Luxury retail depends on sidewalks free of working-class crowds.
Evidence
The high-class retail business for which Fifth Avenue is so well known is the most sensitive and delicate organism imaginable, depending, first, on the exclusiveness of the neighborhood; second, on its nearness to the homes of the rich and the large hotels; and, third, on its lack of congestion, especially on sidewalks, so that the customers may not be crowded or jammed in a hurlyburly crowd on their way to and from the different shops… . The loft buildings have already invaded the side streets with their hordes of factory employees. If an adequate move were made restricting the occupancy of the buildings so that no manufacturing could be done either on Fifth Avenue or from Madison Avenue over to Sixth Avenue, the matter would be solved. The employees from these loft buildings cannot be controlled. They spend their time-lunch hour and before business-on the avenue, congregating in crowds that are doing more than any other thing to destroy the exclusiveness and desirability of Fifth Avenue. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 413
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: The sidewalk is theorized as a classed commodity — shopping as a spatial practice that requires the absence of certain bodies. This inverts the Simmelian premise: the crowded sidewalk is not a neutral stage but a terrain already stratified by who is permitted to stroll.
- XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Simmel/Lofland/Cole cross-reading: the sidewalk strolling of the flâneur is enabled only where civil law has already removed the loitering workers.