Sidewalk

by Duneier, Mitchell; Carter, Ovie; Carter, Ovie

• ISBN13: 9780374263553
• ISBN10: 0374263558
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

For the last decade a dozen people have worked as street vendors on the Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village. All but one are black men. Hakim sells "Black Books" and mentors young men who come to his table. Marvin, who sells recycled magazines, gave up drinking and drugging and is now encouraging Ron to turn his life around. Ishmael is homeless; the police throw his property in the back of a garbage truck when he leaves the block to relieve himself. Joe Garbage "lays shit out" to earn his few dollars a day. To write Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier spent five years with these men as a "participant-observer". In that time, street people have become pawns in "quality of life" campaigns nationwide. Mayors attack them. Businesses want them off the streets. Even liberal whites are uneasy in their presence. But Duneier uses documentary techniques to tell the whole story -- showing ways the men give one another the moral support that social service agencies have given up on even as they persist in anti-social acts such as selling stolen goods in plain sight. Nearly four decades after Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Sidewalk gives us a clear, sharp picture of city life today -- as it is, and as it might be.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(14)
PART ONE THE INFORMAL LIFE OF THE SIDEWALK	17	(98)
The Book Vendor	17	(26)
The Magazine Vendors	43	(38)
The Men without Accounts	81	(34)
PART TWO NEW USES OF SIDEWALKS	115	(42)
How Sixth Avenue Became a Sustaining Habitat	115	(42)
PART THREE THE LIMITS OF INFORMAL SOCIAL CONTROL	157	(74)
Sidewalk Sleeping	157	(16)
When You Gotta Go	173	(15)
Talking to Women	188	(29)
Accusations: Caveat Vendor?	217	(14)
PART FOUR REGULATING THE PEOPLE WHO WORK THE STREETS	231	(62)
The Space Wars: Competing Legalities	231	(22)
A Christmas on Sixth Avenue	253	(40)
PART FIVE THE CONSTRUCTION OF DECENCY	293	(26)
A Scene from Jane Street	293	(19)
Conclusion	312	(7)
Afterword	319	(14)
Hakim Hasan
Appendix: A Statement on Method	333	(26)
Notes	359	(22)
Acknowledgments	381