Crouching on the floor of City Hall waiting for a dignitary to move his hand and look alert, that’s how I like to spend my time. I take pictures for some of the city's labor unions and The Chief, New York civil employees’ weekly. Now that’s fun.

I have dug into the city deeper than the grime on the windPat Arnow at work covering a picket line with camera. Photo by Gary Schoichetowsill. It wasn’t always this way. A native of Chicago, I — and my husband Steve Giles — spent 21 years in the South. I loved the region--hiking, Southern writers, the food — biscuits, grits, barbecue, cornbread, hush puppies, iced tea…(but I do digress when it comes to food) — and being called "hon" by strangers.

In Huntington, W.Va., I graduated from Marshall University, helped start the city's first domestic violence shelter, and created public information programs for a mental health center.

In East Tennessee, as editor of Now and Then, a magazine about Appalachia, I learned about mountain politics, arts, history, and culture. I came to appreciate the complexities of the region.

Moving to Durham, N.C., to edit Southern Exposure, the venerable hell-raising journal of Southern politics and culture, I found the broad region of the South an even more complex and compelling region for study and reporting. I published investigative reports on the burning of black churches in the South, on the impact of the property rights movement, censorship of the arts, and campaign finance abuses.

I went on to work as culture editor of In These Times, an alternative newsmagazine (once called "The Socialist Weekly") covering national and international politics and culture. I also wrote articles, reviews, and interviews for newspapers, magazines and the Britannica.com website.

Just before the turn of the century (I love that phrase), Steve and I came to New York on vacation. We had such a good time, we sold everything in North Carolina and moved to the Lower East Side.

After years of working in the left-wing, alternative, and academic press, I was thrilled to land a job as a research editor at Reader's Digest. Forget being a big dog for a magazine published by a nonprofit. As a fact checker at a behemoth publisher, I made a living wage.

But even behemoths get the blues. Publishing was in decline, and then the World Trade Center fell, which we still think about because we don’t see the towers out our window anymore.

View of Lower Manhattan with World Trade Center What we saw from our window
View of Lower Manhattan today What we saw from our window after that.
gehry tower rising Frank Gehry's Beekman Tower is rising to the top of the skyline.

The next year, I ended my sojourn in the mainstream press and took up with city labor unions, taking photographs at rallies, parades, press conferences, demonstrations, celebrations, and meetings. It's a fine way to explore the city and support the unions that need all the help they can get to keep wages and benefits and due process.