Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on October 18, 2006
Enterprise and Society 2006 7(4):695-704; doi:10.1093/es/khl046
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Tales from the Elevator and Other Stories of Modern Service in New York City
DANIEL LEVINSON WILK is an assistant professor of American History at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) in New York City. He completed his dissertation at Duke University under the direction of Edward Balleisen, Alexander Keyssar, William Chafe, Sarah Deutsch, and Janice Radway. Contact information: School of Liberal Arts, Fashion Institute of Technology, Seventh Avenue and 27th Street, New York, NY 10001-5992, USA. E-mail: danlw@fitnyc.edu.
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Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has influenced generations of scholars in urban studies, as well as lay people interested in what makes cities work. It argues that healthy, functioning neighborhoods provide safety and a sense of community by mixing residential housing, shops, bars, small parks, and other spaces and establishments that keep people coming and going at all hours, looking after each other. But there are exceptions—other neighborhoods that also work, despite a lack of mixed use—and Jacobs’s brief comments on one exceptional kind of neighborhood inspired my dissertation. Jacobs writes that the work of building a sense of community can be commodified and turned into capitalist enterprise and wage labor. She calls the "network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids," on Park Avenue and other upper-class residential streets "a form of hired neighborhood."1
Many scholars since then have discussed wage