Willamette Week chose the title "Panhandlers, Inc." for its cover story this week, a piece by Dave Fitzpatrick that described the author's experience when he grew stubble, made a cardboard sign, and stood on a streetcorner. Some people gave him money. Others -- other people with their own cardboard signs -- told him that others had already claimed his corner, and he had better leave promptly.
Mr. Fitzpatrick talked to other streetcorner people -- he uses the terms "signers" and "flaggers" interchangeably to describe them -- and at one corner found a man named Ted Sheppard, who said that his particular corner was controlled by a cartel of signers. "We organized this like a business," Mr. Sheppard said, with three people taking turns occupying the corner on Northeast 43rd Avenue.
This sent me to the Laquedem Library in search of Henry Mayhew's work from 1849-1951, London Labour and the London Poor. Alas, I have only an abridged edition (the complete work is four volumes of about 500 pages each), but I found the passage I had in mind, a portion of volume two that describes the crossing-sweepers of London: people who stood with brooms at street-crossings to sweep the crossing in front of pedestrians in the hopes of receiving a coin or two. Mr. Mayhew wrote, "The irregular sweepers mostly consist of boys and girls who have formed themselves into a kind of company, and come to an agreement to work together on the same crossings." He describes how the sweepers who have claimed a particular crossing fend off newcomers, in basically the same manner as the signers who have claimed Northeast 43rd Avenue.