Specters, Traditions, and The Dominance of Common Sense PDF

Chapter Title: Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense
Book Title: Urbanism without Guarantees

Book Subtitle: The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood
Book Author(s): Christian M. Anderson
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctvz0h9q8.12
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6
Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of

Common Sense
One of the things that are striking about the history just presented—
which was largely condensed around many of the same watersheds that
residents most often narrate—is just how infrastructural it is. It contains
numerous examples of visible projects of infrastructure and infrastructure
building that, on closer inspection, also seem to have entailed an array of
performative infrastructures accruing around and animating those visible
achievements. I am not interested in going back and scouring the histori-
cal record to excavate such traces. I am an ethnographer, after all, not a
historian. But I am interested in thinking about how performative infra-
structures may yet continue to emerge and accrue around some of these
histories in ongoing ways today—alternately valorized and contested,
contingently mediated in praxis, lodged in place and common sense, and
in enactments of indeterminate spatial labor and ambitions for use value
among the people who live and work here. This chapter offers a selection
of ethnographic vignettes arranged in such a way as to further tease out
some of these dynamics and active relays.
Tim O’Brien writes that “story-truth is truer sometimes than hap-
pening-truth” (1991, 203). I read this as a manner of saying it may well be
the way stories get taken up and enacted, and not necessarily the strictly
factual content, that matters most in the long run. O’Brien writes about
the experience of being a foot soldier in the Vietnam War and how the
stories people who experienced it told afterward—if they told them at
all—were less about accurately reporting literal history and more about
selectively carrying aspects of the experience forward in the present, in
fragments, curated and modified such that the dead would not be for-
gotten while those who made it home might narrate themselves in ways
that made more bearable the weight of their own living, in the wake of
113

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114 · SPECTERS, TRADITIONS, AND THE DOMINANCE OF COMMON SENSE
overwhelming trauma and existential destabilization. West Forty-Sixth

Street is hardly a war zone. But story truth can, perhaps tellingly, be a use-
ful way to think about the way performative infrastructures take shape
and orient practice in the minimal unity of everyday life in contemporary
urban space. O’Brien shows that there is an affective feeling in storytell-
ing that can adhere more, or at least differently, to life than just facts and
analysis. Story truth can evoke some of the excesses and absences of con-
temporary spatial-social experience—fleeting flashes of feeling and asso-
ciation, complex connections to some not quite fully known elsewhere,
evocative glimmers of things that were missed, distorted, or misperceived
as events were happening.1
In this chapter and the next, I have tried out a kind of ethnographic story
truth in relation to everyday life and praxis on West Forty-Sixth Street.
The point is not to objectively report or make claims to even know the
truth, strictly speaking, but to get at something else about the fragmented
and incomplete character of urban life and urban spatial-structural forma-
tion in minimal unity. These representational and narrative strategies are
not postmodern indulgences, artifacts of analytical paralysis in the face of
the impossibility of representing it all, or an attempt to distort the facts.
As ethnographer Les Back observes, “Partiality and failure do not suggest
that the lines in our portraits have no semblance of likeness” (2007, 155).
Likewise, as I have tried to foreshadow and show throughout this text,
messiness, indeterminacy, and irresolvable subjectivity do not stand in the
way of our ability to make sense of and make arguments about the social
world—even when perhaps they should. These qualities are a large part
of what is actually at stake in our understanding of everyday life. People
seem to go on subjectively being, feeling, and making sense of the social
world regardless of whether their facts are correct. So my arguments are
not ultimately focused on representing stories about people and daily lives
but are rather about surfacing the narratives that people tell and act upon
themselves—the performative infrastructures that ordinary people enact
in their everyday practices, and which accrue in place and location. In
this sense, it is deadly true that stories can, if iterated in space and social
practice, produce very real and enduring material effects. This is both the
promise and peril of performative infrastructures.
Ideas and common sensibilities emerge from particular material social
conditions, but they can also escape, exceed, or intervene and play a part
in (re)constituting such conditions. This is the dialectical power of ab-

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SPECTERS, TRADITIONS, AND THE DOMINANCE OF COMMON SENSE · 115
straction, the indexical, mimetic, and of course performative, which, as I

have explicated in detail, gain particular traction and matter a great deal
in the space of everyday praxis. So what follows is offered as far more than
a collection of disjointed stories. Consider it a layered ethnographic argu-
ment, interwoven with supporting theoretical insights about how, out of
the often chaotic mess that is situated everyday life and limited perspec-
tive, things are assembled into cohesive formations, processes, and active
forces, perhaps concretized in ways that pretend to universality but really
are deeply partial, and have real and heterogeneous effects.
One Way Street, Part 1

In “One Way Street,” Walter Benjamin takes an imaginary journey down
an allegorical street. The text is made up of fragments that explore the
cultural tendencies, social formations, and experiences of modern life, ar-
ranged as if they were encounters on a walk down this street. Benjamin
stops to read signs, explore interiors, and examine objects encountered
along the way. He engages themes of time, history, and knowledge as well
as the relationships among concrete material things, memories, and sub-
jective experiences as they persist in urban space. At one point, in the
fragment titled “To the Public: Please Protect and Preserve These New
Plantings,” Benjamin muses:
If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that
we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree, not in our
brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in
looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of
tension and ravishment. Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock
of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as birds seek refuge in the
leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the
awkward moments and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we
love, where they can lie low in safety. And no passerby would guess
that it is just here, in what is defective and censurable, that the
fleeting darts of adoration nestle. ([1928] 1978, 68)
This dreamlike melding of idea and object, feeling and substance, and
abstract and concrete is not merely stylistic, and is indeed characteristic
of Benjamin’s writing. In this passage, Benjamin deliberately plays with

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materialist theories such as those of Henri Bergson, who proposes with

rigorous philosophical seriousness that human memory is external to the
brain, embedded in objects and matter as they interact with the body.2
Think about it. Upon entering a dark room, the hand knows precisely
where a light switch is located even though the mind could not say this
with certainty. A traveler has no recollection of a place until returning later
and realizing she knows the way. A visit to a childhood home provokes a
flood of memories hitherto forgotten. For Bergson, and Benjamin, these
are indications that the material world with which we are always in contact
preserves our imprints and perhaps even acts as auxiliary to consciousness
and sociality in ways we may not immediately realize in the flow of every-
day experience. It is literally that memories are there. Benjamin’s dream-
like representational world is the result of a consistent attempt to work
through this relationship between the material and cognitive across space
and time. Moreover, Benjamin is implying that some locations are stickier
than others. Perhaps our sensibilities become most powerfully adhesive
when encountering the blemished or somewhat defective—condensing in
glitches, existing in states of shabbiness and disrepair, and slipping over
what is smooth, functional, and seemingly unbroken.
Benjamin’s views on the relationships among the material, social, sen-
sible, and temporal are indicative of his unorthodox understanding of his-
tory. As most clearly articulated in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
([1968] 1969), Benjamin views history as something quite different from
the common notion of sequential linear events that simply accumulate
and lead to the present. Benjamin describes historical temporality as op-
erating through jetzt-zeit, “now time,” because history, he argues, always
begins in the present, where different kinds of practical activities and so-
cial formations retrieve, revive, and enact past ideas otherwise left behind
and forgotten. In essence, Benjamin argues that the past is tangible only
to the extent that contemporary social and cultural activities animate and
reproduce particular aspects of it. Sometimes this is conscious and delib-
erate, as when history is curated, manipulated, and changed by powerful
groups and societies under different social conditions. However—and this
is key—selective uptakes of history also can and frequently do become
animated in routine, habit, space, and commodity relations. As such, par-
ticular iterations of history that are the product of highly specific constel-
lations of power and social activity can come to be enacted more or less
automatically and uncritically in and through everyday routine. In this

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sense, Benjamin can be read as questioning how the deposits of sensibility

accrued around blemishes and glitches past might be preserved not only
in official histories, but also in the concrete spaces and ordinary activities
of daily life in place.
From a decidedly different location than Benjamin, but seemingly on
the trail of similar deposits, Sylvia Wynter asks:
What are the mechanisms, what are the technologies, what are the
strategies by which we prescribe our own roles? What is common
to all are cosmogonies and origin narratives. The representations
of origin, which we ourselves invent, are then retroactively pro-
jected onto an imagined past. Why so? Because each such projec-
tion is the shared storytelling origin out of which we are initiat-
edly reborn. In this case we are no longer, as individual biological
subjects, primarily born of the womb; rather, we are both initiated
and reborn as fictively instituted inter-altruistic kin recogniz-
ing members of each such symbolically re-encoded genre-specific
referent-we. (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 34)
In these terms, perhaps it is also just there, in the shade of the gingko
trees, cacophony of the sidewalk, or imagined space just beyond visibility
on an inky black night, that performative infrastructures nestle, mutate,
and become activated, for better or worse.
What’s in a Name, Part 1: Accounts Differ

During the time I spent on West Forty-Sixth Street, I heard a lot of specu-
lation about how the area between Thirty-Fourth and Fifty-Ninth streets,
Eighth Avenue, and the Hudson River—what I refer to in hybrid as
Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen—got its names. Some people seemed assured of
the provenance I offered earlier—that the area was named Clinton in the
mid-1800s as a tribute to New York state governor DeWitt Clinton, who
was instrumental in the creation of the Erie Canal which had so trans-
formed the fortunes of the West Side waterfront. Others speculated that
the name Clinton was made up, or at least resurrected, by some coalition
of New York City growth boosters at some point in the mid-twentieth
century to symbolically sanitize the area. Similarly, the more recent name
“Midtown West” frequently appears in property listings and official city

