On the Shady Side of the Street

Many mornings, on Broadway between 43rd and 44th Street, there is a caravan of parked vans. Some of these vans appear, how shall I put this, a tad on the shady side. For example, on Tuesday there was this:



I'm not sure if the owner of this van just used the logic of, "If a Bud Light truck has Bud Lights in it, then my empty van has..." Or maybe it's owned by an entrepreneur who's planning on starting a hot new Manhattan night club, with the obvious first step being to buy a dingy white van and brand it with the club's brilliantly minimalist name. You know, to get the word around. Or maybe it's a really, really clever acronym: Suckers! Police Ain't Catching [my giant stash of] E.

On, Wednesday the Space van was nowhere to be found. There was, however, this:



Ah, yes. Well, at least with this one we know that Midnight Express is a group of Services and that it is Incorporated. But what could it possibly be expediting at midnight? Hot ladies? Hot dogs? Dustin Hoffman & Jon Voight? Is it actually a fancy horse-drawn carriage that turns into this van when the clock strikes 12? Or is it delivering something to the building it's parked in front of...the suspiciously inauspicious ESPN Zone. Maybe it's their week's shipment of hockey puck patties and they're not quite up to the standards of industry giant Knickerbocker Meat, Inc.

I expect to be reporting more on this story as it develops.