Inspired in part by Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, in this paper, I examine mundane-life in early to mid-twentieth century Cairo from a pedestrian’s street level perspective. “Walking and Working the Streets” is devoted to the sounds and activities of ordinary Cairene men and women as they used, physically occupied and walked through public roads to commute, work, sell, shop, and sometimes to be entertained. I will especially focus on the calls of street hawkers, entertainers and merchants who relied on their voices to advertise their goods and services. As I elaborate in my talk, the streets were not only a living, breathing laboratory for all of the rapid infrastructural and technological transformations unfolding at the turn of the twentieth-century, but they were one of the few places where all elements of society interacted face to face. Public streets and squares at the turn of the twentieth century however, were a contested space. In the second half of the paper, I examine both the Egyptian government’s attempts at regulating and silencing the streets and the class implications of these policies. New anti-begging and anti-homelessness discourses invoking fears of an imminent breakdown of public security, order and even public health. Here I document the ever-present class bias in the Egyptian press, especially with many articles and editorials calling for the silencing of street hawkers and the itinerant poor. These classist discourses were a dominant theme in the Egyptian press and were mostly a byproduct of a small yet growing upwardly mobile educated Egyptian middle class. Insecure perhaps in their newly acquired and still forming class position, and armed with an almost messianic civilizing mission to uplift the Egyptian masses to some subjective and idealized level of “modernity,” these writers and intellectuals vulgarized, infantilized, and sometimes dehumanized the vast majority of the Egyptian population. This was not merely a matter of aesthetics, cultural taste or re-enforcement of class distinction, but it was equally, a reflection of a deep-seated fear of the masses and a growing anxiety about street disorders. However, as I will elaborate in the conclusion, there were varying and creative ways with which ordinary Egyptian men and women clashed, negotiated with, or evaded state authorities. The itinerant poor and especially street hawkers, refused to be silenced and out of economic necessity, they often re-appropriated the “public” streets for their own use.