Floating City (5 page)

“So where are you going?”

“Hell, I have no idea.”

We sat back, absorbing the similarity of our problems. Both of us stuck between past and future, both looking for a way forward. The solution would seem obvious later, but not in that moment—just that oddly fraternal feeling, the sense that we were joined in a common struggle to find our way here in the city of New York. I had left Chicago just as the subjects of my first book were aging out of the drug world. Most ended up in jail or dead. Now Shine and I were asking the same question:

Is there a second act?

•   •   •

T
his was when Shine first told me to start by getting a car and driving around the city. It just seemed so banal and obvious I didn't take him seriously.

“You need to float,” he said, adding a “bro” like punctuation.

“Float?”

Shine pointed to the bartender. “Like that dude. He used to be a comedian, then he drove a truck. He worked on a farm, he played baseball. Now he's here.”

“Where does the car come in?”

He tucked his head a notch and narrowed his eyes. Was I too stupid to understand a metaphor?

“I get it,” I said.

His eyes moved to the clock above the bar, then to the window. The foot traffic on the street was starting to thicken, a trickle toward the deluge of five o'clock. He began the patting-the-pockets ritual that precedes departure.

“Don't let me keep you,” I said.

“Yeah, I got some business to deal with. People getting off work, they want what they need.” He stood up. “You got my number. Call me.”

He reached over to the bar and threw some bills on the counter, pointing to my drink to let the bartender know that he had paid for both. He had a blue New York Yankees cap in his hand, which he put on his head gently and with great care, then gave me a nod and walked out the door.

•   •   •

I
spent the next two years in Harlem, mostly with Shine and his friends. I was lucky enough to win a research grant to study the history of black street markets, which helped me understand the history and culture of the place but also gave me a chance to
build the trust I needed to launch a study of more contemporary markets—even with Shine's backing, people weren't going to let me watch their criminal activities right away. Talking to the “old heads” about the history of the community would help to settle everyone's nerves. And truth be told, that's the way a good Chicago sociologist would proceed. Becoming intimate with one neighborhood just naturally seemed like a good foundation.

As I expected, everyone from small-time street vendors to car thieves to loan sharks had a story about the past they wanted to share. And as they grew comfortable with me, they started introducing me to the people busily working in the alleyways. It was slow cooking, but the time seemed to be well spent. I learned that the underground economy was still a primary source of sustenance for Harlemites who could not find jobs or who were mentally or physically unable to work full-time, which put a different perspective on all the headlines about unemployment. Their off-the-books wages were at least as good as most minimum-wage work, the only other realistic option. And their earnings flowed through the neighborhood, raising everyone's standard of living. But I also saw the painful price they paid, from living in constant fear of the law to living almost entirely in a world of cash with little savings and no credit. Frequent exposure to street and domestic violence didn't help, especially when they were afraid to go to the police. And they weren't exactly building up a useful résumé for future employment.

But all of these people did their business on the same few blocks, day after day, just like the men and women I'd observed in Chicago. Walking around with Shine and taking my own solitary journeys on the streets near the university, I could easily tell that people from other areas of the city came into Harlem to buy goods and services off the books, from pirated videos and crafts on the street to car repair and sexual services. Yet these were all invisible to me. I knew that many Harlem residents left the neighborhood to do off-the-books work in other parts of New York. Some were nan
nies, like Shine's mother, who took the bus to the homes of wealthy families. Janitors and housekeepers worked odd jobs in Midtown corporate offices. Craftspeople and artists and street vendors sold their wares on sidewalks all around the city. Shine himself served clients all over the five boroughs.

So I felt productive but uneasy. I was gathering stories of Harlem's underworld and I certainly had a wide range of black marketers to follow and observe. I even spoke to my university about launching a formal study of both modern-day and older underground markets in New York. But I was afraid it was too much like my work in Chicago and that I was missing all the ways that the underground markets of Harlem connected to the larger city. I knew I needed a different approach to really do something original.

In the academic world, as it happened, the latest craze in urban sociology involved a new way of thinking about today's cities. Urbanists like Saskia Sassen and David Harvey had written poignant studies about New York's rebirth as a global metropolis more intimately linked with Tokyo and London than with Newark or Philadelphia. These great service economy centers transcended regional economies, unlike the old “twentieth century” cities (such as Buffalo or Cleveland) that lived and died by the resources around them. Global cities were dominated by finance, real estate, entertainment, and media, while their aging counterparts had to feed on the crumbs of manufacturing and heavy industry. As a result, New York and London were filled with cosmopolitan jet-setters while most of Cleveland's and Buffalo's citizens were making do in their aging neighborhoods.

This new narrative rang loudly in and out of the academy. Mayors and business leaders from São Paulo to Mexico City to Bangkok dreamed of replacing their sooty heavy industries with sleek modern technology companies that would ensure their place in the emerging global networks. How could they attract the global
headquarters of major multinationals, as Britain did? Or could they use art and architecture as a vehicle to attract global investment, like Spain? Could New York's dominance of finance be challenged?

