A Talk with William Kornblum

Sociology professor William Kornblum has been a leading scholar in the area of urban studies at The Graduate Center for three decades. As a researcher, he wears many hats, focusing on issues that include public housing, disadvantaged youth, neighborhood redevelopment, and human interaction with the natural environment. He is also an avid sailor. His recent book, At Sea in the City: New York from the Water's Edge, takes the reader along as Korblum sails through and around his home town, offering a wealth of historical and sociological insights along the way. Folio talked to Kornblum about the book and his research interests.

It was something I started to do as a recreation, an escape from more formal academic writing. I always thought of these sailing trips that my family took into the city and around different parts of the waterway system as offering the opportunity to look at the city from a different perspective, from a more environmental perspective. For many years I ran a research unit for the National Parks Service on the socioeconomic planning of urban national parks. So, one of the hats I've always worn, since I came to this graduate school in 1973, was as a kind of urban environmental researcher. When you do that kind of work, you end up publishing a lot of technical reports, environmental impact statements and planning documents. The writing is usually pretty dull, but the work itself is fascinating. So doing this book in the voice of a kind of naive urban sailor or domestic adventurer was an opportunity to recycle a lot of the experiences and knowledge I had gained in my work, but in a different genre of writing.

That's right. The book is a kind of a love letter to the city that highlights people who I feel are exemplary New Yorkers, including my parents. My father was a labor lawyer and commissioner of labor in New York City in the 1950s, a very tumultuous time in New York City labor history. Just by being his son I learned a tremendous amount about labor and work, so that was always another hat I wore in my research. The first book I wrote, which came out of my dissertation, was about Chicago steel workers, and that was a completely separate kind of work that I pursued and still do. [Kornblum recently published a report on sustained unemployment among airline workers after 9/11.] I was able to bring that interest into the book as well, especially in the chapter about concrete and construction workers. That is a recycling of my own youth and a tribute to the people who build the physical city. It's also a recognition of the fact that the physical city comes out of the earth: the rock, gravel, and cement come down the Hudson on barges. It comes into the city, and people at work put it together and build buildings.

There hadn't been a good study of an urban entertainment zone like Times Square, so I started doing fieldwork there in the 1970s and got students interested. Students and faculty were doing research on after-hours clubs, on the hustler scene, music, pornography, and "adult" establishments. In 1979, we were asked by the Ford Foundation to do an assessment of the conditions of Times Square, which had become notorious, through movies such as Midnight Cowboy, as the country's biggest de-facto combat zone. I assembled a group of scholars to do a monograph, called "Times Square: The Bright Lights Zone," which, for a while, became a kind of handbook for thinking about Times Square. It didn't recommend the kinds of large-scale redevelopment that we're seeing now. It was in favor of a more organic, crescive model. But it gave people more of an understanding of the human ecology of the area and how it had emerged historically, describing the influence of the various moral crusades that swept through central city entertainment zones--starting with Prohibition, the bans on burlesque houses, the drug crusades, and so on. All of these moral fissures in society resulted in a place where people decided to look the other way.

Human ecology is a field within the social sciences that's practiced in anthropology, sociology, and environmental psychology. It really refers to the distribution of human activities in space and time, and the inter-relationships of people in their environment. It can be a built environment or it can be an environment of the natural ecosystems like the marshlands or the beaches, forests, or parks (which are of course built, but they're built to resemble a natural environment). In the early days of human ecology, almost all the emphasis was on the built environment, but it was quite clear that you could apply this approach to the interactions of humans and the natural environment. I've always had this perspective of human ecology--it requires that you pay close attention to demographic trends and quantitative social science, as well as have an ability to observe and participate in the processes one is studying. Let me explain it this way: it's possible to think of social forces acting at a distance, but when you look at the way they operate within a bounded area, it becomes much more specific, and more possible to address certain conflicts.