A Place on the Corner, Second Edition

By Elijah Anderson

This paperback edition of A Place on the Corner marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elijah Anderson's sociological classic, a study of street corner life at a local barroom/liquor store located in the ghetto on Chicago's South Side. Anderson returned night after night, month after month, to gain a deeper understanding of the people he met, vividly depicting how they created—and recreated—their local stratification system. In addition, Anderson introduces key sociological concepts, including "the extended primary group" and "being down." The new preface and appendix in this edition expand on Anderson's original work, telling the intriguing story of how he went about his field work among the men who frequented Jelly's corner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226775029

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Index

Preface to the Second Edition

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during the 1970s, the emphasis in the sociology department was on quantitative research. Yet, many graduate students were beginning to conduct qualitative studies reminiscent of the Chicago department’s early history. Among these young scholars were William Kornblum, whose work was on community and working class life at a South Chicago steel mill; Ruth Horowitz, who studied local gangs; Carole Goodwin, who studied the community of Oak Park, Illinois; Charles Bosk, who studied surgical residents; Tom Guterbock, who worked on machine politics; Mark Jacobs, who studied juvenile probation officers; James Jacobs, who did work on prisons; Michael Burawoy, who studied the political culture of shop floor workers; Andrew Abbott, who studied mental institutions; and David Gordon, who studied a religious movement. And I conducted ethnographic work at a South Side Chicago corner bar and liquor store that came to be known as Jelly’s.

At the time, Morris Janowitz was trying to revive the old Chicago school through his Center for Social Organizational Studies, which supported Kornblum’s work, my work, and that of several other students; other centers and faculty were also supportive. Additionally, the students involved with Janowitz’s Center would attend regular seminars on topics of social organizational and ethnographic interest, and many were encouraged to read Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess’s The Introduction to the Science of Sociology and other Chicago classics. But at the inspirational core of these qualitative revitalization efforts was Gerald D. Suttles. It was through taking his field methods course that I had the opportunity to pursue ethnographic work and found the setting for A Place on the Corner. Often, Suttles, through his course, not only provided students their first intense fieldwork experience; he also created an intellectual circle that sustained and diffused the research tradition he had embodied in his own work. Moreover, Suttles must have been conscious of his own intellectual role, for his relationship to students transcended instruction, guidance, and critique; it included friendship and personal support. Among those supporting and extending Suttles’s leadership were such scholars as Victor Lidz, Barry Schwartz, William J. Wilson, Charles Bidwell, Richard Taub, Donald Levine, Terry N. Clark, and William Parrish. These faculty members spent many hours seeking to develop what they hoped would be the leading scholars for the next decade and were especially helpful as teachers and role models.

I worked closely with Suttles for about two and a half years, at which point he left the University of Chicago, leaving what was for me a strongly felt vacancy. Then I moved to Northwestern to work with Howard S. Becker. There I found more support for ethnographic work, including a nurturing community of graduate students and teachers, including Bernie Beck, Charlie Moskos, Ackie Feldman, Arlene Daniels, and Jim Pitts, among others. I continued to work with both Suttles and Becker for the duration of my graduate studies.

In the early part of the century, many sociologists were steeped in the thinking that ghetto areas and urban villages, where so many ethnic, working class, and poor people lived and played, were disorganized, highly dangerous, and in need of social reform. Ironically, the roots of a correctionist approach were planted in the early urban studies of the Chicago school. Later, the related position of social disorganization was challenged by William Whyte’s Street Corner Society, and further questioned by the example of Herbert Gans’s The Urban Villagers.

But the fullest expression of a more complex and socially relativistic perspective was the series of naturalist (Matza 1969) participant-observation studies provided by Howard S. Becker’s Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Gerald D. Suttles’s The Social Order of the Slum and William Kornblum’s Blue Collar Community further contributed to the debate by showing lower class neighborhoods and communities to be in fact highly organized in socially complex ways. When I began my work at Jelly’s, the issue was not completely settled. Thus it seemed reasonable to focus on the issue of social organization and its component parts—sociability, status, identity, beliefs, and values—issues that emerged quite naturally at Jelly’s.

The sociological contribution of A Place on the Corner is really twofold: first, the text presents a set of conceptual findings related to status and social grouping, and second, an ethnographic portrait of men at a particular historical time marginalized by skin color and poverty. These findings grew out of three years of participant observation among a group of roughly fifty-five black street corner men who hung out regularly at Jelly’s, a street corner bar and liquor store located on the South Side of Chicago. Jelly’s was their place, a kind of club house where they established and maintained their own social rules and standards of propriety. It was in this setting that they could relax and be themselves, away from the constant gaze of the wider society, white as well as black. Erving Goffman might have referred to the setting as one of remission, or as backstage to society. It was a place where the people of Jelly’s could hang out, where they knew they mattered to the others present, and where there were people who cared about them and whose opinions of them they regarded. As the men hung out at Jelly’s, they engaged in the fundamentally human process, utterly front stage, of making and remaking their own local stratification system. During everyday social interaction, the subgroups of the wineheads, hoodlums, and regulars became clarified as their members competed for place and position, their identification with one group or another based on their putative control of resources more or less valued by the general group. In these circumstances, the fundamental outlines of the extended primary group emerged. A product of collective action, status, and rank appeared all the more fluid. Here status existed in and through social interaction, with people moving up or down, depending on what others present thought of them and allowed. In essence, social order existed because people largely stayed in their places, and they did so because other people helped keep them there.

The second part of my findings relates to the neighborhood. Back in the day at Jelly’s, the regulars were quite prominent on the corner. There they represented a class of men generally committed to decency and family life, men for whom the street corner was essentially a place of recreation. Such people generally held high-paying, low-skill jobs in the manufacturing economy; they would go to the corner to hang out for sociability, to embrace the looseness and fun of the street. There they would encounter their relatively worse-off brethren, the people they called hoodlums and wineheads. There they could lobby to be somebody, using their relatively superior financial resources to be top dogs, though at times they were moved to adopt a tough front. Jelly’s corner suited them.

Jobs were more readily available at the time. Even the hoodlums, who prided themselves on getting by with an invisible means of support, sometimes had jobs, although they often tried to keep this quiet. In those days, there was a certain wholesome manliness associated with the street corner. And such a place was relatively benign compared to many such settings today.

As the sources of poverty have become more structural, increasing distress has been visited on these communities. The underground economy with its drug dealing, street crime, hustling, and gambling has become more prevalent in such areas. Yesterday’s representation of the corner has given way to a much harsher characterization, whereby acute tension between the street and the decent world is more sharply displayed. Where the civil law is weak, street justice is often the result. In many respects, my subsequent work in Philadelphia (presented in Streetwise and Code of the Street) has investigated more thoroughly issues that were only adumbrated in A Place on the Corner.

Last summer I revisited Jelly’s corner. It appears to be a shadow of what it once was. Instead of a neighborhood bar and liquor store, there is now a carry-out with men hanging around who are much more like the hoodlums and wineheads I observed earlier, people more clearly on the margins of society. The streets are no longer as navigable for regulars; they have become rougher and the regulars have given up spending time there. These streets—and the ghetto street corners of other urban areas—are in a large part indirect casualties of the structural changes alluded to above. In the past, there was more legitimate money around. The transformation of the economy, with the resulting marginalization of ghetto residents through increasing joblessness resulting in hopelessness and despair plus the arbitrariness of the police and criminal justice system have all worked to alienate the inner-city community (Wilson 1987). Over the past thirty years, not only has there been a profound decline in manufacturing and the subsequent exodus of jobs from urban centers like Chicago and Philadelphia, but there has been the almost simultaneous decimation of those various social programs—a profound and sustained political attack on the Welfare State—that were designed to give hope and opportunity to the disenfranchised and their children (Block et al. 1987; Katz 1990; Gans 1996). These developments have made life in the inner city harsher and more difficult than was the case at the time when I conducted field work for A Place on the Corner.

When conducting this ethnographic study, my concerns precluded my seeing the men at Jelly’s as simply a problem in need of correction (to paraphrase the great W. E. B. DuBois). Rather, at that time, I was simply a curious graduate student who wanted to know the people of this urban neighborhood; to engage in fieldwork, and to appreciate and to understand their social world—in effect, to learn how they went about meeting the exigencies of everyday life. And then, to represent my findings to a broader audience, including social scientists as well as the wider literate population. Indeed, my primary concern was to provide a truthful rendition of the social world of Jelly’s. My thinking was that such people and places were understudied and thus too often misunderstood, and that bringing about an understanding of this marginalized population in its complexity could be important not just as a contribution to knowledge about the black street-corner man, but also as a possible aid to those who aspire to serve as responsible and effective citizens of a civil and democratic society and who would engage in the hard social and political work of extending its full benefits to all.

References

Becker, Howard S. 1973. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.

Block, Fred, Richard Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven. 1987. The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gans, Herbert. 1996. The War against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy. New York: Basic Books.

Katz, Michael. 1996. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books.

Kornblum, William. 1974. Blue Collar Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matza, David. 1969. Becoming Deviant. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Suttles, Gerald D. 1968. The Social Order of the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Howard S. Becker, Charles Bosk, and Barry Schwartz for helpful comments, and Christine Szczepanowski for research assistance, on this work.

Preface

Between 1970 and 1973 I engaged in participant observation at Jelly’s bar and liquor store on the South Side of Chicago and gathered materials for this study. During this period I hung out with black working and nonworking men who spent a good deal of their time in the bar or on the corner. At all times of the day and night and throughout the seasons of the year, I socialized with the people—drinking with them, talking and listening to them, and trying to come to terms with their social world. They carried on their business and talked about life, and they taught me much. In what follows I attempt to convey some of what I have learned.

My main purpose here is to sort out and focus on those items that make up the local status system at Jelly’s and on the ghetto streets generally. In what follows, I address these basic questions: What are the rules and principles under which these men operate? What social hierarchies are present here? How are they expressed in social interaction? How do the various statuses here intersect or conflict or support one another? How, and along what lines, do people here remind others and demonstrate to others that they deserve to be deferred to? What does it take to be somebody here?

I would like to acknowledge the help and support of various institutions, teachers, colleagues, students, and friends who were generous with needed support and advice on this project. I would like to express my gratitude for the intellectually stimulating and supportive environment for field studies at the Sociology Department of Northwestern University and at the Center for Social Organization Studies at the University of Chicago. For financial support I am grateful for a National Institute of Mental Health research fellowship (1F01 MH49967–01), a Ford Foundation fellowship, a grant from the James Michener Fund while I was on the faculty of Swarthmore College, and a Summer Faculty Award from the University of Pennsylvania.

Although many people contributed to my research efforts, space will not allow me to thank them all personally here. But in particular I would like to acknowledge the following for their support and helpful comments on this work: Bernard Beck, the Reverend Fletcher Bryant, Morris Janowitz, Jack Katz, Charles Moskos, Arthur Paris, Karen Peterson, Jennie Keith-Ross, Robert Washington, and William J. Wilson. I thank my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania who read and commented on portions of the manuscript: Erving Goffman, Dell Hymes, William Labov, and Philip Rieff. Thanks are due to Doris Sklaroff for her competent typing of successive drafts of the manuscript. I would like to extend special thanks to Victor Lidz, who has followed and supported this research project from the very beginning when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago; I am grateful for his various readings of the manuscript, his encouragement, and his helpful advice. Also, I want to thank Harold Bershady for helpful editorial comments. I would like to thank my friend Renée C. Fox for her moral support and encouragement toward the end of the work. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Frank Westie, Walt Risler, and Irving Zeitlin, all of whom were my undergraduate teachers, for encouraging me to pursue advanced work in sociology.

I owe much in my own ways of sociological thinking to the inspiration of my teachers Howard S. Becker and Gerald D. Suttles; from them I learned the sociological method and the technique of participant observation. Both provided intellectual support and advice at crucial junctures during the research. I am very grateful to my wife, Nancy, who knows this book with me. And last, but certainly not least, I am greatly indebted to the cats down at Jelly’s, whose privacy must be protected through anonymity.

1

The Setting

Urban taverns and bars, like barbershops, carryouts, and other such establishments, with their adjacent street corners and alleys, serve as important gathering places for people of the urban villages and ghetto areas of the city.¹ Often they are special hangouts for the urban poor and working-class people, serving somewhat as more formal social clubs or domestic circles do for the middle and upper classes. The urban poor and working-class people are likely to experience their local taverns as much more than commercial businesses.² They provide settings for sociability and places where neighborhood residents can gain a sense of self-worth. Here people can gather freely, bargaining with their limited resources, their symbols of status, and their personal sense of who and what they are against the resources of their peers and against what their peers see them really to be. Here they can sense themselves to be among equals, with an equal chance to be somebody, even to be occasional winners in the competition for social esteem.³ This is their place. They set the social standards. And when they feel those standards are threatened, they can defend them. Other settings, especially those identified with the wider society, with its strange, impersonal standards and evaluations, are not nearly as important for gaining a sense of personal self-worth as are the settings attended by friends and other neighborhood people.

Jelly’s, the subject of this study, is a bar and liquor store located in a run-down building on the South Side of Chicago. Situated at a corner of a main thoroughfare, Jelly’s is a hangout for working and nonworking, neighborhood and nonneighborhood black people, mostly men. They gather at Jelly’s at all times of the day and night, and some even sleep on the streets or in the nearby park.

