Sidewalk

The next major challenge to informal social control is public urination. Some men on Sixth Avenue urinate against the side of buildings like the Washington Court Condominium, irritating the residents of these buildings. Mudrick prefers to urinate in a disposable cup. As he urinates, Mudrick mockingly refers to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has overseen an increase in broken-windows policing that has hampered the business of street vendors: “This is for the street, Mitch. This is for Giuliano” (173). He asserts that he started urinating into cups as a quick-fix solution, since local stores and restaurants will not often let people use their bathroom facilities without making a purchase.

Duneier decides to speak with other vendors to find out whether it is as difficult for them to access public restrooms as Mudrick suggests. He sees Ron using a restroom at a nearby Pizzeria Uno. Ron says that he had been using the restaurant’s toilet for ten years without a problem, but that the other day, the manager approached him and said he didn’t want the street vendors using the restrooms because they had left them in a poor condition. Ron also mentions that he previously urinated on the Washington Court building, but stopped after residents would mention their disgust: “So now I don’t even like doing that. If I have to pee in public, I pee in the street” (176).

Ron says that he didn’t see any harm in urinating on a building. But since this behavior upsets people, Ron tries to modify his habits by using public restrooms or peeing in the street when he cannot be far away from his table. Although it may seem counterintuitive, for Ron, peeing in the street is a way of being respectful to those around him:“Sometimes you can’t help but pee in the street. Because when a person is dirty or stinkin’ he don’t want to go to a bathroom with decent people in there” (177).

Continuing his investigation, Duneier meets Raj, who is an Indian newsstand worker at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place. As Raj has no bathroom in his newsstand, he uses the restroom of a nearby Indian restaurant, Baluchi’s. However, when he cannot leave his newsstand, he must pee in a cup, which brings him great shame, even though no one can see him. Ron feels shame because others see him urinating, but Raj feels shame merely at violating social norms about urinating in public.

Raj also mentions that he is able to use the restroom at the Waverly Restaurant without paying. Raj’s experience runs counter to those of some of the black vendors. Hakim and another vendor, John Stewart, both have difficulty accessing a restroom at a nearby McDonald’s, which, they said, have locked the door of their toilet. So the two men take the recorder to the fast food restaurant. The service worker behind the counter informs them that any paying customer can use the restroom, but Hakim tells him that a number of paying African-American customers who work on the street are being denied access. John Stewart attempts to assert a sense of loyalty—and thus, the expectation of respect—by stating he has been a McDonald’s customer for twenty-five years. As he says to the worker: “I’ve been coming to McDonald’s before you was born” (181).

Duneier shows that there may be some racial disparity in who has access to the bathroom. Duneier, a white male, is given access to the restroom without buying any items. This leads Duneier to wonder who, exactly, is considered a “customer.” Ultimately, being a customer may matter less than perception. Duneier speaks to managers at Waverly Restaurant and the McDonald’s, and they express concerns that if they let in one man working on the streets, they will open the floodgates to them all, which may result in dirty bathrooms and an unsatisfactory environment for customers.

Duneier looks into other options, but finds that nearby public restrooms like those in Washington Square Park, are maintained very poorly—they lack even separation dividers between stalls—and are not desirable locations for one to do their business. Duneier finds that informal social controls to encourage men not to urinate in public will not diminish the problem, which has its roots in a lack of public restrooms. The easy solution would be to put in place more public restrooms. But not everyone would be in favor of such a solution, because it could lead to unintentional problems (such as men sleeping in the stalls) or create a welcoming atmosphere for street workers (which many politicians oppose). Duneier maintains that the “lack of such resources does not break the lifeline of the people on the streets” but “merely leads them to engage in behavior that is unsanitary and appears indecent to those who are not aware of its social genesis” (187). The chapter underscores the need for recognition of the humanity of these street workers and an understanding of why they commit acts that may seem offensive to the public eye.

The last challenge to informal social control comes in the way that some men talk to women. This chapter opens with Mudrick making flirtatious comments like “I don’t see no ring on your finger. When you want to get married?” to two white women (188). The women either rebuff him or ignore him. When Duneier says one of the women seems nice, Mudrick retorts: “No women nice. All of them full of shit” (188). Duneier is quick to point out that many positive interactions take place on a daily basis between pedestrians and people working on the street, and that he’s only observed three such vendors like Mudrick who make attempts to “entangle” women in this manner (189). But he concedes that even if there are only a few men engaging in this activity, that number may be enough to create the perception among residents that there is an unacceptable level of deviant behavior on the sidewalk. Much of this chapter concerns the fraught interactions between poor black men and upper-middle-class white women on the street. The author asks three questions: 1) why the interaction between these two groups is particularly troubled 2) whether these conversations pose an actual harm to passing women and 3) why informal social controls are not successful in regulating the actions of these few men.

In trying to answer these questions, Duneier reiterates Jane Jacobs’s theory of “eyes on the street.” The theory posits that even simple interactions on the street create feelings of safety, because there is a sense that someone will come to your aid when you need it. Duneier puts forth his own conclusion: back in Jacobs’s time, strangers on the sidewalk interacted with people possessing similar backgrounds to themselves, but in the present day, we interact with people of all sorts of backgrounds, leading to more complex entanglements. Later in the chapter, Duneier remarks that “for the residents of the Village, ‘eyes upon the street’ do not necessarily make the street welcoming and comfortable. Sometimes, eyes have the opposite effect” (213).

To illustrate this effect, Duneier returns to the men who make comments to passing women. Mudrick expresses pleasure in flirting with these women, regardless of whether they reciprocate or not. And then he says something that catches Duneier’s attention: “They gotta deal with it” (193). Mudrick asserts that women he talks to do not feel harassed because he is showering them with respect. Duneier uses a tool called Conversation Analysis (CA) to break down transcripts of Mudrick’s conversations with women and show that beyond just his words—which will likely be unpleasant to many women—tensions persist in what is unsaid as well.

According to the CA, Mudrick issues mostly questions and compliments, which would generally lead to responses in normal social situations. But the women’s prolonged periods of silence and slow timing to respond when they do reply reveal that the women do not desire to conversate. Mudrick either does not pick up on or ignores these social cues—a form of rudeness—chatting until one woman walks away without answering his question. Duneier refers to the fact that some of the lower-income, black men on the street deploy conversation as a weapon against women of higher status as a form of “interactional vandalism” (199). Through interviews with local passerby, Duneier says that this sort of “interactional vandalism” is what causes some residents to feel perturbed by people working and living on the street. When Duneier asks if Mudrick is interested in any of the women seriously, he says no and stresses that he’s focused primarily on raising his granddaughter, Dyneisha. But in reference to a black woman whom he has been dating, he says: “Some womens you gotta give a lot of respect” (199).

Duneier continues the chapter with the example of Keith Johnson and Carrie the dog walker. Carrie regularly walks her dog, Daisy, in this area. Keith is familiar with Daisy, and during this interaction, he beckons Daisy to play with him without asking Carrie’s consent. Notably, Keith doesn’t know the woman’s name, but only the name of her dog. Keith’s ignorance of social cues—such as the way Carrie expresses discomfort through her silence and her tugging at her dog’s leash—and his command for her to “drop the leash for a minute” show an assertion of power and entitlement that he exerts over a female passerby (203). However, when Duneier chats with Carrie, she responds easily, unlike with Keith. Duneier surmises that this may be due to similarities between them in race and class or possibly the way Duneier speaks to Carrie. CA also reveals Carrie’s discontent with the situation.

Afterward, the author considers how “gender and race might be decisive on these blocks, possibly leading troubled encounters to occur with more regularity between certain categories of people” (209). After all, Duneier notes that this sort of behavior takes place in white working-class and middle-class America, but the added racial and class divides in Greenwich Village exacerbate tensions between the sidewalk and the surrounding community. To gain some insight, the author interviews Carrie the dog walker, and reveals that, in Carrie’s words, “white liberal guilt” may undergird some of the complex relationships between these poor black men and upper-middle-class women (212). These women have voluntarily chosen to live in a diverse city, leading them to feel angst when they have troubling encounters with men of other races. Duneier concludes that informal social control, such as rebukes from other vendors, have failed to curb this behavior. 

A local bookstore owner, Jill Dunbar, seizes several books from Alice’s table, claiming that these signed author copies were stolen from her store. Jill says that someone who stole the books from Dunbar’s premises likely “fenced” or sold the books to Alice (217). When Alice critiques Hakim for allowing Jill to walk off with the books, Hakim responds blithely: “I’m not about to get arrested over four books. When a white woman comes here and says something is hers, it’s hers. It’s as simple as that” (217).

Duneier visits Jill’s store. She tells him that the book vendors cut into bookstore owners’ business margins, partly through the fencing of stolen books and partly by selling books at a cheaper rate. Duneier vets the sources of Hakim and Alice’s books, which include scavengers; neighbors donating used books; a Brooklyn distributor; and people dropping off one or two copies of books at a time. Sometimes publishing-house employees even sell books to supplement their income. Through this process, Duneier concludes that most of the book vendors’ sources are credible and identifiable. Hakim makes a point that Jill is painting him as a scapegoat for economic turbulence caused by chain bookstores and picking on him because he is a “black male working in public view” (221). He asserts that the bookstores sell stolen books, too. Duneier finds Hakim’s rebuke to be somewhat similar to juveniles who dismiss their behavior by pointing the finger at someone else. But Hakim does not view his behavior as deviant. When Hakim shares these notions at his table, they go over well with his sympathetic customers.

Taking a turn into investigative reporting, Duneier digs into Hakim’s claims of theft in the publishing industry. He finds that the local publication Daily News has been affected by theft, with many stolen newspapers going to newsstands. He speaks with a woman in the book-distribution industry, who confirms that street vendors are not alone in selling stolen books. New York’s best-known bookstore, the Strand, has faced accusations of vending stolen goods. Fred Bass, the Strand’s owner, is the only bookstore owner to state that the scavengers who steal from his store make little impact on its profit. When Duneier speaks to Alice again, she acknowledges the books came from Dunbar’s store, but states that Dunbar’s lack of respect for Alice upsets her: “If Jill had talked to me instead of just grabbing the books […] we would have cooperated with her” (227). At the end of the chapter, Duneier points out the difference in the sale of stolen goods in private bookstores and publishers versus among public street vendors, which is that “the informal economic activity of the street fits the delinquent stereotype, whereas the activity of the formal economy does not” (228).