Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  • • •

  Start with what’s comfortable, I told myself, and hope it takes you somewhere. Since my work on Chicago crack dealers was my academic foundation, it made sense to start from there. My entry point came via Michael Clark, a major player in the Midwest drug scene. I had known him for years and written about him without upsetting him too much. Back in 1997, he had offered me the help of a cousin in New York called Shine. “He’ll hook you up,” he promised. Then he took my notebook into his hands and wrote down a phone number.

  I didn’t call Shine right away. I wanted to discover the city on my own, and calling Shine felt like a crutch. But after stumbling around Harlem trying to strike up conversations with drug dealers and sex workers without much success, I got out the notebook and dialed the number.

  Shine lived less than a mile from my new apartment, it turned out, but he was down in Harlem and I was up in Morningside Heights. Coming to New York, I had expected a replay of my experience at the University of Chicago, where arriving students were given maps divided into safe and unsafe neighborhoods and warned repeatedly about which ones to avoid—all the black neighborhoods, basically. And to some extent, the tiny incline of Morningside Park, one block long and barely steep enough to be called a hill, did create an invisible barrier between the worlds of Columbia University and Harlem.

  But here was my first lesson, unnoticed at the time, in the ways in which New York is not Chicago. The friendly neighborhood bar I had just discovered was also Shine’s friendly neighborhood bar. A warm and unpretentious place where most of the customers worked for small local businesses, it was a pleasant contrast to the university environment and certainly better than the noisy off-campus places jammed with students. I’d leave the West End to the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I just felt more comfortable among working people.

  Shine laughed when I told him the name of the bar. “Hell, I’ll be there tonight watching the game,” he said. “Drop on by.”

  When I headed over after work, walking fast in the brisk winter air, I wondered how I could have overlooked a major ghetto drug dealer among the ordinary working people. But when I saw him, I immediately saw why. Shine was a large man, fit and athletic, with a quiet, watchful presence, but his dark blue pants and dark shirt made him look like a U.S. postal worker taking a break after the day’s shift. In a room of uniformed men, nearly all black and Latino, he blended right in.

  I ordered a drink from the bar and carried it to his booth, sitting down across from him.

  For a moment, we didn’t speak—just sat, surprisingly comfortable, taking each other in.

  “How’s Michael?” Shine finally asked, his white teeth making a crisp contrast against his red lips and black skin as he smiled. “How’s he living?”

  “Good, good,” I muttered. “He’s settling down.”

  “That nigger’s been settling down since he came into this world,” Shine said.

  “Yeah, but if you’re that good …”

  You don’t even need to try, the old line was. Ghetto wisdom. I didn’t have to finish the thought because Shine knew just what I meant, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Social codes like this are how people signal their allegiances, and I had learned them well during my long immersion in Chicago’s drug culture.

  “He’s good with people,” Shine continued, speaking with respect. “Knows how to get them moving. Nigger practically turned around his neighborhood, that’s what I heard.”

  By this, Shine meant that Michael had taken such effective dictatorial control of his drug block that he’d made it both safe (which made his neighbors cooperative) and extremely profitable, all while staying out of jail. In response, I tried to stay positive without endorsing his crimes.

  “Yeah, he’s successful—and his kid, Jackie, she’s going to take over the world. She’s five. What an amazing little kid.”

  Trying to fill in the silence between small talk, I added, “New York’s not as friendly as Chicago.”

  Shine looked skeptical. “You like friendly people?”

  “Sure. Of course. Who doesn’t?”

  “This ain’t Chicago, my brother,” Shine said. “You can’t get far with friendly out here.”

  But then he frowned and looked at me more closely, pondering the mystery of my character for a long, silent moment. Finally, he came to a conclusion. He nodded and lifted his glass to take a gulp of ice. “I can see how you got along with niggers,” he said. “You don’t seem all that scary, so they can’t see you coming. That’s how you get ’em to tell you all our secrets, ain’t it?”

  The way he said it, laughing and crunching the ice between his teeth, it came out like the sly compliment of one hustler to another. I couldn’t help feeling a momentary pleasure.

  “So what next? What’s your plan?” Shine said. “You want to move into the projects here?”

  This had been on my mind since the day I’d arrived in the city, of course. What next? What should I study? The thing I’d noticed right away was the same thing everybody notices, the special energy of the place. Chicago’s beauty was wrapped up in its Midwestern sameness, the predictable rhythms of its people, the solid embrace of caste and clan. In contrast, New York seemed like chaos barely held together. I wanted to do something that tapped into that somehow. Even if I could put all the office politics aside, another study of crack gangs trapped in the projects didn’t seem the most promising pursuit.

  “So this will be the last time I see you,” Shine said.

  “Maybe,” I answered.

  We stayed very solemn for a moment, then cracked up laughing. Relaxing another notch, we drifted into a conversation about Michael and the other Chicago characters we had in common, which became the story of how I’d wandered into the projects one day and got taken hostage by Michael’s gang. “Next thing I know, I’m moving in—and seven years go flying by.”

  Shine kept his head down, a diamond glittering in his ear. “Michael said you were writing a book,” he said.

  In my experience, there was one good way to explain an enterprise like mine to someone like Shine. “Everybody’s got to hustle,” I said.

  Shine nodded solemnly at the tabletop. “Everyone hustles,” he agreed. “Especially around here.”

  So we understood each other. We were good. I went back to my current obsession. “The city seems too big, too hard to get my hands around. I’m not sure where to start. I’m not sure where to hang out. How do I even know where the significant locations are going to be?”

  Shine was about to get up to refresh his drink, but the bartender made a motion to stay put; he would bring a drink over. Shine settled back into his chair with a sigh. He could see that I was frustrated. Setting up a pattern that would last for many years, he responded with matter-of-factness. “Just keep on keepin’ on, that’s what my auntie says.”

  “Yeah, but keep on keeping on where?”

  He laughed. “That’s exactly what I said.”

  For a moment he was quiet. The noise of the bar rose up around us and pushed us closer together. Shine leaned forward and shook his head. “Shit, I’ve been doing the same thing for years. I’m getting itchy, man. I keep asking myself, What next? What’s the next thing I can get into and do something with? So I was talking to my auntie and she says that—’Just keep on keeping on, nephew’—and I sit there thinking to myself, What the fuck is this woman talking about? Has she even heard the concerns I am expressing? The whole point is where to go.”

  “So where are you going?”

  “Hell, I have no idea.”

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

  Is there a second act?

  • • •

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

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

  “Float?”

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

  “Where does the car come in?”

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

  “I get it,” I said.

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

  “Don’t let me keep you,” I said.

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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