I personally liked the focus on global flows and the power of this perspective. Traditional sociology, beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century, had portrayed cities as many different gardens knitted together. In this so-called “ecological” view, your neighborhood determined your eventual job, your educational path, whom you might marry, and even your chance of being victimized by crime. Segregation wasn't necessarily so bad, because an urban economy still brought people together and a gentle, paternalistic government could feed resources equitably back to each garden. It was also a neat and tidy way of intellectually managing the chaotic bustle of cities brimming over with immigrants, freed slaves, native populations, and all manner of transients. But the new breed of sociologists studying globalization argued that faraway places were closely intertwined despite their physical distance, causing a disruption in the old ecology or perhaps even a new ecology altogether, and this idea was starting to make intuitive sense to me after just a few months in New York. Black neighborhoods were turning white, Greenpoint was going from Polish to Latino, Mexican day laborers were living side by side with young white artists, and suburban whites were now moving back to cities in droves. A minority since the early 1970s, whites now made up 77 percent of all Manhattan apartment buyers, and the homes they purchased were often rehabbed rental units that once housed minorities and the working poor. The city was gentrifying at a pace that had not been seen in decades. The laborers were relegated to the outer boroughs.

And with gentrification, New York was becoming a city of sharp contrasts. As Sassen wrote pointedly, 90 percent of the highest-paid professionals arriving in the new New York City were white and
their conspicuous consumption and service needs were spawning entire industries, which were mostly staffed by minorities coming from distant homes. The global city was becoming a divided city, fragmented in all sorts of ways that were just starting to become clear.

For me, the challenge was to import this abstract theory into my own brand of ethnography. How could this flotsam and jetsam be captured by a hunker-down sociologist who liked to pitch a tent and watch people do their thing? There was also the problem of subject. The arguments about the underground economy were mostly based on speculation and little concrete information. In the academy as well as the media, all the talk of “global cities” tended to be centered on the glamorous life of elites who played in skyscrapers. My colleagues in the art and literature departments all but worshiped the new breed of international polyglot artists, the British rappers who mixed tracks with Bronx DJs, Hong Kong filmmakers who cast Western actors, even the fusion chefs who mixed classic French cuisine with Chinese flavors. These people seemed to define modern life. And economists were starting to tell us about the great wealth accumulating in these cities and the unexpected effects it could have—a real estate investment group in Hamburg could derail a land use project in Denver simply by playing with fancy debt instruments, which made the global elite relevant to anyone who wanted to affect policy.

But something was missing in all of these portraits. New York and London each contained eight million people, Tokyo had thirteen million, and only a small percentage worked in finance, real estate, arts, and other major industries. If cities like New York were really taking on a unique place in the global socioeconomic system, the lives of those outside the skyscrapers also had to be taken into consideration. And the conventional wisdom assumed that this wonderful New York gumbo was produced by the city's
mainstream
economy, which left out the underground supports I was already
seeing in Harlem. What if I focused on the subterranean ways people made their living? Wouldn't that strike a unique chord—especially since most scholars studied the underground economy purely in terms of deviance? In Chicago, I had seen crack gangs and local citizens work together in ways that wove invisible connective threads deep into their communities, and I knew the underground had potential to reveal unsuspected truths about the way society really works outside the speeches of politicians and the self-serving pronouncements of the financial community. If immigrant nannies worked off the books for the yuppies who bought the high-priced condos, if low-income black drug dealers served white hedge fund traders, wasn't it possible that the whole vast global city was actually knit together by the invisible threads of the
underground
economy? Wasn't it possible that staring up at the glamorous skyscrapers made you blind to the true picture?

Since a sociologist studies relationships, my daunting task would be to find and chart the connections among the high and low. But here I was at a distinct disadvantage. I wasn't producing surveys of ten thousand New Yorkers; I didn't work with census data for multiple cities. My last book told the story of Chicago's ghettos by focusing on one gang and one community. A genuine criticism could be made that it was difficult to generalize from the two hundred low-income black gang members I observed to the twenty-five thousand that filled Chicago's streets, many of whom were neither black nor low income. My department colleagues were the first to make me aware of the need for scientific precision, pushing me gently but forcefully to deal with what social scientists call the “generalizability problem.” In the last few decades under pressure from the lab-coat side of the discipline, the scholars who study large numbers of individuals have had great fun discounting studies with small
n
's—small numbers of people in the sample, which effectively limits the relevance of the work for the wider population. Especially at the new Columbia, size mattered.

So what made me confident that my research had any relevance for the wider world?

Again, the specter of journalism raised its ugly head. If I tried to narrate the new New York with nothing but stories of ambitious street vendors or drug gangs in Harlem, most sociologists would laugh. The groups simply represented too few residents to be meaningful. This left two choices. I could abandon the big picture and focus on finding something unique that had escaped the scientists using “big data.” This could mean uncovering a strange lifestyle or hard-to-access group, perhaps a disappearing culture or some other unusual case that begged for explanation. Alternatively, I could try to expand my focus by including not just low-income black populations but a much wider range of New Yorkers of varying classes, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

I had already taken the first path, having produced research on poor slums, drug-running gangs, and marginal groups. Now I wanted to find as many different New Yorkers involved in the underground economy as I could. I would have to fill up as many boxes as possible: poor, rich, middle class, men, women, Latino . . .

But this approach only raised further problems. First, my expertise was precisely on those who were shut out of society: the gentrified, the displaced, the unemployed. These marginal figures were usually the
victims
of great social changes. Or worse, they were the criminals, the traffickers in sex and contraband who were generally seen as victimizers. While I would have to include a much broader cast of characters and types, there still remained the possibility the conventional wisdom might be right. There was a risk of overstating or romanticizing the influence of these networks of people. Also, there was no map to this territory. No one really knew exactly who was making money illegally because they were, by definition, hidden from public view. Even if I had a hundred different characters and types in my study, critics could complain about another hundred who'd escaped my net. Would I ever really be able to say
that my sample truly represented the diversity of illegal commerce in the city?