Come Out Swinging

The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason's Gym

Lucia Trimbur

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780691150291
• eBook ISBN: 9781400846061
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A nuanced insider's account of everyday life in the last remaining institution of New York's golden age of boxing

Gleason's Gym is the last remaining institution of New York's Golden Age of boxing. Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, Hector Camacho, Mike Tyson—the alumni of Gleason's are a roster of boxing greats. Founded in the Bronx in 1937, Gleason's moved in the mid-1980s to what has since become one of New York's wealthiest residential areas—Brooklyn's DUMBO. Gleason's has also transformed, opening its doors to new members, particularly women and white-collar men. Come Out Swinging is Lucia Trimbur's nuanced insider's account of a place that was once the domain of poor and working-class men of color but is now shared by rich and poor, male and female, black and white, and young and old.

Come Out Swinging chronicles the everyday world of the gym. Its diverse members train, fight, talk, and socialize together. We meet amateurs for whom boxing is a full-time, unpaid job. We get to know the trainers who act as their father figures and mentors. We are introduced to women who empower themselves physically and mentally. And we encounter the male urban professionals who pay handsomely to learn to box, and to access a form of masculinity missing from their office-bound lives. Ultimately, Come Out Swinging reveals how Gleason's meets the needs of a variety of people who, despite their differences, are connected through discipline and sport.

Chapter One

SURVIVAL IN A CITY TRANSFORMED: THE URBAN BOXING GYM IN POSTINDUSTRIAL NEW YORK

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OVER THE PAST FOUR DECADES, NEW YORK CITY’S SOCIAL, economic, and political structures have transformed dramatically, and the word “postindustrial” is used to describe these changes. “Postindustrial” is used in a number of contexts, and the trends that it captures are subject to myriad interpretations by scholars, policymakers, and social critics. As a result, the term is contested and not without discursive, political, and ideological problems.¹ However, “postindustrial” can be a useful way to mark the decline in manufacturing and the acceleration of the FIRE economy—finance, insurance, and real estate—in urban centers and some of the resulting social and cultural conditions and structures of feeling among city residents. This chapter, “Survival in a City Transformed,” provides a sketch of the postindustrial landscape of New York City, in which Gleason’s Gym and this ethnography are situated. The first part of the chapter examines postindustrial restructurings and some of the accompanying social and cultural changes, such as the elimination of welfare entitlements, the expansion of crime control, and the ascension of consumer capitalism. The second part looks at how postindustrial restructurings affected urban boxing gyms in New York City. I argue that Gleason’s Gym survived the vicissitudes of the new postindustrial economy by incorporating some of its features, such as the turn to multiculturalism and diversity, the shift to cosmopolitanism and aggressive advertising, and the focus on the body and emergence of the fitness industry.

POSTINDUSTRIAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESTRUCTURINGS

NEW YORK’S LABOR AND HOUSING MARKETS

In studies of the labor market, the postindustrial points to a specific economic restructuring that began in the late 1960s in which metropolitan centers that manufactured goods began to focus more heavily on retail, financial, and corporate services.² That is, the postindustrial registers a reorganization in which reliance on industrial capital was replaced by reliance on the FIRE industries. As industrial operations scattered to the global south, which offered lower taxes as well as less regulation, union organizing, and collective bargaining, cities in the Northeast and the Midwest lost a devastating number of jobs, turning them into rustbelt regions.³ Though many urban economies suffered from this process of deindustrialization, New York City was disproportionately affected. The changes New York City endured were more exaggerated and the growth of services quicker and more extensive than in other cities.⁴ Between 1965 and 1989, the number of manufacturing jobs in New York fell from 865,000 to 355,000, causing a rapid rise in unemployment.⁵ Workers who lost manufacturing jobs had a difficult time finding employment of comparable remuneration in the new service economy and had few opportunities for upward mobility.⁶

While Fordist models of production were on the decline, new modes of accumulation gained ascendancy.⁷ New possibilities for global trade and direct foreign investment, innovations in technology and its uses, advances in transportation, and the growing power of multinational finance and telecommunication firms shaped the postindustrial economy.⁸ In her work on the globalization of economic activity, Saskia Sassen suggests that cities such as New York emerged not only as places where capital is coordinated but also as production sites. The production of financial goods and services requires what she calls “dispersal” and “concentration”; because some economic practices are decentralized, others must be more centralized.⁹ For instance, as jobs moved from US metropolitan centers to peripheral low-wage areas, more coordination was necessary in central business districts. Sassen explains, “The more dispersed a firm’s operations across different countries, the more complex and strategic its central functions—that is, the work of managing, coordinating, servicing, financing a firm’s network of operations.”¹⁰ A new class of professionals to do this managing, coordinating, servicing and financing soon formed.

Concentration and dispersal restructured the labor market and changed the nature of work in urban areas. Workers bifurcated into “core” and “contingent” laborers. Core workers are executives, consultants, managers, and a range of specialists who manage capital. Contingent workers, or unskilled laborers in personal services, support the economic activities and personal lives of core workers.¹¹ The experiences of work and the financial compensation of the two groups stand in sharp contrast. Core workers enjoy higher salaries, better benefits, and more job security than contingent workers and, as a result, the former have access to more possibilities for wealth accrual, such as investment in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.¹² Contingent workers engage in low-wage and unstable work: typically labor that has been subcontracted or that is part-time, seasonal, and temporary.¹³ Though this flexibility reduces costs, it creates job insecurity and instability, benefit losses, and a reduction in investment in human capital.¹⁴

While the postindustrial economy promised new possibilities of profit and accumulation, wealth was unevenly distributed across society.¹⁵ The owners and managers of capital disproportionally benefitted from the economy’s splendors and a polarization of income financially distanced contingent workers from core workers.¹⁶ An earning gap between manufacturing and nonmanufacturing, retail services and corporate services, and the outlying boroughs and Manhattan increased the gap between poor and rich.¹⁷ Service jobs of contingent workers paid far less than did Fordist manufacturing jobs, and the remaining manufacturing jobs became low-wage and low-skill. Unionization rates plummeted and the power of remaining unions to negotiate reasonable contracts diminished.¹⁸ Further, the new economy presented tremendous obstacles to career advancement and social mobility for contingent workers.¹⁹ On the whole, low-income service jobs caused contingent workers to labor more and make less.²⁰

New York City’s economic restructuring disproportionately affected black and Latino residents and created a racialized and gendered division of labor.²¹ In the postindustrial economy, black and Latino workers were excluded from the best-paid jobs. With their circumstances compounded by employers’ preferences for Latino workers, women, and even white ex-prisoners over black workers without criminal records, black men faced difficulty even securing low-wage employment.²² When they did obtain work, black men were paid below living wages. Poverty rates skyrocketed and produced new forms of racial inequality. Under- and unemployment continue to burden workers of color. In 2004, 72 percent of black men in their twenties who had not completed high school did not have work, while 50 percent of black high-school graduates could not find a job.²³ Today the division of labor in postindustrial New York is split predominantly among white men (and, to a lesser extent, white women) in professional and management positions, black women and Latino men and women working in clerical or service jobs, and Asian and Latino workers laboring in the remaining low-income manufacturing positions.²⁴

The racial inequalities in the service economy reproduced themselves spatially in the form of residential segregation. The new economy required space for expanding businesses, hospitals, and universities while a growing class of core workers in postindustrial growth sectors produced new markets for luxury condominiums and Manhattan loft space.²⁵ Urban areas previously zoned for industry were repurposed and developed as office and residential quarters. The pace of gentrification accelerated and real estate speculation escalated. Much of the city’s real estate was gobbled up by the rich, decimating the number of affordable housing units for working individuals and families. The housing market in areas of New York with large numbers of black and Latino residents—namely the Bronx, northern Manhattan, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and central Brooklyn—collapsed.²⁶ Alex Vitale writes:

Throughout the 1980s, the city’s spending on homelessness-related services was directed toward providing emergency shelter and social services. Only a small amount was spent on creating new affordable housing for those on public assistance or working for low wages. At the same time, however, billions were spent on tax incentives and direct subsidies to encourage the development of high-rent commercial buildings and luxury housing, which often displaced low-income housing and low-skilled jobs. This unequal development destabilized many middle-class communities through the twin problems of rampant disorder emanating from the growing underclass and gentrification pressures coming from the new, extremely wealthy professional class.²⁷

Such spending priorities precipitated a housing crisis that continues to affect families of color, who are more likely to live in overcrowded and decrepit housing than are white residents.²⁸

