Sidewalk

For the last decade a dozen people have worked as street vendors on the Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village. All but one are black men. Hakim sells "Black Books" and mentors young men who come to his table. Marvin, who sells recycled magazines, gave up drinking and drugging and is now encouraging Ron to turn his life around. Ishmael is homeless; the police throw his property in the back of a garbage truck when he leaves the block to relieve himself. Joe Garbage "lays shit out" to earn his few dollars a day. To write Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier spent five years with these men as a "participant-observer". In that time, street people have become pawns in "quality of life" campaigns nationwide. Mayors attack them. Businesses want them off the streets. Even liberal whites are uneasy in their presence. But Duneier uses documentary techniques to tell the whole story -- showing ways the men give one another the moral support that social service agencies have given up on even as they persist in anti-social acts such as selling stolen goods in plain sight. Nearly four decades after Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Sidewalk gives us a clear, sharp picture of city life today -- as it is, and as it might be.