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Live and Let Live: Diversity, Conflict, and Community in an Integrated Neighborhood
We are in a bind," writes Evelyn M. Perry. While conventional wisdom asserts that residential racial and economic integration holds great promise for reducing inequality in the United States, Americans are demonstrably not very good at living with difference. Perry's analysis of the multiethnic, mixed-income Milwaukee community of Riverwest, where residents maintain relative stability without insisting on conformity, advances our understanding of why and how neighborhoods matter. In response to the myriad urban quantitative assessments, Perry examines the impacts of neighborhood diversity using more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. Her in-depth examination of life "on the block" expands our understanding of the mechanisms by which neighborhoods shape the perceptions, behaviors, and opportunities of those who live in them. Perry challenges researchers' assumptions about what "good" communities look like and what well-regulated communities want. Live and Let Live shifts the conventional scholarly focus from "What can integration do?" to "How is integration done?"
- GenresSociology
248 pages, Paperback
Published February 27, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 18, 2017
I moved from the East Side of Milwaukee to the Riverwest neighborhood almost forty years ago. So I very much enjoyed this deep ethnographic study of the neighborhood and its community life.
Evelyn Perry moved with her boyfriend into a rented flat on Pierce Street in July 2007. She conducted three years of fieldwork and sixty interviews. As an ethnographer, Perry studies and observes, starting with background on the neighborhood. She wrote and socialized in cafés, patronized the co-ops and traveled on foot, becoming part of the fabric here.
Perry, an assistant professor who teaches sociology at Rhodes College, spends most of the book describing Riverwest based on her observations. She focused on the culture that the residents shared, defined in her sociology by the three keys of place: location, form and culture. Her observations, mostly value-neutral, build through the early chapters until we get to the premise of live and let live.
German and Polish working-class families built the neighborhood a hundred years ago. Italian families later joined the mix.
In the early seventies, Perry writes, antiwar and civil rights activists in the neighborhood created an identity by naming the community Riverwest. Activists and hippies of the day blocked the widening of Locust Street. The annual Locust Street Festival celebrates the victorious effort to keep the street just as it had been. It is the oldest and biggest neighborhood festival in the city.
Milwaukee is one of those hypersegrated big cities. But in the heart of the city, as Perry describes it, Riverwest distinguishes itself as a tolerant and integrated neighborhood.
About ninety city blocks make up the long and thin neighborhood, two miles long and half a mile wide, that’s one square mile, within the city limits of ninety-six square miles — about one-percent of the city.
While only a third of Riverwesterners live in owner-occupied housing. stability of the neighborhood also comes from the tenancy of long-term and lifetime renters.
Riverwest exists as a buffer between an affluent university neighborhood to the east and a lower-income, higher-crime neighborhood to the west. The Onion, which published a print edition in Milwaukee for many years, described Riverwest as “cool, colorful and iconoclastic.”
Perry describes the value of the face block, the two sides of a street that face each other between intersections. Leaders, known as block captains or mayors of the street, typically emerge on these face blocks.
The premise of this book, the live-and-let-live code, plays out primarily on face blocks, Perry writes. But some people let it go too far, she adds. Smoking a joint on the front porch is one thing, but selling rock out the back door goes over the line.
Riverwest maintains its in-between status, going back decades. The neighborhood did not gentrify or decline. Some people who tried to balance the live-and-let-live credo left the neighborhood, fed up with bad behavior.
Riverwest's’ social mix includes black, white and brown diversity of all ages, politics, religions as well as artists, musicians, students and alternative professionals plus hippies young and old.
Riverwest supports “an alternative prestige hierarchy,” where thrift, meaningful vocation and creative expression garner more recognition than do degrees, wealth accumulation and material consumption.
Perry writes in the appendix that many versions of Riverwest exist, but that this is the one she found. She tried to grasp the multiple, complex and contradictory tales of the neighborhood.
ABOUT THE COVER
“Falcon Bowl,” a large painting by Mike Fredrickson, serves as the cover art. Ironically, the Falcon Bowl itself, the namesake of the big piece, appears to the left of the image we see here, but chopped off to meet the format of the cover. http://amoodycover.com/wp-content/upl...
The Falcon Bowl, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, houses a small bowling alley downstairs, one of the oldest in the country. Upstairs, a neighborhood bar and behind that a popular hall that hosts bands, parties and other functions.
Another recent ethnographic study in Milwaukee took place a few miles from here. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, written by Matthew Desmond, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his exploration and revelations.
This book pairs well with Riverwest: A Community History, by Tom Tolan, which is the story of this neighborhood as told by a journalist.
Evelyn Perry moved with her boyfriend into a rented flat on Pierce Street in July 2007. She conducted three years of fieldwork and sixty interviews. As an ethnographer, Perry studies and observes, starting with background on the neighborhood. She wrote and socialized in cafés, patronized the co-ops and traveled on foot, becoming part of the fabric here.
Perry, an assistant professor who teaches sociology at Rhodes College, spends most of the book describing Riverwest based on her observations. She focused on the culture that the residents shared, defined in her sociology by the three keys of place: location, form and culture. Her observations, mostly value-neutral, build through the early chapters until we get to the premise of live and let live.
German and Polish working-class families built the neighborhood a hundred years ago. Italian families later joined the mix.
In the early seventies, Perry writes, antiwar and civil rights activists in the neighborhood created an identity by naming the community Riverwest. Activists and hippies of the day blocked the widening of Locust Street. The annual Locust Street Festival celebrates the victorious effort to keep the street just as it had been. It is the oldest and biggest neighborhood festival in the city.
Milwaukee is one of those hypersegrated big cities. But in the heart of the city, as Perry describes it, Riverwest distinguishes itself as a tolerant and integrated neighborhood.
About ninety city blocks make up the long and thin neighborhood, two miles long and half a mile wide, that’s one square mile, within the city limits of ninety-six square miles — about one-percent of the city.
While only a third of Riverwesterners live in owner-occupied housing. stability of the neighborhood also comes from the tenancy of long-term and lifetime renters.
Riverwest exists as a buffer between an affluent university neighborhood to the east and a lower-income, higher-crime neighborhood to the west. The Onion, which published a print edition in Milwaukee for many years, described Riverwest as “cool, colorful and iconoclastic.”
Perry describes the value of the face block, the two sides of a street that face each other between intersections. Leaders, known as block captains or mayors of the street, typically emerge on these face blocks.
The premise of this book, the live-and-let-live code, plays out primarily on face blocks, Perry writes. But some people let it go too far, she adds. Smoking a joint on the front porch is one thing, but selling rock out the back door goes over the line.
Riverwest maintains its in-between status, going back decades. The neighborhood did not gentrify or decline. Some people who tried to balance the live-and-let-live credo left the neighborhood, fed up with bad behavior.
Riverwest's’ social mix includes black, white and brown diversity of all ages, politics, religions as well as artists, musicians, students and alternative professionals plus hippies young and old.
Riverwest supports “an alternative prestige hierarchy,” where thrift, meaningful vocation and creative expression garner more recognition than do degrees, wealth accumulation and material consumption.
Perry writes in the appendix that many versions of Riverwest exist, but that this is the one she found. She tried to grasp the multiple, complex and contradictory tales of the neighborhood.
ABOUT THE COVER
“Falcon Bowl,” a large painting by Mike Fredrickson, serves as the cover art. Ironically, the Falcon Bowl itself, the namesake of the big piece, appears to the left of the image we see here, but chopped off to meet the format of the cover. http://amoodycover.com/wp-content/upl...
The Falcon Bowl, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, houses a small bowling alley downstairs, one of the oldest in the country. Upstairs, a neighborhood bar and behind that a popular hall that hosts bands, parties and other functions.
Another recent ethnographic study in Milwaukee took place a few miles from here. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, written by Matthew Desmond, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his exploration and revelations.
This book pairs well with Riverwest: A Community History, by Tom Tolan, which is the story of this neighborhood as told by a journalist.
September 14, 2024
A pretty good overview of Riverwest’s many views of itself. I think this book does a good job capturing the feeling of the neighborhood.
The author uses personal interactions and interviews to highlight attitudes towards crime, diversity, gentrification, etc.
One other reviewer stated that it didn’t go deep enough. I could see that. Sometimes the book felt repetitive. But, if you’ve spent any time in Riverwest, I think you’ll find this a great read.
The author uses personal interactions and interviews to highlight attitudes towards crime, diversity, gentrification, etc.
One other reviewer stated that it didn’t go deep enough. I could see that. Sometimes the book felt repetitive. But, if you’ve spent any time in Riverwest, I think you’ll find this a great read.
August 21, 2017
This book had a high bar to cross, but ultimately failed to get there. I wanted to come away knowing more about Riverwest and I'm not sure I did.
The author examines how individual blocks are different, but not at any great detail. Undoubtedly a hard subject to study, but I think there are a number of cases where specific blocks are much more gentrified and stable or chaotic and messy than the others around them. This contributes I think to the feeling that Riverwest is many different neighborhoods. The diversity of blocks is extreme in the neighborhood.
The author examines how individual blocks are different, but not at any great detail. Undoubtedly a hard subject to study, but I think there are a number of cases where specific blocks are much more gentrified and stable or chaotic and messy than the others around them. This contributes I think to the feeling that Riverwest is many different neighborhoods. The diversity of blocks is extreme in the neighborhood.
February 8, 2018
If you like sociological jargon, and theorizing, as if such jargon were postmodern poetry and not just serious social science, this is the book for you! She avoids the French and Germans and weaves a readable web of all-American academic "sophistry". I liked it-- but objectively speaking, this book is too top heavy with theorizing and short on illuminating vignettes of everyday life. It helps if you live in a gentrifying neighborhood-- mine Cleveland, but very similar to the Milwaukee of her book.
September 13, 2022
I read this in a few days, while staying in an Airbnb in Riverwest. I definitely could see the various viewpoints people have about this neighborhood. Interesting that it's considered a mixed neighborhood (by Milwaukee standards) when it's majority white. I thought the author could have brought in a more critical & academic lens and brought in more than 60 interviews over 3 years. It was still quite a delight to read such a slice of life.
August 24, 2017
One of the best books about Milwaukee I've read. Highly recommended.
January 1, 2018
A steller look at one of the coolest working class neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Where ever you live, I hope there's an area like this to appreciate!
March 20, 2017
A sociological study, based on the author's fieldwork, of Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood as a racially, ethnically and economically diverse community.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews