Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, Norman Street is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-1978. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons still resonate in the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives.
Based on a three-year study of Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg area, Norman Street is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Over the decades, Greenpoint-Williamsburg has become home to artists, actors, writers and young people with alternative cultural aspirations. Susser documents how these groups, in many ways, have joined with the remaining working class population to build a thriving community that is now threatened with displacement by municipal rezoning which has facilitated massive plans for new corporate investment. Increasingly prescient at a moment of economic crisis when people are again occupying public spaces in major American cities, spurred to collective action by mounting economic inequalities and the government's role in perpetuating them, Susser's study of change, action, and conflict in a neighborhood that has become emblematic of urban transformation-for better and worse-has much to say to us today.
Witchcraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Samuel McIntire made this seaside town famous. But echoes of lesser-known tales linger along its lanes and avenues, from mysterious Chestnut Street to the founding Quakers of Buffum Street. Essex Street is one of the oldest in town, and the crooked street has carried several different names over the years, confusing tourists to this day. The Gedney House on High Street dates back to 1665 and was built by a shipwright, while the neighboring Pease and Price Bakery was a family-owned store that served the community for more than eighty years. Local historian and Salem News columnist Jeanne Stella recounts these and more stories of well-worn paths.
