This wraps up a full year of showing you all that there are people out in Hartford, despite claims to the contrary.

Not once did I need to sit around and wait for people to appear. Didn’t need to stage anything.

There are definitely sections of the city that didn’t make it into these pics, but that was never the concern of this series. All I wanted to do was say “look here, notice people.” You can replicate this in those other neighborhoods easily.

It didn’t matter what time of day or which day of the week. Even with businesses closed for the pandemic, people could be found doing normal people things: shopping, shooting the shit with neighbors, waiting for buses.

It became clear that when people claimed that “nobody was around” they were talking about a particular demographic — not necessarily those who live here, but those who work in the types of buildings that have their own cafeterias.

Because even if they didn’t bother to walk up Park Street or down Wethersfield Avenue, they would’ve still seen people in the central business district, had they chosen to acknowledge bus and bicycle riders as people, had they considered those sleeping in tents in the park to be people.

Please, next time you hear someone utter that “Hartford is a Ghost Town” nonsense, send them a year’s supply of evidence to the contrary.

Now, I can go back to intentionally cropping people out of my photos of buildings and squirrels.

Here, here is the one ghost I spied in 2020 and 2021: