Sociologist chronicles the streets of Greenwich Village

Mitchell Duneier has nearly been arrested. He’s worried about where to urinate. He’s slept on borrowed couches, gone hunting through trash, sold used magazines, and sat outside in the rain.

This is life for the mostly homeless men who sell second-hand goods around Greenwich Village. And because it’s their life, Duneier, a professor of sociology, made it his life. For seven years, he spent nearly every summer and semester break living and working among that community of vendors in a quest to understand the dynamics of class, race and economics in America’s inner cities.

The result of that exhaustive search was “Sidewalk,” a deep and often-moving study of urban street life that Duneier published in 1999. The book created a minor sensation in both popular and academic circles, winning both the Los Angeles Times’ prize for the best current-interest book of 1999 and the sociological community’s prestigious C. Wright Mills Award. Even Spike Lee took notice, calling the book “the most readable work of sociology that I have ever come across.”

The book has also cemented Duneier’s reputation as a rising star in UW–Madison’s already-strong sociology department. “Sidewalk” is already being called a classic that will be on required reading lists for students of urban sociology for years. “Duneier is something special, a once-in-a-generation talent,” says Charles Halaby, chair of sociology. “His research already ranks him among the most important American urban ethnographers ever, period.”

What sets Duneier apart is his unique approach to research — a mix of long-term analysis, insightful journalism and personal participation. It’s a style that acknowledges Duneier’s fierce desire for understanding and his willingness to wait — sometimes for years — to make sure he has it right.

A native of Long Island who has lived in New York and Chicago during his academic career, Duneier is a natural for urban research. He likes to be around vibrant, active communities, and he’s a skilled listener. His sharp powers of observation would have made him an excellent reporter, which is in fact what he set out to be as an undergrad at Northwestern University.

But the desire to go deeper eventually led Duneier to sociology, which he studied as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. While living in Hyde Park, he began hanging out at a local restaurant, where grew fascinated by the banter of the customers, especially a group of elderly African-American men from the neighborhood who were regulars there. Their conversations became the basis for Duneier’s Ph.D. dissertation, which was published in 1992 as the book “Slim’s Table.”

The well-acclaimed book was Duneier’s first foray into ethnography, the in-depth study of a particular culture or group. Ethnography involves hours of observation and repeated interviews, which can go on for months or even years. Duneier took to it immediately. Naturally inquisitive and unfailingly thorough in his research, he was well suited for the meticulous work. And he was excited by its potential outcome — a deeply detailed picture of a small piece of society that probably had been overlooked by most. “One of the things that ethnography is very good for,” he says, “is for getting beneath the surface of what one sees just passing by — the behind the scenes, the back regions … to see that something that looks very simple has a complex structure to it.”

In “Sidewalk,” Duneier plumbs the lives of a community of mostly African-American vendors, who make their living by selling used books, recycled magazines, and other scavenged goods from tables set up around Greenwich Village. While the men are virtually a village institution, with many regular customers and supporters, some business owners and residents call their presence a public nuisance.

Duneier’s interest in the group started in 1994, when he was a New York University law student living in a nearby apartment. On one of his many trips past the tables, Duneier spied a copy of “Slim’s Table” for sale. He stopped to remark to the vendor, a man named Hakim Hasan, that he was the author. Duneier had the idea to get to know Hasan and observe activities at his table, something that might make a fitting sequel to “Slim’s Table.”

Hasan, although initially skeptical, consented to let Duneier hang around his table and make observations, which eventually became the basis for a manuscript. But neither Hasan nor Duneier felt satisfied with the outcome. He asked his publisher to throw away the work and started over.

Ditching two years of research wasn’t easy, he says, “especially when you’re going up for tenure.” But his next idea was even bolder. Instead of just watching, Duneier volunteered to work in the community of vendors, learning the routines of their lives by actually living them himself. The Ph.D. sociologist signed on for a summer as an assistant to Marvin, who sold magazines and other printed matter from a table on Sixth Avenue.

Duneier’s first few days on the sidewalks were hardly chummy. But as he grew to know the vendors’ society, he learned that the community divided into fairly rigid hierarchies, with book vendors at the top. Next came magazine vendors, and at the bottom were those who did odd jobs, like watching over tables while the regular vendors went for food, or scavenging for products to sell.

He also learned the survival instincts necessary to do business under the tight constraints of the New York laws that allow for sidewalk vendors. Once seen as an effective way to minimize panhandling, the laws have been narrowed in recent years, creating additional contingencies for the sellers. For example, and no merchandise can be left unattended. To assure that they don’t lose their place or that the police don’t haul away their possessions, some vendors sleep next to their tables in folding chairs.

In “Sidewalk,” Duneier argues that this public life makes the Sixth Avenue vendors a sort of eyesore for many business owners and residents. He details how police handle the vendors in ways that are often consistent with “broken- windows theory,” the idea that a broken window that remains unfixed will encourage additional vandalism and lawlessness. “Sidewalk” explores the ways in which human beings are treated as “social broken windows.”

Duneier’s case against that treatment is built by his own experiences on the street. While the men may appear disorderly to passersby, he uncovered a well-organized, public business with defined roles and hierarchies. He also came to know the vendors as intensely human beings, each capable of the whole spectrum of human strengths and frailties.

Duneier says his unique participant-observer style doesn’t compromise his ability to take a scholarly view. “The mistake in ethnographic work is to believe that you don’t have a presence, and that you don’t have emotions,” he says.

Those emotions came through in one of the book’s most dramatic scenes, when Duneier set up a vendor’s table in bold defiance of direct police orders on Christmas Day in 1996. Earlier that day, the police had demanded that Ishmael shut down his table, despite there being no prohibition on selling on Christmas Day. It had been a bad week for Ishmael already; a few days earlier, police had seized all his possessions and thrown them away during a crackdown apparently aimed at illegal vendors who were putting their goods directly on the ground (a violation of law).

Carrying a copy of the ordinances that allow for street vending, Duneier set up his table in the exact spot where Ishmael had been. When police returned and tried to shut him down, he grew defiant, asserting his legal right to be there. A police officer told Duneier that he would take him to jail if he continued to “cop an attitude.” At one point, the officer grabbed the copy of the law from Duneier and said, “This, listen to me, this means nothing to me right now.” After a second officer arrived, the incident ended with Duneier’s table intact.

The episode yields deep insight into police authority and the liberties they sometimes take to maintain order on the streets. But at its base Duneier’s decision to get involved was “intuitive,” he says. He is, after all, a human being. And on that day, with the holiday making the heart of New York City a cold and lonely frontier, he was just another human being trying to make sense of the world.