Remembering The Urban Villagers and Its Location in Intellectual Time: A Response to Zukin

Driving the Working Class Out of the City

Zukin writes with two advantages. One is hindsight, which lets her see the urban renewal effort from beginning to end, the more recent and still ongoing privatized urban renewal process called gentrification, and of course the deindustrialization of the national economy, which hurt industrial cities the most. Her other advantage is the timing of her professional training; she became a sociologist after neo–Marxists and others persuaded sociologists to incorporate the political economy and a much longer historical timespan into their analyses.

The West End was one of the early big city urban renewal projects so that the full national impact of the federal program was not visible when I was writing. Furthermore, I was not concerned with the “epochal spatial transformations of the modern city” (p. 41), which Zukin believes I should have included in my analysis. I was using my fieldwork to persuade renewal officials to reverse any still reversible policies to help the West Enders who were about to be displaced. ⁵ My first, no, my only priority was altering urban renewal policies, not writing history.

Still, had the neo–Marxist “school” of urban sociology been around when I was doing my research, I might have included a briefer version of Zukin's skilful historical analysis. Had I written my book in the late l970s, I would certainly have described the economic and political powers behind the destruction of the West End as major figures in the then badly sputtering Boston growth machine.

My failure to discuss deindustrialization was no omission; it did not really get under way till after Urban Villagers was published. Moreover, Boston itself had very little industry, and most manufacturing took place in industrial suburbs like Lynn and Lowell.

Actually, urban renewal must be associated with an earlier, preindustrialization chapter in American urban history. It originated in the 1949 Housing Act, in which the “real estate lobby” of nationally powerful landowners, builders, bankers, and others obtained the federal monies and powers as their price for letting public housing survive. ⁶

However, the Act was also another installment of the government's infusion of federal funds into the postwar economy to head off the then still widely feared resumption of the Great Depression. In addition, the Act was a follow–up to the various community development projects, including public housing, funded as one of the New Deal's Keynesian policies to end the Depression. ⁷

Omitting Spatial Analysis

In the late 1950s, my colleagues and I would have been puzzled by the notion of discursive space; even the term discourse had not yet entered our professional vocabulary. Although I had just received my PhD in City Planning when I began the West End research and was thus ready to study spatial issues, my fieldwork suggested that the West Enders saw the world differently. They had little affect for the neighborhood, and although they cared about and for their apartments, they centered their lives on the family, friendship, and other networks in which they were embedded. Many people told me that they were ready to go anywhere in the Boston area as long as they were all relocated together.

The West Enders had little disposable income for shopping expeditions, but the West End had not been a major shopping area since the pushcart era, and by 1957, few young people who normally provide much of the street life still lived in the area. Thus, the “daily ballet” that Jane Jacobs—who was not an empirical researcher—saw in New York's Greenwich Village and that Zukin believes to be endemic to the city was not being performed in the West End. ⁸

Any such “action” was all in the North End, then on its way to being transformed into Boston's Little Italy, where suburbanites and tourists could eat in Italian restaurants and wonder if the people they saw on the streets were Mafioso. ⁹ (Indeed, in 1958, a mutual friend asked me to show Jane Jacobs around the North End, but she turned down my invitation to also tour the West End; it lacked the vitality she wanted to see.)

Although Zukin reread my book for an urban journal that emphasizes spatial analysis, I was not doing an urban study. I had been hired to undertake a community study to report on the West Enders’ social structure and culture, and 12 of the 14 chapters of Urban Villagers were devoted to that report. ¹⁰ In the late l950s, a community study was not defined as urban sociology, which was then still almost entirely devoted to ecological analyses.

My study design resembled that of other community studies of the time; I described the major institutions and other social features of the area. In addition, community studies often reported new or interesting findings that would contribute to sociology's literature and I chose, among other things, to discuss the thesis that class trumped ethnicity. My models were William F. Whyte Jr., whose study of Cornerville also contributed significantly to small–group analysis; Helen and Robert Lynd, who had emphasized the dominance of class in Middletown at a time when the social sciences rarely discussed this subject; and W. Lloyd Warner and his associates, who had added status in their study of Yankee City.

My thesis about class trumping ethnicity came out of my fieldwork and had I found that the West Enders shared in what Zukin describes as the “depth of white ethnic groups’ dispossession of … cultural identity” (p. 43), I would have reported it. What I did find was that the West Enders paid little attention to their ethnicity. Their familial and social networks were almost completely Sicilian, so there was no need to express what would in the 1980s be called an ethnic identity. Nor was that identity taken away from them; they just did not find it relevant to their lives. Consequently, “their bodies, their names and even their souls (did not) bear the imprint of Julius Caesar” (p. 43).

My book departed from the community study model in one respect; here and there I added tangential analyses that commented on the sociological controversies and other issues of the day in which I was interested. ¹¹ I did so because I thought my fieldwork could correct some incomplete or inaccurate ideas and theories that had originated in someone's armchair. ¹²

Urban Villagers was probably later viewed as an urban study because I added the two chapter epilogues about its forthcoming destruction, and also because over time, urban sociologists incorporated community studies into their turf. That I called the West End an urban village undoubtedly helped too.

Social Analysis and Personal History

My time–boundedness, and my being closer to the data than Zukin also moves me to comment on her intriguing suggestion that my being a Nazi refugee and a “displaced person” fueled my empathy for the West Enders’ helplessness against urban renewal. However, I was never a displaced person because by the mid–1930s, my parents realized that Jews had no place in Germany and started the process of leaving it. We were able to get out just before the start of World War II, but virtually penniless, which may have enhanced my understanding of the West Enders’ economic situation as well as my reaction to the economic injustice built into urban renewal. ¹³

The Critique of “chicago Ethnography”

The most personally painful instance of Zukin's time–boundedness is her conclusion that the book reflects the “Chicago school of ethnography's grave inadequacies” (p. 47). Among other things she accuses that school—I assume she means Everett Hughes and his students (of which I was one)—of studying neighborhoods “in isolation” and treating them as “specimens of a social class or an ethnic group” (p. 47).

However, that charge should be laid on the discipline generally. Sociologists did and still do so little fieldwork that many studies are quickly generalized to serve as examples of generic types. Thus, readers turned the West End into the prototypical white ethnic working class urban neighborhood, just as my 1967 study The Levittowners was and still is read as a surrogate for post–World War II suburbia. ¹⁴

I will not speak for the other Hughesian fieldworkers, but I did not study the West End in isolation for I placed it in the historical and ecological contexts that I then saw and considered relevant. In addition, I compared it to the working class neighborhoods that American and British sociologists had studied in the 1950s.

Moreover, I worked within the then existing division of labor in sociology and the social sciences, and perhaps most important for understanding that work, at a time when sociology was a far smaller discipline than today. Today's cohorts have no sense of how little empirical work was being undertaken, and how few of us were doing community and other “ethnographic” studies. ¹⁵

Fieldwork is a lot harder, more time–consuming, and less often funded than most other sociological research, which is why it is still mostly limited to case studies and why community studies continue to be about single neighborhoods. For the same reasons, urban history is still left mostly to urban historians and macrosociological analyses of the political economy, to other social scientists. On the whole, I believe this to be a reasonable state of affairs.

Conclusion

The lesson I draw from Zukin's and my time–boundedness is that both are useful. Although I consider my history of the late 1950s to be factually more accurate than hers, The Urban Villagers was a product of its sociological time, just as her reading is a product of the present one. Each sheds some light on how sociologists think and do research and the two together suggest how essential a grounding in the sociology of knowledge is for authors, critics, and readers alike.