Sidewalk

Sidewalk tells the true story of sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s years-long effort to understand the informal sidewalk economy of 1990s Greenwich Village, in New York City. The story begins when Duneier meets Hakim Hasan, who is a vendor of books on Sixth Avenue, one of the commercial hubs of the Village and the main focus of this book. Through Hakim, Duneier becomes acquainted with several of the lower-income book and magazine vendors, scavengers, and panhandlers that make up the intricate informal economy of the sidewalk. He learns how sociopolitical forces like harsh crack cocaine sentencing policies, racism, dissatisfaction with the values of corporate life, fractured family ties, and dwindling job opportunities contributed to these vendors leaving the formal economy for the informal sector of the streets. He charts the migration of these workers from Penn Station to Sixth Avenue, describing the various factors that make these four blocks of Greenwich Village a suitable home for the street vendors, such as the ample magazines and sympathies of the liberal, upper-middle-class Greenwich Village residents, along with a pro-civil liberties lawyer championing a local law that will enable the sidewalk men to carve out an innovative—if controversial—business model.

Duneier sets the foundation for Sidewalk in the works of the renowned academic of urban life, Jane Jacobs, whose idea of “eyes on the street” (that is, making streets safer vis-à-vis “public characters”) considerably impacts urban sociology for the decades to come. Duneier dissects the ways in which Jacobs theories hold up (or don’t) through an examination of how the makeup of the Village has changed over the past two decades. He notes how those changes impact the way residents and public characters like the street vendors view one another. Duneier describes the complex ways that vendors interact with one another within the informal economy through mentorship, competition, and informal regulation of social norms designed to keep the peace. And he shows how this booming informal economy threatens to come to a halt when policing and lawmaking based on a new sociological “broken windows” theory leads to a crackdown on the way vendors and panhandlers conduct business on Sixth Avenue.

Finally, Duneier delves into the way race and class undergird the theories and policies and assumptions that underline the making of this book. From the way the black vendors interact with the mostly white residents of the Village to the heavy policing of black street vendors and panhandlers compared to the kind treatment of the white Romp family, the list of examples is enormous. These tensions are illustrated perhaps no better than in the example of Duneier himself, whose background as a middle-class, well-educated Jewish professor differs completely from those of his subjects. Ultimately, it is Duneier’s empathy, thorough research, and skillful participant-observation that enable him to build bridges with his subjects and create a compelling ethnography of this small but vibrant social world in danger of collapse.