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language, although I almost never heard it used by people who actually

live there.
Hell’s Kitchen is probably the most enduring, and certainly the most
evocative, name for the place. There are many stories about the origin of
this moniker:
There was once a large tenement building so bad that they named
it . . .
There was once a popular local beer hall called Heil’s Kitchen.
People used to say, “Let’s go to Heil’s Kitchen,” and eventually
they started to say . . .
Two cops were watching a riot in the neighborhood and one of
them said, “This place is hell.” The other one said, “No, hell is
too nice. This is . . .”
[Variations on] back in the day, everything about the place was
hellish, so somebody called it . . .
. . . and after that the name stuck.
Propinquity
One of the hallmarks of urban space is a certain social saturation—a per-
meability and thickness of sociality. This is a salient feature of contempo-
rary West Forty-Sixth Street. According to the 2010 census, at the time of
my research, there were about 1,250 people living on just three city blocks
here, with many more flowing through and visiting commercial ameni-
ties and public spaces every day.3 Under these circumstances, a certain
viscosity of social interaction characterizes public and even some facets
of private life, perhaps further accompanied by distinctive kinds of so-
cial comportment. Samuel R. Delany (1999), in a critical extension of Jane
Jacobs, describes this kind of viscosity in terms of “contact”—the conver-
sations, connections, hookups, and other chance encounters, on the street,
in line at the store, or in a communal or public space, through which so
much spontaneity and consequential social intercourse occurs. Michael
Sorkin (1997, 1999) describes much the same in terms of “propinquity,”
meaning “being together in space.” “Legible in the variety and tractability
of routines of circulation and contact,” Sorkin writes, “the currency of pro-
pinquity is exchange, the measure of the city’s activity” (1997, 11). While

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both of these urban observers would justifiably argue that the character
and density of contact and propinquity in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen have
shifted dramatically over the course of the history I just narrated—today
needing to be understood as being under threat by proponents of bland,
homogenizing urban development and order maintenance that would just
as soon render an urban landscape made slick for exchange-value making,
with no sticky spots or glitches that cause one to linger or confront some-
thing aporetic—such a critical mass of teeming heterogeneous activity is
still undeniably present.
People in the Neighborhood

Besides Watty and Sara, introduced above and reemerging in scenes
below, there were a number of other residents whose everyday lives I ob-
served on West Forty-Sixth Street. Their lives provide a further sense for
the saturations and dynamics at play in this space and in the character of
propinquity and contact. These are lifeworlds such as one might pass by
on the street or spend a few moments proximate to while waiting for the
cashier at the corner store.
Carmen
Carmen had lived within a few blocks of her birthplace on the Middle
West Side of Manhattan her entire life, nearing sixty years. She grew up
as a middle child with eight brothers and sisters in a fifth-floor corner
apartment at the back of a building on Forty-Ninth Street at Tenth Av-
enue. Carmen’s family came to the United States from Puerto Rico in 1950,
before she was born. She told me that her dad wanted something better
for his wife and two kids, so he packed the family up and moved them
to Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen, where other relatives had already moved and
found apartments. At one time, she told me, all the tenants in the building
that her family moved into were filled with relatives.
Carmen was cagy about her exact age, but she was born at some point
after the family got established in their new home. She said things were
pretty happy for a lot of her childhood. But when she was eleven, her fa-
ther died. She was vague about exactly how—she just said he was ill—
but it was clear that his death dramatically shaped her life thereafter. Her
mother didn’t speak much English, and as the child who happened to be

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old enough to be responsible but young enough to remain at home, Car-

men ended up doing a lot of translating for the social services that helped
sustain her family during that time. These were lean years, but there was
more than a hint of fondness and even pride in Carmen’s voice when she
described how her family had experienced them. Carmen remembered
standing in line to get boxes of cheese and cans of meat from the gov-
ernment. She said that even though they were poor, she and her siblings
didn’t know it at the time. For one thing, she explained, that’s how ev-
erybody else she knew was living too. For another, her mother worked
hard to ensure they had a good life “We had Christmas and New Year’s,
Mother’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving. Everybody always had something
for Christmas. My mom always made sure.” Carmen remembered going
shopping with her family at the Salvation Army warehouse, known as the
Sally Store, on the 500 block of Forty-Sixth Street: “We went down to the
Sally Store and we got black-and-white shoes and dresses. To us, that was
like Macy’s. One time, me and my sister got matching dresses in different
sizes, just like a regular store. We paid $2.50. Down the street the same
dress was $6. That’s what you did.” Carmen said that she and her siblings
spent a lot of time at programs run by different charitable organizations in
the city. They spent time in the country with the Fresh Air Fund. They also
spent a lot of time at St. Albert’s Catholic Church, which sat on the 400
block of West Forty-Seventh until it closed in the mid-1970s. Her parents
helped with the maintenance there.
Carmen said her mother valued hard work, but she never made her
kids focus too much on cooking, cleaning, or domestic things because she
wanted them to focus on studying so they could grow up and make some-
thing of themselves. So Carmen studied as hard as she could, finished
high school, and eventually went to beauty school. When she couldn’t get
a job as a beautician, she took a job at the dry cleaners that still operates
at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. One day she met a man
who was a customer there. She was nineteen; he was twenty-eight and also
from Puerto Rico. They got married in 1974, had the first of two children
a year later, and moved down to a small place on the 400 block of West
Forty-Sixth to have some space of their own.
When they first met, Carmen’s husband worked in a factory in the gar-
ment district, just southeast of Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. Eventually he left
that job for one that paid better, polishing cars at the now defunct Potam-
kin Cadillac dealership on Eleventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street. Soon after

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he started this job, he began to get horrible calluses on his hands and the
bottoms of his feet. Carmen said, “It was almost like the polish that he
was standing in and touching all day went into his body and made a hard
shell in those places.” He died of cancer, a liver tumor, at age forty-seven.
He didn’t want her to worry about it until he couldn’t hide it anymore. He
lasted six months after that. She thought that the polish and the calluses
definitely had something to do with the cancer. Carmen was thirty-eight
with two kids. And she figured out how to get by, like her mother before
her.
I met Carmen at Hartley House, where she worked every summer as
the evening receptionist at the front desk. The person who introduced us
described her as a “tough cookie,” and in a lot of ways this turned out to
be true. Unlike most of the other (whiter? more affluent? more masculine?
younger? less precarious?) people who agreed to participate in my study,
Carmen wouldn’t let me follow her around. She would only talk to me in
the lobby of Hartley House, and she didn’t want to be audio recorded or
photographed. In fact, she didn’t even wholeheartedly agree to participate
at all until the very last of our meetings with each other.
When I initially asked her if she might be interested in participating,
Carmen said she didn’t think so, but that she would think about it, and I
should come back another day to ask again. The next moment, she started
to warmly tell me a snippet of her biography, then stopped herself and told
me again to come back another day to get her answer. The same thing hap-
pened the next time I came back. And the next. And so it went.
She was always both reluctant to talk to me and bursting with rich sto-
ries. The reluctance seemed to be a result of doubt—doubt about me, defi-
nitely, but also doubt that the things she had to say about the world or her
life would ever be of interest to anyone else. Somewhere along the line she
apparently told her daughters about me, and they were apprehensive. As
Carmen recalled, “They said, ‘Mom, why are you telling stories to some
white guy at Hartley House? What is he doing talking to you, and what’s
in it for you?’ ” Though she was casual about it, Carmen was clearly let-
ting me know she shared their misgivings. At another point I asked her
to let me record some of her stories, saying I could make her a copy of
the recording. She looked at me as if I were dim and asked, “Why would I
want that? I got those stories right here,” as she crossed her hands over her
heart. “I will always have them right here. I am just not sure that I want to
let them go out into the world.”

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Eventually we came up with a system that she clearly viewed as a kind

of test. After each of our conversations, I would run and jot down the
things she had told me. I would type them up and bring them to her the
next time, when she would verify whether or not my details were correct.
Each time we would add a little more, and she would think a little more
about whether she really wanted to participate.
Once, when we were reviewing her comments on a write-up, Carmen
told me that her daughters had read the latest notes and objected to the
way she described herself and her past. She paraphrased them: “They said,
‘You make it sound like you were so poor. Do you want people to think
you were poor?’ ” Carmen seemed unsure about what to say on this point.
She said that she had no shame about growing up the way she did because
everybody she knew came up like that. People got by because they stuck
together, which they did because it was necessary to get by.
“That’s how it was,” she said. “Everybody here [in the neighbor-
hood] lived like that back then. That’s just what you did. Some of
them might try to say they didn’t now, but I remember. Don’t try to
tell me you didn’t wait in line for that cheese too!”
“It sounds to me like you may not have had a lot of material
things,” I said, “but that you had . . .”
“Each other,” she finished for me. “That’s right. My mom used
to say, ‘From one egg, everybody eats’—‘de un huevo, comen todo’
in Spanish.4 That was her motto, and that’s how we did it. What-
ever we have, everybody is going to get some.”
It is a sentiment that Carmen still applied to her own family and friends,
but that she said she thought the people in the neighborhood seemed to
have lost touch with over the years.
I have argued throughout this book that dynamics of urban spatial-
structural formation and transformation are contingent on everyday
rhythms and routines that variously sediment and dissolve durable mate-
rial and abstract patterns in place. And of course such rhythms can also
reveal much about the structural formations that people have inherited
and need to negotiate in the place to begin with. In these respects, a brief
account of the daily routine of someone like Carmen is instructive.
Even though she did not let me follow her, it was clear from our
conversations that Carmen’s daily routine consisted of rhythms deeply

