Introduction front the sensibilities of local residents and passersby. How can we compre- hend types of behavior such as sidewalk sleeping, urinating in public, selling stolen goods, and entangling passersby in unwanted conversations? What factors engender and sustain such behavior? How can we understand the processes that lead many people to regard those who engage in such acts as indecent"? How do the quantity and quality of their "indecency"make them different from conventional passersby? One of the greatest strengths of firsthand observation is also its greatest weakness. Through a careful involvement in people's lives, we can get a fix on how their world works and how they see it. But the details can be mis- leading if they distract us from the forces that are less visible to the people we observe but which influence and sustain the behaviors How do eco- nomic, cultural, and political factors contribute to make these blocks a habi. tat--a place where poor people can weave together complementary elements to organize themselves for subsistence? And how do such forces contribute to bringing these men to the sidewalk in the first place? I look at all these aspects of sidewalk life in a setting where government retrenchment on welfare is keenly felt, as is the approbation of influential business groups. When government does assume responsibility in the lives of people like these, it attempts to eradicate them from the streets or to shape heir behavior. These"social controls"e. g, cutting down on the space for vending or throwing vendors'belongings in the back of garbage trucks-are he intended and unintended results of what has become the most influential contemporary idea about deviance and criminality: the"broken windows theory, which holds that minor signs of disorder lead to serious crime. What the consequences of this theory, its assumptions, and the formal social controls to which it has led? in trying to understand the sidewalk life, I refer to an area of about three city blocks. Here we can see the confluence of many forces: some global (deindustrialization), some national (stratification of race and class and gen der), some local (restrictive and punitive policies toward street vendors) Here, also, are blocks which can be studied in light of Jane Jacobs's earlier account and which contain the kinds of social problems that have become iconic in representations of the city's"quality of life' crisis. My visits to some other New York neighborhoods and some other American cities sug gest that they. tno. have tensions surrounding inequalities and cultural dif-
Introduction( 1 ferences in dense pedestrian areas. Across the country, liberals have voted to elect moderate, " law and order"mayors, some of them Republican. Whereas disorderly-conduct statutes were once enough, anti-panhandling statutes have been passed in Seattle, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Washington, D. C San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Long Beach, Philadelphia, New Haven, Ra leigh, and Baltimore Yet New York City and Greenwich Village are unique in a multitude of ways. 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 Greenwich Village.6 Nor can I hope to show how the sidewalk works in low-income neighborhoods where the majority of tense sidewalk interactions occur among members of the same class or racial group. In the end, I must leave it to readers to test my observations against their own, and hope that the con- cepts I have developed to make sense of this neighborhood will prove useful in other venues. i gained entree to this social world when i became a browser and cus- tomer at Hakims table in 1992. Through my relationship with him, I came to know others in the area. He introduced me to unhoused and formerly un housed people who scavenge and sell on the street, as well as other vendors who compete with him for sidewalk space and access to customers. These re- lations then led me to panhandlers, some of whom also sometimes scavenge Once I was in the network, contacts and introductions took place across the various spheres. Eventually, I worked as a general assistant-watching vendors' merchandise while they went on errands, buying up merchandise offered in their absence, assisting on scavenging missions through trash and ecycling bins, and"going for coffee. " Then I worked full-time as a magazine vendor and scavenger during the summer of 1996, again for three days a week during the summer of 1997 and during part of the fall of 1997. I also made daily visits to the blocks during the summer of 1998, often for hours at a time, and worked full-time as a vendor for two weeks in march 1999. when my research came to an end Although in race, class, and status I am very different from the men I
12) Introduction write about, I was myself eventually treated by them as a fixture of the blocks, occasionally referred to as a"scholar"or"professor, "which is my oc cupation. My designation was Mitch. This seemed to have a variety of chang- ng meanings, including: a naive white man who could himself be exploited for"loans"of small change and dollar bills; a Jew who was going to make a lot of money off the stories of people working the streets; a white writer who was trying to"state the truth about what was going on. "More will be said about these and other perceptions in the pages that follow My continual presence as a vendor provided me with opportunities to bserve life among the people working and/or living on the sidewalk, in cluding their interactions with passersby. This enabled me to draw many of my conclusions about what happens on the sidewalk from incidents I myself witnessed, rather than deriving them from interviews. Often I simply asked questions while participating and observing Sometimes, when I wanted to understand how the local political system had shaped these blocks i did my interviews at the offices of Business Im- provement Districts, politicians, and influential attorneys. I also questioned police officers, pedestrians, local residents, and the like. I carried out more than twenty interviews with people working the sidewalk in which I explic- itly asked them to tell me their"story. " These sessions, held on street cor ners, in coffee shops, and on subway platforms, lasted between two and six hours. 