SIDEWALK.

• Author: Waldman, Amy
• Position: Review

SIDEWALK

by Mitchell Duneier Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.00

SIDEWALK EXAMINES HOW societies and subcultures form and regulate themselves. It explores and explains the life of cities, from how public space is controlled, both formally and informally, to how local laws get made and why they get broken. It tells a story--dozens of stories--about how people relate across boundaries of race and class and experience.

It does all of this simply by probing very, very deeply into the world of a small group of men, most of whom are black, that has adopted a stretch of sidewalk in Greenwich Village. There, depending on their proclivities and ambitions, they sell books, magazines, or secondhand goods, or guard the tables or spaces of those who sell, or panhandle, or in some cases, sleep. These are men, one of whom, Hakim Hasan, writes in an afterword to Sidewalk, whose identities "are hidden in public space."

Some of the men in the Village are ex-convicts, for whom the street means a fresh start; others are ex-corporate men, for whom it means liberation. Some of the men are "unhoused," in Mitchell Duneier's preferred term, while others go home to apartments each night. Some are intellectuals selling books specifically about the black experience; others subsist by charging those vendors money to guard their spaces overnight. Some get up and go to work each day; others, occasionally unhinged by drugs or alcohol, live less predictably.

What is significant is that, in one form or another, all of them work as entrepreneurs in the informal economy, and as such, their stories are a tribute to the redemptive, stabilizing, power of work. And what is surprising is how the men have constituted a strangely nurturing network in which newcomers are taught to scavenge and sell by old-timers; rules about social behavior are as much enforced within the group as from outside; and conduct is shaped by a combination of logic, integrity, anger, and the drive for respect.

For them, the sidewalk has become a sustaining habitat, but they do not exist in a vacuum. Some of their small social transgressions, from peeing in public places, to harassing women and bank-goers, to drinking, make many urban dwellers, including some who live in the neighborhood, just wish they would go away. Under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, they have borne the brunt of quality-of-life policing.

The essential question running through the book is whether these men are "public characters" or "broken...