New York City came to Washington in July 2001, when a delegation of artisans and musicians from the city occupied part of the National Mall during the thirty-fifth Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Nearly nine years later, the publication of Lox, Stocks, and Backstage Broadway offers a rich, extended exhibition catalog of sorts from this festival, drawing from both the extensive New York-based team research that helped prepare the exhibit and the events at the festival itself. The book’s portraits of nine occupations specific to New York City’s particular blend of cultures and activities offer beautiful, well-chosen, and sometimes revelatory descriptions from the city’s vast and ever-renewing store of folk traditions.
Nancy Groce, who helped coordinate the project, argues for the unique cultural landscape of New York City as a subject for folkloric inquiry in itself: “a community of communities” with such a “kaleidoscopic complexity” that it cannot be viewed simply “through the prism of class, race, or ethnicity” (2) as previous studies of urban folklore attempted to do in other urban settings. Perhaps overstated, perhaps not (what kinds of data exist for a fair comparison, after all?). But Groce’s insistence on presenting New York City as a site of human interaction rather than conceptual difference opens up meaningful pathways for exploring the overlapping layers of knowledge involved in generating a livelihood within the ultra-compact environment. A clear and concise theoretical introduction to the fields of urban and occupational folklore follows, emphasizing the significant role New York City played in the development of both these fields [1]. In addition to placing the City firmly into the center of urban folklore, these chapters provide an accessible academic apparatus for scholarly reading, and effectively leave the rest of the book for perusal by both the scholar and the casual reader.
The remainder of the text is anchored by three large-scale studies of major New York City institutions (Broadway, the subway system, and Wall Street). Six more focused studies of specific individuals, groups, and businesses—including a crew of professional graffiti artists, a Coney Island bialy baker, the New York tinsmiths’ union, and a particularly colorful city bus driver—help weave the major studies into a multi-layered fabric. The voices on display here truly create a sense of occupational counterpoint, with each offering a different perspective on the humming urban landscape.
The Broadway chapter offers the richest and most significant ethnographic description of the professional New York theater scene that I have read. Showing how the different aspects of a Broadway show come together—from the “gypsies” who build their reputations from years of auditions and chorus roles, to the studied artisans who create the sets, scenery, costumes, props, and hats, to the stagehands who have been in the business for generations—Groce offers a strikingly original portrait of community folklife that has too often been overshadowed in scholarship by studies of the theater’s “creative team” (writers, composers, directors, choreographers, and “stars”). She also successfully illustrates the broad physical distribution of the scene, showing how a Manhattan-based production actually comes about through the labor of workshops throughout the city and beyond—a point that comes through as a motif in the rest of the book as well.
Groce’s chapter on subway workers, while a bit more predictable, nonetheless illustrates the richness of the lives of those who work to keep the city’s transportation running. The train operators’ stories of various characters and happenings encountered on the tracks, from freeloading animals to casual nudity, offer a brilliant commentary on the city’s diversity and sometimes bemused tolerance of others.
As a former New Yorker, I tore through most of the other chapters with relish. I personally remember encountering the same 86th Street bus driver interviewed in the book, spending hours fascinated with the jumble of subway lines, and enjoying the ebb and flow of the theater scene. Wall Street, however, was rather distant, even during my trips to the southern tip of Manhattan; and in some ways the book’s final and longest chapter on Wall Street brokers replicates that feeling. Groce and her team do admirable work chronicling life and lore on the trading floor. At the same time, the traders’ work is so deeply tied to broader concepts of world commerce—concepts that ominously resonate with the global economic collapse that took place several years after the book’s fieldwork—that an economics refresher course sometimes seemed in order, or at least an appendix sorting out a couple of the key concepts. Regardless, I left the section with a better understanding of why Wall Street culture always seemed so insular, even as I did my own dissertation fieldwork no more than a couple miles away.
Amid the book’s beautiful presentation were moments that could have used a little more attention to detail. Given that urban settings (and particularly New York City) are also extremely well documented in the local press, it seemed strange that Groce did not try to follow up some of the project’s extraordinary stories—such as the account of an attempted subway suicide (89)—as points of origin for and comparison to the retellings. The book also misspells the names of two major Jewish deli owners (Yona Schimmel and Abe Lebewohl) in the chapter on a Lower East Side lox appetizing shop (130, 133). Finally, the book’s lack of a concluding chapter seemed to me a lost opportunity to come to some final thoughts on the project, particularly since the ensuing years have seen both the attacks of 9/11 (which Groce addresses periodically throughout the book) and the more recent mortgage-driven economic meltdown, both of which profoundly affected many of the occupations covered in the book.
Such minor critiques, however, should not take too much away from this delightfully written and wonderfully informative volume. A fulfilling read for both undergraduate and graduate students, Lox, Stocks, and Backstage Broadway offers a compelling model for beginning to understand how people make their livings and tell their stories within a complex, interwoven, and possibly unique urban ecosystem.
[1] Though not mentioned in the book, Groce’s introduction is an edited version of an earlier article: Nancy Groce, “Local Culture in the Global City: The Folklife of New York,” Voices 30 (Spring/Summer 2004): 6–12.
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[Review length: 1026 words • Review posted on May 25, 2010]