At the request of Nacio Jan Brown, essayist and fiction writer Thomas Farber wrote this beautifully evocative portrait of life on Telegraph Avenue — its rhythms, its character, its dangers, and its sense of possibility.

Farber paid special attention to two groups whom he saw as “fram[ing] the spectrum of possibilities” of life on the Ave: junkies and children. He offered this incisive take on the young people of the street, “sheltered and exploited by those for whom the street is also the center of life”: