A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 by Marta Gutman

Abstract

Book Reviews 197 children in the design of space and places for them both in the community and in structured spaces, where children spend much of their time. Policy makers and educators could learn much from reading these chapters. Indeed, if we continue to direct and shape the spaces our children can inhabit, then understanding the dissonances between the purpose and use of spaces for children, and the value of embodied, affective and just children’s spaces is essential. References Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. (Richard Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacRae, C. (2011). Making Payton’s rocket: Heterotopia and lines of flight. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 30(1), 102–112. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge. Tilley, C. (2004). The materiality of stone: Explorations in landscape phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. Review by Kumara Ward Dr. Kumara Ward is an academic at Western Sydney University teaching curriculum and Pedagogy in the Early Childhood Education program and a member of the Centre for Educational Research – Sustainability Strand. Her teaching, doctorial studies and current research focus on the symbiosis between the arts and the natural and built worlds and ways in which they promote embodied interaction and multifaceted ways of knowing our complex human and other than human common worlds. A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 Marta Gutman (2014) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 454 pages. $45.00; ISBN: 978-0-226-311289 Idealism followed industry into Oakland during 1870. The arrival in California of the transcontinental railroad in November 1869 helped hasten the growth of a settlement some 10,500 strong into one playing host, just 20 years later, to nearly 50,000 residents and all manner of attendant social concerns. Female charitable enterprise fanned out across the expanding city, with the Ladies’ Relief Society and sister organizations building from scratch upon foundations of religious Book Reviews 198 determination, expertise from neighboring San Francisco and no little local resolve. Into this “charitable landscape” steps Marta Gutman, scholar, architect and our expert chaperone to a world now mostly lost. A City for Children covers a hundred years and more of Oakland’s history, taking the reader up to the destruction—facilitated by an ex-army Sherman tank, no less— of the New Century Recreation Center, a neighboring playground, and public school. That recreation center and playground, together with kindergartens, orphanages, homes for the destitute, and daycare facilities, formed nodal points in a web of civic philanthropy. It is the very great achievement of this book to recover, reimagine and scrutinize this landscape made for the benefit of children by redoubtable women including dressmaker Rebecca McWade and teacher Elizabeth Betts. Eschewing the tendency of historians of childhood to focus on places for children in isolation, Gutman knits together the entire charitable city as it would have appeared to its sponsors and beneficiaries. To achieve this, the author draws on archival evidence ranging from oral histories to government reports and photographs, all interpreted with acuity. Particularly noteworthy are Gutman’s remarkable (and self-fashioned) neighborhood maps depicting the scale, layout and crucial proximity of institutions charitable and religious. Based on details gleaned from insurance records and (as the author states very modestly) “information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork” (see, for instance, page 107), these maps represent an enormous labor of love and help excavate a layer of city life now obscured. Such painstaking attention to place is characteristic of a study many years in the making. Standing out as memorable landmarks in Gutman’s landscape are buildings intended for one activity and appropriated—or “repurposed”—for another. The chapter on “The Saloon That Became a School” exemplifies the author’s arguments regarding activists’ drive for identity to flow from spatial configuration. For example, Elizabeth Betts’ West Oakland Free Kindergarten occupied a site facing the rail terminus and intended to promote sobriety and particular forms of socialization among the many immigrant children arriving into the city. The “metaphor and practice of salvage” (p. 30) also characterized women, either privileged or more modest in means, who transformed private homes into charitable spaces, a process...