Page 32 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Consumption in Context . 17

rate for children aged 5 years and under was 50 percent. These economic
extremes are a relatively recent development. Newhallville was for many
decades a thriving, multiethnic neighborhood filled with blue-collar
workers who owned their homes and worked in nearby factories. These
factories set the rhythm of the area, punctuating the day with streams of
people going to and from work on one of the three daily shifts. One
longtime resident recalled a neighbor whom she had never met, but
who used to walk past her house every night, using a shortcut that went
through her backyard, whistling on his way to his graveyard-shift job at
the Winchester plant.
Inhabited by successive waves of German, Irish, Italian, and African
American residents, Newhallville's fortunes have depended largely on
those of the Winchester Repeating Arms plant. Employing 12,000 dur-
ing the World War II years, by the late 1970s that number was only
about 1,400 (City of New Haven 1982). Only 475 people worked at
Winchester in 1992. Today, Newhallville residents work as home health
aides, nursing assistants, nurses, janitors, teachers, police officers, and
firefighters, among other things. While these jobs often offer some bene-
fits and security, they just as often do not, and rarely do any of these
forms of employment rival that which was once offered at the factory in
terms of pay, regularity, and security. Moreover, when factories were
major employers, it was possible to land a well-paying job with only a
high school diploma. Many service-sector jobs require not only a high
school diploma but additional, specialized education or training, and
Newhallville residents must now be more highly educated and enter the
workforce later than in the past. These are also jobs that typically de-
mand or create a highly feminized workforce. Despite these changing
labor force demands, public schools have been increasingly troubled,
with high schools graduating in some cases less than half of any in-
coming class.
During the past several years, the city has been engaged in transform-
ing the former site of the Winchester plant into an industrial park. This
success has been tentative at best (City of New Haven Blue Ribbon
Commission 1990); at the time of my research the facility was un-
finished and only partly occupied. In an ironic twist, one of the most vis-
ible occupants of Science Park is the New Haven Family Alliance, a non-
profit organization devoted to helping dysfunctional families and
troubled youth. During my fieldwork neighborhood residents had to ask
security guards for permission to enter the former site of their (or their
parents') employment in order to visit an organization whose purpose is