Sidewalk

Duneier, Mitchell (with photographs by Ovie Carter).

Sidewalk.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

383 pp.

ISBN 0-374-52725-3

$24.95

Sidewalk, a winner of the C. Wright Mills Award, is required for readers interested in old-school urban ethnography and recommended for those concerned with current issues of informal economies, homelessness and civic regulation of "undesirables." In the tradition of participant-observation work like W.F. Whyte's Streetcorner Society, Duneier draws us into a world we do not know, among book and magazine vendors on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, mostly black casualties of racism and the postindustrial economy. Among these people with "identities ... hidden in public space" (319), he explores the "invisible social structure" and "web of interactions that constitutes the ongoing life of the sidewalk" (314, 85).

The cast of characters is led by Hakim, a book-seller who, like Whyte's Doc, was Duneier's main gatekeeper. Uneasy with Duneier's initial project about "the everyday life of one street vendor"-himself-"and the people who come to his table to buy and talk about books" (333), Hakim played a key role in Sidewalk's evolution and wrote an "Afterward" for the book that eventually emerged.

After reading the original manuscript ... I concluded that the events and conversations that took place at my book-vending table could not convey, by themselves, the complexity of the social structure that existed on these blocks. I sent Mitch a long, handwritten letter outlining my concerns (322).

Duneier asked Hakim to come to California to help direct an undergraduate seminar about race and the street, a time during which they talked the book was reconceived. Duneier returned to the field to sell and scavenge magazines with a vendor named Marvin and his partner Ron (a position Hakim helped arrange), looking toward the wider world of the sidewalk beyond Hakim's table.

He finds beneath the surface turmoil of the sidewalk a complex social and moral order. An example of the former are men, not vendors, who "have made places for themselves on the street, becoming part of the lifeline" (85).

They perform a number of distinct and recognized roles: the place holder, the table watcher, the mover and the person "who lays shit out." The range of roles demonstrates the many ways that the sidewalk's informal...