BAWDY.

Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks—the pedestrian 

parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with 

circulation but are not identical with it and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to 

the proper workings of cities. 

A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction 

with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it. The same 

might be said of streets, in the sense that they serve other purposes besides carrying wheeled traffic in 

their middles. Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. 

Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks 

interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull. 

More than that, and here we get down to the first problem, if a city’s streets are safe from 

barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear. When people say that a 

city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on 

the sidewalks. 

But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of 

danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of 

civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and 

its sidewalks. 

This task is totally unlike any service that sidewalks and streets in little towns or true suburbs are 

called upon to do. Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only 

denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by 

definition, full of strangers. To anyone person, strangers are far more common in big cities than 

acquaintances. More common not just in places of public assembly, but more common at a man’s own 

doorstep. Even residents who live near each other are strangers, and must be, because of the sheer 

number of people in small geographical compass. 

The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe 

and secure on the street among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by 

them. A city district that fails in this respect also does badly in other ways and lays up for itself, and for 

its city at large, mountain on mountain of trouble. 

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the 

same thing in the end. “1 live in a lovely, quiet residential area,” says a friend of mine who is hunting 

another place to live. “The only disturbing sound at night is the occasional scream of someone being 

mugged.” It does not take many incidents of violence on a city street, or in a city district, to make 

people fear the streets. And as they fear them, they use them less, which makes the streets still more 

unsafe. 

To be sure, there are people with hobgoblins in their heads, and such people will never feel safe 

no matter what the objective circumstances are. But this is a different matter from the fear that besets 

normally prudent, tolerant and cheerful people who show nothing more than common sense in 

refusing to venture after dark—or in a few places, by day—into streets where they may well be 

assaulted, unseen or unrescued until too late. 

The barbarism and the real, not imagined, insecurity that gives rise to such fears cannot be tagged 

a problem of the slums. The problem is most serious, in fact, in genteel-looking “quiet residential areas” like that my friend was leaving. 

It cannot be tagged as a problem of older parts of cities. The problem reaches its most baffling 

dimensions in some examples of rebuilt parts of cities, including supposedly the best examples of 

rebuilding, such as middle-income projects. The police precinct captain of a nationally admired project 

of this kind (admired by planners and lenders) has recently admonished residents not only about 

hanging around outdoors after dark but has urged them never to answer their doors without knowing 

the caller. Life here has much in common with life for the three little pigs or the seven little kids of the 

nursery thrillers. The problem of sidewalk and doorstep insecurity is as serious in cities which have 

made conscientious efforts at rebuilding as it is in those cities that have lagged. Nor is it illuminating to 

tag minority groups, or the poor, or the outcast with responsibility for city danger. There are immense 

variations in the degree of civilization and safety found among such groups and among the city areas 

where they live. Some of the safest sidewalks in New York City, for example, at any time of day or night, 

are those along which poor people or minority groups live. And some of the most dangerous are in 

streets occupied by the same kinds of people. All this can also be said of other cities. 

Deep and complicated social ills must lie behind delinquency and crime, in suburbs and towns as 

well as in great cities. This book will not go into speculation on the deeper reasons. It is sufficient, at 

this point, to say that if we are to maintain a city society that can diagnose and keep abreast of deeper 

social problems, the starting point must be, in any case, to strengthen whatever workable forces for 

maintaining safety and civilization do exist in the cities we do have. To build city districts that are 

custom made for easy crime is idiotic. Yet that is what we do. 

The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of 

cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an 

intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people

themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city areas—older public housing 

projects and streets with very high population turnover are often conspicuous examples—the keeping 

of public sidewalk law order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards. Such places are 

jungles. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has 

broken down. 

The second thing to understand is that the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by spreading 

people out more thinly, trading the characteristics of cities for the characteristics of suburbs. If this 

could solve danger on the city streets, then Los Angeles should be a safe city because superficially Los 

Angeles is almost all suburban. It has virtually no districts compact enough to qualify as dense city 

areas. Yet Los Angeles cannot, any more than any other great city, evade the truth that, being a city, it is 

composed of strangers not all of whom are nice… . But of this we can be sure: thinning out a city does 

not insure safety from crime and fear of crime. This is one of the conclusions that can be drawn within 

individual cities too, where pseudosuburbs or superannuated suburbs are ideally suited to rape, 

muggings, beatings, holdups and the like. 

Here we come up against an all-important question about any city street: How much easy 

opportunity does it offer to crime? It may be that there is some absolute amount of crime in a given 

city, which will find an outlet somehow (I do not believe this). Whether this is so or not, different kinds 

of city streets garner radically different shares of barbarism and fear of barbarism… .

An incident at Washington Houses, a public housing project in New York, illustrates this point. A 

tenants’ group at this project, struggling to establish itself, held some outdoor ceremonies in midDecember 1958, and put up three Christmas trees. The chief tree, so cumbersome it was a problem to 

transport, erect, and trim, went into the project’s inner “street,” a landscaped central mall and promenade. The other two trees, each less than six feet tall and easy to carry, went on two small fringe plots at the outer corners of the project where it abuts a busy avenue am lively cross streets of the old city. 

The first night, the large tree and all its trimmings were stolen. The two smaller trees remained intact, 

lights, ornaments and all, until the) were taken down at New Year’s. “The place where the tree was 

stolen, which is theoretically the most safe and sheltered place in the project, is the same place that is 

unsafe for people too, especially children,” says a social worker who had been helping the tenants’ 

group. “People are no safer in that mall than the Christmas tree. On the other hand, the place where the 

other trees were safe, where the project is just one corner out of four, happens to be safe for people.”

____________________

This is something everyone already knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A 

deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. But how does this work, really? And what makes a city street 

well used or shunned? Why is the sidewalk mall in Washington Houses, which is supposed to be an 

attraction, shunned? Why are the side· walks of the old city just to its west not shunned? What about 

streets that are busy part of the time and then empty abruptly? 

A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the 

presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three 

main qualities: 

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private 

space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings 

or in projects. 

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural 

proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the 

safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or 

blank sides on it and leave it blind. 

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of 

effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the 

sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty 

street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by 

watching street activity. 

In settlements that are smaller and simpler than big cities, controls on acceptable public behavior, 

if not on crime, seem to operate with greater or lesser success through a web of reputation, gossip, 

approval, disapproval and sanctions, all of which are powerful if people know each other and word 

travels. But a city’s streets, which must control not only the behavior of the people of the city but also 

of visitors from suburbs and towns who want to have a big time away from the gossip and sanctions at 

home, have to operate by more direct, straightforward methods. It is a wonder cities have solved such 

an inherently difficult problem at all. And yet in many streets they do it magnificently.

It is futile to try to evade the issue of unsafe city streets by attempting to make some other 

features of a locality, say interior courtyards, or sheltered play spaces, safe instead. By definition again, 

the streets of a city must do most of the job of handling strangers for this is where strangers come and 

go. The streets must not only defend the city against predatory strangers, they must protect the many, 

many peaceable and well-meaning strangers who use them, insuring their safety too as they pass 

through. Moreover, no normal person can spend his life in some artificial haven, and this includes 

children. Everyone must use the streets. 

On the surface, we seem to have here some simple aims: To try to secure streets where the public 

space is unequivocally public, physically unmixed with private or with nothing-at-all space, so that the 

area needing surveillance has clear and practicable limits; and to see that these public street spaces 

have eyes on them as continuously as possible. 

But it is not so simple to achieve these objects, especially the latter. You can’t make people use 

streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. 

Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it 

is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility 

or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are 

least conscious, normally, that they are policing. 

The basic requisite for such surveillance is a substantial quantity of stores and other public 

places sprinkled along the sidewalks of a district; enterprises and public places that are used 

by evening and night must be among them especially. Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief 

examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety. 

First, they give people—both residents and strangers—concrete reasons for using the 

sidewalks on which these enterprises face. 

Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to 

public use in themselves but which become traveled and peopled as routes to somewhere else; this 

influence does not carry very far geographically, so enterprises must be frequent in a city district if 

they are to populate with walkers those over stretches of street that lack public places along the Sidewalk. Moreover, there should be many different kinds of enterprises, to give people reasons for 

crisscrossing paths. 

Third, storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace 

and order themselves; they hate broken windows and holdups; they hate having customers made 

nervous about safety. They are great street watchers and sidewalk guardians if present in sufficient 

numbers. 

Fourth, the activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for food or drink, is 

itself an attraction to still other people.

