June 1, 2007

For convenience sake, the field site was set to be census tracts 206, 208, 210, 212. This gives a smaller area to start with and concentrates our attention on the realities of urban ethnography, including the reality that people move extensively around and that there are real boundaries (in the Chicago sense of ecological zones) that may not be impenetrable but may require extra efforts to cross. In that sense Park Avenue, the eastern boundary, with the elevated tracts forming an almost medieval wall fringed with a quasi-industrial area east of Madison, is such a boundary. By contrast, Lenox on the west, cannot be considered a boundary of any kind, except for census and statistical purposes. I suspect that the more substantial western boundary is the hills west of St. Nicholas, hills that terminate many of the streets. The southern (126th) and northern boundaries (139th) are similarly a matter of census convenience.

Given the artificiality of our focus on these tracts, it is interesting to summarize the diversity of the area, with the renovated brownstones and new condos mostly found in 206 and 208 (possibly explaining the smaller densities) and the large housing developments in 210 and 212 with the massive divide between the "middle income" Lenox Terrace in 212 and the "low income" Lincoln Houses in 210 (with the greatest population density). While we start with an account of our field site as "inner city," we will probably end with an account that emphasize this diversity (including the emerging racial diversity that is not quite visible in the 2000 census). This is not quite a closed "ghetto" though it is getting to be a place of interaction among income and racial groups that will have to be handled.

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