{"id":20054,"date":"2014-02-18T20:51:08","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T01:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=20054"},"modified":"2014-02-18T20:51:08","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T01:51:08","slug":"michael-parenti-whats-a-slum-urban-poverty-and-marginality-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2014\/02\/michael-parenti-whats-a-slum-urban-poverty-and-marginality-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Parenti: What\u2019s a Slum? Urban Poverty and Marginality in America"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"East<\/a>
East Harlem, 1970<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I was about thirteen-years-old I chanced upon an article in Henry Luce\u2019s Life magazine that described East Harlem ( a Manhattan working class neighborhood) as \u201ca slum inhabited by beggar poor Italians, Negroes, and Puerto Ricans,\u201d words that stung me and wedged in my memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe live in a slum,\u201d I mournfully reported to my father.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s a slum?\u201d he asked. He was not familiar with the term.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a neighborhood where everybody is poor and the streets are all run-down and dumpy and dirty and filled with beggars.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShut up and show respect for your home,\u201d he replied. Note his choice of words. Poppa was not expressing pride in East Harlem as such. But situated within the neighborhood was our home, and you didn\u2019t want anything reflecting poorly upon family and home.<\/span><\/p>\n

On my block, 118th Street, there was both normal poverty and extreme poverty. But the latter was not readily detectable. For years there was an iceman on the block who did a bustling business. This meant that there were families that did not have refrigerators\u2014including my own. We made do with a window box that held a piece of ice and a bottle of milk and a few other perishables. Eventually we got a second-hand refrigerator.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also on 118th Street was an old brownstone that served as a nursery for needy children. One day during my high-school years, I heard the famous writer Dorothy Parker being interviewed on the radio. (I was already familiar with her name if not her writing.) She was talking about giving aid to the poor children who were cared for in that very same settlement house on 118th Street. \u201cAre they Negro children?\u201d asked the interviewer. \u201cNo, I believe they are Italians,\u201d Dorothy Parker answered. The nursery for the needy was just across the street halfway down the block from my house. I often hung around that area yet I had never seen impoverished children being escorted in or out of there; or I never thought anything of it if I had seen any.<\/span><\/p>\n

Italian Harlem had its block parties, family links, and numerous face-to-face acquaintances. Still it was not one big Gemeinschaft (community). It was not an urban village. Many people were unknown to each other even on the same block, even in adjacent buildings. I had to find out about the nursery-for-the-needy from a radio interview with Dorothy Parker. That is almost pure Gesellschaft (impersonal mass society).<\/span><\/p>\n

Contrary to the slur in Life magazine, I came to realize that, despite the extreme poverty, my neighborhood was inhabited not by \u201cbeggar-poor\u201d derelicts but mostly by hardworking and usually underpaid proletarians, more-or-less sane folks who were the ordinary heroes of the urban landscape. Much the same can be said for the nearby African-American and Puerto Rican communities in Harlem.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Italian Harlem (as East Harlem was also called) there could be found people who drove the trucks, taxicabs, trolleys, and buses. They manned the loading docks and the maintenance crews, and practically monopolized New York\u2019s building sites as construction workers, carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, roofers, glaziers, housepainters, and plumbers. And when they were not building structures, they were on the wrecking crews that tore them down.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other Italian Americans put in long hours employed in candy stores, grocery stores, and five-and-dime stores, in dress shops, barber shops, butcher shops, and sweatshops; in beauty parlors, ice cream parlors, and pizza parlors; tending bakeries, barrooms, and poolrooms. They were bank clerks, janitors, dry cleaners, and laundresses. They were auto mechanics, machinists, manicurists, hospital workers, and gardeners; ditch diggers and gravediggers, milkmen and mailmen, shoemakers and homemakers, elevator operators and telephone operators, apartment guards and bank guards, night workers and day jobbers. They shined shoes at Grand Central Station right next to their Black coworkers, and on the Staten Island ferry. And they buffed the shiny lobbies of midtown office buildings.<\/span><\/p>\n

They served as waiters and waitresses, cooks and caterers; secretaries and receptionists; garment cutters, tailors, seamstresses, and dress designers; fish vendors, vegetable vendors, peddlers, and truck farmers.<\/span><\/p>\n

They worked in insurance offices and post offices. They built the highest skyscrapers and deepest subway tunnels, and years later their offspring cleaned the subway tracks and the streets and sidewalks of the whole city and collected the garbage, holding the lion\u2019s share of jobs in the Sanitation Department.<\/span><\/p>\n

These were the people who performed \u201cthe work of civilization\u201d to borrow a phrase from the great economist Thorstein Veblen. (Veblen was actually talking about the unsung unpaid work that women did all over the world.) The working poor lived out their lives largely unsung and unnoticed. Wherever they toiled, it was almost always to \u201cbring some money home for the family,\u201d that prime unit of survival.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tucked away amidst the blue collar ranks of Italian Harlem were the politicos who got out the vote in their neighborhood precincts for the Democratic Party. There were local lawyers and realtors; doctors, dentists, and morticians; professional musicians and many amateur ones, and photographers (mostly for weddings and Holy Confirmations); a few young toughs training to be professional boxers who might end up as downtown bouncers if they were lucky; some union shop stewards and union organizers, a struggling magazine illustrator, a comic book cartoonist, a sculptor, a tall lovely sixteen year-old girl who was working as a model downtown, young men attending City College and young women attending Hunter College, and a few aspiring opera students, including a lovely mezzo-soprano who performed with great charm at local events and at high mass at Holy Rosary Church. Then there was an occasional young man going off to the seminary to become a priest, or a young woman preparing to become a nun<\/span><\/p>\n

In sum, pace Henry Luce and Life magazine, defamatory labels like \u201cslum\u201d and \u201cbeggar poor\u201d can hide a multitude of virtues\u2014not likely to be appreciated by Mr. Luce and his superrich cohorts.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is the saying that \u201cthe slums are not the problem, they are the solution,\u201d meaning they are the place we dump the marginal and low performing groups. It might do well to remember that the slums are where hard-working underpaid people live and out from which they venture to help keep society afloat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Parenti<\/strong>\u2018s most recent books are GOD AND HIS DEMONS (2010); THE FACE OF IMPERIALISM (2011); WAITING FOR YESTERDAY: PAGES FROM A STREET KID\u2019S LIFE (2013) from which this article is excerpted.<\/em><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was about thirteen-years-old I chanced upon an article in Henry Luce\u2019s Life magazine that described East Harlem ( a Manhattan working class neighborhood)..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,152,181,92,97],"tags":[229,357,347],"class_list":["post-20054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discrimination","category-economy","category-labor","category-theory","category-us-news","tag-economic-exploitation","tag-racism","tag-workers-struggle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/new-york-1970-vietnam-war-camilo-jose-vergara-1.jpg?fit=1000%2C666&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}