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ESSAYS AND OPINION

Sidewalk Life and Sidewalk People
Christopher DeWolf

Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier with photographs by Ovie Carter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

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There is life to be found everywhere in the city, on its streets, its sidewalks, in its parks. There are communities to be explored and relationships to ponder. This is part of what makes city life so appealing, the constant interaction of people within its confines. Often the city serves as a breathtaking social stew, home to many complex relationships that would take lifetimes to unravel. In his book Sidewalk, sociologist Mitchell Duneier takes more than a close look at one of these relationships, he immerses himself within. The focus of his book is the life of sidewalk vendors and the homeless – the "unhoused" as he puts it – in a small section of Greenwich Village in New York City. Thanks to a bylaw passed in the early 1980s, written matter can be legally sold on the streets of Manhattan without a licence, and a community of written-matter vendors has emerged on a small section of Sixth Avenue in the Village. By working amongst and especially with the vendors, examining the effects of their presence and the community they have formed, Duneier has built a book that is as rich, intriguing and vastly layered as its topic.

We begin by introduction to the structure of vending life on Sixth Avenue: there’s the "black book" sellers, the pulp paperback sellers, the magazine sellers, the illegal scavengers who "lay shit out" (selling things they’ve found in the garbage) and the other men whose lives revolve around or are influenced by these vendors. We meet the vendors themselves, who are almost entirely black men, and Duneier focuses in particular on Hakim, Rob and Marvin. Hakim is an educated, middle-aged man who left the corporate world after he became disgruntled with the racism that lurks below a benign surface. He sells black books, literature that focuses on African American culture, politics and society. Hakim is a well-read, well-spoken man who sees himself as one of the public characters that Jane Jacobs described in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He acts as something of an "elder" to those around him, including a young high-school dropout named Jerome to whom he lends books and encouragement. He is also a neighbourhood staple to many of his customers. Ron and Marvin are magazine sellers; unlike Hakim, they get their material from the trash, scavenging local recycling piles for good-quality, salable magazines. Marvin is a former alcoholic while Ron, an articulate and intelligent man when sober, is still addicted to crack and alcohol.

Drug addiction leading to poverty is a common thread among many of those on Sixth Avenue and is one of the most important issues in Sidewalk. Much of the book is dedicated to the "broken windows" theory, based on a study that found abandoned cars in both poor South Bronx and wealthy Palo Alto were stripped and vandalised once area residents realised they were indeed abandoned. In a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article based on the results of that study, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling wrote that so-called broken windows, signs that a neighbourhood has stopped caring, are a catalyst for urban decline. This theory has been flaunted and often mutated by politicians and business leaders opposed to the presence of written matter vendors, arguing that they act as broken windows, creating a hostile atmosphere and thus commencing a deterioration of neighbourhood morals. Duneier cites examples where men are indeed hostile and threatening, but argues that the community created by the sidewalk vendors is far better to the alternative: bands of drug addicted, truly homeless people such as those who swamped New York in the 1980s. Many men who have been involved with the Sixth Avenue vendors have shaken their substance addictions. Vending, too, he argues, offers men an honest income, which is certainly more satisfying to the city as a whole than having them steal or panhandle for food and shelter.

Sidewalk’s strength lies in its honesty. The men of the sidewalk are portrayed frankly and roundly. For instance, we see both the drunk, incoherent Ron and the intelligent, caring Ron. These men as well as the homeless or poor of other cities are too often portrayed as one-dimensional nuisances: ugly, dirty and in the way of progress. Duneier does not make judgements on the men and instead, his honest portrayals reveal them as ordinary human beings with all the standard complexities involved. The broken windows theory as practised by the police and neighbourhood business groups treats men and women on the street as objects that can be swept away, cleaned up or disposed of. In simply revealing the real people behind these broken windows, Sidewalk finds its greatest strength. Duneier's text is accompanied by strikingly beautiful photographs by photojournalist Ovie Carter, giving us another medium in which to gaze upon the interactions and lives of the sidewalk sellers.

The sidewalk and the city, like Duneier’s book, revolve around the people and the communities they create. We begin to understand that cities and neighbourhoods are painted by those who inhabit them as well as the buildings and streets that for the canvas. If any long-term solution is to be found with regard to the problem of crime and poverty, one must not merely observe but fully delve into the patterns, layers and intricacies of human relationships to each other and the environment that surrounds them, without succumbing to generalisations based on race, wealth or occupation.

Christopher DeWolf is the editor of Urbanphoto. He lives in Montreal.

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