Seattle People: Street Kids by Alice Wheeler

Since the days of Mary Ellen Mark's famed documentary Streetwise, artists have been drawn to Seattle's street-youth scene--the tribes, the vulnerability, the violence. And no photographer has captured this world with greater empathy and artistry than Alice Wheeler. We sent her out to Westlake Park to meet and document the current generation of street kids downtown. The photos are part of our feature this week, in which Nina Shapiro tells the horrifying story of a mentally ill man who moved to Seattle, fell in with the Westlake and Freeway Park kids, and ended up being brutally murdered.