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synchronized with the particularities of the place where she had lived her
whole life. Her wake-up time depended on the time of year. During the
school year, Carmen worked as a teacher’s aide and office staffer at a public
school a couple blocks away. On those days, she woke up at 6 a.m. During
the summer, when she worked evenings at Hartley House, she woke up at
9 a.m. The first thing Carmen did when she woke up was take a bath in her
kitchen. Her apartment was an old tenement that would not have origi-
nally included a private bathroom. Bathtubs were routinely plumbed into
the kitchen in buildings of this sort. In Carmen’s apartment, the tub was
right next to the sink. Carmen says that her husband built an enclosure
around it, and things have been that way for so many years that she hardly
thought about it now.
After she bathed and got ready, she would head out, either to school
or, during the summer, to her mother’s. During the school year, Carmen
went to her mother’s after work to prepare dinner and often stayed until
late in the evening. Carmen’s mother still lived in the same apartment that
the family grew up in. Over the years, her mother also acquired the apart-
ment next door. Thanks to rent control, the monthly rent for both was
$159.36. This was a small blessing, as Carmen’s mother had Alzheimer’s
disease, and Carmen spent most of her free time looking after her. Car-
men said she felt her mom deserved to be taken care of now, because she
worked so hard to take care of others when they were growing up. “It’s
only fair. That’s how it’s supposed to be.” This was clearly not easy on Car-
men, and she seemed to feel like it was only a matter of time before some-
thing changed and made the situation untenable.
During the summer months, Carmen’s evening shifts at Hartley House
doubled as some of her most cherished social time. Eventually I learned
it was best to talk with her at around 7 p.m., after the public and most of
the staff at Hartley had gone home. Between 6 and 9 p.m., Carmen sat and
talked with other women who had deep connections to the neighborhood
in their own right—a Hartley staff cleaning woman with two kids in the
childcare program there, an elderly woman who had kids that Carmen
went to school with, and a woman who was a friend from church. They
had a great time together, laughing and telling stories and sometimes even
singing songs. They looked at magazines or catalogs or the New York Post,
and they talked about the pictures or the most sensational stories, all in
Spanish. “We sit around like old hens and talk about men and church and
our kids,” Carmen said. The atmosphere in the lobby when these women

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were the only ones left in the building was transformed from bustling and
frenetic to cozy, joyful, and boisterous. The ceilings were low, the couches
were soft, and the space was small in a way that allowed their presence to
completely fill the room. These women had known each other for years,
and in a couple of cases for generations. Carmen said, “I like it here with
them. They stay ’til the end [9 p.m., when she locked up] because they
don’t have anything else to do.”
On the weekend, Carmen took care of her mother and occasionally
visited with siblings. Mostly they came to her mom’s place from where
they lived in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Every Sunday after church, Carmen
went to Western Beef—a low-cost supermarket chain store up the West
Side Highway on Sixty-Second Street—and bought whatever was on sale
for both herself and her mother. I once asked Carmen if she ever left the
West Side. She said:
I’ve been to Puerto Rico, uptown, to the Bronx, and down to

Brooklyn, but there is no place like home on Forty-Sixth Street.
Life on Forty-Sixth has been great for me. I settled down, had
my kids, and I’m growing old here, just like my mom who is still
growing older up on Forty-Ninth . . . I wouldn’t trade this here,
my life here, for anything. Maybe that sounds silly, but I mean it. I
wouldn’t trade it for nothin’.
At this last part, Carmen tensed and looked me dead in the eye—eyebrows
raised with an unmistakable seriousness.
Carmen had been in the neighborhood long enough to know many
people who had accepted buyouts as enticement to move out of rent-
controlled apartments. Such units could then be rented at market rates,
and landlords could make that money back relatively quickly. The re-
located tenants— the ones whom Carmen knew, anyway— meanwhile
often soon came to regret accepting such offers, as sums that may have
seemed substantial at the time they were offered quickly evaporated into
moving costs and market-rate rents in places now perhaps far removed
from the lives they had previously known. Carmen was obstinate that she
would never accept such an offer. And in fact her mother was now the
only rent-controlled holdout in her own building, which was right then
being renovated all around her with conspicuously little effort to protect
her from the noise, dust, and disruption as she stayed in place. “Where

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else are we going to go?” Carmen asked, rhetorically. Her whole life was
here, and she refused to imagine it anywhere else.
Rachel and Harmony

Rachel and Harmony lived in a studio apartment on the second floor of
a building on Restaurant Row. They were a recently married couple, both
in their late twenties. They moved to New York City from North Carolina,
had not lived here long, and in some ways exemplified another growing
segment of the population on West Forty-Sixth: young people who were
still determining career paths and wanted to be close to the culture of
Manhattan and the arts of the theater district.
Harmony was an aspiring jazz singer who had performed in a few
off-Broadway shows and held occasional day jobs as a personal assistant
to various Midtown executives. She originally moved to New York City
alone, without Rachel. Though they were committed to each other at the
time, Rachel was finishing up a master’s degree in divinity at the time.
Harmony moved ahead to jump-start her career, and Rachel visited when
she could until she was done with school. Harmony originally chose to
live in the neighborhood because it was a short walk or cab ride from the
reputable jazz clubs where she often went to perform. She happened to
find an apartment she could afford on West Forty-Sixth. Rachel moved up
a few months later, and they were married shortly thereafter.
Rachel soon got a job as a chemistry teacher at one of the more highly
ranked public high schools in the city. It was a job that she said she per-
formed well but grudgingly, because although she had a bachelor’s de-
gree in chemistry, she would much rather have been a priest. Perhaps it
stands to reason that I first met Harmony and Rachel in the basement of
St. Clement’s Episcopal Church before a Sunday service I was observing.
They came over and struck up a conversation, curious and excited to see
another youngish person whom they presumed was thinking of joining an
aged congregation. They were clearly disappointed when I told them why
I was there. But they graciously hosted me at the service and answered my
questions. Shortly after, I contacted them about participating in the study.
After a delay of several weeks, Rachel wrote back, “Harmony and I talked
about it. We think we are totally interesting and should be included in
your study.”
Harmony and Rachel’s daily lives seemed to be constantly shifting,

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gradually but surely, between different patterns throughout the time that
I spent with them. Some of this was by design. Much of it was not. An ac-
count of their routines over most of the time I observed them indicates
something of the battle between ambition and inertia ongoing in their
lives.
On school days, Rachel’s alarms—she had three—would begin to go
off just before 6 a.m. She would hit snooze for at least a half hour. Each
new day, she would think to herself, “Tomorrow I am going to get up on
time!” as she rushed to brush her teeth, put on clothes, and comb her hair.
Meanwhile, Harmony might get up to assist if there was anything urgent,
but mostly just stayed out of the way, allowing Rachel to move fast enough
to be out the door at 6:45 a.m., at which point Harmony would go back to
sleep.
Rachel typically walked half a block to Ninth Avenue to pick up
breakfast—maybe an egg sandwhich or just a boiled egg—at either a deli
called Smilers or a little market they simply called “the corner store.” From
there, she headed to the subway and proceeded to commute uptown via
some combination of three different trains and transfers, depending on
the timing and which train showed up at the station first. Chronically just
at the edge of late, she had this down to a science.
Once on the train, Rachel might go over the day’s lessons (primarily in
her head), eat breakfast, or take a nap, depending. Though she rarely in-
teracted with the other people on the train directly, she was acutely aware
of them. She explained this to me one morning, slyly pointing out certain
other teachers as well as men in work boots, all of whom indicated that
she was on time that day. “There are other teachers that are the late crowd,”
she said. “And there are some students who I had last year that were always
late, and if I am on the same train as them, I am like ‘Uh-oh. . . .’ ” Rachel’s
goal time for arrival at school, several blocks’ walk from the subway, was
7:40 a.m.
Meanwhile, sometime between 7 and 8 a.m., Harmony would get out
of bed—that is, if she didn’t have a day job to get to or a performance she
had given the night before. Shortly before we met, Harmony had lost her
job as a personal assistant to the CEO of a major media venture when the
business went under. Since then she had found temporary office work, off
and on. Mostly, however, she had taken the opportunity to try and get her
singing career on track. The inventory of things that any would-be per-
former has to do to make an impression in New York City is intimidating.

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Figure 6. Rachel cooking in the living room and Harmony in the kitchen—the spaces all mash together in their tiny
apartment. Photographs by the participants.
Aside from auditioning and networking, there are headshots, demos, and
promotional kits and websites, all of which require many choices and
forms of upkeep. Harmony often spent the morning working on these
things. She also kept an eye out for employment, if the opportunity was
right.
For Harmony, the cycle of working off and on had also been loosely
conneceted to hip and back alignment issues that required extensive phys-
ical therapy. When she was working, she could afford it. When she was

ff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
staying at home, she had a few implements to help her do some rehabilita-
tion, which she often did in the afternoons.
The rest of the day, Harmony would sometimes clean the apartment, all
four hundred square feet of it. The apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen,
a tiny bathroom with a half bathtub, and a single living, dining, and bed-
room. In some ways having a tiny apartment made cleaning up easy, but
in other ways it made it easier to make a mess and spread it everywhere.
Around 5:00 p.m., Rachel would get home from work, and they would
immediately make dinner, in one form or another. One of the variations in
Harmony’s and Rachel’s lives was that they went through phases of cook-
ing and not cooking, to an extreme. They would sometimes stop cooking
for weeks altogether, and then suddenly resolve to go to the grocery store
and spend a month trying out complicated recipies like roasted lamb stew
or shellfish—things that seemed brave given the space that they had to
work with (and which amplified the intensity of the mess). Rachel was
the cook, and again Harmony did her best to stay out of her way, cleaning
around her as she went. “She makes it look easy, this woman,” Harmony
said. “She is amazing.”
I accompanied Rachel and Harmony one early summer evening as they
shopped at Whole Foods on Columbus Circle at Fifty-Ninth Street and
Broadway, where they went whenever the mood struck them—usually
during the weekend. They did not use a list. Instead, Rachel walked
around and examined what was available, awaiting inspiration. They tried
diligently to buy local food, in season, and they read labels for things they
wanted to avoid. The day I accompanied them, they eventually bought the
makings for fish tacos, chili, pasta with pesto, tofu teriyaki casserole with
egg noodles, and lots of salad. They said they were trying to eat less meat
for the same reason they were trying to go local: guilt about industrial
agriculture. They had tried and failed at joining a community-supported
agriculture program, finding that they were not stable enough, in their
habits or preparation, to be able to absorb and use the regular shipments
of random produce that such programs dispense. Harmony quipped that
they might be better prepared for the chaos of a baby than regular CSA
boxes.
When Harmony and Rachel were not in a cooking cycle, they liked to
start someplace with a happy hour, then eat wherever the night took them.
Bedtime arrived by 9:00 p.m., if not sooner. More specifically, 9:00 p.m.
was time for Rachel to go to bed and for Harmony to do something quiet.

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Rachel had a chronic autoimmune illness, and she often experienced un-
predictable levels of fatigue as a result. Sometimes she would have little en-
ergy for weeks. Other times it was far less prominent. Invariably, though,
she needed early nights. Typically they would watch TV together to wind
down. After Rachel fell asleep, Harmony’s options were limited to things
that were cramped and needed to be quiet and dark. Sometimes she would
go into the bathroom or nestle under a blanket, and look at her laptop.
This evening routine might be extended to entire days on the
weekend—with the exception of church on Sunday mornings—and dur-
ing the summer. If Harmony went out to perform or see a show at a club,
things could also change, because going to a club required what both of
them considered an exceptional amount of gussying up, and the activity
tended to run late into the night.
Interestingly, while Harmony and Rachel were socially conscientious
and well intentioned, their actions often seemed to lag behind their ideals
and aspirations. They would not dispute this. For example, though they
were aghast at industrial meat production to the point of being able to
riff on the trophic and ecological impacts of specific agricultural policies
dating from the Nixon administration, they would sometimes go to Mc-
Donalds for burgers during no-cook phases. Likewise, while not official
members of the block association, they were in close contact through
their church and kept up with the goings-on. And they definitely had a
sense that some of the activities undertaken by the block association in the
name of public safety and security might be racist and discriminatory. But
as a same-gender couple, and as women who sometimes felt threatened
and feared for their safety being together on the streets of the neighbor-
hood, especially at night, they tolerated and even sometimes appreciated
the civic efforts of their more activist neighbors. One day, as I was “help-
ing” Harmony clean the apartment—the place was so small that I did my
best to just stay out of the way—she was talking about a situation where
good intentions went awry, and I asked her about her perspective on such
matters:
“So is that generally your view of how things get messed up?” I
asked. “It’s not that there are evil people out there doing evil things
but just that people do stuff and they might have good intentions
but then things go haywire?”
“I don’t know that that is generally my view,” she answered,

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thinking about it carefully. “I don’t know that I would say I have a

real good handle on why bad things happen. But I do think that is
a common way—a really common way—that bad things happen. I
think that people look at a problem and try to fix it, but they don’t
think of the problems that the fix might bring.” She paused. “But
look,” she said, striking an expression of humility, “I am not going
to label evil. That’s silly. I’ve got enough of it in me.”
A couple months later, I was visiting the apartment and I no-
ticed a picture of a brown-skinned child on their mini refrigerator.
It was a kind of generic image of the sort a charity might send to
someone as part of a packet.
“Are you sponsoring this kid?” I asked.
“Yeah, Pedro,” Rachel said nonchalantly.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” Rachel said. All three of us started laughing.
“Really?” I said. “I thought you were going to give me some
moving story here!”
“I know we are supposed to care, but . . .” Rachel said, trailing
off.
“We do love him!” Harmony interjected, and we laughed again.
“It’s like . . . it doesn’t help for me to know where he is or about
his life,” Rachel explained. “But look, those are pictures that he
made for us,” she said, pointing to some drawings on the fridge.
“He drew those,” Harmony said, nodding and smiling.
“These?” I said looking closer at the worksheets.
“Yeah, those are from him.” Harmony said. “ ‘A drawing for
my sponsor,’ ” she said, reading from the typed inscription on the
paper. “And he . . . look,” she said, holding two pictures of the boy
side by side. “The first picture we got is on the left and the second
one is on the right. He is looking good, right?”
“Yup,” I said.
“He is growin’,” Harmony continued optimistically, with more
than a hint of humor.
“He put on some weight there,” Rachel pressed.
“More nourished,” I agreed.
“He can’t read yet.” Harmony said. “We keep getting letters from
grandma and mom telling us about that.”
“I think he is working on it,” Rachel said, chuckling.

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“He likes soccer and dancing,” Harmony added.

“So how did this happen?” I asked.
“Rachel,” Harmony said.
“You know,” Rachel explained, “one of those guys on the street
was like, ‘Sponsor this kid,’ and I was like, ‘OK.’ ”
“Some guy on the street?” I said, momentarily confused. “Oh,
you mean with the—”
“You know those guys on the street—” Rachel said.
“Right,” I said, remembering. “The guys who are like, ‘Do you
have a minute to save a dying child?’ and most people are like,
‘Hmmm. Nope.’ ”
“It is through Children International.” Harmony said. “They are
reputable enough. They just withdraw like $17 a month from her
account.”
“It’s $22,” Rachel said.
“Well, right on,” I said. “He is looking good.”
“You know,” Harmony said. “I figure the whole family would be
mortified to know that his sponsors are two lesbians. But whatevs.
If he ever wants to come to New York, we will put him up.”
“From wherever he is!” Rachel added, and we all laughed.
“You do what you can,” I said.
In the end, Harmony and Rachel proved to be the hardest participants

with whom to schedule observation times. I would contact them to try
and arrange meetings, and it would often take them many weeks to re-
spond and sometimes months to set something up. My time with them
dragged on much longer than I originally expected. Like a CSA box, it
seemed that I often fell somewhere between the unpredictability of the
minimal unity and the ballast of what was already sedimented in their
lives—an additional wrinkle that the routines lodged in place could not
easily accommodate despite better intentions.
There were other residents whose lives I could represent in this level of
detail—Watty and Sara, of course, and there was Franc, a former advertis-
ing executive who found himself on disability after a debilitating accident.
Franc was a resident of the 400 block for only a single month and spent his
days getting medical treatments and sitting on park benches or in what-
ever church sanctuaries happened to be open, trying to get his life back to-
gether. There was Darrick, a gay insurance executive who shared a rented

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apartment with his beloved dog and partied until the wee hours of the
morning, even on weeknights. When I first met Darrick, he had the most
rigidly regimented and tightly scheduled routine of anyone I encountered,
to an extent that seemed stifling. But Darrick surprised everyone by scrap-
ping his routine entirely one day, seemingly out of the blue, and taking
a job in Hong Kong, where he said he was excited to take on new chal-
lenges and establish a new routine in a new place. In addition to those just
named, there was a nightclub manager, a crotchety tradesman, an accoun-
tant, an aging Broadway performer, a freelance graphic designer, a dip-
lomat, a lawyer, several additional schoolteachers, a photographer, a film
editor, and an Episcopal priest; people who owned condos worth millions,
people who lived in limited-equity co-ops, people who rented under all
sorts of conditions, and people who lived in transitional publicly subsi-
dized housing; straight and LGBTQ+; mostly white, but also Latinx, Black,
Asian, and categories beyond and between.
These were among the people who resided on West Forty-Sixth Street
and who might cooperate to try and shape the space of the neighborhood
by turning up at a block association meeting, coming out for an event like
Summerfest, or participating in the “network of voluntary controls and
standards” in some other way.
What’s in a Name, Part 2: Accounts Converge

The reality of Benjamin’s and Wynter’s arguments about history always
needing to be understood from now time, as bearing on the present, is
visible in subtle ways on the one-way street that is contemporary West
Forty-Sixth and in the way that history is constantly rehearsed, amended,
and enacted in people’s everyday lives here. Ongoing debates about the
name of the place are just one small example that opens up the broader
point. In a sense, it doesn’t matter where the name actually originated or
what this space is officially called on maps or in city documents. What be-
comes forceful is what a name means for the people who live here, what it
means in the context of their experiences and common sensibilities about
the space, and how those things in turn might influence what they do and
value here.
Everyone seemed to have an opinion about what the neighborhood
should be called. Though they often differed in their conclusions, these
opinions were remarkable for what they had in common, which was a
shared sensibility that the neighborhood was really bad until some point

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not too long ago—maybe just before they got here, maybe just after. Most
people who had been here for decades, and even some who were there
for less, had stories about just how bad it used to be. Darrick was happy
that the prostitution that plagued the area until recently had been subdued
since he arrived. Franc had a friend who lived in the neighborhood in the
early 1990s whom he never wanted to visit because “there were drug ad-
dicts everywhere.” When Sara first moved to the area, she found it “quite
scary” because there seemed to be derelict and shady people lingering ev-
erywhere. More than once, Watty told me the story of his outwardly sweet
and gentle neighbor who helped little old ladies cross the street with their
groceries, but, it later came to light, worked for the Irish mob disposing of
bodies by chopping them up into little pieces. Whether they called it Hell’s
Kitchen or Clinton, people used these stories as a means of legitimizing
what they thought the neighborhood should be called and what it should
be like in the present, either rejecting (the narrative of Clinton) or defi-
antly appropriating and overcoming (the narrative of Hell’s Kitchen) parts
of the past that still clearly haunted this space.
While there is truth in these stories people tell about the bad old days,
the question that interests me is again one of how that truth emerges and
changes in a way that is intertwined with the spaces and practical activi-
ties of everyday life in the present. What histories are being animated and
enacted, just there, in the now time of West Forty-Sixth?
Tradition
Raymond Williams describes a kind of collectively produced and shared
understanding of history similar to what I slowly came to recognize at
work in people’s activities on West Forty-Sixth. In a section called “Tradi-
tion,” Williams writes:
Tradition has been commonly misunderstood as a relatively inert,

historicized segment of a social structure: tradition as the surviving
past. But this version of tradition is weak at the very point where
the incorporating sense of tradition is strong: where it is seen in
fact as an actively shaping force. For tradition is in practice the
most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures
and limits. It is always more than an inert historicized segment;
indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation.
What we have to see is not just “a tradition” but a selective tradition:

