Amazing Grace

When I lived in Tucson, Ariz., in the early 1980s, I was often surprised to observe how many of my fellow city dwellers kept remarkably sophisticated dental equipment in the glove compartments of their cars. Stalled in traffic or stopped at red lights, they would lean close to their rearview mirrors and, with their gleaming picks, probes and scrapers, go to work on their incisors. On the rare occasions when they noticed me watching from my car, they glared, as outraged as if they’d caught me peering through their bathroom windows. One common complaint about urban life is that it teaches us not to look, not to pay attention and, especially, not to make eye contact. Whether our principal mode of transportation is vehicular or pedestrian, subway or freeway, the result is the same: We stop seeing, stop noticing the too-familiar details of our neighborhoods and of our accustomed routes as we travel to and from work encapsulated in our private, durable bubbles. In part, it’s a means of self-protection, of survival, an adaptive method of maintaining some privacy and dignity, of defending ourselves against the daily onslaught, the maddening distractions of our overcrowded and overstimulating environments. Mitchell Duneier’s fascinating and instructive “Sidewalk” is, among other things, an eloquently persuasive argument for sharpening, rather than defensively deadening, our observational skills, for paying closer attention to the city in which we live--and especially to the neighbors we are most likely and most eager to ignore or take for granted. Generously illustrated with expressive and communicative black and white photographs by Ovie Carter, it introduces us to the complex personalities and voices of an entire community: the mostly male, mostly African American vendors who, thanks to a loophole in the municipal statutes regulating peddling, are legally permitted to sell printed matter--books, magazines and comic books--without a license on the streets of New York City. At the center of Duneier’s adopted milieu is a 42-year-old street intellectual named Hakim Hasan, who--like everyone else in this deeply subversive study--confounds our easy assumptions about the sort of man who would wind up selling books from a folding table on the busy corner of 6th Avenue and 8th Street in Greenwich Village. A dropout from the corporate world, Hasan is remarkably articulate and well-read, Francine Prose is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “Blue Angel: A Novel.” versed not only in the “black books” (fiction and nonfiction by and about African Americans) he sells to his customers and to the young men for whom he serves as advisor, teacher, mentor and amateur therapist, but in literature, history and sociology. It’s Hasan who first mentions Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 classic, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” is the touchstone against which Duneier--a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and UC Santa Barbara--measures his findings and conclusions as he considers the ways in which cities have changed over the last 40 years. And it’s Hasan who first identifies himself as what Jacobs called a “public character”--a person who watches, who keeps track of what is happening on the street and thus makes its residents feel protected and safe. The irony, of course, is that Jacobs’ public characters were “respectable” storekeepers and small businessmen, while Hasan and his (predominantly homeless) colleagues are precisely the sort who make middle-class white Americans feel less safe, more threatened and endangered. Indeed, several of Hasan’s friends and co-workers--addicted to alcohol and drugs, barely coping with the medical, psychological and logistical problems of homelessness--are volatile and unstable. But in many cases, the level of discourse and conversation that Duneier tape-records is higher and more engaging than what one is likely to hear in the classroom, or at an academic faculty dinner party. Familiar with the contents of their wares, the vendors have considered opinions on why the quality of Architectural Digest has declined, so that it is harder to sell than it used to be, and about the industry that provides their (in some cases pilfered) inventory. “There’s large numbers of people in the publishing industry who are underpaid,” observes Hasan. “And this is not just the underlings. It’s the editorial people, too. A lot of these people see these books as a way of supplementing their income. Sometimes it means lunch for a day, or carfare.” What’s most compelling and touching about these sidewalk vendors is the immenseness of their efforts to lead disciplined, productive lives, to support themselves and in some instances their families (a Filipina named Alice--the only woman in the group--has raised children and grandchildren on the money she earns selling paperback classics on the streets) and to contribute to the society that excludes and scorns them. “Sidewalk” traces the history of this community, which began in the 1980s, when Reaganomics and the closing of New York’s SRO hotels swelled the ranks of the homeless population, and when the city and local business associations made it increasingly uncomfortable for the dispossessed to live in Amtrak’s Pennsylvania Station; there, for some years, they had found sufficient resources and services (food, toilets, shelter) to survive with a degree of decency and order. In 1982, after a poet was prevented by the police from selling his literary magazine on the street, the Civil Liberties Union campaigned for an amendment to the General Vending Statute that exempted “general vendors who exclusively vend written matter with the aid of small portable stands” from the licensing regulations that applied to other peddlers--and the book and magazine sellers were provided with a way to reorganize their lives. Almost overnight, a whole system--a mini-hierarchy--evolved, governed by its own codes of professional conduct and business ethics and headed by the sellers, who are in turn supported by helpers responsible for watching their tables when they leave to eat or use the bathroom, for holding their places on the block, for moving and storing (often in the subway tunnels) their precious inventory. Nearly all of them, it should be said, have a detailed and practical familiarity with the precise provisions of the amendment that allows them to ply their trade, knowledge figures importantly in their predictably problematic dealings with the police and that offers moving testimony to the role law and government play, even at the humblest levels of a more or less functioning society. Duneier writes lucidly and sympathetically, with a minimum of jargon, and wisely lets incident and anecdote take the place--and do the work--of theory and abstraction. Several telling incidents illustrate the role that racism plays in the lives of the men and women on this Village street corner. Duneier takes over a stand after an African American vendor is shut down by the police and has a very different sort of encounter with the policemen who return on their rounds. And in one striking chapter, he tellingly describes the experiences of a white family from Vermont who annually come down to the city to sell Christmas trees and whose experience living in their camper--local residents offer them keys to their apartments so the children can nap and bathe--could be taking place in a different city, a different planet, from the one that barely tolerates Hasan and his friends. It’s to Duneier’s credit that he allows Hasan to write the final chapter, to describe his life in his own words and to report on his impressions of co-teaching a class with Duneier at UC Santa Barbara. (The university paid Hasan a lecturer’s salary for the semester-long course.) Hasan, it should be said, is an even more powerful and expressive writer than Duneier. His account of his own “exile on the street” begins: “The streets that are the focus of these pages are places of metropolitan refuge, where the identities of the men and women who work and live are hidden in public space. In the pedestrian’s eye these men and women are reduced to a horrific National Geographic photograph come to life. It is as if they were born on these streets and have no past, or other life experience.” Hasan’s afterword completes the portrait that Duneier has so ably drawn of these public characters who provide a model of human resourcefulness and resilience, who should be treated not only with compassion and tolerance but with respect by politicians, by urban dwellers, by anyone who cares about the continuing health of our cities. Greenwich Village is, it so happens, my neighborhood. Reading “Sidewalk” has changed forever the way in which I inhabit it, slowed the speed at which I pass the tables of books and magazines set up near the grocery at which I buy food for my family and wholly altered the quality of the attention I pay to the men and women whose lives are--like mine, as it turns out--sustained by the written word.