly as a sign on a slippery road saying "Bridge Out Ahead!" And he had taken up a found feather, and dipping its tapered end in a cracked ink well, had sought to substantiate the fact that he had been worthy of a song, had attained a sort of immortality in that fact, but had also indeed occupied a small portion of God's real estate for nearly 68 years. "Lefty Was" indeed.