Green Streets, Mean Streets: Review

Mr. [Elijah Anderson]'s observational skill serves him well wherever he goes, and his portrait of the gentrifying Village is wonderfully lifelike: one-time hippies turned into landlords, yuppies braving the city streets only when protected by their dogs. But by far the strongest chapters in the book, the newest no doubt for many readers and the most searing, are those set in the black community he names Northton. Mr. Anderson is able to make himself at home on the ghetto street corner, hanging out with a gang or chatting with middle-aged workmen who once served as role models for local youths, but no longer do. He interviews churchgoing ladies who are now afraid whenever they venture out of their apartments. He shows us the thinking of a teen-age mother and explains what it feels like to be an adolescent male on a dark street at night, waiting for a chance to prove one's toughness by assaulting the next passer-by. Most memorable and appalling is the section in which he takes us inside a filthy crack house and talks at length with a pitiful "coke whore." Mr. Anderson is a scrupulous guide, and he whitewashes nothing in his picture. And yet, for all his honesty, at times he seems to shy away from the moral conclusions indicated by his evidence. His theories about the ghetto poor lean heavily on the sociologist William Julius Wilson. Like Mr. Wilson, Mr. Anderson believes that the root of the problem is largely economic: a lack of dignified, well-paying jobs. This, combined with the weakening of traditional values (caused largely by the black middle class's departure), has so demoralized inner-city blacks that they cannot resist the temptations of the drug culture. Thus, for Mr. Anderson, it is the economy that is to be blamed for teen-age motherhood, crack-addicted babies and the endless crime that ravages both Northton and the Village.