Swingin' In The Train

Where does entrepreneurship end and "crime" begin?

You know the lines in “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” that go, “Now bring us some figgy pudding…we won’t go until we’ve got some”?

That’s a playful reference to the old custom of carolers going to homes, singing unsolicited, and then asking or expecting some payment: a little cash, a little treat. Genius, a website that crowdsources analyses of song lyrics, offers this explanation:

This verse seems a little aggressive with the carolers essentially demanding figgy pudding from the house they are at, but English carolers have been singing this song since as far back as the 16th century. Traditionally, poorer carolers would sing on the doorsteps of wealthy houses. This verse is meant to boldly poke fun at the differences between the two social and economic classes. While the verse is sung in jest, there is a bit of truth to it; the carolers hope by spreading Christmas cheer that the wealthy people they are singing to might share a little of their Christmas feast.

Last year, when we had Christmas at our new house, a group of neighbors who sang carols throughout the neighborhood rang our door and asked if they could sing for us. Of course, we said yes, and they did a little rendition of Frosty the Snowman. “Are we supposed to give them a little something?” my mother asked, seeing if anyone had a few dollars in their wallet. The head of the group said no, it was just for fun and they weren’t looking for money. But, of course, nobody would have thought a little tip, or some cookies if we’d baked that night, to be inappropriate or undeserved.

This brings me to the subway acrobats:

I’ve never seen this in D.C., though it might exist. It’s usually seen as a New York City thing, which has a long culture of semi-legal public performance. Oftentimes the subway performers will be outside a station or on a platform, usually with a little container, or open instrument case, for spare change. That happens everywhere.

The “subway acrobats,” however, take it a step further and perform their routine inside a moving subway car: they essentially put on a little acrobatics/gymnastics show, using the bars and handles of the train car to spin, swing, somersault. There are reports of their feet sometimes coming uncomfortably close to riders’ faces, even occasionally (accidentally) kicking riders. At the end, of course, they’ll ask for a buck.

People are divided over this. Many think performing inside the subway car is going too far. Many New Yorkers also like subway performers, and consider them to be part of the city’s character. Others view them as sitting towards the lower end of the crime-and-disorder spectrum. Heather Mac Donald, for example, wrote of them: “Many riders experience their barely veiled extortion as a lesser degree of assault.”

What, exactly, distinguishes this from an unsolicited caroler demanding a bite of figgy pudding? This hustle as old as time is enshrined charmingly, harmlessly, in a Christmas carol—and in some contexts we have no problem digging out a dollar—yet in other cases we find it to be an unacceptable incursion into the privacy we expect when going about our business.

If it’s easy to argue that the subway acrobat goes too far in violating that expectation, what about the “churro lady”? The churro lady is, as an article in Eater NY puts it, “not a single person but rather has come to be representative of the churro vendors in the subway, often women, who have been routinely ticketed by the city and are the subject of law enforcement harassment.”

Not only often women, but often, if not almost always, immigrants. In 2019, one such particular churro lady was arrested, which sparked a major outcry:

She was handcuffed Friday evening at the Broadway Junction station in Brooklyn and given a summonses, her tenth, for selling churros. Her cart, confiscated. She's become known as the Churro Lady. She identified herself to reporters as Elsa.

“This also happened before. We would get tickets, but we would also get our things back, and we would go to another station to sell. But this officer is too much,” she said.

Is she doing her best with what she has to work and seek opportunity? A scrappy, hardscrabble entrepreneur? Or is she a repeat offender racking up a rap sheet—a criminal? Is it reasonable to simply point to the rules on unlicensed street vending? Or is it reasonable to look at how street vending, whatever rules it may or may not follow, is a simple means of work for poor people almost everywhere in the world?

I’m not a fan of the phrase “criminalizing poverty.” But I do wonder if something like that isn’t at play. Perhaps we wish there were simply were not people for whom subway performing or unlicensed street vending were the easiest and most available means of working. We feel that, in a highly developed country, people shouldn’t, and maybe shouldn’t have to, resort to such things.

Perhaps amid our affluence, we’ve forgotten how utterly natural it is to discover a skill in oneself—dance, music, singing, cooking—and find a simple way to make money at it. For every vendor who might be shrugging at the rules, there are probably many more who, speaking poor English and coming from countries much poorer than ours, would never even think it’s against the rules to pick a choice spot in the street and sell something you’re good at making.

We have modern terms—“home-based business,” “cottage food law,” “farmers’ market”—as if we have literally had to rediscover and rename the oldest, most natural forms of human commerce.

The people who most want other people to work—especially “low skill” immigrants, especially the people in the “inner city”—are also the ones most likely to take the hardest tack against people who, you can easily argue, are doing just that.

There are different conceptions of the city here: one views it as a great big human living room, where everything plays out, where the sometimes noise and chaos are part of the overall thing, inextricable from it. Others view those elements as defects. They prefer to visit or live in places where those elements have been excised—which is probably to say, where the people who need recourse to them have been excluded.

Every gray area, every bit of seemingly unregulated commerce, everything that once helped people with almost literally nothing grab the bottom rung of the ladder of the American Dream and start climbing, is squeezed out or made difficult today. The small home, the informal business in front of a home, the food truck or table in an underused parking lot, the man selling coconuts out of a pickup truck beside the strip mall, the woman selling squashes outside a Chinese supermarket which doesn’t stock that particularly variety, the vendor selling fish or groceries from a tiny traveling truck.

It may be the case that few people really want to do these things. And it may be the case that many who do not partake experience them as minor annoyances. But it is also the case that shrinking such informal opportunities does not “solve” poverty any more than a cat disappears when it hides its head behind a curtain.

As I put it in a piece about small cars, and repeated in a piece about tiny trucks:

We now view as trappings of poverty what we once viewed as engines of opportunity. We lose tolerance for discomfort, for gradual and incremental improvement, for making do, for being hardscrabble and resourceful.

And, in turn, we make life artificially and needlessly harder for those who are still willing to exercise those virtues, or who have not become affluent enough to dispense with them.

Nobody should get kicked in the head by a subway acrobat; nobody should get food poisoned by an unlicensed food cart. But however much we might regard these activities, or their extremities, as belonging to “crime” or “nuisance” or “disorder”—however much we should carefully regulate such activities—these people are pulling themselves up, figuratively, or literally, in the same manner as desperate people have been for all of human history.

All of us could have been, or could be, in a position of asking for some literal or metaphorical figgy pudding. That we think such a thing beneath or behind us is no reason to foreclose it for others who do not.

---

Related Reading:

Benches For Whom?

Crime and Housing

Thoughts On Turnstiles and Glass Houses

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 800 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!