BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Sporting their trademark facial tattoos and with their canine sidekicks in tow, travelers are back in town. Well, just a few early birds, so far, it seems.
Three of them, all in their early 20s, and their pooch were hunkered down outside the Astor Place Starbucks last Monday morning. Max, center, in photo above, said he grew up on the Lower East Side, but his family then moved around, including an apparently forgettable stint in what he called “Massa-two-s–ts.”
With him were Beck, left, and Mary, who appeared to be intently watching or reading something on her cell phone — perhaps “A crusty proposal,” Chad Marlow’s hard-hitting, sobering (so of course the crusties didn’t like it), infamous — call it what you will — talking point in The Villager from a few years ago? Crusty travelers need phones, too, to keep in touch with their families and loved ones, the homeless youth protest — despite the fact that it makes some skeptical passersby wonder how down-and-out they really are.
The trio had just arrived from Portland — they had hopped a freight train — but were leaving soon for Seattle. Max was sporting an official engineer’s cap that a train worker had given him along the way.
“It’s too hot here,” said Max, apparently referring to both the rising temperature and the coming deluge of fellow crusty travelers. “It’ll blow up in about a month,” he said. “There’ll be kids on every corner.”
As for the names they call themselves, Max offered, “Gutter punks…train hoppers…”
How about “crusty travelers”?
“I embrace the ‘crusty’ label,” he said with a good-natured grin. “Yeah, I’m a little dirty…but I wash in restrooms.”
Speaking of which, he said, they were about to go to the Streetworks drop-in center, at 33 Essex St., to shower and clean up a bit.
“It’s a really great resource,” he said.
Last summer was “The Summer of the Crusty Pit Bulls,” as at least two travelers’ pit bulls went on a rampage in the East Village, attacking punk photographer Robert Bayley’s pug, Sidney, who died soon after, and viciously chomping on the arms of two men who were trying to shield their dogs from attack.
But Max said his mutt — part Lab, part Great Pyrenees and part pit — is very gentle. His name is Space Bag.
“You know, like the cheap box of wine,” he explained with a smile.
A bit farther south, down at the Citi Bike station by City Hall, Nicole Welcome, 28, in photo below, was “swapping in an inner tube” on a bike-share cycle that had a flat.
She’s not a traveler, per se — she lives on Delancey St. — but she travels all over the city fixing the blue bikes.
“Wherever the red lights are at,” she fixes the bikes, she said, referring to the red “broken” indicator lights on the bike docks.
