Sidewalk
Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Categories: Books, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences


Farrar Straus Giroux

Dimensions: 5.38 x 1.12 x 8.26 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0374527259
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780374527259
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print length: 400 pages
Publication date: December 20, 2000
subtitle: Paperback – December 20, 2000
author: Visit Amazon's Mitchell Duneier Page search results Mitchell Duneier Hakim Hasan Ovie Carter
review: Editorial Reviews Review “ Sidewalk will radically change the way we think about ‘the public sphere.'” ― Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo Mama's Disfunktional! “An inspired, yet strategically conceived work that restores a sense of new possibility and passion to ethnography just as it was threatened by cliche through its recent popularity.” ― George Marcus, author of Ethnography through Thick and Thin “[ Sidewalk ] is in the best tradition of participant observation. If I were still teaching, I would want all of my students to read this book.” ― William Foote Whyte, author of Street Corner Society “An exciting and original approach to the problems of urban life, informed by years of intensive participation and by a deep understanding of social science thinking. No one has combined theory and intimate knowledge of city streets as successfully. A masterpiece of fieldwork.” ― Howard S. Becker, author of Outsiders “Duneier must be one of the outstanding ethnographers of our time: he renders visible what typically remains submerged as we take in the world at street level. This is a deep, complex, moving book that yanks you out of your own lived experiences of that world and draws you to another.” ― Saskia Sassen, author of The Global City “[A] magnificent book . . . Duneier is a professor of sociology, but he has a superb journalist's ear for quotes and the ability to limn character and scene. He writes, that is, as very few sociologists do: he stays on for years, immersed in his subject, as virtually no journalist will do.” ― Richard Eder, The New York Times “A necessary book . . . A work of frontline reportage, an inquiry into the economic and political and moral forces that are busy reconfiguring the city, [and] an urgent plea for justice, however couched it is in the careful, procedural, understating style of fieldwork.” ― Luc Sante, Village Voice Literary Supplement “ Sidewalk is an intellectual treat and a student turn-on. I'm using it in my urban studies course and as a key reading for introductory sociology.” ― Harvey Molotch, co-author, Urban Fortunes “Insightful and compelling . . . . Capture[s] the pathos, struggle, joy, honor and dignity of the men and women of 'the sidewalk.'” ― Elaine Rivera, Chicago Tribune “ Sidewalk brings us close to the hustle and bustle of urban street life--the book is a knowing, thoughtful exploration that will earn it a place among the classics of the documentary tradition.” ― Robert Coles “A nuanced study of the lives of impoverished street vendors in New York's Greenwich Village . . . . A work that adds much to our understanding of race, poverty, and our reactions to them.” ― Kirkus Reviews “I suspect this exemplary ethnography will, like Street Corner Society , speak to generations of readers . . . . The photos by Ovie Carter . . . and the appendix on method are worth the price of entry . . . . The entire book demonstrates . . . scrupulous care, caring, and respect . . . . Duneier uses theory to help him understand and explicate his observations, never for its own sake. Like all classic fieldworkers he is open to learn, to change, as a result of the ethnographic experience.” ― Joan Cassell, Washington University, American Anthropologist About the Author Mitchell Duneier is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California at Santa Barbara. His first book, Slim's Table, received the 1994 Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. Ovie Carter, a photographer for the Chicago Tribune , has received the Pulitzer Prize and multiple awards of Excellence from the National Association of Black Journalists. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sidewalk By Mitchell Duneier Farrar Straus Giroux Copyright © 2000 Mitchell Duneier All right reserved. ISBN: 9780374527259 Introduction Hakim Hasan is a book vendor and street intellectual at the busy intersectionof Eighth Street, Greenwich Avenue, and the Avenue of the Americas?akaSixth Avenue. He is a sturdy and stocky five-foot-seven African American,forty-two years old. In the winter, he wears Timberland boots, jeans, ahooded sweatshirt, a down vest, and a Banana Republic baseball cap. One Thursday in February 1996, an African-American man in his mid-thirtiescame up to Hakim's table and asked for a copy of Alice Walker's book The Same River Twice , about her experiences in turning her novel The ColorPurple into a movie. Hakim was all sold out, but said he would get somemore in stock soon. "When you get some, you let me know," said the man, who worked deliveringgroceries. "I'll let you know." "Because, you see, not only that," said the man, "I've got a friend thatloves to read." "Male or female?" asked Hakim. "Female. She's like this: when she gets a book in her hand, in anotherhour it's finished. In other words?like, with me, I'll read maybe ... fivechapters, then I'll put it down 'cause I gotta do something, then maybe I'llcome back to it. But with her, she gets into it and goes through the wholebook like that. Boom. And she puts it on the shelf and it's just like brand-new.Like, when it's her birthday or what-have-you, I buy her books, becausethat's one of the things that she likes. I bought the book Waiting to Exhale inpaperback, right? Listen to this: when I approached her with the book, themovie was coming out and she said, `You late! I been read that book!'" Hakim laughed. "I think she had a point." "I said, `Better late than never.' I wish I read that book before I seen themovie. Now, you can tell me this, Hakim: is it the same thing in the paperbackas the hardcover?" "Yeah, it's just different print." "Just different print? Okay. Well, when you get the other book by AliceWalker, you let me know." The man made a motion to leave, but then he continued talking. "Because, you see, what happens is that there are a lot of females ... authorsthat are coming out that are making their voices heard. More so thanever black. Even Alice Walker says something about this. It goes deep, man." "Yeah, I'm gonna read that book by Alice Walker," said Hakim. "I'mgonna read it today." "Oh, you're gonna read it today?" the man asked, laughing. "I just finished two books over the weekend. I read at least one book aweek," said Hakim. "I try to tell my son that," said the deliveryman. "If you read one book aweek, man, you don't know how much knowledge you can get." Hakim doesn't just name titles. He knows the contents. I have observedthe range and depth of his erudition impress scholars, and have seen himshow great patience with uneducated people who are struggling with basicideas and don't know much about books. He might sit for hours without havinga single customer step up to his table; other times the table becomes a socialcenter where men and women debate into the night. For two years, I lived around the corner from where Hakim sets up. Almostevery day, whenever I had time to amble about on the block, I'd visitand listen to the conversations taking place at his table. At first, Hakim sold what he called "black books," works exclusively byor about blacks. In later years, he became romantically involved with a Filipinabook vendor named Alice, who carried used paperback classics and New York Times best-sellers, and they merged their vending tables. Nowthey are on their own again, working side by side. Alice is the only womanwho works outside on Sixth Avenue every day, and she has practicallyraised her daughters and granddaughters there. Whereas Alice tends to be"about business," local residents, workers, and visitors come to Hakim todiscuss topics of all kinds, from burning issues of the day to age-old questions. * * * Not long after we met, I asked Hakim how he saw his role. "I'm a public character," he told me. "A what?" I asked. "Have you ever read Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great AmericanCities ?" he asked. "You'll find it in there." I considered myself quite familiar with the book, a classic study of modernurban life published in 1961, and grounded in the author's observationsof her own neighborhood, Greenwich Village. But I didn't recall the discussionof public characters. Nor did I realize that Hakim's insight would figurein a central way in the manner in which I would come to see the sidewalklife of this neighborhood. When I got home, I looked it up: The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointedpublic characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a widecircle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character.A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function?althoughhe often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of hiscounterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of differentpeople. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest. Jacobs had modeled her idea of the public character after the local shopkeeperswith whom she and her Greenwich Village neighbors would leavetheir spare keys. These figures could be counted on to let her know if herchildren were getting out of hand on the street, or to call the police if astrange-looking person was hanging around for too long: "Storekeepers andother small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order,"Jacobs explained. "They hate broken windows and holdups." She alsomodeled the public character after persons like herself, who distributed petitionson local political issues to neighborhood stores, spreading local newsin the process. Although the idea is meaningful to anyone who has lived in an urbanneighborhood where people do their errands on foot, Jacobs did not defineher concept except to say, "A public character is anyone who is ... sufficientlyinterested to make himself a public character." To clarify, we mayconsider her opening observation that the social structure "hangs partly" onthe public characters. What Jacobs means is that the social context of thesidewalk is patterned in a particular way because of the presence of the publiccharacter: his or her actions have the effect of making street life safer, stabler,and more predictable. As she goes on to explain, this occurs because thepublic character has "eyes upon the street." Following Jacobs, urban theorists have emphasized what city dwellers inpedestrian areas like Greenwich Village have always known: sidewalk life iscrucial because the sidewalk is the site where a sense of mutual supportmust be felt among strangers if they are to go about their lives there together.Unlike most places in the United States, where people do their errands incars, the people of Greenwich Village do many, if not most, of