Floating City
Authors: Sudhir Venkatesh
ALSO BY SUDHIR VENKATESH
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto
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First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Sudhir Venkatesh
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi.
Floating city : a rogue sociologist lost and found in New York's underground economy / Sudhir Venkatesh.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-101-63868-2
1. Informal sector (Economics)âNew York (State)âNew York. 2. Sociology, UrbanâNew York (State)âNew York. I. Title.
HD2346.U52N5585 2013
330âdc23 2013007700
To Amanda, a forever love
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
I
arrived at the gallery early, nervous and excited. Shine was coming into my world.
For five years, ever since arriving in New York City in 1997, I had been trying to understand the city's underground economy, the little-known world of shadows where people hid income, broke laws, and found an endless number of creative ways to make a buck. The technical term for my vocation is “ethnographer,” which is a fancy word for a sociologist who spends a great deal of time watching people in their everyday situationsâhanging out
,
to be precise
,
as opposed to using a survey or asking questions like a journalist. I was committed to the idea that time itself made a difference. Time to see the things that people might ordinarily hide, to hear them say the things they might ordinarily be ashamed of, to give them the sense of safety they need to reveal the things they fear, to build up bonds of trust. Ten years with Chicago's crack gang became the subject of my previous book,
Gang Leader for a Day.
Now the challenge was the same: I needed a way
in.
That was Shine. An accomplished Harlem crack dealer when I first met him, he'd been trying to expand into new markets as the crack business slowed. That meant going to Midtown and Wall Street, the Village and the Upper East Side. As I followed his adventures across society's boundaries, I met a huge variety of people making a living outside the margins of the legal worldâprostitutes, pimps, madams, adult filmmakers, immigrant
wranglers, and a thousand varieties of middlemen taking their little piece of the action. Sometimes this became a formal study, as when I got a grant to research street markets in Harlem or interviewed more than 150 prostitutes as part of a collaboration with the Urban Justice Center, and sometimes I came away with little more than a tantalizing sense that things connected in ways I could not yet see. But the most fascinating and moving development of all was when Shine began meeting people I knew in my normal lifeâwhen the crossing of boundaries went from “interesting subject” to painful reality.
The party was already jumping when I arrived. Inside the big white loft, lumber and scrap metal and giant wrecking balls seemed to be strewn about aimlessly. It looked like an abandoned construction site, not art, although it's possible that a decade of researching crime and poverty had made me a bad audience for this sort of thing.
Across the room, I saw Shine's cousin Evalina. I had known her for a few years. In my study of illegal economies, Evalina always seemed to pop up in surprising places. Short but voluptuous and always full of zesty energy, she had worked for Shine in high school, then ran away to the West Coast to find herself. After getting arrested for car theft and shoplifting, she finally came back to New York, where Shine let her sell cocaine again on the condition that she go back to school. Eventually she'd found her way to photography and then sculpture. She had a piece in tonight's show. I was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea to start following her adventures too.
“Isn't this exciting?” she said, coming up to me. “Don't you love all this crazy stuff?”
“Uh, yeah, exciting,” I said. “Congratulations on getting into the show.”
She smiled and seemed very happy, but I couldn't help thinking that she was trying a little bit too hard. Like me, she stood out in
this sea of white faces. I knew from Shine that she was smitten with the art world of Soho and Chelsea and someday hoped to own a gallery of her own. In the meantime he was letting her keep 30 percent of every sale that she could make downtown. Evalina loved being able to accommodate her fabulous new friends, but she wasn't always so smart about getting their money up front. This was, in fact, one of the principal reasons Shine was coming to the gallery tonight. If he was going to survive in this new territory, he told me, he was going to have to find a way to make these damn artists pay up.
There he was now, standing in the doorway in his jeans, hoodie, and white high-top sneakers. He paused to scan the horizon, as any salesman would. He looked confident, tall, handsomeâand completely out of place.
With three people of color in the room, this was now officially the most “integrated” gathering I'd ever seen in Soho.
Shine hesitated for a moment. Maybe it was a moment's doubt; I can't be sure. Then he strolled up to a clump of wrecking balls that floated in midair courtesy of invisible strings. Painted a sickly green and black, they were big enough for a large man to hide behind.
I slid up next to him. “Some strange stuff.”
“Really? You think so?”
I rolled my eyes.
He thought for a moment, looking at the huge floating balls. “I think they're cool.”
In the last five years, I had seen him nurse his bruised knuckles after a beatdown, care for a troubled relative, convince young men to take on the risks of the crack trade, and everything in between. Few things he could do would surprise me. But this surprised me. Was he putting me on? “Really? You think
that
thing is cool?”
He nodded. “Could be a disease or just some soap bubblesâ
you know, like the kind you used to blow when you were a little kid.”
Smiling, he warmed to the idea. “It could make you happy, or it could kill you. Yeah, this shit's cool. This dude gets it.”
I felt a little bit annoyed. The big Harlem drug kingpin also had to be the master of this alien place? But I stifled the feeling. I had been at Shine's side when he began to make his first forays out of Harlem down to the bars of Wall Street and Soho. I knew how much courage it took, how much careful strategic analysis, how much
vision
. I had known a lot of drug dealers and none had ever been so eager to cross boundaries. If you looked at it in a certain way, Shine was an ambitious young American chasing a dream and fighting hard to overcome a mountain of obstacles. Instead of being annoyed, I should have been making notes about his adaptive genius.
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
S
hine was not the only urban explorer I was watching, however. From various perches in the underground economy and among the wealthy young, I could see the forces of globalization and urban development transforming every New York neighborhood. In Hell's Kitchen, Rudy Giuliani's ambitious cleanup had brought in tourist dollars and whirlwind gentrification. In Midtown, multinational corporations were building new headquarters. On Wall Street, the financial services sector was booming with an energy that seemed almost manic. All over the city, middle- and upper-class people were beginning a historic migration back from the suburbs. All of this was visible to the naked eye and much celebrated in the media. But people in the underground were on the move too, and these equally enormous changes seemed to be happening without comment or notice. The waves of gentrification sent thousands of underclass strivers in search of their own new markets and new places to work. From South Asian porn store
managers and Nigerian taxi drivers in Hell's Kitchen to ambitious Latina street prostitutes on the Lower East Side and even high-end call girls on the Upper East Side, the rapid change roiling this global city was creating new winners and new losers as far as the eye could see.
The turbulence hinted of the economic bubble and crash to come, but much of it seemed hard to pin down. The vast invisible continent of America's subterranean economy was shifting in a way that seemed to portend some great change, and the outcome was anybody's guess.
In this context, Shine's encounter with modern art felt like a sign. I was no longer in a Midwestern city where boundaries and borders of both social groups and neighborhoods were durable, unlikely to change no matter what forces threatened them. Chicago celebrated itself for being a “city of neighborhoods,” which meant that it was also a place of systematic social and racial segregation. This had good points and bad points. Everyone had their hood and people took pride in both protecting their turf and becoming involved. Even the underground economy was local. Whether it was for babysitting, drugs, or a loan, most people in Chicago did their under-the-table deals with neighbors. It was almost inconceivable for one of my ghetto crews to cross paths with my economic peers in Hyde Park or the University of Chicago. A popular local catchphrase said it all: “Don't make no waves, don't back no losers.” I had assumed that was how all cities worked. But now the stability of Chicago was behind me, at a time when the stability of the rest of America seemed increasingly shaky too. Maybe New York was pointing at America's future.
But where was it pointing, exactly?
A new world of permeable borders beckoned. The idea of
bricolage
kept coming to me, the art of combining fragments of existing things to make a new order. Maybe I was beginning to see the outlines of a new pattern myself, a fresh take on how the criminal
underworld interacts with the mainstream world to make the world of the future.
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
A
t that moment, with Shine and I still standing in front of the giant green-and-black balls, I heard a woman's voice call out from the middle of the room. “Hey! Sudhir!”