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 which a quotation has been culled After I had been observing on the block for four years, Ovie Carter,an African-American photojournalist who has been taking pictures of the inner city for three decades, agreed to take photographs to illustrate the things I was writing about. He visited the blocks year-round and came to know the people in the book intimately. Ovie's photographs helped me to see things that I had not noticed, so that my work has now been influenced by his After three years passed, I believed I had a strong sense of the kind events and conversations that were typical on the blocks. In the next two years of this research, my field methods evolved to the point where intense use was made of a tape recorder. The tape recorder was on throughout my n the block, usually kept in a milk crate under my vending table. Peo-
Introduction( 1 3 ple working and/or living on the sidewalk became accustomed to the ma- chine and, after being exposed to it over a period of weeks, came to talk in ways that I determined to be like the talk I had heard before. Since the ma hine was taping on a public street, I hoped that I was not violating any ex- pectation of privacy if it picked up the words of people who couldn't efficiently be informed that it was on. I have since received permission to quote almost all the people who were taped without their knowledge. When names are used, they are real ones, and i do so with consent. In those few cases when this is not possible(such as incidents involving police officers whose speech was recorded by my microphone without their knowing it), I have not used names at all or have indicated that a name is false I am committed to the idea that the voices of the people on Sixth Avenue need to be heard. To that end, my goal has been to assure the reader that what appears between quotation marks is a reasonably reliable record of what was said. (Some quotes have been edited slightly to make them more concise. )When the best I could do was rely on my memory or notes, quota- tion marks are not used. I have come to believe that this is perhaps especially necessary when a scholar is writing about people who occupy race and class positions widely divergent from his or her own, for the inner meanings and logics embodied in language that is distinctive to those positions can easily e misunderstood and misrepresented if not accurately reproduced. Further- more, the increasingly popular practice of creating composite characters and combining events and quotations sometimes occurring months or years apart, is not employed here. No characters have been combined. No events have been reordered Some of the people on the street volunteered to"manage"the taping by themselves, leaving the tape recorder on while wearing it in their pocket or resting it on their table when i was away from the scene or out of town. Such acts demonstrated the desire of persons in the book to ask their own ques tions, have their own topics addressed and recognized, and enable me to hear some things that went on when I could not be present. Sometimes they used the machine to interview one another and gave me the tapes. (In the pages that follow, I indicate when I rely upon such a source. Given the knowledge Hakim had of both Jane Jacobs's work (which he inspired me to reread)and the life of these sidewalks, I asked him to respond to this book He took time out of his daily grind as a vendor to write an afterword
1) Introduction There was another way in which the vendors, scavengers, and panhan dlers worked with me as collaborators. I invited some of them to classes to teach my students, in both Santa Barbara and wisconsin. And I asked all of them to judge my own"theories "of the local scene when the book was com- plete, though always indicating that, while respecting their interpretations, I would not be bound by them. Throughout the book, it is I who have selected the material presented, and I take responsibility for the interpretations that go along with that material For twenty-one people who figure prominently on the blocks, i have now made a commitment to return the advance and a share of any royalties or other forms of income that the book might yield. Like all observers, I have my subjectivities. I know that scrupulous ad herence to rules of method will not lead necessarily to objective truth. I be lieve that what is most important is that I try to help the reader recognize the lens through which the reality is refracted i have written a statement on method to that end, and throughout the book I endeavor to explain my pro- cedures for selecting data and my own biases and uncertainties about the inferences i draw Fieldwork is presumed to require trust. But one never can know for cer tain that he or she has gained such trust, given the absence of any agreed upon indicator of what"full"trust would look like. In this case, I think, some level of trust was shown by people's readiness to provide access to in- formation, settings, and activities of the most intimate sort. They sometimes revealed illegal activities or actions which, if others knew of them, might re sult in violent retribution But as I will explain, there were times when the trust I thought I had de veloped was nothing more than an illusion: deep suspicion lingered despite an appearance of trust. In some cases, perhaps it always will. Surely it takes more than goodwill to transcend distrust that comes out of a complex his- tory. Though participant observers often remark on the rapport they achieve and how they are seen by the people they write about, in the end it is best to be humble about such things, because one never really knows March 1999