"Yellow Fever Always Begins . . . Near the Water": Urban Epidemics, Spot Maps, and Early National Architectural Improvements

Abstract

Drawing on urban and architectural history, material culture, and historical geography, this article offers a new way to conceptualize the public reception of theories about epidemic disease and the built environment in the early national period. It explores a genre of yellow fever pamphlet containing narrative text, architectural proposals, and spot maps that reinforced Americans' judgments about the kinds of people and places most prone to disease, and ultimately about the kinds of infrastructure they hoped to build in response. Pamphleteers identified waterfront districts and their lower-class residents as purveyors of disease. Over time, their writings did more than simply diagnose the relationship between poverty, illness, and infrastructure. They helped readers forge mental maps of these neighborhoods and their poorer occupants that shaped conversations at the municipal level about possible futures for city living. Following successive yellow fever outbreaks, Americans considered the urban waterfront and its poorer occupants as conduits for sickness, and therefore appropriate targets of infrastructural reform and displacement.