For Immediate Release (1/31/98):
by Robert Lederman
Robert Lederman is President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics) and was the main plaintiff in the lawsuit that affirmed the right to sell art on the street without a license.
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Like all the greatest cities in human history, New York City streets are sometimes congested. City streets that lack abundant economic and social activity wither and die. No one visits them, no one opens a business on them and few people want to live there. It's exactly the extraordinary number, diversity and creativity of the people on its streets, including vendors, that makes this city so vibrantly alive.
Street vending is the origin of commercial activity and free enterprise. Historically, vendors and traveling merchants developed most of the world's cities and towns. Their trading routes spread culture, language and new ideas throughout the world. Ironically, some of this City's most outspoken critics of vending, including certain members of the Fifth Avenue Association such as Macys, began as humble pushcart vendors themselves. In this nation which claims to be the land of opportunity for all, vending remains one of the last opportunities to start a business with nothing but hard work and a dream.
Vending provides choices in goods and services that are unavailable elsewhere or that, due to today's high rents, are unaffordable for the majority of the public. If an office worker chooses to spend their 45 minute lunch break eating a one dollar hotdog and window shopping, is this really "unfair competition" for restaurants offering high-priced meals and a twenty minute wait for a table? Is a street artist offering an original painting for fifty to one hundred dollars "competing" with an art dealer selling paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars?
The Giuliani Administration is being dishonest with the public and the media when it claims that legitimate concerns about "congestion" and "public safety" are the reason they are working to eliminate street vendors. The Business Improvement Districts and giant corporations that are pushing Giuliani to eliminate vending simply want to exploit our public sidewalks for their own financial benefit. If as planned, today's vendors are replaced by McDonalds food carts, Disney souvenir stands and garish billboard-sized advertising kiosks disguised as pay toilets and bus shelters, the residents that complained about vendors will look back on today's street culture as a golden age. Giuliani's Street Furniture Initiative will cause the exact congestion, public danger and visual blight the Mayor and his Street Vendor Review Panel appointees blame on vendors.
It seems reasonable for homeowners in a quiet residential suburb to resent a sudden influx of vendors to the sidewalks surrounding their tree-lined estates. Is it equally reasonable for someone, after moving to an apartment twenty or thirty stories above teeming Broadway, Lexington Avenue or Fifth Avenue, to notice a few vendors from their balcony and then become obsessed with driving them out of existence? Like the Native American, vendors were on these streets hundreds of years before their present well-heeled occupants.
In this nation, preoccupied with guaranteeing every group its rights, perhaps it's time for vendors to demand their own. We don't seek an unfair advantage, a government handout or rights that aren't already guaranteed to every other person. All we want is the unabridged right to freedom of expression and free enterprise that this nation was founded upon. Streets are more than just a staging area for people to enter and exit limousines and luxury buildings. When the U.S. Supreme Court called this nation's streets a, "marketplace of ideas", they were acknowledging that our public sidewalks are not just for walking.
For more info, contact: A.R.T.I.S.T. Ph: (718) 369-2111 or (212) 561-0877; Email <ARTISTpres@aol.com>; Web site http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html