This last point, that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners 

and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city 

people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. People’s love 

of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere. This trait reaches an 

almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where the street is divided by a narrow 

central mall, right in the middle of traffic. At the cross-street intersections of this long north-south 

mall, benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even 

barely tolerable these benches are filled with people at block after block after block, watching the 

pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy 

sidewalks, watching each other. Eventually Broadway reaches Columbia University and Barnard 

College, one to the right, the other to the left. Here all is obvious order and quiet. No more stores, no 

more activity generated by the stores, almost no more pedestrians crossing—and no more watchers. 

The benches are there but they go empty in even the finest weather. I have tried them and can see why. 

No place could he more boring. Even the students of these institutions shun the solitude. They are 

doing their outdoor loitering, outdoor homework, and general street watching on the steps overlooking the busiest campus crossing… . 

Not everyone in cities helps to take care of the streets, and many a city resident or city worker is unaware of why his neighborhood is safe. The other day an incident occurred on the street where I

live, and it interested me because of this point. 

My block of the street, I must explain, is a small one, but it contains a remarkable range of 

buildings, varying from several vintages of tenements to three- and four-story houses that have been 

converted into low-rent flats with stores on the ground floor, or returned to single-family use like ours. 

Across the street there used to be mostly four-story brick tenements with stores below. But twelve 

years ago several buildings, from the corner to the middle of the block, were converted into one 

building with elevator apartments of small size and high rents.

The incident that attracted my attention was a suppressed struggle going on between a man and a 

little girl of eight or nine years old. The man seemed to be trying to get the girl to go with him. By turns 

he was directing a cajoling attention to her, and then assuming an air of nonchalance. The girl was 

making herself rigid, as children do when they resist, against the wall of one of the tenements across 

the street. 

As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed 

advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had 

emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the 

man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-inlaw keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly to the other side. 

Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was withdrawn quickly and its owner 

reappeared a moment later in the doorway behind the man. Two men from the bar next to the butcher 

shop carne to the doorway and waited. On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, the fruit man 

and the laundry proprietor had all come out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed 

from a number of windows besides ours. That man did not know it, but he was surrounded. Nobody 

was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was. 

I am sorry—sorry purely for dramatic purposes—to have to report that the little girl turned out to 

be the man’s daughter.

Throughout the duration of the little drama, perhaps five minutes in all, no eyes appeared in the 

windows of the high-rent, small-apartment building. It was the only building of which this was true. 

When we first moved to our block, I used to anticipate happily that perhaps soon all the buildings 

would be rehabilitated like that one. I know better now, and can only anticipate with gloom and 

foreboding the recent news that exactly this transformation is scheduled for the rest of the block 

frontage adjoining the high-rent building. The high-rent tenants, most of whom are so transient we 

cannot even keep track of their faces, have not the remotest idea of who takes care of the their street, 

or how. A city neighborhood can absorb and protect a substantial number of these birds of passage, as 

our neighborhood does. But if and when the neighborhood finally becomes them, they will gradually 

find the streets less secure, they will be vaguely mystified about it, and if things get bad enough they 

will drift away to another neighborhood which is mysteriously safer.

In some rich city neighborhoods, where there is little do-it-yourself surveillance, such as 

residential Park Avenue or upper Fifth Avenue in New York, street watchers are hired. The 

monotonous sidewalks of residential Park A venue, for example, are surprisingly little used; their 

putative users are populating, instead, the interesting store-, bar- and restaurant-filled sidewalks of 

Lexington Avenue and Madison Avenue to east and west, and the cross streets leading to these. A 

network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a form of hired 

neighborhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes. At night, with the security of the 

doormen as a bulwark, dog walkers safely venture forth and supplement the doormen. But this street 

is so blank of built-in eyes, so devoid of concrete reasons for using or watching it instead of turning the

first corner off of it, that if its rents were to slip below the point where they could support a plentiful 

hired neighborhood of doormen and elevator men, it would undoubtedly become a woefully 

dangerous street. 

Once a street is well equipped to handle strangers, once it has both a good, effective demarcation 

between private and public spaces and has a basic supply of activity and eyes, the more strangers the 

merrier. 

Strangers become an enormous asset on the street on which I live, and the spurs off it, particularly 

at night when safety assets are most needed. We are fortunate enough, on the street, to be gifted not 

only with a locally supported bar and another around the corner, but also with a famous bar that 

draws continuous troops of strangers from adjoining neighborhoods and even from out of town. It is 

famous because the poet Dylan Thomas used to go there, and mentioned it in his writing. This bar, 

indeed, works two distinct shifts. In the morning and early afternoon it is a social gathering place for 

the old community of Irish longshoremen and other craftsmen in the area, as it always was. But 

beginning in mid afternoon it takes on a different life, more like a college bull session with beer, 

combined with a literary cocktail party, and this continues until the early hours of the morning. On a 

cold winter’s night, as you pass the White Horse, and the doors open, a solid wave of conversation and 

animation surges out and hits you; very warming. The comings and goings from this bar do much to 

keep our street reasonably populated until three in the morning, and it is a street always safe to come 

home to… . 

A friend of mine lives on a street uptown where a church youth and community center, with many

night dances and other activities, performs the same service for his street that the White Horse bar 

does for ours. Orthodox planning is much imbued with puritanical and Utopian conceptions of how 

people should spend their free time, and kin planning, these moralisms on people’s private lives are

deeply confused with concepts about the working of cities. In maintaining city street civilization, the 

White Horse bar and the church-sponsored youth center different as they undoubtedly are, perform 

much the same public street civilizing service. There is not only room in cities for such differences and 

many more in taste, purpose and interest of occupations; cities also have a need for people with all 

these differences in taste and proclivity. The preferences of Utopians, and of other compulsive 

managers of other people’s leisure, for one kind of legal enterprise over others is worse than irrelevant 

for cities. It is harmful. The greater and more plentiful the range of all legitimate interests (in the 

strictly legal sense) that city streets and their enterprises can satisfy, the better for the streets and for 

the safety and civilization of the city.

____________________

Bars, and indeed all commerce, have a bad name in many city districts precisely because they do 

draw strangers, and the strangers do not work out as an asset at all.

This sad circumstance is especially true in the dispirited gray belts of great cities and in once 

fashionable or at least once solid inner residential areas gone into decline. Because these 

neighborhoods are so dangerous, and the streets typically so dark, it is commonly believed that their 

trouble may be insufficient street lighting. Good lighting is important, but darkness alone does not 

account for the gray areas’ deep, functional sickness, the Great Blight of Dullness. 

The value of bright street lights for dispirited gray areas rises from the reassurance they offer to 

some people who need to go out on the sidewalk, or would like to, but lacking the good light would not 

do so. Thus the lights induce these people to contribute their own eyes to the upkeep of the street. 

Moreover, as is obvious, good lighting augments every pair of eyes, makes the eyes count for more 

because their range is greater. Each additional pair of eyes, and every increase in their range, is that 

much to the good for dull gray areas. But unless eyes are there, and unless in the brains behind those 

eyes is the almost unconscious reassurance of general street support in upholding civilization, lights 

can do no good. Horrifying public crimes can, and do, occur in well-lighted subway stations when no 

effective eyes are present. They virtually never occur in darkened theaters where many people and 

eyes are present. Street lights can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where there are no 

ears to hear. Does it make a noise? Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light? Not for 

practical purposes. 

To explain the troubling effect of strangers on the streets of city gray areas, I shall first paint out, 

for purposes of analogy, the peculiarities of another and figurative kind of street—the corridors of 

high-rise public housing projects, those derivatives of Radiant City. The elevators and corridors of 

these projects are, in a sense, streets. They are streets piled up in the sky in order to eliminate streets 

on the ground and permit the ground to become deserted parks like the mall at Washington Houses 

where the tree was stolen. 

Not only are these interior parts of the buildings streets in the sense that they serve the comings 

and goings of residents, most of whom may not know each other or recognize, necessarily, who is a 

resident and who is not. They are streets also in the sense of being accessible to the public. They have 

been designed in an imitation of upper-class standards for apartment living without upper-class cash 

for doormen and elevator men. Anyone at all can go into these buildings, unquestioned, and use the 

traveling streets of the elevator and the sidewalks that are the corridors. These interior streets, 

although completely accessible to public use, are closed to public view and they thus lack the checks 

and inhibitions exerted by eye-policed city streets. 

Troubled, SO far as I can determine, less by the amply proved dangers to human beings in these 

blind-eyed streets than by the vandalism to property that occurs in them, the New York City Housing 

Authority some years back experimented with corridors open to public view in a Brooklyn project 

which I shall call Blenheim Houses although that is not its name. (I do not wish to add to its troubles by 

advertising it.)

