How a narrow street with painted stripes CHANGED THE WORLD

There are video cameras everywhere these days. They provide live feeds for security purposes in homes, shops, and offices. There is one live video feed, however, that has little to do with security and everything to do with posterity. I hadn’t been on the live Internet feed of this rather ordinary street in London more than 30 seconds before I saw four people half a planet away scramble across a zebra-striped crosswalk in front of busy afternoon traffic in order to pose for a quick photo of simply that: the four of them walking across that ordinary street. But it’s not really an ordinary street. It’s a place of magic, of inspiration, of symbolism, of imagination. This is because something extraordinary happened there on Friday, August 8, 1969. That’s when all four Beatles strode across that same crosswalk to pose for a photograph.

The photograph, of course, is the cover of , The Beatles album named for the street on which they walked that day, crossing the street away from Abbey Road Studios, the building in which the vast majority of their recordings had been made during the decade that was quickly drawing to a close. They were almost done making records now, almost done being Beatles, and almost done posing for pictures together. They were four grown men walking away, not leaping about or mugging for the camera, as they’d done in many thousands of photos before. Yet this is the photograph for which they will forever be most remembered. Less than two weeks after crossing Abbey Road, The Beatles would be done recording in the studio together forever. Just over a month later, Lennon told the others that he intended to leave the group. Several months after that, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and John Lennon would be ex-Beatles.