Forty years after this photo was taken, the geometric tile lay in jaggedy jigsaw pieces, and Snake Plissken limped over the shards into the gladiator ring. In the ’40s, 100,000 people passed through Union Station every day. It was so crowded, two full-time guys spent the whole day scraping gum off the midway floor; it was packed with soldiers boarding trains as mothers wept and girlfriends waved goodbye with their handkerchiefs. Here, the station is almost empty. Perhaps it’s midnight. It’s toward the end of the Dust Bowl, when the prairie was already Egypt, the bluestem and the grama grass plowed away, leaving maelstroms of dirt. This man’s work boots, his battered hat and his worried smoking, hint that he’s no soldier, but a refugee from Oklahoma. Most Okies packed up their wives and kids (and mattresses and teakettles and rocking chairs) into Model T’s and drove west, where they wandered from vineyard to vineyard, picking grapes for nothing, as vagrant as pollinators. They didn’t take trains. Maybe this man had no wife, no kids. Maybe he ran away and left the ones he did have, wanting not to drive cross-country in a car, but instead to take the rails east or west and find a city, one filled with neon and places with names like The It Club. A place where you could dizzy yourself with drinks and floor shows, where the ladies wore d’Orsay pumps and the matchbooks were printed in four colors, and the match heads were tipped in green or silver. He probably knew he was destined only for safety matches with their brick-red tips, or a future laying bricks. But at midnight, waiting for a train with cigarettes in one pocket and tin of stale snuff in the other, and no company but the phosphorus ghosts of match girls blowing through the arched hallways and over benches, clutching at their glowing toothaches, there was nothing better to do but daydream until his train pulled in.
Photograph by Arthur Rothstein, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF33-003029-M1