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an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-

shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process
of social and cultural definition and identification. (1977, 115)
Tradition, Williams argues—resonating with Benjamin and Wynter—

needs to be understood less as something handed down from the past
than as a key element of social and cultural organization in the present.
Individuals, groups, and entire societies selectively produce and refine tra-
ditions according to changing social conditions at any given moment.
Traditions are not feel-good celebrations of the past but are instead
often an “historical and cultural ratification of the contemporary order.”
Williams argues that institutions—families, civic associations, cities, and
even bigger aggregations—play a key role in mediating and consolidating
these selective traditions by absorbing, preserving, and perpetuating them
in the face of the present moving horizon, further refining and folding
them into enacted memory. Because they can play this subtle role in the
ratification of the status quo—and, I submit, in the justification of what-
ever it takes to preserve or repair everyday life in the face of disruption or
crisis—traditions can be understood as a crucial part of how relations of
hegemony and dominance take place.
So how and in what sense is it possible to identify something like the
process of selective tradition making on West Forty-Sixth Street? As in
all urban locations, countless lives, actions, and events circulate and have
circulated through this space over time. Which ones are granted pres-
ence, let alone the chance to shape space, within the contemporary order?
While some lives and labors are etched in popular knowledge or enacted
memory, others are unknown or selectively forgotten. Some things get
suppressed, erased, and banished. Others are selectively valorized in ways
that are not always innocent. Tradition—the selective activation of the
past in particular present moments—is part of the contingent but collec-
tive investment in performative infrastructures as lodged in place. What
spatial labors and aspirational use values are mediated and made possible
from there?
Social Work and Progressive Improvement

The West Side seemed to have literally gotten a bad name long before any
of the people I met arrived there. Indeed, the West Side seemed to have

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developed a reputation for dysfunction and disorder almost immediately

after it was industrialized. By many residents’ accounts, it was almost as
if the place itself went bad at some point and started to propagate dys-
functional people and criminals. This threat was something that people
seemed to think still needed to be vigilantly guarded against in this space
into the present. Just where did such imaginations come from?
Some of the richest and most detailed historical records of the old West
Side were produced by social workers and would-be reformers. One such
set of surveys, the West Side Studies, was conducted in the summer of 1912,
when a team coordinated by the Bureau of Social Research of the New
York School of Philanthropy, in collaboration with the Russell Sage Foun-
dation, conducted a substantial study of the West Side.5 The selection of
the West Side as the focus of this study is explained as follows:
These 80 blocks which border upon the Hudson River, between

Thirty-fourth and Fifty-fourth Streets, contrast sharply with almost
all other tenement neighborhoods of the city. They have as nearly
homogeneous and stable a population as can be found in any part
of New York.6 The original stock was Irish and German. In each
generation the bolder spirits moved away to more prosperous parts
of the city. This left behind the less ambitious and in many cases
the wrecks of the population. Hence in this “backset” from the
main current of the city’s life may be seen some of the most acute
social problems of modern urban life—not the readjustment and
amalgamation of sturdy immigrant groups, but the discourage-
ment and deterioration of an indigenous American community.
(Goldmark 1914, iv)
As Wynter might point out, this kind of social Darwinist thinking should
perhaps be treated as an enduring norm and not an aberration—a norm
that helps to produce narratives of blemish, around which certain sensi-
bilities might then condense in place over time.
Motivated by this understanding that the neighborhood was filled with
a “backset” of people who would present them with an ideal setting in
which to study and try out interventions into what they considered many
of the deepest ills of early twentieth-century city life, the survey team
made a detailed block-by-block inventory of the people and social prob-
lems of the West Side. During the duration of the study, many survey team

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members actually lived in the community. Hartley House on West Forty-

Sixth—the same institution where monthly block association meetings
and community events were held, and which had a long and venerable
presence in the neighborhood—is mentioned by name as having contrib-
uted in particularly helpful ways to the research.7
The survey results, published in 1914, include a wealth of description
accompanied by numerous charts and diagrams tallying such things as the
number of tenants per building and block, countries of origin and num-
ber of generations removed, employment status and profession, criminal
activity, and birth rates. There are also many photographs of unidentified
people and various West Side settings. The survey was further subdivided
into several themes that each explored a different issue on the West Side,
published as separate sections of the greater West Side Studies. The sec-
tion entitled “Boyhood and Lawlessness” focused on the youth gangs and
criminal activities of young boys, calling attention to their negative social
impact on the community and the troubling implications for the futures
of the children involved. The lawless boy was framed as central to an array
of further social problems:
And, indeed, every suggestion which will tend to lessen the

troubles of the Middle West Side is peculiarly needed. The whole
community—from molested property owners to the most disin-
terested social workers—are agreed that the worst elements rule
the streets and that neither police nor court authority succeed in
enforcing decency and order. And the center of the problem is the
boy, for in him West Side lawlessness finds its most perennial and
permanent expression. (Goldmark 1914, xiii)
The authors of this section of the survey aim to evaluate the prospects for
“regenerating” such boys.
A second section, “The Neglected Girl,” seeks to “gain some knowl-
edge of the type of girl who is seen so frequently at the street corners and
who refuses to be attracted to agencies which frankly declare a desire to
improve her” (True 1914, 1).8 It offers numerous stories about the lives and
home situations of a sample of sixty-five girls whom the researchers got to
know by starting a social club where the girls could come for activities.9
A third section, “Mothers Who Must Earn,” looks at the lives of several
families with the father dead, disabled, or absent, necessitating that the

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mother be the primary wage earner for the household. It underscores the
difficulties around properly looking after children in these circumstances.
The West Side Studies are fascinating in a number of ways. They pro-
vide a detailed empirical account of what the neighborhood was like right
at the point when it was starting to reach a certain industrial saturation.
The studies also offer a sympathetic look at the daily lives of people trying
to make do under some of the difficult circumstances that arose for labor-
ing people amid these conditions. This was a period before the advent of
any social safety net, and detailed knowledge of situations such as those
described in these studies subsequently factored into the later develop-
ment of state-sponsored social welfare programs. Along those lines, the
tone and content of the studies impart a distinct sense of the social ideas
and intentions of the people who carried out the research. The writing
practically crackles with the progressive liberal sensibilities that were tak-
ing root in urban areas across the United States and England at the time.10
The introduction to the collection concludes, “Indeed, if there is any one
truth which emerges from these studies, it is the futility of dealing with
social maladjustments as single isolated problems. They are all closely in-
terrelated, and the first step in getting order out of our complexities must
be knowledge of what exists” (Goldmark 1914, vi). There seems to be an
understanding that the concerns documented in the studies were collec-
tively produced, and what was needed was some new project of collective
mitigation beyond the systems of law, policing, and individualized incen-
tive, which were clearly all understood as failing to address these problems
on the West Side. The researchers do not purport to even know exactly
what these new means might be, but they do suggest that they must in-
volve forms of social investment that benefit people who are marginalized,
vulnerable, and precarious. Rather than a straightforward ethic of respon-
sibility, this position is presented as a matter of collective necessity.
The studies conclude with a strong and distinctively progressive sense
that getting by and making do need to be more than individual pursuits
for individual ends. The argument is that everyone should have the dig-
nity and security of a decent life, and that rampant suffering and crises
of social reproduction diminish and affect everyone. When basic digni-
ties are not collectively achieved, a collective failure has occurred, and the
possibility that suffering and crisis will happen again is something that
everyone is party to, even if unevenly. Addressing these demands, even
in one part of one city, took a massive investment of social, political, and

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practical energy during the Progressive era, which could explain why
such efforts eventually became exhausted. Such ambitions and sensibili-
ties seem almost utopian from the perspective of a much differently en-
trenched present.
That sense of seeming almost utopian from the standpoint of the pres-
ent is perhaps precisely where I should pause and pose this narrative as a
question in relation to the spheres and capacities of the people who are
undertaking civic action in the spaces of the neighborhood today. Numer-
ous potential enrollments and attachments are opened up by the concep-
tual framework laid out by these social workers. Someone inclined to ar-
guments related to revanchism might conclude that the West Side Studies
are actually about regulating and producing conditions—by intervening
in social reproduction to generate more functional individual and collec-
tive bodies, by building productive skills and creating habits of industri-
ousness, and by trying to protect entrenched property and legal structures
from inefficiency and disorder—more amenable to capital accumulation.
No doubt they are. But there is something to be gained by thinking more
closely about how those enrollments and structurings in dominance may
or may not have occurred. Another way to see things is that the collective
impulse of the era was genuine and more than capitalist, but that in the
very terms in which the problem, the question of what was broken, and
the potential solution were posed, there was a certain insistence on repair
and a certain directionality to who would be repairing whom, that was
framed in classically liberal terms of improvement, with the assumption
that all could be accommodated by liberal formations if only we could get
the distributions and interventions right. They never seem to have asked
whether that entire oeuvre or genre-specific way of conceptualizing social
individual and collective life—even though it seems to have been unravel-
ing and mutating in its contradiction in their midst, necessitating other
modes of being in this space as connected to others—and aspiring to these
kinds of recuperative repair might be part of what exists, needing to be
rethought and remade in new terms. The failure to ask or even be able to
think this question is a fundamental part of the active tradition still ongo-
ing here in the present.
The Capeman
On a summer night in August 1959, two brutal murders took place in
Mathews-Palmer Park. As the story goes, a Puerto Rican gang called the