A few doors away from Jelly’s is a laundromat; down the street are a dry cleaner, a grocery store, and, farther on, a poolroom. As cars and buses pass, their passengers sometimes gawk at the people of Jelly’s. From the safety of their cars, often with rolled-up windows and locked doors, passersby can see wineheads staggering along, a man in tattered clothing nodding out, leaning on Jelly’s front window, and a motley, tough-looking group of men gathered on the corner, sometimes with a rare white man among them. Those on foot hurry past, not wanting to be accosted by the people of Jelly’s.

Periodically, the humdrum routine is punctuated with some excitement. An elderly black woman bursts out of Jelly’s, clutching her jug of wine and her pocketbook as she hurries along, minding her own business. The group on the sidewalk comes to life as one of the men grabs at her purse and yells, Gimme some o’ what you got there, woman! I’ll geh ya’ this fist upside yo’ head! she responds, shaking her fist and confidently moving on about her business. Children play nearby and among the men. They rip and run up and down the street and occasionally stop a man, apparently unmindful of how he looks, to say, Got a quarter, mister? The man bends over, puts his hands on his knees, negating any tough look he might have had, and begins to kid with the children, teaching them about being good li’l kids and giving up a quarter or whatever he can spare. Later that same evening the same man may show his tough side by drawing a switchblade and placing the edge against another man’s throat, desperately threatening his victim. Blue-and-white police cars cruise by, each with two policemen, one black and one white. The police glance over and slow down, but they seldom stop and do anything. Ordinarily they casually move on, leaving the street-corner men to settle their own differences.

After being around Jelly’s neighborhood for a while and getting to know its people, the outside observer can begin to see that there is order to this social world. For example, the wineheads turn out to be harmless, for they generally do the things people expect them to do: they drink on the street, beg passersby for change, and sometimes stumble up and down the street cursing at others. One also begins to understand that what looks like a fight to the death usually doesn’t come near a fatal end. Often such a fight turns out to be a full-dress game in which only best friends or cousins can participate—but at times even they can’t play this game without its ending in a real fight. After a while one gets to know that old black woman leaving Jelly’s with the taste as Mis’ Lu, a nice ol’ lady who been ‘round here fo’ years, and studs ‘round dese here streets’ll cut yo’ throat ‘bout messin’ with her. She hope raise half the cats ‘round here. Secure in her knowledge of how she is regarded, she walks the streets unafraid, back-talking to anyone messin’ with her.

On these streets near Jelly’s, one can’t help noticing the sidewalks and gutters littered with tin cans, old newspapers, paper sacks, and whatever. The city does not pay as much attention to this area as many residents would like, but somehow it doesn’t really seem to matter to anyone. People go about their business. One storefront has been boarded up for months and wineheads sometimes sleep there. The inset doorway is a perfect place to lie in wait for an unsuspecting holdup or rape victim. Most people who use this general area have come to accept their deteriorated physical world as it is. They simply make the best of it. Many have become so resigned that they would find it extraordinary if someone took an active interest in trying to do something about it—even something as minor as fixing up and painting. This is Jelly’s neighborhood.

But once inside Jelly’s, people don’t have to be concerned with the conditions outside. They become involved as soon as they meet others on the corner, or as soon as they walk through Jelly’s door. Somebody is waiting at least to acknowledge their presence, if not to greet them warmly. They come here to see what’s happenin’—to keep up on the important news. They meet their runnin’ buddies here, and sometimes they commune with others. Inside, or outside on the corner, they joke, argue, fight, and laugh, as issues quickly rise and fall. In this milieu it is time-out and time away from things outside. It is time-in for sharing one’s joys, hopes, dreams, troubles, fears, and past triumphs, which are all here and now to be taken up repeatedly with peers whose thoughts about them really matter.

As this short description indicates, there is more to social life in and around Jelly’s than might be suggested by a cursory inspection, informed by the stereotypes and prejudices of those not involved. Life here cannot be understood as simple social disorganization.⁴ Nor can one reach a full understanding by viewing social relations here simply as effortless sociability.⁵ When one gets close to the life of Jelly’s and develops the necessary meaningful relations with its people, he can begin to understand the social order of this world. People make him aware of the general prescriptions and proscriptions of behavior by somehow fitting him in, including him as they attempt to sort out and come to terms with their minute-to-minute, ordinary everyday social events. Individuals are thus seen acting collectively, interpreting and defining one another; they make distinctions between and among those with whom they share this social space. They are seen fitting themselves in with one another’s expectations and collective lines of action, each one informed by a sense of what actions are allowed and not allowed to different kinds of people in varying sets of circumstances.

