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Acceptance in Manhattan versus apprehension in Johannesburg
Jonny Steinberg, Business Day
May 21, 2007

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A467958

SOMETIMES it takes a single moment in a foreign city to understand simple things about the place you inhabit back home.

I spent the last Saturday morning of April in Tompkins Square Park on the east side of Manhattan. Most of the people there were young and very well groomed. They stood around and chatted while their dogs sniffed one another in the park´s leash-free enclosure.

I needed to find a men´s room. I spotted one at the northern end of the park, walked through the door and found myself on another planet. The place was packed tight with black and Hispanic men, leaving little room to move. Some were at the urinal, others huddled in threes or fours, murmuring quietly. A row of toilets lined the far wall, the cubicle doors and walls long ago stripped and carted way. A man sat on each toilet with his trousers around his ankles, the sound of faeces hitting toilet bowl punctuating the gentle mumbling of men in conversation. It seemed from the way they inhabited this place that these people spent a lot of time here, that they were using it in well-established ways.

I went back outside and watched the white people and their dogs.

It was immediately apparent, from the sounds, from the ambiance, from that indescribable sense of mood and spirit public spaces exude, that the dog-runners were not only untroubled by the men in the toilet: they were oblivious to them.

A few days later, I met an acquaintance who has lived close to the park for decades, and told her my tale. "Good grief," she said. "I didn´t even know there was a public toilet in the park. I in fact don´t ever recall seeing a public toilet in New York."

I find it an extraordinary story for what it says about both New York and Johannesburg. In the 1970s, Tompkins Square Park was the epicentre of the East Village´s heroin epidemic; in the 1980s, its crack epidemic. At one o´clock on an August morning in 1988, armed police stormed the park, ostensibly to enforce a curfew. The homeless resisted. What followed became known as the Tompkins Square Park Riot, a two-day-long urban battle.

That is now forgotten history. The Saturday morning I walked into the park, the American economy was entering its 15th year of growth, and the colonisation of Manhattan by the long boom´s beneficiaries was well established. The middle class is now so thoroughly in command of the city, its rules of conduct so firmly stamped on public space, it barely notices that anyone else is there. The homeless meekly insinuate themselves into the cracks, their knowledge that the lion´s share of space belongs to others now deep in their blood.

Compare this to the leafy places where Johannesburg´s middle classes hang out. A couple of years ago, a group of homeless people began gathering in the eastern corner of a small park across the road from my flat. Within weeks, a residents´ association had formed to lobby local government to have them removed. The park is now surrounded by a tall green fence with a locked gate and stands empty.

Rich and poor cannot share public space so easily here. It is too dangerous. The rules of engagement are insufficiently clear. Why?

The answer is resentment. It is absent in the Manhattan park, but present in spades here. Watching the poor of Manhattan, I marvelled that there was not a trace of it. Whether they felt no anger at the inequality rubbed in their faces, or whether they had simply learnt to repress it, I do not know. I´m not sufficiently familiar with New York to understand. Perhaps it is the result of a decade-and-a-half of very tough policing. Perhaps it is the deeply ingrained American ideology that anyone can make it, and that the world is thus fundamentally fair.

In Johannesburg´s public space, the poor bump up against the rich to ask rhetorical questions about why things are as they are. Sometimes the questions take form as a hostile glance, sometimes as sarcastically obsequious panhandling. Sometimes young men simply occupy space, their knowledge that their mere presence is dangerous a source of hollow satisfaction. The rich live in a permanently furtive state, always on the lookout for trouble.

As in New York, Johannesburg´s bourgeoisie is reaping the benefits of a long boom. It is something of a triumph, expressed in a taste for flashy cars and gaudy homes. But unlike their American counterparts, Johannesburg´s rich have not taken control of their city. On the contrary, they fear it. The reason is that the middle class´s ascendance carries a stamp of legitimacy there, but not here.

Steinberg is a freelance journalist.

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