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Vampires was supposed to rumble there with an Irish gang, but for rea-
sons that remain unclear, the fight was called off before it started. Fifteen-
year-old Salvador Agron and a fellow Vampire showed up looking for a
fight, and Agron stabbed and killed two boys—Anthony Krzesinski and
Robert Young—who happened to be in the park among a small group of
white teenagers he mistook for rivals.11
For a number of reasons, Agron’s crimes captured the public imagi-
nation and caused a citywide outcry. There had been several other gang-
related killings that summer. True to the Vampire name, Agron was wear-
ing a satin cape at the time of the stabbings and was dubbed the Capeman
by the press. When arrested, he gave a remorseless and glib confession
and was initially sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in
prison. The crimes were understandably sensationalized. They triggered
a moral panic, and—in some ways mirroring the concerns that had been
outlined in the West Side Studies decades before—were widely interpreted
as evidence that the youth of New York City, and specifically the nonwhite
youth increasingly populating Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen and other working-
class neighborhoods, had, amid the throng of modern city life, gotten out
of control and lacked any sense of right and wrong.
The Capeman murders bear an uncanny resemblance to the plot of the
Broadway musical West Side Story, which had been playing at the Win-
ter Garden Theater, just a few blocks from West Forty-Sixth, not too long
before these crimes took place. Famously, that musical also portrays a
conflict between rival white and Puerto Rican gangs on the Middle West
Side during which two young men are stabbed and killed (notably com-
plicated by an interethnic love story that arguably interprets Romeo and
Juliet through the lenses of liberal common sense not unrelated to those
just alluded to in the imaginations of the social workers of the West Side
Studies). A life-imitates-Broadway-imitates-life circle was turned again
in the late 1990s when Paul Simon and Derek Walcott created a musical
about the murders, called The Capeman, which flopped after sixty-eight
performances.12
One of the things I did with Watty—at his persistent request—was
shoot and edit a video of him walking around the neighborhood while
giving a kind of narrated tour, which he later sent to the local PBS station
with the hope that they might air it. (They declined.) One of the stops
on this tour was Mathews-Palmer Park, where we set up a shot of Watty
standing against the backdrop of the mural, talking about some of the
park’s history. We talked about the women for whom the park is named,

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May Mathews and Alexandra Palmer, both caretakers and stewards of

the community and the park in ways with which Watty clearly identified.
(Interestingly, May Mathews was the executive director at Hartley House
around the period when the West Side Studies were undertaken, while Al-
exandra Palmer, who died in 2003, was a founding member of the West
Forty-Sixth Street Block Association and a local legend known first for
being the one who took the responsibility—and the risk—of locking the
park up at night during the 1970s and 1980s, and second for often inviting
local youth over to meals in her apartment. Guess which one was more
frequently cited in the selective civic tradition in the present?)13 Then I
brought up the Capeman murders, which had taken place where we were
standing. Watty downright shushed me. He tilted his head to the side as
if to avoid the camera and said quietly through his teeth, “We don’t like
to talk about that. . . . [We] would rather portray a more positive image.”
In the moment, I felt bad about this, and I later edited this exchange and
Watty’s reaction out of the final video.
But the more I thought about it, the more I found it curious that a
fifty-year-old crime evoked this reaction. When I first learned about the
Capeman murders in researching the history of the street and the play-
ground, I assumed they would be ancient history to many of the people
who currently live on West Forty-Sixth. I figured most residents would
not even know about it, and even if they did, they would simply view it as
an unfortunate tragedy from a bygone era. Of course Watty knew about it,
but to my surprise he also appeared to be actively warding off the memory
and the story as if they had some power to infect the present. It was as if
the mere thought or mention of this historical incident—of such a violent
disruption to the social space of daily life as usual—might cause some of
what was deposited here from the past to well up and overtake the present
order. Watty clearly felt strongly that would be a bad thing. I am not so
certain.
Guardian Angels
There were other past moments of disorder that loomed large in the spaces
of West Side present, implying defect and blemish but also sedimenting
particular recourses to collective-populist intervention and repair in the
formations at play there. As I have said, and as was widely known to resi-
dents, New York City was in the throes of a severe fiscal crisis in the 1970s.

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After a public bailout in 1975, New York City was one of the first instances
in which the forced austerity that would subsequently become a hallmark
of structural adjustment programs globally was applied to a city.14 Public
spending was curtailed to the point that the city was forced to cut back
on basic services like police and sanitation. Living standards deteriorated.
Many affluent people and businesses left the city. Crime rates increased,
and the general perception was of a city in chaos and decline.
Fed up with these social conditions, people took matters into their own
hands. One such person was Curtis Sliwa, at the time a night manager
at a McDonalds in the Bronx, but soon, and with a memorable stop on
West Forty-Sixth Street, to become something of an order-maintenance
firebrand. Sliwa formed a small band of volunteers to start patrolling the
subways late at night in an effort to deter criminal activity. Though they
were not armed, members of the group were prepared for physical con-
frontation. They wore distinctive red berets and military-style clothing,
and they called themselves the Guardian Angels.
Though the police and the general public were apprehensive about this
kind of vigilante action, Sliwa and his Angels persisted. Membership in the
organization grew, as did its media profile. They expanded their repertoire
beyond the subway and began doing street patrols. They started doing pro
bono work for different communities and businesses. In the early summer
of 1988, the Guardian Angels moved to West Forty-Sixth Street.
I wrote to Curtis Sliwa to see if he would be willing to answer a few
questions about his time on West Forty-Sixth. To my surprise, his publi-
cist got back to me promptly to set up an interview. I met him in his office
on the eighteenth floor of the Empire State Building, where he almost im-
mediately launched into what can only be described as a forty-five-minute
monologue. (That is really what it was. He talked, I listened, and only to-
ward the end did I become unstunned enough to interject and pose a few
questions. The man was verbose, with a gift for crude imagery and meta-
phor. It was a genre of spectacular, self-referential masculinist charismatic
performance that has now become all too familiar.) The story Sliwa spun
was as audaciously engrossing, presumably embellished, and spirited as I
imagine a research “interview” can possibly get. As much as I would like
to insert the whole transcript here, I will instead offer choice excerpts to
give a sense, somewhat tongue in cheek, for the overall narrative and the
flavor of our conversation.
According to Sliwa, the Angels ended up on West Forty-Sixth largely

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because of their own effectiveness in the midst of the crack epidemic. It

all started when the theater owners of Forty-Second Street called in the
Angels—who by then had a growing reputation for their work in the
Bronx, and who had been working nearby—to try and help deal with
the situation that was unfolding:
Because now all of a sudden there is this mayhem. It’s chaos.

People are getting robbed. There’s crackheads breaking into the
theaters and sawing the pipes off in off hours, you know, selling
the copper and the brass, anything. And there’s, like, floods. And
this is like . . . you know, it’s bad, Times Square. You needed to
give it a colonic because of the pimps, the prostitutes, the sleaze
factor. But these crackheads brought it to a new dimension. And
people were dealing crack openly, the way they would be dealing
nickel and dime bags of reefer. And nobody quite understood the
connection with crack. So the president of the theater owners of
Forty-Second Street invites us in, because nothing is working with
the police. And we moved into a theater that had to be abandoned
because the crackheads in ’86 were so bad that they couldn’t get
anyone coming in. So they give us the theater, we operate out of it,
and we used very aggressive tactics to push it out of the Deuce. Just
Forty-Second Street. So naturally, what happens? Well, business is
doing well again, the crackheads have dispersed into other parts
of Midtown, mostly north of Forty-Second—Forty-Third, Forty-
Fourth, Forty-Fifth, Forty-Sixth . . . in fact, it’s right in front of the
New York Times building, which used to be on Forty-Third, so they
are having kittens.
The Angels cleaned up the Deuce, and the police and other nearby busi-
ness reacted by blaming them for pushing the problem out into surround-
ing areas. “Shoulda left it on the Deuce,” they all said, according to Sliwa.
But he said the diffusion was not the Angels’ fault, just a “natural progres-
sion” and an offshoot of everyone underestimating the scope and the in-
tensity of the crack epidemic at that point.
The business owners of West Forty-Sixth were among those up in
arms. They felt that the unsavory element that had been pushed off of
Forty-Second had moved up and was scaring away their customer base.

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Restaurant owners reacted by trying to shut down the soup kitchen at

St. Luke’s Lutheran Church on Restaurant Row because they said the
people who frequented the soup lines there were intimidating their cli-
entele. Sliwa again: “Easy, because they say, ‘Look at all these homeless
guys. Smelly, disheveled, loud, abrasive. Every afternoon they are chasing
our customers away.’ So the Lutheran minister brings me in. He says, ‘I
remember what you guys did on Forty-Second Street. I saw it with my
own eyes. It was incredible. You did what the NYPD couldn’t do.’ ” Eager
to save his soup kitchen by showing that the people he served were not
the problem—they had been there for years, after all—the pastor got the
idea that the Angels should come to West Forty-Sixth and do the same
thing they did on Forty-Second. He set up a meeting between Sliwa and
the restaurateurs.
On the night of that first meeting, it was hot. The tempers of the res-
taurant owners flared, and they accused Sliwa and the Angels of causing
the whole problem in the first place. Of course, Sliwa was a cool customer,
saying, “Rather than condemn us, since we didn’t create the problem, why
not take advantage of the techniques we have utilized to target and remove
the problem?” The restaurant owners turned the Angels away at that first
meeting. Sliwa said this was understandable; they just didn’t grasp the na-
ture of the problem they were dealing with and what it would take to fix.
He illustrated the situation by describing what Hell’s Kitchen Park, just up
at Tenth Avenue and Forty-Seventh, was like at night in those days:
You could go there at four in the morning—hundreds of crack-

heads. Swarming like bees around a beehive. Again, whatever crack
they could get. Crack dealers knew, show up there and man . . .
you know, you always have to have enforcers and security, because
crackheads try to rip you off. So you had to have the enforcers
there, but they would do anything. “How much, how much? Jum-
bos, jumbos.” Jumbos means two in a vial. “Twenty bucks.” Then
they would go out and steal something. And they would bring back
the thing. And the guy would say, “What do you think, I am going
to be able to sell a battery? I need cash!” And they would . . . any
way they could get money. They were desperate. And you could see
them always percolating there. So I outlined the problem and a lot
of the restaurateurs were like, “Huh?” Because they never ventured

