Sidewalk
by Mitchell Duneier
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

If you've ever been to New York City and wondered about the lives of street vendors, "Sidewalk" is the book for you.

Mitchell Duneier, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisonsin-Madison and the University of California, Santa Barbara, spent five years chronicling the lives of those who make a living selling written matter on Sixth Avenue in the West Village. After reading "Sidewalk," you realize these sidewalk vendors are more complicated than the stereotype might indicate. They take pride in making an honest living. They compete for prime sidewalk space. They delegate tasks like true business managers. And only a few of them are alcoholics or drug abusers.

Duneier approaches his subject with a sociologist's eye and a writer's craft. He provides vivid examples of life on the street, supplementing them with context, history and analysis. He devotes an entire section to the hygiene practices of the vendors. Vivid images of naked homeless vendors washing themselves in Penn Station's public bathrooms (before New York City "cleaned" Penn Station up) are not repulsive, but only underscore how adaptable and human these street vendors are. An in-depth discuss ion of the laws that allow and regulate sidewalk vending proves fascinating, since most of us walk past sidewalk vendors without giving a thought to what brought them there and what keeps them there.

Hakim Hasan, Duneier's main source, attended Rutgers University and worked for several years as a copy editor at a law firm before he became fed up and began a life as a street vendor. He is a "public character," offering advice and encouragement to his colleagues and customers alike. He wrote the afterword to "Sidewalk", which takes an honest and refreshing first-person perspective on sidewalk life.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] They compete for prime sidewalk space. They delegate tasks like true business managers. And only a few of them are alcoholics or drug abusers. [an error occurred while processing this directive] This is a well-researched book, with dozens of photographs, taken by Chicago Tribune photographer Ovie Carter, providing a perspective words could not possibly convey. Duneier, a white college professor, gains the trust of the mostly black street vendors so genuinely that they allow him to tape their conversations, go home with them and talk to their relatives. He illustrates how one particular street vendor gains self-respect by taking care of his elderly aunt. He cooks her meals, and even travels more than an hour back to her apartment one day because he was worried he might have left the stove on, an act of responsibility he would not have done just a year earlier.

But even when it seems that the street vendors are about to break through and become "normal" citizens, Duneier reminds us that they are marginal people in the eyes of most. He contrasts the experience of the vendors with a white family from Vermont that comes to Manhattan every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas to sell Christmas trees. The local residents give the family the keys to their apartments, allowing them to use the bathroom and shower, a form of hospitality never extended to the local street vendors.

"Sidewalk" is probably not the sort of book you would buy to read on lazy weekends, but it could be. Duneier presents an abundance of weighty issues, but the book itself is an easy read. When you close the covers, you know that the next time you walk New York City's blocks, you will see street vendors in an entirely new light.

— Ben Welch (bwelch@english.umass.edu)