By andrew Jacobs

SIDEWALK By Mitchell Duneier. Photographs by Ovie Carter. 383 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

o some New Yorkers, the men who hawk secondhand books and scavenged magazines on city sidewalks are no better than beggars and squeegee men; they form a parasitic and intimidating gantlet that mars the urban streetscape and consumes precious areas of public space. Protected by local law, vendors of written material have largely weathered Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's quality-of-life jihad, which has swept away peddlers, panhandlers and other unsavory elements in the name of a safer, saner city.

For more than a decade, New York's largest colony of booksellers has occupied a patch of Greenwich Village, stretching alongside Avenue of the Americas near Eighth Street. Here, in one of the country's most famously liberal neighborhoods, they are sometimes cherished but more often barely tolerated, even scorned. Despite questionable anti-peddling campaigns by the police and the local business improvement district, this tenacious community continues to survive.

Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist, immersed himself for five years in the world of these book vendors, studying their culture and their tempestuous relationship with pedestrians, local residents and the police. Mostly black, many of them homeless or former convicts, they wrestle with drug addiction and alcoholism, sleep on the pavement and relieve themselves against the sides of luxury co-op buildings. They can be loud, unkempt and, as Duneier writes, an affront to even the most progressive Villagers.

But rather than seeing them as pests, deviants or symbols of urban disorder, Duneier sets out in his book ''Sidewalk'' to show these men as assets to a vibrant, viable city. Touching on the theories of Jane Jacobs, whose writings about Greenwich Village street life changed the way America sees its cities, he presents the beleaguered book peddler as integral to a healthy neighborhood, an extra set of eyes that keeps the street safe while providing book-crazed New Yorkers with inexpensive reading material. And in a city cleaved by race and class, Duneier says, the sidewalk book table draws a wide cross section of browsers and readers, fostering interaction between people who might never otherwise mix. But above all, Duneier says, book peddling is a way for society's most marginalized citizens to earn an honest living. Many of his subjects previously supported themselves through drug dealing, begging or public assistance, and without access to such employment, Duneier contends, crime and panhandling would surely rise.

Although such ideas might set less progressive eyes rolling, Duneier manages to cut through pie-in-the-sky idealism with convincing research married to a well-considered dialectic. Using the personal stories of those who have reclaimed fractured lives through peddling, he makes a decent case for encouraging sidewalk vending as a means to improve city life. Society, he says, errs when it tries to rid public space of outcasts it has had a hand in producing.

Ovie Carter/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Mitchell Duneier

Duneier spent months working full time alongside men like Joe Garbage, a magazine scavenger; Butteroll, a panhandler who sleeps beside subway tracks; and Mudrick, an irascible schemer who charges tourists for directions. But rather than just describe and document the lives of those who survive on recycled matter, ''Sidewalk'' illuminates a world that passers-by never see. Dozens of people benefit from Booksellers' Row: the table watchers who keep an eye on merchandise when a vendor has to relieve himself, the place holders who guard prime selling spots overnight and the movers who carry wares to and from storage places. Some of the men make as much as $120 for a 12-hour day; their goods are either donated by sympathetic residents, procured through the gray market or pulled from curbside recycling bins and Dumpsters.

Duneier, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of a study of working-class black men, ''Slim's Table: Race, Respectability and Masculinity,'' spent years slowly gaining the trust of his subjects, although he acknowledges that their suspicion never completely evaporated. In the end, the men were trusting enough to carry his tape recorder, documenting their own interactions when he was not around. Duneier did not clean up their street vernacular, and the result is an authenticity that brings these men to life. Adding to the powerful text are hauntingly beautiful photographs by Ovie Carter, a photographer for The Chicago Tribune.

Although ''Sidewalk'' is unabashedly sympathetic to its subjects, it does not shy away from documenting their flaws and fragilities. Still, despite episodes of unruliness -- sidewalk arguments, public drunkenness and catcalls to passing women -- most of the men adhere to a code of conduct that minimizes their impact on the surrounding community. Pornography, for example, is not displayed during the day, and when scavenging, the men are careful not to disturb recycling piles, lest they upset building owners or superintendents.

As long as they conform to municipal law, secondhand book peddlers can occupy prime real estate without a permit, free of charge, 24 hours a day. But as Duneier discovers, if the men break the rules -- by laying books on the pavement or leaving the tables unattended -- the police retaliate. The other peddler foe, the local business improvement district, tries to displace the men by installing concrete planters on prime sections of sidewalk.

Ultimately, ''Sidewalk'' calls into question the ''broken window'' theory of policing embraced by Mayor Giuliani, which sees all visible signs of disorder -- from cracked window panes to drunken vagrants -- as inducements to more serious crime. Rather than see book peddlers as broken windows, Duneier urges us to embrace them as ''fixed windows'' -- law-abiding men who improve city life by mentoring jobless black men and easing them back into the mainstream. They may offend some with their presence, but in the end, Duneier would say, the magazine and book peddler makes for a more compassionate, safer -- and better-read -- society.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29