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over to Tenth Avenue. . . . In fact, Eighth Avenue became sort of

like the green line in Beirut.
It wasn’t long before things got so bad that the restaurant owners had no
choice but to call Sliwa and the Angels back in, by which time they were so
desperate that they just straightaway asked him what he needed to operate:
“We need space and we need radios.” . . . No money—we are not

private security—but we needed a space to operate out of because
we were literally going to have to take this block back inch by inch.
They are hanging out. They are literally coming onto the block
and going into the restaurants in the middle of the day now, and
snatching people’s pocketbooks. It’s like Dawn of the Dead. These
are like zombies. They are out of control. Nobody knows how to
deal with them. The criminal justice system is turning them loose
because, again, they are dealing with this as if it is a simple viola-
tion instead of a felony.
Could Restaurant Row be saved by the Guardian Angels and their tactics?
Sliwa and his brigade moved into a space in a basement on the 300
block in June 1988. No sooner did they get there than the story had an-
other dramatic twist. The mayor at that time, Ed Koch, got wind of the
situation and was not happy. Subways in the middle of the night were one
thing. A tourist zone near the Times Square area was quite another. Koch
decided to try and nip this vigilantism in the bud before it got out of hand.
He gave the restaurant owners an ultimatum he thought would leave them
no choice: say goodbye to the Angels, or say goodbye to the NYPD’s ser-
vices. Sliwa again:
He [Koch] meets with the restaurant owners. It’s advertised. He

threatens them while the cameras are there: “If you choose to go
with the ragtag bunch of vigilantes from the Bronx led by that
wisenheimer Curtis Sliwa, then you will be on your own means.
We are not sending any more cops.”
So the caucus goes and takes a vote. Joe Allen says very politely,
“Mr. Mayor, we appreciate everything that the city has done for
us.15 This is a gateway of the world. It’s economically an engine
for the city, as you know. But we are inviting them in. Half of our

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restaurants have closed because your police cannot get control of

the situation, and the Guardian Angels, they cleaned up Forty-
Second Street. They know how to do this.” The mayor was person-
ally insulted. So Benjamin Ward literally pulls the cops that would
normally walk through the area and puts them all on Shubert
Alley—across the street off Eighth Avenue.16 And the producers
of Shubert Alley, production agents, theater owners, they vote not
to have the Guardian Angels come on. And in fact, they tell the
police, “We don’t want them. Arrest them.” So now it is almost
like East Berlin and West Berlin. Again, Eighth Avenue becomes
like a Maginot Line, like the green line in Beirut. If we cross over,
Eighth to Seventh avenue, we better not be on a block where there
is a major theater, because now it is like the theater owners want us
hunted down.
The Angels stuck to their turf and started the hard work of driving crack
addicts off West Forty-Sixth starting from Eighth Avenue and working to-
ward the river.
Sliwa said there was a “heavy condensation” of crackheads in the build-
ings of West Forty-Sixth because there were many single-room occupancy
hotels. He described the melee that ensued:
So it is like beehives. It was like anthills, you know, worker ants

everywhere, because they were working twenty-four hours. So we
literally began taking it back inch by inch, foot by foot, storefront
by storefront, foyer by foyer, because they would take over build-
ing lobbies. In fact, uh, the guy who owns the restaurant on the
corner, now, is one of our main supporters. . . . He was living right
near Hell’s Kitchen Park at the time, and he would be on his ten-
speed mountain bike. He lived on the top floor. He would come
down the steps on the bike, because there were crackheads in the
hallway, and just go right down the brownstone steps, to the store,
and just, like, come back and rush into the apartment. He goes,
“It was unbearable. You guys were the only . . . you would come,
and like the Red Sea, the crackheads would part. Like the Red Sea
did for Moses. And you would flush them all out. It was the only
time there was any peace and tranquility.” We couldn’t be there all
the time, because we would go from block to block, but we kept

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Restaurant Row, Forty-Sixth Street, clean from Eighth Avenue to

Ninth Avenue.
It was rough work. Many of the Angels quit because they couldn’t hack it
or got kicked out because they were not up to the strict internal standards
of the group.
At this point in the story, I was itching to get in a few questions—not
that it was easy. I managed to ask him to more specifically describe the
character of the tactics he kept referring to. He replied unhesitatingly:
Oh, slam and jam. Uh, we broke every rule in the book. We vio-
lated your civil rights. We tossed you upside down. We went in
your pockets. We knew who the crackheads were. We knew where
the crack dealers were. It wasn’t some guy, you know, coming in
from New Jersey to see the theater, but it might have been the guy
coming in from New Jersey who parked the car in a parking lot on
Eleventh to score crack in the SRO [single-room occupancy] hotel.
So we had it figured out. We scoped the SRO hotels, we kept data,
we knew who the dealers were, we knew who the crackheads were,
and we just started shaking people down, getting very physical, and
just driving them out.
He said the whole strategy was a bit like the “clear and hold” tactics that
changed the philosophy of military operations in Iraq. The Angels would
take one block at a time and hold it while moving on to take another. At
that point, they started to achieve some results, and people started to no-
tice. Sliwa again: “Slowly but surely we began to have a difference. And
then the Times Square Improvement District came about.” Just like that,
his story switched from detailed description of the activities of the Angels
to the context of much larger, enduring formations of urban policy.
Sliwa went on:
This woman, her name escapes me, recently she was part of the
Bloomberg administration. They brought her into the New York
Times, and they had a meeting, because the old “gray lady’s” office
at that time was on Forty-Third Street. We were one of the invited
participants. And Sulzberger Jr., the guy who later ran the paper,
hosted the meeting and he said, “We have to form a Times Square
improvement district because we cannot let these vigilantes, the

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Guardian Angels, embarrass the entire community. There has to be

a much more civil way of doing this, where we provide sanitation
services and police—private security—but we tax, put a special tax
on all commercial properties.”
Just to make sure that I understood his implication correctly, I asked

Sliwa if he thought that the Angels, by providing localized security ser-
vices for different businesses who felt that the city could not or would not
provide them, had been a precursor to modern and now prolific business
improvement district models. He said, “We were the catalyst.” He under-
stood his organization as having provided an early model for municipal
service implementation by parties other than public agencies (a kind of
commons, I might have interjected, but a decidedly negative-rights or
“freedom from”–based and exclusionary one). Further, he thought that
by achieving the results they did, the motley Angels had shown that such
outcomes were possible without costly resources but with the right combi-
nation of innovation, initiative, and tactics. By showing up bigger players
like the city, the New York Times, the Broadway theater owners, and other
interests who had previously achieved less dramatic results with more re-
sources under previous policy conditions, Sliwa felt that the Angels had
played a part in spurring subsequent power players to take dramatic ac-
tion, thereby triggering a policy shift.
Important people were now paying attention. Sliwa again: “Now, it was
interesting. U.S. attorney, Southern District, at that time, Rudy Giuliani,
was looking at this like, ‘Wow. This ragtag group of young men and young
women, with no weapons, special powers or privileges, is literally taking
over whole blocks and keeping them.’ ” Anticipating where he was headed
with this, I asked Sliwa whether he thought that the tactics the Angels de-
veloped and used on West Forty-Sixth Street bore a resemblance to New
York City’s particular uptake of the broken windows policing philosophy,
outlined in theory in the early days of the Angels and later put into prac-
tice by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Sliwa said:
“He [Giuliani] has actually said that he learned quite a bit. In fact,
the guy who came up with broken windows theory, we brought
him over to Japan to lecture because we have groups . . . I forget his
name but . . .”
“Kelling?” I said.
“That’s right,” Sliwa confirmed, “He came up with that. But

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he said, ‘Oh, yeah, a lot of this was Guardian Angels. It’s obvious.
Because you guys also focus on the graffiti, the small things that
you treated as if they were major.’ And obviously Giuliani perfected
it with zero tolerance. . . . Giuliani definitely said he learned a lot
when a volunteer group could be called into Times Square, the
gateway of the world, and the most professional, trained police de-
partment was not able to get the same results we were. The reason
they weren’t able to get the same results we were is that we could be
focused, we used a lot of the tactics that later on they were permit-
ted to use. And there is no doubt that later on they used profiling,
when Giuliani came in.”
“Oh yeah!” I said enthusiastically, although I found myself
confused to be agreeing.
“And sometimes mistakenly,” Sliwa continued. “Sometimes
obviously mistakenly us too, except what we would do is apologize,
dust them off, and say sorry. And luckily it didn’t come back to
haunt us. But clearly, we were over the top then. But . . . anarchy.
You would have forty crack dealers on a whole street. It was like
you were running a phalanx of crack dealers.”
At this, Sliwa completed a distinct narrative loop. He had started by out-

lining how a specific situation gave rise to a particular set of responses—
how a certain set of enacted responses, clearly legible as forms of spatial
labor and driven by all sorts of performative infrastructures as condensed
in common sense, emerged from a situation of perceived crisis in place. It
is also possible to see how difficult it would be to say whether the driving
ambition was for space as use or exchange value in that situation. They
are clearly bound up with each other in a way not cleanly reducible to ei-
ther. He then talked about how these tactics eventually crystalized within
larger formations in dominance, even becoming separated from that situ-
ation and applied beyond the specific context in which they were worlded.
Finally, he circled back, ex post, and narrated the original context—now
even infusing a sense of compulsion and perhaps telos—as one in which
the ideas, forms of common sense, and tactics that mutated out from it
only afterward were in fact necessary and justifiable from the start. This
was a remarkable story indeed. The notion that renowned urban policies
like business improvement districts, broken windows, and zero tolerance
might have drawn, even in some small way, from the wellspring of such

