Ok readers of iloveuab.com, I have a task for you. I need you to help me solve a very interesting mystery. Have you ever seen these weird scrapings on the sidewalks all around UAB? I have been noticing them ever since I came to UAB and I have from time to time had other people also notice and comment about them while we were walking down the sidewalk. I bet that you have seen these and never even noticed them or wondered what they are. If you have no idea what I am talking about, then check out this picture:

I took this picture over at the BEC because it seemed like the markings are somewhat newer there. However, you can find them all over campus on new and old side walks. I actually know how the person is making these markings because I just happen to spot him doing it. I have no idea who he is nor why he is doing this to the side walk, that’s why I need your help to solve this mystery. Like I said, I have seen this guy scraping the side walk with what looked like a baseball size ball of granite or marble. He was bent down over near the parking lot of Blount Hall (kinda near CVS) and was scraping this ball of rock back an fourth over the side walk apparently trying to round it out. I know this is kind of an odd story, but these types of things interest me. I like a good mystery every now and then.

Does anyone have any information on this guy? Does he work at UAB? Is he maybe a crazy homeless man? Why the hell is he scrapeing the side walk? Let me know about it in the comments.

-Stone

EDIT: This mystery has become every closer to being solved. Molly Ercums found this picture on Flickr that someone had taken. I’ll copy the story over verbadum:

Walking to work to UAB through southside, I would often see areas of scratched sidewalk, as seen here. There seemed to be no discernible pattern, they were just scattered between 10th Ave/14th St. by Blount Hall and over towards the medical center. One day I discovered a massive scraped area on the sidewalk behind some bushes behind Rast Hall, and a stout-middle aged asian man was kneeling there.

As weeks rolled by I would often see him, carrying a rock, which was apparently the tool he was using to decorate all of southside’s sidewalks as he walked from his apartment near mine to somewhere on the medical campus, where I also worked. I couldn’t see any possible purpose for the bizarre patterns he created, so I attributed it to some bizarre obsessive/compulsive complex.

Finally, a few days before I moved out of Birmingham, I encountered him and bluntly asked him what he was doing scratching up the sidewalks with the rocks (which he ALWAYS carried). After smiling and fumbling for words, he replied in broken English that when you “do this for a long time, the rock becomes very beautiful!”

I guess I’m so accultured to people leaving graffiti and other “tags” everywhere, I assumed he was trying to create some sort of visual art on the sidewalk, but in fact the sidewalk was merely his polishing tool.

SOURCE

Interesting!

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