Because the buildings of Blenheim Houses are Sixteen stories high, and because their height 

permits generous expanses of shunned ground area, surveillance of the open corridors from the 

ground or from other buildings offers little more than psychological effect, but this psychological 

openness to view does appear effective to some degree. More important and effective, the corridors 

were well designed to induce surveillance from within the buildings themselves. Uses other than plain 

circulation were built into them. They were equipped as play space, and made sufficiently generous to 

act as narrow porches, as well as passageways. This all turned out to be so lively and interesting that 

the tenants added still another use and much the favorite: picnic grounds-this in spite of continual 

pleas and threats from the management which did not plan that the balcony-corridors should serve as 

picnic grounds. (The plan should anticipate everything and then permit no changes.) The tenants are 

devoted to the balcony-corridors; and as a result of being intensively used the balconies arc under 

intense surveillance. There has been no problem of crime in these particular corridors, nor of 

vandalism either. Not even light bulbs are stolen or broken, although in projects of similar size with 

blind-eyed corridors, light bulb replacements solely because of theft or vandalism customarily run into 

the thousands each month. 

So far so good. 

A striking demonstration of the direct connection between city surveillance and city safety! 

Nonetheless, Blenheim Houses has a fearsome problem of vandalism and scandalous behavior.

The lighted balconies which are, as the manager puts it, “the brightest and most attractive scene in 

sight,” draw strangers, especially teen-agers, from all over Brooklyn. But these strangers, lured by the 

magnet of the publicly visible corridors, do not halt at the visible corridors. They go into other 

“streets” of the buildings, streets that lack surveillance. These include the elevators and, more 

important in this case, the fire stairs and their landings. The housing police run up and down after the 

malefactors-who behave barbarously and viciously in the blind-eyed, sixteen-story-high stairways-and 

the malefactors elude them. It is easy to run the elevators up to a high floor, jam the doors so the 

elevators cannot be brought down, and then play hell with a building and anyone you can catch. So 

serious is the problem and apparently so uncontrollable, that the advantage of the safe corridors is all 

but canceled-at least in the harried manager’s eyes. 

What happens at Blenheim Houses is somewhat the same as what happens in dull gray areas of 

cities. The gray areas’ pitifully few and thinly spaced patches of brightness and life are like the visible 

corridors at Blenheim Houses. They do attract strangers. But the relatively deserted, dull, blind streets 

leading from these places are like the fire stairs at Blenheim Houses. These are not equipped to handle 

strangers and the presence of strangers in them is an automatic menace. 

The temptation in such cases is to blame the balconies—or the commerce or bars that serve as a 

magnet… . This is City Planning, with all the stamp of orthodoxy on it, not some aberration of local 

willfulness. 

____________________

Suppose we continue with building, and with deliberate rebuilding, of unsafe cities. How do we 

live with this insecurity? From the evidence thus far, there seem to be three modes of living with it; 

maybe in time others will be invented but I suspect these three will simply be further developed, if that 

is the word for it. 

The first mode is to let danger hold sway, and let those unfortunate enough to be stuck with it 

take the consequences. This is the policy now followed with respect to low-income housing projects, 

and to many middle-income housing projects. 

The second mode is to take refuge in vehicles. This is a technique practiced in the big wildanimal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances 

until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles. Surprised visitors to that city 

are forever recounting how the police of Beverly Hills stopped them, made them prove their reasons 

for being afoot, and warned them of the danger. This technique of public safety does not seem to work 

too effectively yet in Los Angeles, as the crime rate shows, but in time it may. And think what the crime 

figures might be if more people without metal shells were helpless upon the vast, blind-eyed 

reservation of Los Angeles. 

People in dangerous parts of other cities often use automobiles as protection too, of course, or try 

to. A letter to the editor in the New York Post, reads, “I live on a dark street off Utica Avenue in 

Brooklyn and therefore decided to take a cab home even though it was not late. The cab driver asked 

that I get off at the corner of Utica, saying he did not want to go down the dark street. If I had wanted to 

walk down the dark street, who needed him?” 

The third mode … was developed by hoodlum gangs and has been adopted widely by developers 

of the rebuilt city. This mode is to cultivate the institution of Turf. 

