City Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New Nineteenth-Century City (review)

Diane Shaw argues that the sorting and ordering of urban space was an intentional and manipulated process. Thus the city is a cultural construct. Historians whose mantra has long been "technology is a social process" will hardly find this news. Nevertheless, this carefully researched, fine-grained analysis demonstrates just how these processes worked themselves out on the ground and the ways in which the city itself became an agent of change. Shaw examines the physical and spatial development of Rochester and Syracuse, New York, during their early decades of the nineteenth century. Both had promising sites—Rochester emerged where the Genesee River drops two hundred feet just seven miles from its mouth on Lake Ontario, and Syracuse was situated near the state-owned salt springs—but it was the construction of the Erie Canal that transformed both into boom towns.

The initial plans focused on commerce and interregional connections. The 1811 Rochester plan laid out a main street that was ninety-nine feet wide, expecting that it would be the route of the state turnpike to Buffalo; the 1819 Syracuse plan anticipated that the Erie Canal would run right through its center. The founders shrewdly used land sales to give the impression of a viable urban place. Lots near the main intersection were narrower and priced higher than those a few streets away, even though they had no immediate locational advantage. In Rochester, deed restrictions on lot sales required buyers to erect structures within a short period, and, to ensure the emergence of a cohesive mill district, the founders only leased lots along the millrace. With the coming of the canal, warehouses, forwarding agents, banks, and newspapers created a small but distinct commercial core that was separate from the mills, though the separation was only by a street or two. Buildings often combined wholesale and retail functions. Syracuse, in particular, featured double-fronted buildings with pulleys, hoists, and loading bays on the canal side, and Greek Revival storefronts on the street side. The location of civic functions a few streets away from the main intersections further reflected the primacy of commerce. Again, developers exerted control, Nathanial Rochester himself donating land for his town's courthouse, school, and earliest churches.

In a particularly engaging chapter, Shaw discusses how a newly self-conscious middle class asserted control over public and semipublic spaces. As the cities grew, merchants rebuilt their shops to attract and reflect decorous gentility and a sense of order among middle-class shoppers. The hotels provided lounges, first for men and later for women. Each city attempted to regulate sidewalk obstructions and outlaw swearing and vulgarity on the streets. Larger buildings at prominent intersections marked off the space, "articulating the mercantile cityscape" (p. 66), announcing that each place was on its way to solid city status. Thus the built environment interacted with emerging new bourgeois standards, and a new aesthetic for the commercial district rendered these changes in three dimensions. In this interactive sense, then, the urban space itself became an agent of change.

For almost forty years, urban historians have relied on Sam Bass Warner's model of the pre-industrial "walking city," which posits that before the introduction of mass transit, cities and towns evidenced little internal differentiation. This model has already been substantially undermined in terms of residential segregation, and studies on New York and Philadelphia make clear that these cities were well on their way to functional differentiation by the 1820s. But by examining two small cities from the beginning of their development, Shaw is able to describe the incremental stages of these processes.