Margarita Kompelmakher
 

Invisible Man:
Life on the Edge
 
 
 
 
 

10:18am.The sign read, “Falafels $2.50.”    The man behind it wore a black ski hat under the hood of his jacket and stood with his back to the street. He manned the stainless steel food cart with impeccable speed and precision. He almost always worked alone, except on Saturday, when business was overwhelming and he offered one of the street youths a couple of bucks to bag food and give out change. I walk by this stand everyday on my way to class. Some people are led to his stand by their stomachs, others arrive out of habit, but I was first lured by the mystique of his absence. One day the man with the stand wasn’t there. I found myself longing for the pungent aroma of the food the faceless man prepared. His absence aroused my interest. I had never really paid attention to him in the past, but now I felt a strange need to get to know him.   12:00pm.The traffic light reads, “Walk.”   To walk through New York City is to dance through New York City.  To the tourist’s eye, the people of New York are a non-profit dance company and the streets of New York are the stage.  The street is a massive orgy of movement where people nonchalantly pivot around one another, flutter their hands violently to motion for a taxi, shake off snow particles, and leap over puddle slush on the street corners. Each street is a new performance moving to a different rhythm, a movement in time. The point of the dance is to maintain the rhythm of each street. If the rhythm goes unmet one will risk either trampling someone or being trampled on, and the flow of the dance will be disrupted. One can’t experience a New York City street from on top of a tourists’ double-decker bus. To experience this living organism one has to be a part of it, dancing in accordance to its rhythm.    When compared to the affluent Flatiron district that it follows, the last stretch of Chelsea that includes the intersection of 27thstreet and Broadway looks like its abandoned twin: misplaced, rundown, and torn. The glistening offices of Flatiron give way to shabby buildings crying out for residents. 27th and Broadway screams to be noticed next to its beautiful counterpart. Quiet businessmen in suits are replaced with a different sort of working man here. In the late seventeenth century these men were known as “hucksters,” but we attribute the names street vendor, peddler, hawker, and transient dealer to them today. These men set the rhythm on 27th and Broadway.    He turns around for a split second. We make eye contact. He recognizes me and smiles. I nod in response and raise my hand to gesture a hello, and hurry to class. Three hours later I emerge out of my studio for lunch and head to his cart. He always treats me to a free sample of whatever he has cooking while he prepares my falafel. He is a Middle Eastern immigrant, and I have been purchasing falafels from him for three months. But the language barrier between us makes it impossible for us to communicate in any form other than the ‘smile-n-nod’.   Many street vendors here are immigrants. They sell everything from leather jackets for twenty dollars to the ever popular hot dog with the “works.” They vend to make a living on the streets, and wish for the day they will be able to take their business indoors. Paul Stoller knows these dreams of advancement are usually short lived. His book, Money Has No Smell, is based on fieldwork following West African street vendors in New York City. Stoller writes the, “expansion of the gulf between rich and poor has created space for the rapid growth of an informal economy.” Where as less then fifty years ago the center industry in New York City was manufacturing, today’s global restructuring has kicked out the manufacturing sector and replaced it with financial service and technology corporations. The direct result was the loss of thousands of stable factory jobs and the indirect result was the dwindling of New York City’s middle class. This polarization between the rich and poor has forced many once hirable blue-collar workers to join the ranks of the informal economy and has made it more and more difficult for those already there to make the jump into the formal economy. On June 3, 1998 hundreds of street vendor protestors marched along Broadway towards Battery Park to protest Guliani’s new regulations that would ban 144 blocks in midtown Manhattan from street vending. Guiliani’s “Quality of Life” program focused on cleaning up the city and getting rid of its trash, street vendors included. While the effects of globalization have left the street vendors in the cold, numerous laws and regulations force the street vendor to sell only in “suitable” places such as the crowded streets of 27th and Broadway.    The man who sells Falafels remains a mystery to me, and I am left with only my imagination in figuring him out. I imagine his life must be laborious, and picture his wife and children that are clothed by the fruitfulness of his cart. Perhaps he vends in obscurity like an illegal immigrant wanting to keep himself a secret from the government. I wonder what happens to him on the odd days when he doesn’t show up, or why he happened to choose this street corner to do business. But, of course, I’ll never know the real answers. The generous man known only as the “Falafel Guy” still eludes me in the same way, a bundle of black clothing that blends into the dark street corner.    12:02pm.The traffic light reads, “Don’t Walk.”   The street corner and the street vendor are like an old married couple. The initial passion between them has slowly burned out through the years, but nevertheless they love each other knowing that one wouldn’t be able to function without the other. Over the years they’ve grown as one: begun to smell like one; taste like one. It’s the little things that keep them together. It’s the familiar kisses they exchange every day to reaffirm that they appreciate the other. It’s the shoulder to lean on when the muscles are sore. It’s the comforting voice of the “rock” in your life when the rest of the world is moving too fast for you. The street corner and the street vendor need one another.   