City: Rediscovering the Center

3 Street People

3 STREET PEOPLE Many people work the street. There are the regulars: cops, postmen, sanitation men, traffic directors, doormen, bus dispatchers. There are supervisors: transit authority people checking on bus dispatchers, traffic officials on traffic directors. There is even a man to check that the grate cleaners are doing their job. Store owners can be street people. On a high-volume street with many small stores, some owners spend a lot of their time standing in the doorway. If a passerby stops to look in the window, they will start to sell him. There is very little they do not know about the street. The irregulars are the most numerous: handbill passers, pushcart food vendors, merchandise vendors, messengers, entertainers, palmists , solicitors for religious causes, blood pressure takers. Then there are the odd people: Moondog, Mr. Magoo, Mr. Paranoid, Captain Horrible, Aztec Priestess, Gracious Lady, Tambourine Woman. Whatever the fantasies they have been acting out they make a beneficent presence on the street. Since the midseventies, however, their ranks have been swelled by scores of disturbed people released from institutions . There has been no outpatient support for these people and a number are on the streets who ought not to be. The bag ladies are a special category. They antedated the wave of released patients and endanger no one save themselves. They remain fiercely independent. There appears to be more of them on the street than before. The underlife of the street has a rich cast too. There are the beggars, the phony pitchmen for causes, the three-card-monte players [26] CITY and their shills, the whores and their pimps, the male prostitutes and the Murphy Men, the dope dealers, and worst of all, the muggers in their white sneakers. Bad or good, the variety of street people is astonishingly wide. To appreciate this, stand still. If you stay in one spot long enough, you will begin to see how many different kinds of people there are; how regular are their ways; and how many seem to know each other, even the ones you would assume to be adversaries. If you stand in one spot long enough you will also become aware that they are noticing you. They have reason. You are not part of the routine of the block. You have no obvious business being there. If you write things down on a pad of paper they are more curious yet. Before long someone will come up to you and ask what you are up to. If you establish yourself as OK the word will get around. You will be accepted . People will say hello to you. There is one regular you will find puzzling. He is the familiar stranger. You recognize him—you've seen him often. But you don't know who he is. He knows you. He nods to you. But who is he? He is out of context. He is not in uniform. He is not in the surroundings you usually see him in. Is he the assistant manager at Gristede's? The bartender at Gianni's? You need to place him. The process works both way. The barber next door has been cutting my hair for fifteen years. But he always calls me Doctor. He thinks I'm a surgeon at the hospital down the block. I'm not going to tell him I'm not. It's too late. And it would not be fair to him. Calling me a doctor is part of our relationship and it is best let be. Let us now take a closer look at the principal kinds of street people. Without drawing lines too fine we will go from good to bad. Vendors Street vendors sell everything. There are perennial staples: junk jewelry, watches, umbrellas, plastic raincoats, toys. But the vendors are always trying out new items and occasionally most of them will be riding one fad, or whatever the jobbers are loaded up with. Several years ago it was leather belts. So many vendors took to selling them that it looked like the point of saturation had surely been reached. But supply created demand, and the sight of all those leather belts on the sidewalks drove people to buy more leather belts. They are still buying them. The vendors have been growing in number. They have been broadening the range of the merchandise sold. To the aggravation of Street People [27] merchants, they have...