SOCIAL ENTITLEMENTS AND CRIME CONTROL

Postindustrialism not only restructured the labor and housing markets but also redefined the relationships among capital, workers, and the state. The market gained enormous power in the economic and social lives of New York City residents just as the state began shirking its responsibilities for providing social entitlements.²⁹ A system of governance promoting corporate deregulation, social-welfare cuts, and law and order policies supported the postindustrial economy. Contrary to the priorities of state intervention created under twentieth-century industrial capitalism, this system of governance relies on discourses of “personal responsibility,” which look to the market and individual initiative rather than structural context or social conditions to solve social problems and inequalities.³⁰ Welfare reform, which began under President Reagan and was refined under President G.H.W. Bush, culminated in President Clinton’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and obliterated three-quarters of a century of social welfare for the poor. Logistically, by annihilating Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), an outgrowth of earlier mother and widow pension programs, and creating Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the law imposed time limits on social assistance, required clients to work in low-wage positions, and slashed compensation. Ideologically, it attacked the disenfranchised and marginalized, especially the poor of color, and blamed them for their circumstances. It also buttressed a postindustrial labor market that needed low-skill and low-wage workers to fill service positions. In doing so, it created a group of vulnerable workers who were available to capital for exploitation, a racialized process.³¹

Welfare reform was just one part of a larger conservative attack on the poor of color, especially urban youth, and dovetailed with a new focus on law and order, particularly crime control.³² “Tough on crime” legislation and practices abolished rehabilitation, for the most part, and fixated instead on an array of new penalties, such as three-strike rules,³³ truth-in-sentencing laws,³⁴ victim impact statements, sentencing guidelines, and “zero tolerance.” The emerging crime complex instituted longer sentences than ever before and expanded the number of nonviolent acts considered criminal, which exploded the prison population even as crime rates dropped.³⁵ Between 1970 and 1982, the US prison population doubled, and between 1982 and 1999, it tripled.³⁶ The prison industry in the United States costs roughly $35 billion and employs more than 525,000 workers, more than any Fortune 500 company other than Ford Motors.³⁷ It confines more than two million people and forces nearly five million additional individuals under custodial supervision, such as parole, probation, and work release.³⁸ Most of these men and women are low-skilled, low-income black and Latino and have been charged with low-level drug trading and consuming, even though, as Michelle Alexander documents, drugs are used and sold at comparable rates across race lines.³⁹

CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE RISE OF URBAN FITNESS

As the structure of the economy and governance changed, consumer culture in the US grew rapidly. Whereas many scholars focus on the FIRE industries to understand New York’s transformation, others look at how postindustrial spaces and capital provided resources for new forms of cultural production. What were once wastelands and sites of decay and abandonment turned into premier locations for redevelopment and cultural attractions.⁴⁰ In an attempt to lure consumers possessing amounts of wealth unparalleled in history into spending large sums, cities promoted renewal projects and invested in upscale leisure activities, hotels, convention centers, restaurants, shopping malls, theaters, and the revitalization of downtown and waterfront areas.⁴¹ At the same time, newly commodified cultural objects and subjects proliferated and expanded their reach in the global marketplace.⁴² With more disposable income and better access to mass-produced and mass-marketed goods, individuals and families enjoyed unprecedented levels of consumption.⁴³ In New York, a thriving cultural economy provided billions of dollars in the forms of jobs and revenue and today employs almost as many people as finance and medicine do.⁴⁴ It is undergirded by diversity, multiculturalism, and advertising. Richard Lloyd explains:

In contrast to theories of the city as trending toward increased homogenization and sanitation in response to the demands of new residents, diversity here is taken to be a central principle of urban authenticity, and the definition of diversity typically p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter One: Survival in a City Transformed: The Urban Boxing Gym in Postindustrial New York
• Chapter Two: Work Without Wages
• Chapter Three: Tough Love and Intimacy in a Community of Men
• Chapter Four: Passing Time: The Expressive Culture of Everyday Gym Life
• Chapter Five: The Changing Politics of Gender
• Chapter Six: Buying and Selling Blackness: White-Collar Boxing and the Cultural Capital of Racial Difference
• Epilogue
• Methodological Appendix: Ethnographic Research in the Urban Gym
• Notes
• References
• Index