Nineteenth-century City Research Articles

The spatial differentiation of commercial and residential functions in Cork city 1787–1863

This paper is concerned with an examination of some aspects of the emergence of functional and social segregation in Cork over the period 1787 to 1863. The discussion is placed in the context of the general conclusions reached by some geographers who have carried out research on this topic in recent years. The central question which has emerged from such work has been to what extent well-defined levels of differentiation emerged in the nineteenth century city and to what did they owe their development. Here, the development of differentiation in Cork is examined through a study, based on information available in street and trade directories, of some activities which were sensitive to social and economic change and whose location may therefore reveal aspects of such differentiation. It emerges from the study that the city exhibited clear but spatially limited segregation in the late eighteenth century and that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the well-defined differentiation which characterises the modern city became evident.

Rhythm, Flight, and Burnout: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the Clerks in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Rhythm, Flight, and Burnout: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the Clerks in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Review: The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York by Nicholas Daly

Review: The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York by Nicholas Daly

People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London

The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.

Zoning Before Zoning: Land Use and Density in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City

Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did U.S. city governments turn to comprehensive zoning to gain control of their land use and built environment. Nineteenth-century cities had comparatively unregulated land-use systems, where proprietors and builders found minimal restrictions to their choices to develop urban land. This article exploits newly digitized geographic information systems (GIS) data, at the level of building footprints, made available by the New York Public Library, to study the land-use geography of mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan, the Western world's then third largest city. We ask: What was the spatial order of the nineteenth-century city? Beyond the case, what can we learn about land use in a political economy where market forces operated with much greater freedom? Addressing these issues, we introduce a variety of advanced GIS methods to the original data set. Specifically, we examine the separation and mixing of the three basic land-use types of commerce, industry, and residence, by the spatial units of both blocks and streets. In addition, we measure at a new level of precision the enormous variations in residential density and crowding that defined the growing sociospatial inequalities of nineteenth-century cities. Documenting systematically and in detail these spatial patterns, including their socially undesirable outcomes, helps understand how nineteenth-century cities developed and the conditions they produced to warrant increasing land-use controls, from building codes to government-mandated zoning.

At home in nineteenth-century America: a documentary history

Contents 1. The Emergence of the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideal 11 2. The Persistence of Domestic Labor 52 3. Home, Civilization, and Citizenship 97 4. The American Home on the Move in the Age of Expansion 132 5. At Home in the Late Nineteenth-Century City 160 6. Dismantling the Victorian Ideal and the Future of Domesticity 199

Streetlife in Late Victorian London: The Constable and the Crowd

The study of Victorian cities helped foster the emergence of social history after 1945. From Asa Briggs to Tristram Hunt, historians demonstrated how cities became sources of antagonism but also machines in which commerce could thrive, the disorderly forces of dirt and disease could be overcome, and modern understandings of class society could emerge.1 Urban history also provided ample opportunity for dialogue with sociologists and others about the new ways of living that cities created and their networks of power and sociability. There was no shortage of sources but it was common to ransack investigators like Henry Mayhew and novelists who could recreate the maelstrom of nineteenth-century city life. There was, however, another figure who observed the Victorian city and indeed was paid to do it: the humble police constable. His notebooks and other police records make possible a different kind of urban history from below. This is the starting point for Peter K. Andersson's important book about street life in the later nineteenth century. Whilst his book can profitably be read by historians of crime, Andersson rightly spots that police records give us an effective point of entry into exploring quotidian behaviour. The book becomes a study of the ‘etiquette of street life’ (p. 204). Andersson deliberately focuses on the mundane and the ordinary, the patterns of behaviour evident as Victorians went about their daily business. The obvious objection to this source material would be that police records deal mainly with flashpoints and moments of conflict, which can skew the way we think about ordinary life. Andersson, however, argues convincingly that such records offer clues about social codes and notions of what was acceptable in human interactions. In the Victorian city, people could not always walk where they liked or behave as they pleased. They had to negotiate a series of social expectations.

Linley Sambourne's Diary of 1889: A Punch Cartoonist at Leisure

Linley Sambourne``s Diary of 1889 affords a glimpse into an English middle-class man``s everyday life. Above all, it serves as a reference point in considering the rise of modern leisure society in the late nineteenth-century city. The journal coincided with the period in which the informally organised forms of leisure shifted into a structured industry. The transition evinces a crucial symptom of capitalist society that everyday life was being restructured in new terms, subject to a massive extension of the capitalist market, and thus began to expose signs of tension and anxiety. Sambourne``s tantalising journal, however, while illustrating a wide range of venues, omits detailed description or sustained commentary upon the nature of modern leisure society, rarely revealing any of its underlying psychological or social complexities. They leave unanswered the feasible quests into what it was really like to be engaged in urban entertainment in the milieu of increasingly commercialised modern culture. In conclusion, the journal prominently features the rise of the leisure industry but the destabilising junctures of the phenomenon is intriguingly downplayed without being open to any critical scrutiny, which ultimately indicates a peculiarly conservative outlook on consumer oriented existence on the author’s part.

Review of 'The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth Century City. Paris, London, New York'

Review of 'The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth Century City. Paris, London, New York'

The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York by Nicholas Daly

The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York by Nicholas Daly

‘Multiple Sonderwegs.’ The Specificity of Historical Development of East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Introductory Remarks)

This introductory article offers intellectual frames and historical context to the subsequent collection of essays. There are two questions their authors try and answer: First, what discussions on the respective specificities of historical develop­ment were carried out in various countries of East Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Second, what was the scope of topics to be discussed, whereas their aim is to interweave this description or analysis of the debates with posing the question regarding the core of the matter – and this by showing a series of case studies where the approach connected, in some way or another, with the peculiar path concept might seem useful. For the purpose of this volume, the notion of peculiar path is approached in a possibly broad context. The structure of the nineteenth-century city, formation of a modern national awareness: such problems are suitable, according to the authors, for research in view of multiplicity of peculiar paths: rather than highways along which the Zeitgeist of a nation or humanity streaks, these would be medium-rank and medium-sized roads on which medium-scale processes and occurrences roll along.

Dirty Politics: Public Employees, Private Contractors, and the Development of Nineteenth-Century Trash Collection in Pittsburgh and New Orleans

Nineteenth-century Pittsburgh and New Orleans were a mess: trash filled the streets impeding travel, hindering commerce, and spreading disease. City officials in Pittsburgh turned to private contractors to collect trash at public expense while in New Orleans they relied on city employees (through the mechanism of widows carts). Like Pittsburgh and New Orleans, nineteenth-century cities faced a mounting garbage problem and, like Pittsburgh, northern cities more often chose contract while southern cities more often chose city collection. In this paper, we look in depth at how Pittsburgh and New Orleans chose contract and city collection, what those solutions looked like in practice, and how these two cases might shed light on the North-South difference. We find that both cities rebuffed offers of assistance that may have led to better trash collection and instead based their collection practices on politics. Moreover, the solutions in practice defied the dichotomous labels of public and private and the assumptions that underlie each.

History Lessons: What Urban Environmental Ethics Can Learn from Nineteenth Century Cities

In this paper, I outline valuable insights that current theorists working in urban environmental ethics can gain from the analysis of nineteenth century urban contexts. Specifically, I argue that an analysis of urban areas during this time reveals two sets of competing metaphysical commitments that, when accepted, shift both the design of urban environments and our relationship with the natural world in these contexts. While one set of metaphysical commitments could help inform current projects in urban environmental ethics, the second “de-animalized” or “cleansed” commitments that influenced the structure of post-nineteenth century urban areas could potentially harm projects in urban environmental ethics. Thus we need to be particularly careful when choosing a metaphysical base for our current urban environmental ethics, as, depending on your specific project, implicitly accepting certain commitments could inadvertently work against the overall goals of the project.

Of Monsters and Madness by Jessica Verday (review)

Reviewed by: Of Monsters and Madness by Jessica Verday Kate Quealy-Gainer Verday, Jessica Of Monsters and Madness. Egmont, 2014 [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-60684-463-2 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN978-1-60684-464-9 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10 Summoned by her father to Philadelphia, seventeen-year-old Annabel Lee finds the cold, dreary streets of the early nineteenth-century city an unwelcome change from the sunny heat of Siam, where she and her now-deceased mother had been living for the last ten years. The erratic moods of her doctor father, his foreboding and shadowy estate, and a recent spate of murders nearby make Annabel even more uncomfortable, but she manages to befriend a few of the house servants, who warn her not to wander the grounds at night and particularly to never enter her father’s laboratory. She also finds a companion in Allan Poe, one of her father’s assistant, and an enemy in Edgar, her father’s second assistant, whose cruel behavior disturbs her almost as much as his eerie resemblance to Allan. The murders increase in frequency along with the odd behavior of her father, Allan, and Edgar, and Annabel finds herself in the middle of an unfathomable horror when the life of her servant friend is threatened. The multiple allusions to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, and Poe’s works make for more of a cluttered pastiche than a stylish homage, and the classic gothic elements—the creepy house, the mad scientist, etc.—feel like generic retreads, as does Annabel’s twisted romance with Allan/Edgar. Still, the themes of death, morality, love, and desire are all here, and the tone moves to true horror when Edgar reveals the extent of his dirty work in vivid and visceral detail. Readers just discovering classic horror works might be intrigued, and the book’s quick pace will be particularly appealing to those readers still intimidated by Shelley and Stevenson. [End Page 178] Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Leary Larrikin

ABSTRACTThis article explores the sartorial style of participants in a street-based youth subculture that thrived in late nineteenth-century Australian cities. Known as ‘larrikins', the lower working-class youth so described had a distinctive style of dress including heeled boots and bell-bottomed trousers. Here we examine the material processes through which this larrikin look was produced, locating it in distinctive urban settings and placing it against a backdrop of nascent mass consumption. While also considering the cultural sources of inspiration for larrikin style, our key aim is to demonstrate the richness of an analysis attuned to materiality, preferring this to the semiotic approaches that dominate the relevant literature.

Architecture as a Generator of Health and Well-being.

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The Gold Diggers of 1833: African American Dreams, Fortune-Telling, Treasure-Seeking, and Policy in Antebellum New York City

This is an article about black dreams, blacks digging for buried treasure, and black fortune tellers, mostly in New York City (although Philadelphia occasionally comes up as well) in the first half of the nineteenth century. The piece is based on decades of reading court cases and newspapers and in it, I adduce a whole lot of material, much of which has not been seen by anyone else in over one hundred and seventy-five years, in order to try and disturb, just a little, the historiographies of, on the one hand, free black life in nineteenth-century New York City, and on the other, that of conjure. In contradistinction to most other scholars working on African Americans in New York City, indeed writing about the North and perhaps even African America, I am little interested in voluntary organizations, religious organizations and the like, or for that matter most of the black leaders or the black elite, all of which subjects have been examined well and extensively by other historians. My interests lie elsewhere, in finding and exploiting sources that enable us to get at, even if usually only obliquely, those who too often get omitted from historical accounts. This piece, then, is part of my long-standing effort to recover the everyday lives of ordinary African Americans living in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Mysteries of Los Angeles; or, They Live , "Eight O'Clock in the Morning," City Mysteries, and the Apotheosis of the Mechanic Hero

John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live has a well-deserved reputation for being, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, the "true neglected masterpiece of the Hollywood Left." While this reputation is primarily based on the films depiction of a working-class hero's slaughter of yuppie scum who were actually aliens attempting to take over the world, Carpenter's narrative resonates with popular American narratives championing the working class at the expense of urban professionals that were being produced long before the 1980s. This essay clarifies the historical sweep of They Live's populist assault by tracing two important antecedents of Carpenter's film: the nineteenth century's city mysteries genre and Ray Nelson's 1963 short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning." Investigating these antecedents illuminates They Live's relationship to previous fictive critiques of capitalism while at the same time demonstrating that elements of once-popular narratives have what could be considered a cultural half-life in which they are available for creative retelling, and that They Live can be profitably read as such a creative retelling.

Sites of "Disconnectedness": The Port City of Yokohama, Souvenir Photography, and its Audience

Photography and East Asian ports formed an inextricably tight relationship during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Initially launched by Western photographers, photography in East Asian treaty ports captured exotic customs and landscapes of East Asia and was an indispensable part of the newly emerging culture of port cities. In Japan, the tourist photography industry was established in the mid-nineteenth century at treaty ports and flourished as an ever growing industry until the beginning of the twentieth century. Catering exclusively to the non-Japanese audience in the West, this photographic industry cultivated a parallel image culture to the indigenous photography scene with its distinctive iconographic repertoire and its particular visual aesthetics. Conditioned by transport technologies, the profile of the foreign clientele of this image industry was never monolithic, and experienced a radical shift in the course of its history, especially since the rise of the globetrotter tourism in the early 1870s. This very fact invites us to question how tourist photography as a commercial commodity responded to its changing circumstances and how the industry’s reaction was reflected in its visual imagination. My analysis focuses on clarifying the complex web of movements of people (photographers, customers of photographic images) in port cities and visual products (photography) within the context of the port city tourist industry, showing how this dynamic was embodied in the intricate strategy of its photographic imaginations. By taking the tourist photography industry in Yokohama as an example, this paper illustrates how it was launched as a business emblematic of nineteenth-century European and American entrepreneurship in East Asia, and how it developed a unique image culture that spread from the port city of Yokohama to Europe, the US, and Australia. It also looks into its visual language and illuminate how this commercial image industry consciously related its geographical, historical, economic, and cultural specificity to its visual products. By doing so, I aim to demonstrate that photography, in this regard, proves to be a cultural artifact mirroring complex interconnections taking place in the nineteenth-century port city of Yokohama.

The Morphology of Nineteenth-Century Cities in the United States

Set within the context of varying traditions of Western urbanism, the U.S. city is considered as a partially autonomous creation, and emphasis is placed on the development of its physical forms during the crucial period of the nineteenth century. Nine distinguishing morphological characteristics such as low density, indistinct urban fringes, and short life of buildings are given special stress. Five broad themes, ranging from the nature of the American environment to the cultural value of land and government, are suggested as possible explanations of American physical urban traits. This is followed by a review of concepts and general findings regarding the three basic components of American urban form: land use ecology, history of building fabric, and cadastral patterns. The essay closes with a more detailed analysis of trends in the last category, given the dearth of conceptual clarity concerning this component. General changes in and representative examples of simple and complex urban ground plans of U.S. cities in the nineteenth century include colonial antecedents, new town foundations, and mature town accretions and modifications both on urban fringes and within densely-built urban cores. Finally, a preliminary division of the century into three morphogenetic periods is offered with a view to stimulating further development of the suggested framework.