Upscale commerce openly required excluding crowds, not just products, from its streets.

Evidence

A representative of the association summed it up. … 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. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 412

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The association’s candid confession that luxury retail is a ‘sensitive and delicate organism’ needing ‘insulation from gross forms of work and workers’ and uncrowded sidewalks reveals commercial space ordering as direct class segregation of the passerby — central to the reader’s urban anonymity thesis.
• XREF: This is a concrete mechanism of how public space is stratified before anyone even interacts — pairs with Lofland’s stranger-typing and with how the Observer Self in Cole reads classed streets.
• SEED: Angle: the sidewalk itself as a classed infrastructure — zoning law as curating who may stroll, pause, and purchase, a forerunner to modern hostile architecture and exclusive districts.