I keep coming back to the general relationship of slummer to slum-dweller as a replication of the relationship between subject and analyst. This isn’t far off from the origins of slumming – the Progressive reformer studying and reshaping the urban poor or, as others have suggested, the sociologist looking down his or her nose at the immigrant ghetto resident, calculating and measuring, all for the collection of data that will be published in some journal or book and added to the dusty stacks of a vast university library. I believe it was Jenks again who wrote about the Chicago School sociologist, Robert Park, not only as a flaneur and detective, but as an urban ethnographer whose bread and butter was the impersonal analysis of the poor. Park wasn’t just a slummer in the more positive connotation of the term; he was also a slummer as tourist, who happily gathered data, then returned to the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago to build a professional career.
This brings me to the idea of historian as slummer, as well as the notion that by fetishizing and romanticizing the history of the Lower East Side (through sites like the Tenement Museum and Eldridge Street Synagogue, along with more for-profit venues like Gus’s Pickles and the now-defunct steak and chops restaurant, Tenement), historians have put the Lower East Side up for sale – literally. In other words, it’s the reclamation of this nostalgic history, this great American narrative, that has helped to drive gentrification in the area in the last twenty years and displace thousands of actual immigrants and migrants. I’m not alone in considering this possibility: a review essay by Eli Lederhendler in the American Jewish History journal from June 2001 suggests a similar reading of how historians have fed into this ennoblement of the Lower East Side at the expense of current low-income residents. And, of course, Christopher Mele writes eloquently about the phenomenon in Selling the Lower East Side. My question, therefore, lies in how we can be responsible historians and sociologists (or whatever) without necessarily negatively affecting the populations we study? Is there an ethic of social activism that must be built into our more literary interests in these subjects? And what must that social activism look like to counter the historian’s tendency to aggrandize her or his topic of study?
