Author Archives: Lynnette Booker
The Prowess and Fortune of a Street Vendor
Alexander Parson, Upper West Side street vendor, opening shop for the day, on the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway.
One of the many advantages of being a street vendor is the tangible sense of free will: the freedom to set your own hours and change business locations indiscriminately. But Alexander Parson, a local street vendor, says he will never leave the Upper West Side where the money is easy and the commute is a few blocks down the street.
Parson wakes up every morning and leaves his apartment which he shares with his brother’s family. Before the sun rises, he walks four blocks to the intersection of 72nd Street and Broadway where there are two tables covered with large tarps. Parson sits beside the tables on a black crate with a cup of coffee to keep his hands warm. He doesn’t remove the tarps. He just sits and reads and waits for the sun to break.
In a pair of blue jeans, a blue navy peacoat, and worn construction boots, Parson doesn’t meet one’s typical expectation of a businessman. Despite his appearance, Parson says he is in the book business, not the bookstore business where a startup costs over $3,000, financing is over $3,000, average monthly expenses are over $70,000, and average monthly sales are over $80,000, which leaves the owner with an average monthly profit of about $11,000. Parson makes a little over a quarter of that a month. He doesn’t pay rent or wages, and he doesn’t have a store—just two long tables to tend.
This is the day-to-day workings of an informal street vendor on 72nd Street and Broadway.
As the sun rises over the Upper West Side, there are cinematic elements that one sees in films about New York. The streets teem with pedestrians. The sounds of impatient honks and the rattling trains beneath your feet. The well-known vendor, who everyone seems to know by name, engages in jovial conversation or stern inquires about his inventory that most often concludes with firm handshakes and less often with cash transactions.
Later at 9 a.m. Parson begins to unwrap his tables which lie at the head of a succession of tables down Broadway, teeming with New York’s most precious commodity: books. Hundreds of books are stacked, one on top of another, on Parson’s tables. From a distance, they look haphazard and informal but every book is categorized by themes—classic, modern, history, theatre and art, autobiography and biography, and, American and British novels.
The question is how does Melville and Hemingway, RuPaul and Lauren Conrad, and even Oprah Winfrey ends up on his tables?
“I don’t buy books; it’s not like I have a store,” says Parson. “Everything is donations.”
Parson’s movements are fast and brisk as he sorts through new inventory. Suddenly a pedestrian walks up behind Parson and scans the books. He picks a few up, flips through their pages, and then smiles at Parson before he walks away.
Alexander Parson categorizing books that are donated by Upper West Side residents, on the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway.
At 52, Parson, stands as an exemplar of perseverance in America. He started six years ago as an apprentice for two street vendors. For one year, Parson worked under their management, transporting and selling books, and completing other menial responsibilities. That same year, when the men decided to retire, they handed down their tables, business contacts, and inventory to Parson. In a year, he gained expertise in street vending and a chance to change his circumstances at the age of 46.
Late into the afternoon, he sits, stands, and socializes with other vendors through the chilly, overcast day. With satisfied sells, Parson disappears for an hour. Massy White, another street vendor who works beside Parson, tends to Parson’s tables while he is gone. The street vendors on the Upper West Side have a brotherhood: a code to look after each other’s tables when one is gone.
Parson returns with more books.
Parson is very scrupulous about the quality of the books he sells even though they are donated. He doesn’t accept books that have been written in, highlighted, have bent and loose pages, and that are crinkled and torn.
“The better condition of the books, the better price you can get,” he says, which an average book on his table sells for $5. A much better deal that one would get at Barnes & Noble.
As Parson packs up his wares, there is a stillness on the street as if there is an invisibility between him and the pedestrians. The civility is gone and soon will he, but the books will stay.
When the street vendors close business for the night, there are no carts and no van or trucks and no storage barrels. The same books that are donated for sell are the same books left on the street—unguarded and unprotected.
“There is a respect in the neighborhood,” Parson says.
Later at 8 p.m., Parson covers his tables with the same tarps and ties their corners securely around the tables’ legs; then, he walks away.
Protected: Harlem’s Neighborhood Face
Protected: Leads
“2 Jobs at Sugar Factory, and a Lump in the Throat” Response
There is a subtle implication of the slave labor in “2 Jobs at Sugar Factory, and a Lump in the Throat,” by Vivian Lee, which indirectly underlines the historical connotation of sugar. Even though there is a subtle reference to the slave labor, the narrative’s perspective is through Robert Shelton and his relationship with Domino Sugar Factory. The article’s principal theme is the gentrification of Williamsburg. Despite Lee ,wittingly, refraining from using the word “gentrification,” this theme is clearly evident through juxtaposition between Williamsburg now and Williamsburg Domino’s shutdown. The condition of Domino Sugar Factory is a metaphor of the Williamsburg Shelton use to know but he no longer recognizes that era, which is clearly stated in the lead paragraph. However, the reference of Shelton and Domino refinery presented in the lead is not rounded at the end of the article, instead the concluding paragraphs references the fourth paragraph that introduces the reference of the slave labor. In the fourth paragraph it introduces another subject artist Kara Walker, who sculpted a massive “sugar-coated homage to African-American Slave women and to the slave laborers who built the 19th-century sugar trade.” In my opinion, the last five paragraphs are unrelated to the principal theme:
“A few other former Domino employees have come by, including his Yonkers supervisor and another man who called “Shelton!” and burst into tears upon seeing him. Mr. Shelton cried, too.
He said he had borrowed his step-granddaughter’s history textbook to learn about the origins of the sugar trade. When a European tourist told him that the Domino plant and all it stood for were built on the backs of slaves, he acknowledged the historical reference, but replied proudly: ‘I don’t see that we were slave labor here. We got paid well.’”
Since Lee does not go into detail about how the slave labor produced sugar this statement is entirely incongruent to the strike that lead to Domino Sugar Factory’s closure and the poverty that Shelton endured in Brooklyn. The only thing that ties those elements together is the historical connotation of the sculpture.
Neighborhood Faces Query
Claudia Smith has lived in Central Harlem for 65 years. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1930 –one of the youngest of eight children. Living in Harlem since the 1950s, she has experienced Central Harlem’s deterioration of 1960s riots, the 1980s crack epidemic, gang wars, and police brutality. She has been effected by these major occurrences in Harlem. Smith has lost family and friends during the crack epidemic, and she has watched many of her close friends migrate back to the south during Harlem’s deterioration. After being inflicted by the social problems and secluded by social problems to Harlem neighborhood, at 85, she still has to feel the infliction of social problems and now something quite differently, excluded from Harlem because of social problems. When she fled to the urban society of New York City, she was looking for opportunity that the south could not provide during that era. With no college degree, just a rudimentary education, she was only capable to get a job as a home health aide. The job provided little to nothing in pay, but she was able to afford a modest apartment with her husband. Throughout major struggles to make the minimum income needed for subsistence, now, she has to deal with the big, bad gentrification. A stirring problem for native residents who are mostly considered lower class citizens living at or below the poverty level, of whom have made it through the eye of the storm to be pirated.
Tourists Have Landed in Queens. They’re Staying.
Kirk Semple presents an interesting outline about Queens contending as No.1 travel destination in the United States entitling: “Tourists Have Landed in Queens. They’re Staying.” The article, despite its witty and charming word choices interspersed throughout the article, it lacks significant and substantial reporting. Reading the article it seems that it is filled with unsupported thoughts. For example, the fifth sentence is an unclear point that strays away from Lonely Planet’s decision to name Queens the No.1. The fifth sentence is needless words that doesn’t provide the “why” but instead inadvertently delays Semple’s abstruse evidence that render Queens as No.1. Based on the headline I expected to hear from Lonely Planet explaining its decision and to hear more extensively from tourists describing Queens specific characteristics that lured them to visit or lodge in Queens. I was expecting to hear about events in the last year that trumped events on Manhattan and other parts of United States.
E.B. White: Here is New York
It is unexpected to declare New York, a populous city which has an overabundance of people and cultured events, as a city that “will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” That of which is a singular perspective of E.B. White’s account of New York City as a visitor. A visitor in any vast city, such as New York, will most likely experience a great deal of loneliness and privacy. Since a visitor may not have a small group of companions because he or she has little acquaintance with the city and its inhabitants; therefore he or she would find a great deal of privacy. The more a visitor becomes acquainted with the city and its inhabitants, he or she will develop a semblance of inclusion and companionship that is possibly intimate. Then over time a visitor acclimates as a New York resident. Since White is not a New York resident and wrote this composition as a young writer and an “inveterate non traveler,” his misconception of loneliness and privacy is something that would be associated with small, dull towns and uncultured cities. Or his misconception of loneliness and privacy is used to emphasize the greater exploration of New York. In the exploration, White expounds on his observation and constant interaction with people and with the city itself. The only moments you feel a semblance of loneliness and privacy is when he describes his “moments in a stifling hotel room” and “in an office on a summer Saturday.” But this is only my perspective based on an obscure opening that reflects an abstract view.
The opening line: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” it is hard to agree with this sentence – along with its opening paragraph because it contradicts the entirety of the book – starting from the second paragraph. In the second paragraph, White immediately presents a long list of various aspects engaged in New York, and then continues a connecting list of descriptive words that presents prolific sense of unity and cohesion in New York. White further expounds with another list of eminent events that sets a tone of inclusion, by which indicates his own involvement and intrusiveness of New York and its inhabitants.