Streetnotes

Based upon a series of ethnographic vignettes, interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this article profiles public chess playing in Greenwich Village, New York City.  I focus upon the famed public spaces for chess players like Washington Square Park and Union Square, and the atmosphere of anxiety and unrest due to the Covid-19 Pandemic and systemic racism surrounding the protests of the summer of 2020.  The long artistic and revolutionary history of Greenwich Village provides an intriguing context for public chess playing and the informal economy of hustling.  As the majority of the chess enthusiasts and table hosts are African American men and, given the metaphoric explanations of “chess as life,” sociopolitical context is critical.  In particular, political artistic displays and protests against police violence and systemic racism are no mere backdrop for chess playing, but intimately felt and entangled within the sense of place and public participation in downtown Manhattan.

As New York City, during 2020 and throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic era, faced multiple crises along with their sociopolitical responses; iconic staples of Greenwich Village life embodied by the area’s chess enthusiasts persist.  In order to illuminate the everyday life of chess playing in public, I focus on two players: Mr. Black in Washington Square Park and Alfred in Union Square.  These ethnographic vignettes reveal downtown chess playing as an activity inseparable from its urban context – uniquely and importantly a New Yorkers’ pastime and entangled within the socioeconomic, political, and artistic landscapes that color downtown New York City.