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a thoroughly contingent and contextual episode as the Guardian Angels’

incursions on West Forty-Sixth Street opens up an unconventional way
of understanding how such policies take shape—not top down or deter-
mined a priori, but reactionary and selective, incorporating and emerging
through the appropriation and subsumption of disparate bits and pieces
from actual experiences in conjunctural social space that can then be nar-
rated, ex post and from the position of dominant genres, as if they had
been complete, logical, and perhaps inevitable all along.
By the early 1990s, and in ways we have already seen, the crisis con-
ditions that had beset West Forty-Sixth and the surrounding area since
at least the 1970s began to shift to a considerable degree. Sliwa described
what happened then: “All of a sudden, the whole area had an economic
revival. All the restaurants were full again. And they forgot us like a . . .
like a girlfriend’s number they wanted to lose.” The owner of the building
the Angels had been operating out of suddenly demanded they start pay-
ing commercial rent. Another woman, whom Sliwa described as a “vile
dragon lady,” stepped up and offered to give them space. Shortly there-
after, in true slumlord fashion, she tried to charge them exorbitant back
rent. In essence, the Guardian Angels left West Forty-Sixth Street because
they got priced out—if you believe Sliwa, partially because of the efficacy
and subsequent enclosure of their own spatial labor. But though they are
long gone, many of the tactics and formations of narrative common sense
that Sliwa and his Angels so forcefully asserted seem to have stuck, still
remaining lodged in popular, policy, and carceral consciousness, to con-
tinuing effect.
What’s in a Name, Part 3: Sentiments of Fragile Progress

Most people who have been there for any length of time can point to some
moment when they knew the neighborhood had really changed:
When a Buddhist-themed vegetarian restaurant opened up on the

southwest corner of Ninth Avenue.
When they looked into the window of the apartment across the
way and saw a giant flat-screen TV mounted on the wall.
When an American Apparel store took over the little greengrocer’s
shop down the street.
When the liquor store started to call itself a “vintner.”

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When people were willing to pay a million dollars to live in a

weird-looking, cheaply constructed condo building all the way
over between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, where not long ago
most people did not dare to even tread.
All these things served as markers that some kind of transition had taken
place; some corner had been turned, and the once-gritty neighborhood
was being succeeded by something else, day by day. While people cer-
tainly seemed to have mixed feelings about these changes, the general
consensus was that they were tolerable, if not good, and at the very least
they were almost certainly preferable to a neighborhood full of mobsters,
drug addicts, petty criminals, and prostitutes. Sara, for example, said, “The
neighborhood is changing a lot because with these nouveau groups com-
ing in, they have different wants and needs for the neighborhood, like me,
where I appreciate the old of the neighborhood but I want it to be cleaned
up.” Sara reckoned the neighborhood would only get better as new people
came in and kept the “good parts of the old” while facilitating new things
like more retail and better “quality of life.”
For Sara, there was a certain sense of value and pride in acknowledging
what the neighborhood used to be like and how far it has come since:
It was actually a very bad place to be. What’s interesting I think

is that I refer to it as Hell’s Kitchen, but there are so many people,
even a lot of real estate people, who won’t call it Hell’s Kitchen.
They want to call it Clinton. I am sure they have different reasons,
but it is interesting how they try to take away that name from
what it is. And you know, it’s changing, and I don’t know if they
don’t want the association from what Hell’s Kitchen was, or what
it means, or what. But a lot of people find that [the name Hell’s
Kitchen, with all of its connotations] is actually very chic.
For Sara, the name Hell’s Kitchen signified a trajectory, an overcoming

of adversity that she hoped to play a part in perpetuating into the future,
alongside a selective continuity with the grit of the past.
Watty, meanwhile, was fiercely and resolutely against the name Hell’s
Kitchen. On many separate occasions, I heard him give someone an ear-
ful as he passionately asserted his reasons for this in conversations with
acquaintances, at block association meetings, even to random patrons as

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he held court at the Ritz. Instead of Hell’s Kitchen, Watty was a booster for
the name Clinton. He believed Clinton reflected the legacy of progressive
improvement started by DeWitt Clinton that continued through the spirit
of the Special Clinton District. In that sense, Watty said that the name
Hell’s Kitchen did not “give the appropriate information,” because what
it referenced contradicted the needs and well-being of the people in the
neighborhood in the present. That is, he maintained that Hell’s Kitchen
conveyed a negative connotation and invited trouble.
As an example, Watty often cited the same park at Tenth Avenue and
Forty-Seventh that Curtis Sliwa said was once like a “beehive” for crack
addicts: “They called it Hell’s Kitchen Park, and look what they got when
they did that—a drug-infested, crime-infested park. It didn’t open pris-
tine like it is. It is a very troubled park.” Watty viewed the name as hav-
ing attracted a negative element to that park in the past. He worried that
the name could do the same thing to the entire neighborhood—that the
neighborhood that was once Hell’s Kitchen might reappear in the present
if people were not careful to avoid conjuring it back. What was funny is
that Hell’s Kitchen Park has for a long time been a beautiful—and highly
secure—space. Another participant, Franc, spent a great deal of time read-
ing and reflecting there. He and I played chess there. Franc—whose par-
ents were Mexican, who had many tattoos, and who had often been mis-
taken for a delivery boy when he worked in advertising—felt that the park
was too sanitized, to the extent that the nannies and parents who brought
children there often looked at him with suspicion. But—just as he had
when I mentioned the Capeman murders during our videotaping—Watty
seemed to feel that underneath the ordinary facade, there was still an ele-
ment of always present trouble, danger, and disorder that could flash up
and take it over. Similarly, when Sara proposed naming the event that the
block association was throwing for kids in Mathews-Palmer Park “Hell’s
Kitchen Summerfest,” the thing Watty was most worried about was who
might show up and what they might come expecting to get up to, drawn
by the suggestive power of that name. As we saw, that particular worry
was unfounded.
Despite their differences of opinion over semiotics, there were some
telling similarities between Watty’s and Sara’s positions on the name, as
there were on other issues. They both maintained that the neighborhood
had changed for the better. They both attempted to selectively curate cer-
tain aspects of the past and leave others behind in their narrations and in

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justifications of their ongoing activities toward improvement. They both

viewed the name as a sort of conduit between this past and the contempo-
rary material and social space of the neighborhood. Likewise, they both
treated the name as something like an exercise in brand management. The
sentiment: the changeover and progressive movement away from the re-
ally bad past is well underway. It is not yet complete, but it is certainly
better than it was. And an increasingly better present and future in and for
this space are now approachable through the correct combination of civic
action toward continued cleanup, making secure, order maintenance, and
repair. Populist and progressive traditions in this place have already pro-
vided momentum and might still serve as a conceptual and moral guide
for these activities. Now just a matter of continuity, preservation, and pro-
tection against new and looming threats, moving into the future. If life can
continue as usual, without too much disruption despite minimal unity,
then that is progress. Clear and hold.
In Sum
These stories open up questions about why some aspects of the past en-
dure in the present in this urban space while others are forgotten. The
answers seem contingent on the intersections among performative infra-
structures, everyday life, and place-based experience. Some events and so-
cial formations find traction in the spaces of the routine and carry on as
traditions, while others that may be viewed as potentially disruptive—or
maybe just inconvenient, pie in the sky, or impractical—are suppressed
or forgotten. Concurrently, these stories hint at how broader historical
and spatial-structural formations have not only circulated through West
Forty-Sixth but perhaps even been worlded here, only to break off, find
traction, and be modified again in other, similar places. From the soil of
everyday life, these formations require particular forms of performative
infrastructures and indeterminate spatial labor to emerge and grow. Only
then might they become enrolled in different structural and value forma-
tions that are always contingent on all the often peculiar combinations
and relays that came before. The story of the Guardian Angels in particu-
lar is almost shocking in its portrayal of how policies and practices now
global and dominant may actually have emerged in a seemingly slapdash,
contingent way from a highly particular and specific set of circumstances
in place. That story further portrays a process of structural formation that

200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 04:17:52 UTC
came together primarily because enough people were invested in finding

ways to go on with life as usual and maintain the uses of urban space as
usual. This seems like it was not particularly well thought out or even ex-
plicitly ideological at the start, but more like a process of situated trial and
error, which—like the progressive movement before—was a substantial
social investment, but one that ended up falling back on old ideas of cri-
sis, repair, and improvement rather than opening out and rethinking the
terms of what exists and the latent possibilities for cooperative sociality
therein. Practices that (to take Sliwa’s word for it) started out as acts of
defiance and resilience in the face of crisis slowly gained steam until they
intersected with consolidated power and were appropriated as a means to
ensure social continuity more broadly—not least the protection of fixed
capital. This resulted in the pathologizing of people alongside privatiza-
tion, exclusion, and enclosure, at which point abstraction had taken the
original ideas far beyond the spaces in which they were born, and some of
the progenitors themselves were cast aside. At least, that’s what seems to
have happened according to Sliwa’s account.
Stories like these are intellectually intriguing in deeply compound
ways. The narratives and story truths that people such as those on West
Forty-Sixth Street seem to valorize and even naturalize offer a glimpse
into the ways performative infrastructures stick in space, condense in
common sense, endure in tradition, and condition civic action. In turn,
in ordinary people’s ongoing enactments, these place-embedded forma-
tions conjoin with spatial labor and civic action as an active material force
within ongoing processes and dynamics of spatial-structural production
and transformation. The account of this process that I have offered in this
chapter perhaps overemphasizes common sense structured in dominance
more than the good sense I have also suggested is submerged. But as the
likes of Benjamin, Wynter, or Williams might insist, this dominance is
never total, and there are always multiple narratives and genres of practice
at play. So in the next, penultimate, chapter, I will emphasize the indeter-
minacy, contingency, and contradiction I have suggested all along before
concluding on a decidedly open note in those terms.

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Chapter Title: Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense

Book Title: Urbanism without Guarantees

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctvz0h9q8.12

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