Under the Turf system in its historical form, a gang appropriates as its territory certain streets or 

housing projects or parks—often a combination of the three. Members of other gangs cannot enter this 

Turf without permission from the Turf-owning gang, or if they do so it is at peril of being beaten or run 

off. In 1956, the New York City Youth Board, fairly desperate because of gang warfare, arranged 

through its gang youth workers a series of truces among fighting gangs. The truces were reported to 

stipulate, among other provisions, a mutual understanding of Turf boundaries among the gangs 

concerned and agreement not to trespass. 

The city’s police commissioner, Stephen P. Kennedy, thereupon expressed outrage at agreements 

respecting Turf. The police, he said, aimed to protect the right of every person to walk any part of the 

city in safety and with impunity as a basic right. Pacts about Turf, he indicated, were intolerably 

subversive both of public rights and public safety. 

I think Commissioner Kennedy was profoundly right. However, we must reflect upon the problem 

facing the Youth Board workers. It was a real one, and they were trying as well as they could to meet it 

with whatever empirical means they could. The safety of the city, on which public right and freedom of 

movement ultimately depend, was missing from the unsuccessful streets, parks and projects 

dominated by these gangs. Freedom of the city, under these circumstances, was a rather academic 

ideal. 

Now consider the redevelopment projects of cities: the middle-and upper-income housing 

occupying many acres of city, many former blocks, with their own grounds and their own streets to 

serve these “islands within the City,” “cities within the city,” and “new concepts in city living,” as the 

advertisements for them say. The technique here is also to designate the Turf and fence the other 

gangs out. At first the fences were never visible. Patrolling guards were sufficient to enforce the line. 

But in the past few years the fences have become literal… .  On the whole, people seem to get used 

very quickly to living in a Turf with either a figurative or a literal fence, and to wonder how they got on 

without it formerly… .  Stockade life had become normal and they feared for their safety without the 

fence… . 

Like the Youth Board workers, the developers and residents of Radiant City and Radiant Garden 

City and Radiant Garden City Beautiful have a genuine difficulty and they have to do the best they can 

with it by the empirical means at their disposal. They have little choice. Wherever the rebuilt city rises 

the barbaric concept of Turf must follow, because the rebuilt city has junked a basic function of the city 

street and with it, necessarily, the freedom of the city. 

____________________

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a 

marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex 

order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order 

is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art 

form of the city and liken it to the dance-not to a simpleminded precision dance with everyone kicking 

up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the 

individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other 

and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to 

place, and in anyone place is always replete with new improvisations. 

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I 

make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic 

occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the 

center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the 

morning?)

While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the 

laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the 

empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein 

arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s 

superintendent depositing her chunky three-year old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage 

point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary children, 

heading for St. Luke’s, dribble through to the south; the children for St. Veronica’s cross, heading to the 

west, and the children for p.s. 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are being made from 

the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and 

side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping 

taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning 

ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now 

bringing downtowners up to midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have 

emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with 

either laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything between. It is time for me to hurry to 

work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick-bodied, white-aproned 

fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, 

looking solid as earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back to 

each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know 

what it means: All is well… . 

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet 

goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe’s 

sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night 

workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled 

down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop. I know the deep night ballet 

and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the 

shadows and hearing the sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely pattering snatches 

of party conversation and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes there is 

sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a 

young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently 

picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not 

too close, until the police came. Out came the heads, too, along Hudson Street, offering opinion, “Drunk 

… Crazy … A wild kid from the suburbs.” [He turned out to be a wild kid from the suburbs. Sometimes, 

on Hudson Street, we are tempted to believe the suburbs must be a difficult place to bring up children.] 

…

On Hudson Street, the same as in the North End of Boston or in any other animated neighborhoods 

of great cities, we are not innately more competent at keeping the sidewalks safe than are the people 

who try to live off the hostile truce of Turf in a blind-eyed city. We are the lucky possessors of a city 

order that makes it relatively simple to keep the peace because there are plenty of eyes on the street. 

But there is nothing simple about that order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go 

into it. Most of those components are specialized in one way or another. They unite in their joint effect 

upon the sidewalk, which is not specialized in the least. That is its strength. 

I finally got it. Apparently there just isnt a bookstore near my house that caries it, and on amazon the cheapest used paperback was still $15 not including shipping. Hooray for getting free shit off the interwebs. Im so excited about it, you have no idea.