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Chapter 8. The Social Space of Shopping: Mobilizing Dreams for Public Culture
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 8 The Social Space of Shopping: Mobilizing Dreams for Public Culture Sharon Zukin I lined up a set of copper pans, every size in order, just out of reach, so the customer would have to get together with the person in the store. It was the beginnings of a conversation, a way of shopping that disappeared during the [second World W]ar, unfortunately. —Chuck Williams, founder of Williams-Sonoma1 Nostalgia for older forms of community and the public space in which they were enacted stirs us to appreciate the places where we have shopped in the past. Partly this reflects their technological and social obsolescence —as my grandparents recalled “the delights of corner-shops, gas lamps, horsecabs, trams, pisstalls: all gone, it seems, in successive generations ,” so I regret the passing of friendly chats with shop clerks and greengrocers and their replacement by the soulless autonomy of Internet shopping.2 But the feeling of attachment to, or alienation from, shopping places is not all a matter of structural change. It also varies with the distance we ourselves have branched out from our social roots. Despite the daily experience of shopping in Manhattan, where I have lived for many years, I still have dreamlike memories of carrying out errands for my mother on the neighborhood shopping street in Philadelphia where I grew up. The butcher, baker, and owner of the dairy store knew me well, at least by face; I greeted most of them by name; and I became an awkward adolescent at my mother’s side while she chatted with them about small events and even smaller purchases. These conversations weren’t only economic exchanges, they were a means of cultural reproduction. My family tacitly understood that the shopkeepers were, in a larger sense, like us. From the smoked fish that was displayed in the front half of the delicatessen to the concentration camp inmate’s number that was tattooed in blue on the wrists of the couple that bought the dairy store from Mrs. Fox, when she grew too old to stand on her feet behind the counter, and the jokes my mom made with Meyer the butcher or Ethel his wife, who doubled as the cashier, we knew that we were members of the same ethnic community —although we never met outside the store.3 My memories linger on this shopping street because I left it many years ago and because the place that I remember so vividly is gone. Half the block was razed after a subterranean pocket of natural gas that no one had known about exploded, and the remaining houses were judged too dangerous for anyone to live in. Most of the children I grew up with had already left the neighborhood, spreading out to farther regions of the city, like my parents, or to another city, like me. Today, only the shells of half a dozen small stores with apartments on the second floor cling sadly together at one end of the block. All that remains of Meyer’s butcher shop is a hand-scrawled sign— “chicken 39 cents a pound”—taped to the plate-glass window. On a weekday morning, the shop is closed, the bare white enamel refrigerator cases gleaming like ghosts in the darkness. My memories return to this shopping street because of the public space that we took for granted, but which is so hard to re-create around shopping today. This was a walking street, surrounded not by parking lots but by blocks of houses, a place of intimate encounters among people who were otherwise strangers. Not everyone has such romantic feelings about the neighborhood shops of their childhood. Alfred Kazin, the famous “walker in the city,” was repulsed when he returned to Brownsville, the mostly Jewish, working-class area of Brooklyn where he grew up in the 1920s. Climbing the subway stairs to the street, he sensed an acrid smell, read the aging signs, and remembered the dingy store interiors with their second-rate selection of goods. I think he would have preferred to grow up among the secondhand bookshops of Lower Manhattan . Or maybe he liked the big department stores that we see in old blackand -white photos, illuminating Gotham with the bright lights of their seasonal window displays. These windows drew novelists like Theodore Dreiser, who strolled along Fifth Avenue in the early 1900s, gazing at the windows; tourists, eager to take part in a big city ritual; and elegant, perfumed shoppers who were...