Overview

Based on a three-year study of Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg area, Norman Street is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Over the decades, Greenpoint-Williamsburg has become home to artists, actors, writers and young people with alternative cultural aspirations. Susser documents how these groups, in many ways, have joined with the remaining working class population to build a thriving community that is now threatened with displacement by municipal rezoning which has facilitated massive plans for new corporate investment.Increasingly prescient at a moment of economic crisis when people are again occupying public spaces in major American cities, spurred to collective action by mounting economic inequalities and the government's role in perpetuating them, Susser's study of change, action, and conflict in a neighborhood that has become emblematic of urban transformation-for better and worse-has much to say to us today.

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9780195367317

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Reviews

<br> The original edition of Norman Street painted a gripping and moving portrait of a mid-1970s NYC neighborhood under assault. At that time, neither Susser nor the residents of Greenpoint-Williamsburg could imagine that the combination of regulation and neglect they were enduring was a precursor of the much larger and more devastating global project of neoliberalism. This reissued and updated edition, with Susser's compelling new introduction, offers a moving and instructive time-trip, transporting us back to a key moment in the struggle for livable urban neighborhoods. <br>--Jane Collins, University of Wisconsin-Madison <br><p><br> Blending fine-grain ethnography with superb political economic analysis, Susser's Norman Street is a classic of urban social science. It gives a vivid picture of the economic ingredients, social struggles, and demographic change that set the stage for a hipsterized Williamsburg and transformed Greenpoint. A paradigm of neighborhood ethnography in a global context. <br>-- Neil Smith, author of New Urban Frontier<br><p><br>

Author Information

Ida Susser is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and a member of the Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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