The Pushcart War and Possible Connections

Today is the birthday of Jane Jacobs, so I decided I should publish my post about The Pushcart War, even though there was a lot more to say.

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When I was in high school, one of my friends told me her favorite book was The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill. I can't remember if she gave me a paperback copy, or if I picked one up somewhere along the way, but I had it for years.

I never read it, though. Probably because of my general inclination not to read books that other people recommend to me, which I have tried to overcome as I've gotten older.

Recently, I saw the book described on Twitter by Malka Older, and I thought of my old friend. I looked for my paperback copy but couldn't find it. I suspect I shed it from my too-full shelves at some point over the decades, thinking I would never read it.

So I ordered a copy through abebooks: it's a 1967 hard-cover edition of the 1964 book, withdrawn from a library in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Like all the reissues, it purports to take place in the future (in this case, the events are set in 1976, and the book's historical recounting is 10 years after that).

Older wrote that the book is a "manual for collective action, resistance, protest." It is "framed as a history, but the dates of the events recounted are in the future... [it is] speculative fiction: it imagines a possible uprising against oppression."

Her long tweet thread analyzes the ways in which the book is a manual for collective action: stick together, be creative, be kind to each other, and treat the opposition as human beings as much as humanly possible. Meanwhile, the powerful people use a lot of familiar methods against the pushcart owners: they create a fake newspaper to carry the corporate line, spread the word that "people" are saying the pushcarts are a problem on the streets, and physically intimidate the pushcart owners.

Jean Merrill lived in Greenwich Village near Tompkins Square with her life partner, Ronni Solbert, who graced the book with its rambunctious illustrations. They had been in the area since the 1950s, and were part of the effort to save Tompkins Square Park from "urban renewal" by Robert Moses in the early 1960s. He wanted to remove its chess tables and shade trees in favor of a Little League diamond.

This is just after Moses had tried to put an expressway directly through Washington Square Park (home of the Washington Square arch) in the 1950s, and about the same time that the city had wanted to widen Hudson Street by severely narrowing sidewalks and removing trees (1960), both of which brought Jane Jacobs to the leadership position she took on against Moses and his efforts to overhaul Greenwich Village, even as her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was being published.

I couldn't find evidence that Merrill and Solbert knew Jacobs personally, but according to this article from the newspaper in the small town where Solbert and Merrill lived the later years of their lives, the influence of the resistance around Washington Square helped in organizing efforts at Tompkins Square.

And it clearly underlay the activities in The Pushcart War, though Merrill was also concerned specifically about street traffic and large trucks. The book's Mayor Cudd is modeled on Robert Wagner, and various pushcart personalities are closely related to real people from the neighborhood. There's no one specifically like Robert Moses in the book, but I wonder if he isn't represented metaphorically as part of "The Three," the owners of the big trucking companies who have a plan to transform New York into a place for giant vehicles and who have no thought about what will be left for the people who live there.  

By about 1970, both the Merrill/Solberts and the Jacobs family had left Greenwich Village, the former for Vermont and the latter for Toronto. 

It's bittersweet that each edition of The Pushcart War has changed the year of the book's setting, because its plot becomes less and less plausible. It seems grounded very thoroughly in the New York of the early 1960s. But even so, as Malka Older said, it's still full of inspiring ideas of what people in solidarity can accomplish.

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This New Yorker article has more about the book, describing it as "the exceptionally odd Pushcart War.... a children's book with almost no children in it."