Introduction paperback, right? Listen to this: when I approached her with the book, the movie 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 the movie. Now, you can tell me this, Hakim: is it the same thing in the paper back as the hardcover? “Yeah, it's just different print.” Just different print? Okay. Well, when you get the other book by Alice Walker, 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..au thors that are coming out that are making their voices heard. More so than ever 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'm gonna r ad 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 a week, "said Hakim I try to tell my son that, "said the deliveryman. If you read one book week, man, you don,t know how much knowledge you can get Hakim doesn't just name titles. He knows the contents. I have observed the range and depth of his erudition impress scholars, and have segn him show great patience with uneducated people who are struggling with basic ideas and don't know much about books. He might sit for hours without hav ing a single customer step up to his table; other times the table becomes a so cial center where men and women debate into the night For two years, I lived around the corner from where Hakim sets up. Al most every day, whenever I had time to amble about on the block, I'd visit and listen to the conversations taking place at his table At first, Hakim sold what he called"black books, works exclusively by or about blacks. In later years, he became romantically involved with a Fili- pina book vendor named Alice, who carried used paperback classics and New York Times best-sellers, and they merged their vending tables. Now they are on their own again, working side by side. Alice is the only woman who works outside on Sixth Avenue every day, and she has practicall raised her daughters and granddaughters there. Whereas Alice tends to be
6) Introduction about business, "local residents, workers, and visitors come to hakim to discuss topics of all kinds, from burning issues of the day to age-old ques- tions Not long after we met, I asked Hakim how he saw his role I'm a public character, "he told me Have you ever read Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of great American Cities?” he asked.“ Youll find it in there. I considered myself quite familiar with the book, a classic study of mod- ern urban life published in 1961, and grounded in the author's observations of her own neighborhood, Greenwich Village. But I didnt recall the discus- sion of public characters. Nor did I realize that Hakims insight would figure in a central way in the manner in which I would come to see the sidewalk life 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-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle 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- although he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of differ ent people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest. 1 Jacobs had modeled her idea of the public character after the keepers with whom she and her Greenwich Village neighbors would leave their spare keys. These figures could be counted on to let her know if her children were getting out of hand on the street, or to call the police if a strange-looking person was hanging around for too long:"Storeke other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and or der, "Jacobs explained. "They hate broken windows and holdups."2 She also modeled the public character after persons like herself, who distributed peti tions on local political issues to neighborhood stores, spreading local news in the process Although the idea is meaningful to anyone who has lived in an urban
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8) Introduction neighborhood where people do their errands on foot, Jacobs did not define her concept except to say, " a public character is anyone who is suffi- ciently interested to make himself a public character "To clarify, we may consider her opening observation that the social structure"hangs partly"on the public characters. What Jacobs means is that the social context of the sidewalk is patterned in a particular way because of the presence of the pub- lic character: his or her actions have the effect of making street life safer, sta bler, and more predictable. As she goes on to explain, this occurs because the public character has"eyes upon the street. " Following Jacobs, urban theorists have emphasized what city dwellers in pedestrian areas like Greenwich Village have always known: sidewalk life is crucial because the sidewalk is the site where a sense of mutual support must 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 in cars, the people of Greenwich Village do many, if not most, of their errands by walking. The neighborhood's sidewalk life matters deeply to residents and visitors alike. Jacobs emphasized that social contact on the sidewalks must take place within a context of mutual respect for appropriate limits on interaction and intimacy. This made for interactive pleasantness, adding up to"an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down. "3 The Village's"eyes upon the street, "in Jacobs's famous dictum, indicated that residents and strangers were safe and consequently produced safety in fact Greenwich Village looked very different forty years ago, when Jane Jacobs was writing her classic book. Much of the architecture remains, and many people still live the way Jacobs's descriptions suggest; but there is another, more marginal population on these streets: poor black men who make their lives on the Village sidewalks. The presence of such people today means that pedestrians handle their social boundaries in situ, whereas, in the past, racial segregation and well-policed skid-row areas kept the marginal at bay. In this book, I will offer a framework for understanding the changes that have taken place on the sidewalk over the past four decades. In asking why the sidewalk life has changed in this affluent neighborhood, I provide the context and point of departure for my research. It has changed because the
Introduction concentration of poverty in high poverty zones has produced social problems of a magnitude that cannot be contained by even the most extreme forms of social control and exclusion. Many people living and/or working on Sixth Avenue come from such neighborhoods. Some were among the first genera- tion of crack users, and so were affected by the war on those who use the drug and the failure of prisons to help them prepare for life after released Some, under new workfare rules, have lost their benefits when they refused to show up to work as"the Mayor's slave. In asking how the sidewalk life works today, I begin by looking at the lives of the poor (mainly) black men who work and/or live on the sidewalks of an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Unlike Hakim, who has an apart ment in New Jersey, magazine vendors like Ishmael Walker are without a home; the police throw their merchandise, vending tables, clothes, and fam ily photos in the back of a garbage truck when they leave the block to relieve themselves. Mudrick Hayes and Joe Garbage"lay shit out" on the ground (merchandise retrieved from the trash)to earn their subsistence wages. Keith Johnson sits in his wheelchair by the door of the automated teller machine and panhandles. How do these persons live in a moral order? How do they have the inge- nuity to do so in the face of exclusion and stigmatization on the basis of race and class? How does the way they do so affront the sensibilities of the work- ing and middle classes? How do their acts intersect with a city's mechanisms to regulate its public spaces The people making lives on Sixth Avenue depend on one another cial support. The group life upon which their survival is contingent is crucial to those who do not rely on religious institutions or social service For some of these people, the informal economic life is a substitute for illegal ways of supporting excessive drug use. For others, informal modes of self-help enable them to do things most citizens seek to achieve by working: to support families, others in their community, or themselves. For still others, the infor- mal economy provides a forum where they can advise, mentor, and encourage one another to strive to live in accordance with standards of moral worth Yet the stories of these sidewalks cannot ultimately serve as sociological romance, celebrating how people on the streets"resist "the larger structures of society. The social order these relationships carve out of what seems to be pure chaos, powerful as its effects are, still cannot control many acts that af-