The Barroom

Jelly’s bar and liquor store has two front entrances, one leading to the barroom and the other to the liquor store. Each room has its own distinctive social character. The barroom is a public place; outfitted with bar stools, a marble-topped counter, and mirrors on the wall, it invites almost anyone to come in and promises he will not be bothered as long as he minds his own business. In this sense it is a neutral social area. Yet people who gather on this side of Jelly’s tend to be cautiously reserved when approaching others, mainly because on this side they just don’t know one another. In contrast, the liquor store is more of a place for peers to hang out and outwardly appears to have a more easygoing, spontaneous ambience.

An open doorway separates the two rooms, and some people gravitate from side to side, the regular clientele usually settling in the liquor store. The social space of the barroom is shared by regular customers and visitors. Sometimes these visitors are people who have been seen around Jelly’s but who have yet to commit themselves to the setting. Sometimes they are total strangers. At times there will be as many as twenty visitors present, compared with eight or nine regular customers. Regular customers are interspersed among the visitors, but though the space is shared, they seldom come to know one another well. The visitors tend to arrive, get their drinks, sit at the bar for a while, then leave. The regular clientele, on the other hand, do their best to ignore the visitors; they treat them as interlopers. And there exists a certain amount of distrust and suspicion between the two groups.

Owing to this suspicion and distrust, the barroom is characterized by a somewhat cautious and reserved atmosphere. When strangers accidentally touch or bump one another, the person in the wrong quickly says ’scuse me. On occasions when the ’scuse me is not forthcoming and further agression seems likely, other precautionary measures may be taken. One night during the early stages of my fieldwork, when I was talking with John, a visitor I had just met, a stranger to both of us seemed drunk and unruly. He tried to enter our conversation. Putting his hand on John’s shoulder, he asked, What ya’ll drinkin’? Lemme’ drink wit you! John tried to ignore the man, but he persisted. Abruptly and firmly John said, Al’right, now. Man, I don’t know you, now! I don’t know you. Taking this comment as the warning it was, the stranger cut short his advances. Immediately he sobered and walked away without saying another word. John then looked away from him, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling, and we continued our conversation.

On this side strangers can demand some degree of deference, for people here are usually uncertain of just what the next person has in mind, of what he is capable of doing, and of what actions might provoke him to do it. On the barroom side, people often don’t know who they’re sitting or standing next to. In the right circumstances the next person might show himself to be the police or the baddest cat in Chi. Or he could be waiting to follow somebody home and rip him off. In the words of the regular clientele, unknown people on this side generally bear watching.

One consequence of the suspicion and distrust on this side is that social relationships between visitors and the regular customers tend to be guarded. Often people engaged in a conversation at the bar will screen what they say so as not to reveal their telephone numbers or addresses to anyone unless he has been proved trustworthy. Before talking to a stranger, a person often will try to read him carefully to get some sense of what kind of person he is, to know how far he is to be trusted. For this people pay close attention to a variety of symbols the person displays, using them to interpret and define him so they will know better how to treat him. They listen to the person’s language or, as the men say, his total conversation and examine it for clues to his residence, associates, and line of work. They check out the way he is dressed. They watch him interact with others, with an eye and ear to who they are and how they treat him. They may even ask someone else, either secretly or publicly, about his trustworthiness. When talking, many tend to check themselves if the wrong people are listening too closely. When people give their names they sometimes use handles like Wooly or Bird or Homey, names that permit interaction without allowing others to trace them to their homes or to other settings they feel protective about. Before giving personal trust, they feel a great need to place the next person.

Another consequence of this distrust is the emergence on the barroom side of a civility based not so much on the moral dictates of the wider society as on the immediate potentially violent consequences of uncivil acts. People have been known to pull guns and knives on this side of Jelly’s—and to use them. One man was shot to death, ostensibly for stepping on another’s carefully spit-shined fifty-dollar Stacy-Adams shoes and not saying excuse me. Once a short, slight man was pushed around by a bigger man. The little man is said to have gone home to get his roscoe (pistol), returned, and made the larger man crawl on his knees and swear never to do him wrong again. Cases like these, kept in the lore of Jelly’s, remind people of what can result from unmindful interaction, and help keep people discreet and civil with one another. People often just don’t know the capabilities of others on this side—what they will do and