PART ONE THE NFORMAL LIFE OF THE SIDEWALK
The book vendor is not hard to understand why Hakim Hasan came to see himself as a pub lic character. Early one July morning, a deliveryman pulled his truck up to the curb behind Hakims vending table on greenwich Avenue off the corner of Sixth Avenue and carried a large box of flowers over to him. "Can you hold these until the flower shop opens up? "the delivery asked No problem, "responded Hakim as he continued to set up the books on his table "Put them right under there When the store opened for business, he brought them inside and gave hem to the owner "why did that man trust you with the flowers? "I later asked. "People like me are the eyes and ears of this street, "he explained, echo- ing Jane Jacobs again. "Yes, I could take those flowers and sell them for a few hundred dollars. But that deliveryman sees me here every day. I'm as de mendable as any store-owner. A few days later, an elderly black man on his afternoon walk came up to the table. "Can i sit down? "he asked Hakim, who gave him a chair The man was panting and sweating, so Hakim went to the telephone on the corner and called 911 As they waited for the paramedics to arrive, the man said he was goi into the subway "Its too hot for you down there, "Hakim replied. "You wait right here for the ambulance!
1) The Informal Life of the Sidewalk Soon an ambulance arrived, and the crew carried away the old man. It turned out he had suffered an asthma attack Another day, I was present at the table when a traffic officer walked by to give out parking tickets "Are any of these your cars? "she asked Hakim. Yes, that one, and that one, "said Hakim, pointing "what is that all about? "I asked "The day I met her, we got into an argument, "he explained. "She was getting ready to give the guy across the street a ticket. I say, ' You can't do this! 'She said, 'Why not? ' I say, 'Cause I'm getting ready to put a quarter in. 'She said, "You can't do that 'I guess that, because of the way I made my argument, she didn't give out the ticket, and from that point onward we be- came friends. And when she comes on the block, she asks me, for every car on the block that has a violation sign, ' Is that your car? "Meaning, 'Is it some- one you know? And depending on whether I say yes or no, that's it-they get a ticket. Once, a group of German tourists wearing Nikon cameras passed the able. Though the information booth run by the Village Alliance Business Im provement District was open on a little island across the street, they walked up to Hakim instead How do we get to Greenwich Village? "one man asked This is Greenwich Village, "Hakim explained "Are these things part of your job description as a vendor? "I asked him once Let me put it to you this way, Mitch, "he replied. "I kind of see what I loosely call my work on the sidewalk as going far far beyond just trying to make a living selling books. That sometimes even seems secondary. Over time, when people see you on the sidewalk, there is a kind of trust that starts They've seen you so long that they walk up to you. There have been occa- sions when I've had to have directions translated out of Spanish into French to get somebody to go someplace It is not only directions and assistance that I have seen Hakim give out. He also tells people a great deal about books-so much so that he once told me he was thinking of charging tuition to the people who stand in his sp on the sidewalk i think he was only half joking. Indeed, Hakim seems to consider himself
The book Vendor( 1 9 a person of some consequence out on the street, not merely a public charac- ter but a street intellectual of sorts as well. His self-image is sometimes re- inforced by his customers On a September afternoon, a middle-aged man walked up to his table. Do you got the book The Middle Passage?" By Charles Johnson? "asked Hakim " Is it a novel? "No. It's by Tom Feelings Oh, it's a big, oversized black book with beautiful pictures! No, I do not have that. Yeah, I know the book It's forty bucks "I know that if anyone knows, you know "Well, I'm one of the few who may know. There's a lot of people out here who know. I try to do my homework. I stay up late at, night going hrough periodicals, newspapers, all kinds of stuff, to try to figure out what's published” Hakim is one of many street book vendors throughout Greenwich Village and New York City generally. Most of these vendors specialize in one or more of the following: expensive art and photography books; dictionaries New York Times best-sellers;"black books; new quality mass-market and trade paperbacks of all varieties; used and out-of-print books; comic books pornography; and discarded magazines On Sixth Avenue alone, among the vendors of new books, a passer may encounter Muhammad and his family, who sell"black books"and an incense known as "the Sweet Smell of Success"at the corner of Sixth at enue and Eighth Street. Down the block, an elderly white man sells best sellers and high-quality hardcovers on the weekends. At Sixth Greenwich (across the street), one encounters Howard, a comics vendor also white, and Alice, a Filipina woman(Hakims sometime business partner) who sells used paperbacks and current best-sellers These vendors take in anywhere from fifty to a couple of hundred dol lars a day. By selling discounted books on the street (and i will discuss how these books get to the street in a later chapter), they serve an important func tion in the lives of their customers. Indeed, if all they did was to sell books at prices lower than those of the bookstores, this would be enough to explain why they are able to sustain themselves on the street. But to understand how Hakim functions as a public character, I thought it would be helpful to look more closely at the meaning the book table has in the minds of both the ven- dor and the customer who patronizes it