Shoes on Phone Lines are Ghetto Advertisement?
Stephen J. Cannell, a former writer/producer for The Rockford Files, Baretta, and The Commish, provides an answer to the tennis shoes on phone lines issue in his novel, Riding the Snake on page 293:
“That’s my nephew LaFrance’s glass-house Impala out front. He’s a kitchen-table drug dealer and a big family problem. Those tennis shoes hanging on the phone line are a ghetto advertisementn to anybody driving by that you can buy drugs inside. Aunt Nadine is old. She can’t handle him. I thought I ran LaFrance out a month ago.”
The novel takes place in Los Angeles, so reinforces the Los Angeles correlation between shoefiti and drugs / gangs.
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