On the corner of 27th and Broadway the “Falafel Guy” makes a business home for himself. He rolls his stand in at around 10am. Then he dutifully sweeps the corner area he occupies, pays his good morning’s to the other street vendors working along side him, and patiently waits for the passerby to take notice of his establishment. But, like the many street vendors around him the regular city walker doesn’t notice him. The rhythm of 27th and Broadway is hectic due to streets teeming with racks of goods on clearance from adjacent stores, and people I call the “camp” folk who hang around the street and block sidewalk traffic. The urgent streetwalker is too focused on maneuvering through traffic to concern himself with the street vendor, who lacks a catchy uniform or a fancy doorway to signify a business. Hence, the “Falafel Guy” needs the street corner to survive. Without the corner the “Falafel Guy” remains a shadow, an invisible man. On the street corner the street vendor becomes needed and as a result noticed.    Gaston Blachelard, in his book the Poetics of Space, writes that “the corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly, immobility.” The street corner a haven? Try telling that to a New Yorker. In this city where everyone is constantly on the go, a red traffic light reading “Don’t Walk” is usually sworn at for the delay it ensures, not prized. Nevertheless, maybe the street corner is a blessing in disguise. Instead of cursing it for bringing our rhythm to a pause we should revel to the fact that it does so. The immobility promised by the corner has the ability to overwhelm people into perception, an awareness of the environment through physical sensation. When one walks in the city it is usually a practiced walk, mechanical. The body takes care of where one is going without any thought and frees the mind to drift away from the act of walking. When walking down the street we think about what we have to do in the future and reminisce about what we didn’t do in the past. One begins to pass space without ever experiencing it, structures seize to exist, people are never noticed, and sensations kept in the body are never realized by the mind.    The corner becomes an important place for New Yorkers; they are awakened to a state of being. On the corner their thoughts are silenced by the end in the road, and standing still opens them up to experiencing feeling in the body. It is on the street corner that one realizes the sensation of being hungry that has been suppressed deep down in the body by thought. It is at this point that the street vendor becomes needed and visible to the passer by. The sign promoting Falafels grows in front of their eyes as they scramble to get a meal before the traffic light reads, “Walk.”    The street corner knows it is not a park. It doesn’t have green, pillow-like grass that makes you want to lay on it with someone special, or lines of benches welcoming you to flip through a book amongst other booklovers. While the public park needs no help finding people who love it, the street corner with its hard cement floor, unattractive gutter, and sometimes - dangerous step, does. Like all public places the street corner needs to feel that people want to spend time with her. She wants to be the center of communication, a place of citizenship, where people can take a break from the hustle and bustle of the city and talk to one another. The street corner needs the street vendors help for this. The street vendor has the ability to bring people together for the common purpose of consumerism, and this common thread creates an opportunity for citizenship. Walking down Broadway towards 27thStreet one morning, I questioned my friend about the “Falafel Guy,” “I wonder if the Falafel Guy is here this morning.” To my surprise the voice that answered the question didn’t belong to my friend but to a lady who was walking to the other side of me, “He’s always there, I get a Falafel from him everyday at this time.” She was hungry. I was hungry. And thirty seconds later both of us stood on the corner of 27th and Broadway buying a Falafel.    5:35pm.The sign that read, “Falafel’s $2.50” is gone.   On June 3, 1998 the absence of street vendors from the streets of New York City felt “eerily empty” according to one reporter. On the day of the protest one man was quoted to have said, “What Guiliani doesn’t understand is that most people view the hot dog (vendor) as a part of the city as much if not more as the skyscrapers and the big corporations.” The familiar street corners that housed the street vendors grew uncanny as the men and women who worked them protested for their right to work. Indeed, the absence of the street vendors from the streets of New York City was as disturbing as the absence of the World Trade Towers after the trauma of September 11th.  The World Trade Towers were the nation’s symbol of the formal economy, while the overlooked street vendors ran the informal economy of the street. Unlike the irreplaceable towers, the absences of street vendors was temporary, a frightening glimpse of what New York City could be like if laws to ban the street vendor continue to be passed. The often invisible men and women of the streets were missed on June 3. The lonely streets were silent, and the corner of 27th and Broadway must have looked unbearably still. Like the “Falafel Guy” whom I only noticed when gone, street vendors in the city will remain invisible until they are gone. And when they are, the citizens of New York City will be left stranded on the corner, hungry, without a “Falafel Guy.”         Works Cited Blachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Stoller, Paul. Money Has No Smell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

  (c)Margarita Kompelmakher 2003