their errandsby walking. The neighborhood's sidewalk life matters deeply to residentsand visitors alike. Jacobs emphasized that social contact on the sidewalksmust take place within a context of mutual respect for appropriate limits oninteraction and intimacy. This made for interactive pleasantness, adding upto "an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when thechips are down." The Village's "eyes upon the street," in Jacobs's famousdictum, indicated that residents and strangers were safe and consequentlyproduced safety in fact. * * * Greenwich Village looked very different forty years ago, when Jane Jacobswas writing her classic book. Much of the architecture remains, and manypeople still live the way Jacobs's descriptions suggest; but there is another,more marginal population on these streets: poor black men who make theirlives on the Village sidewalks. The presence of such people today means thatpedestrians handle their social boundaries in situ , whereas, in the past, racialsegregation and well-policed skid-row areas kept the marginal at bay. In this book, I will offer a framework for understanding the changes thathave taken place on the sidewalk over the past four decades. In asking why the sidewalk life has changed in this affluent neighborhood, I provide thecontext and point of departure for my research. It has changed because theconcentration of poverty in high poverty zones has produced social problemsof a magnitude that cannot be contained by even the most extreme forms ofsocial control and exclusion. Many people living and/or working on SixthAvenue come from such neighborhoods. Some were among the first generationof crack users, and so were affected by the war on those who use thedrug and the failure of prisons to help them prepare for life after released.Some, under new workfare rules, have lost their benefits when they refusedto show up to work as "the Mayor's slave." In asking how the sidewalk life works today, I begin by looking at thelives of the poor (mainly) black men who work and/or live on the sidewalksof an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Unlike Hakim, who has an apartmentin New Jersey, magazine vendors like Ishmael Walker are without ahome; the police throw their merchandise, vending tables, clothes, and familyphotos in the back of a garbage truck when they leave the block to relievethemselves. Mudrick Hayes and Joe Garbage "lay shit out" on the ground(merchandise retrieved from the trash) to earn their subsistence wages. KeithJohnson sits in his wheelchair by the door of the automated teller machineand panhandles. How do these persons live in a moral order? How do they have the ingenuityto do so in the face of exclusion and stigmatization on the basis of raceand class? How does the way they do so affront the sensibilities of the workingand middle classes? How do their acts intersect with a city's mechanismsto regulate its public spaces? The people making lives on Sixth Avenue depend on one another for socialsupport. The group life upon which their survival is contingent is crucialto those who do not rely on religious institutions or social service agencies.For some of these people, the informal economic life is a substitute for illegalways of supporting excessive drug use. For others, informal modes of self-helpenable them to do things most citizens seek to achieve by working: to supportfamilies, others in their community, or themselves. For still others, the informaleconomy provides a forum where they can advise, mentor, and encourageone another to strive to live in accordance with standards of moral worth. Yet the stories of these sidewalks cannot ultimately serve as sociologicalromance, celebrating how people on the streets "resist" the larger structuresof society. The social order these relationships carve out of what seems to bepure chaos, powerful as its effects are, still cannot control many acts that affrontthe sensibilities of local residents and passersby. How can we comprehendtypes of behavior such as sidewalk sleeping, urinating in public, sellingstolen goods, and entangling passersby in unwanted conversations? Whatfactors engender and sustain such behavior? How can we understand theprocesses that lead many people to regard those who engage in such acts as"indecent"? How do the quantity and quality of their "indecency" makethem different from conventional passersby? One of the greatest strengths of firsthand observation is also its greatestweakness. Through a careful involvement in people's lives, we can get a fixon how their world works and how they see it. But the details can be misleadingif they distract us from the forces that are less visible to the peoplewe observe but which influence and sustain the behaviors. How do economic,cultural, and political factors contribute to make these blocks a habitat?aplace where poor people can weave together complementary elementsto organize themselves for subsistence? And how do such forces contributeto bringing these men to the sidewalk in the first place? I look at all these aspects of sidewalk life in a setting where governmentretrenchment on welfare is keenly felt, as is the approbation of influentialbusiness groups. When government does assume responsibility in the livesof people like these, it attempts to eradicate them from the streets or to shapetheir behavior. These "social controls"?e.g., cutting down on the space forvending or throwing vendors' belongings in the back of garbage trucks?arethe intended and unintended results of what has become the most influentialcontemporary idea about deviance