William Whyte; Wrote Pioneering Study of Italian American Street Gangs

William F. Whyte, 86, a sociologist whose groundbreaking study of Italian American street gangs became a classic in sociology. When Whyte was a junior fellow at Harvard University in 1937, he began to work on the book that would establish his reputation. He combined scholarship with community reform in an innovative study of street gangs in a Boston slum known as the North End. Whyte lived and worked in the Italian immigrant neighborhood for three years, bringing his new wife to live there with him. With a $100 grant from Harvard, he hired a gang member named Angelo Orlandella to be his research assistant. The result was “Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum,” which was published in 1943 and remains in print. The book was credited with changing the way Americans viewed urban poverty and Italian Americans. In it, Whyte championed what he called the “participatory observer” method. He and Orlandella organized the North End’s first community protest, which resulted in cleaner streets and improvements to the public bathhouse. The book served as Whyte’s thesis at the University of Chicago, which granted his doctorate in sociology. Although he wrote 20 influential books, his work on the North End gangs was the keystone of his career. A native of Springfield, Mass., who completed his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, Whyte was a longtime professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He surmounted polio as an adult and performed much of his fieldwork on crutches. On Sunday in Ithaca, N.Y.