It was Analise, a woman I knew from the elite subculture of wealthy young New Yorkers, many recent graduates of Harvard and Yale, who were taking over their parents' charitable foundations. She was brunette tonight, slender and lovely in that elegant offhand way that seems to come naturally to rich young women.
For a moment, my brain shut down. Once, when I was doing an interview with a street prostitute in a seedy bar in Hell's Kitchen, a pair of my students wandered in the door. An awkward hello followed before I could ditch them and get back to the interview. Another time, during a study of sex workers in strip bars, I saw a couple of former students, one working as a stripper and the other as a bartender. For me, there was no shame in those encounters. Hanging out in bars and strip clubs is my job.
But this was Analise, America's daughter.
Here I should explain. Everyone comes to his work with a given perspective, and mine begins with that Indian-American kid growing up in California. I was fascinated with everything American, from the grandchildren of Southern black slaves who'd ended up in Chicago projects to the South Asian immigrant cab drivers making it in New York the way the Italians and Irish had done before them. Born to a family that could trace its roots back to the Pilgrims, Analise was as American as they come. She was one of the fortune-kissed beautiful people born to private foundations and charity balls, to horses and private schools, to summers in Maine and skiing in Switzerland. Each time I saw her, she always seemed like a new person, full of mad adventures and intense emo
tions. If she also had the disconcerting habit of treating bartenders and taxicab drivers like her personal valets, it was hard to dislike her for itâher elitism had no malice. It was innate. That's what fascinated me.
Now I was worried. In the previous six months I had seen Analise at a party and another gallery opening, and both times she had taken me aside and talked to me with the manic enthusiasm and frequent sniffles I had come to associate with heavy cocaine users. That was bad enough, something I hoped would not last forever. But tonight I was in the company of one of Harlem's leading cocaine dealers, and I really didn't want to be responsible for handing America's daughter the perfect drug connection.
I took a quick look around, didn't see Shine anywhere near, felt relief. Analise was coming over to me, smiling and spilling a drink in her hand.
“Wow, didn't expect to see you here,” she said. “You know the Carter One?”
“The who?”
They were twins, she said, Carter One and Carter Two. Carter One was her friend Mindy. “Their family owns the building.” She waved a hand to take in the show. “Cool, no?”
Just at that moment, Shine came around an artwork. “Sorry, man. I didn't see you,” he said.
I stood there for what felt like an hour.
Should I introduce them?
I wondered.
Analise figured it out before I could muster myself. She held out her hand. “You're Sudhir's friend? I'm Analise.”
“Shine,” he said.
They grinned at each other as if something very amusing was happening. Shine had heard me talk about how fascinated I was by the world of privileged white kids, and though I'd never mentioned Shine specifically, Analise knew I was interested in the lives of high-level drug traffickers who were adjusting to changes in the
market for crack cocaine. Although I still hadn't committed to a formal study, I had been exploring the idea of drawing a contrast between the neighborhood gangs who sold drugs in Chicago and the independents like Shine who moved around New York. Now she seemed to be studying him with avid interest, following his eyes to a large nostalgic photograph of a house and backyard. I hoped she wouldn't ask him to talk about black people or how it “felt” to grow up as a thug. Analise wasn't usually that insensitiveâon the contrary, she had a basic kindness that I found touchingâbut with her eyes so bugged out and her energy crackling, my mind was racing ahead to the worst possibilities.
“That picture is awful, don't you think?” Analise said, turning her body away from me and toward Shine.
“He should have taken it from the inside,” Shine said.
She seemed surprised. “Why do you say that?”
“Because of the title.
What I Saw.
”
She chuckled. “Yeah, but it still sucks.”
“I didn't say it was good.”
They began looking at the art together, stopping at a large furry doll. “That's sexy.”
“I'd buy her,” Shine affirmed. I saw cheap fur glued to a beanbag. What they saw, I had no idea.
Already, they were a conspiracy of two. I felt about as useful as a plant in the corner.