and criminality: the "broken windows"theory, which holds that minor signs of disorder lead to serious crime. Whatare the consequences of this theory, its assumptions, and the formal socialcontrols to which it has led? In trying to understand the sidewalk life, I refer to an area of about threecity blocks. Here we can see the confluence of many forces: some global(deindustrialization), some national (stratification of race and class and gender),some local (restrictive and punitive policies toward street vendors).Here, also, are blocks which can be studied in light of Jane Jacobs's earlieraccount and which contain the kinds of social problems that have becomeiconic in representations of the city's "quality of life" crisis. My visits tosome other New York neighborhoods and some other American cities suggestthat they, too, have tensions surrounding inequalities and cultural differencesin dense pedestrian areas. Across the country, liberals have voted toelect moderate, "law and order" mayors, some of them Republican. Whereasdisorderly-conduct statutes were once enough, anti-panhandling statuteshave been passed in Seattle, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Washington, D.C.,San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Long Beach, Philadelphia, New Haven, Raleigh,and Baltimore. Yet New York City and Greenwich Village are unique in a multitude ofways. I certainly cannot hope to account for life in the majority of places,which have not seen severe sidewalk tensions in dense pedestrian districts;even many places that have seen such tensions are different from GreenwichVillage. Nor can I hope to show how the sidewalk works in low-incomeneighborhoods where the majority of tense sidewalk interactions occuramong members of the same class or racial group. In the end, I must leave itto readers to test my observations against their own, and hope that the conceptsI have developed to make sense of this neighborhood will prove usefulin other venues. * * * I gained entrée to this social world when I became a browser and customerat Hakim's table in 1992. Through my relationship with him, I came toknow others in the area. He introduced me to unhoused and formerly unhousedpeople who scavenge and sell on the street, as well as other vendorswho compete with him for sidewalk space and access to customers. These relationsthen led me to panhandlers, some of whom also sometimes scavengeand vend. Once I was in the network, contacts and introductions took place acrossthe various spheres. Eventually, I worked as a general assistant?watchingvendors' merchandise while they went on errands, buying up merchandiseoffered in their absence, assisting on scavenging missions through trash andrecycling bins, and "going for coffee." Then I worked full-time as a magazinevendor and scavenger during the summer of 1996, again for three days aweek during the summer of 1997 and during part of the fall of 1997. I alsomade daily visits to the blocks during the summer of 1998, often for hours ata time, and worked full-time as a vendor for two weeks in March 1999, whenmy research came to an end. Although in race, class, and status I am very different from the men Iwrite about, I was myself eventually treated by them as a fixture of theblocks, occasionally referred to as a "scholar" or "professor," which is my occupation.My designation was Mitch. This seemed to have a variety of changingmeanings, including: a naïve white man who could himself be exploitedfor "loans" of small change and dollar bills; a Jew who was going to make alot of money off the stories of people working the streets; a white writer whowas trying to "state the truth about what was going on." More will be saidabout these and other perceptions in the pages that follow. My continual presence as a vendor provided me with opportunities toobserve life among the people working and/or living on the sidewalk, includingtheir interactions with passersby. This enabled me to draw many ofmy conclusions about what happens on the sidewalk from incidents I myselfwitnessed, rather than deriving them from interviews. Often I simply askedquestions while participating and observing. Sometimes, when I wanted to understand how the local political systemhad shaped these blocks, I did my interviews at the offices of Business ImprovementDistricts, politicians, and influential attorneys. I also questionedpolice officers, pedestrians, local residents, and the like. I carried out morethan twenty interviews with people working the sidewalk in which I explicitlyasked them to tell me their "story." These sessions, held on street corners,in coffee shops, and on subway platforms, lasted between two and sixhours. I paid the interviewees fifty dollars when their sessions were over,as compensation for time they could have spent selling or panhandling.Throughout the book, I try to be clear about the kind of research from whicha quotation has been culled. After I had been observing on the block for four years, Ovie Carter, anAfrican-American photojournalist who has been taking pictures of the innercity for three decades, agreed to take photographs to illustrate the things Iwas writing about. He visited the blocks year-round and came to know thepeople in the book intimately. Ovie's photographs helped me to see thingsthat I had not noticed, so that my work has now been influenced by his. Continues... Excerpted from Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier Copyright © 2000 by Mitchell Duneier. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. 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