City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago by Carl Smith (review)

Crisp, clean, and occasionally sparkling, City Water, City Life offers a cultural history of waterworks in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia from about 1790 to 1870. Arguing that “cities are built out of ideas,” Smith constructs his narrative using urban ideas about water and public waterworks (2). As city leaders struggled to slake the thirst and quench the fires of their growing cities, they diverted the stuff of lakes and rivers into tunnels and pumps and hydrants, compelling residents to confront the idea of water as a public good.

In the words and imagery of observers, public water became an impetus for collective action, evidence of human ingenuity, a purifier of social contamination, and a blessing for posterity. The development of waterworks forced city dwellers to re-evaluate their interdependence and their relationship to the environment. Urban reformers argued that water had the power to heal, cleanse, and detoxify in a world of disease, filth, and intemperance. Smith explores city leaders’ assertion that urban debt from public waterworks was a civic duty to future generations that held the promise of enduring greatness. Nevertheless, Smith shows, as users of city water multiplied, squandered, polluted, and sinned, their public works recurrently pointed up the fundamental folly of city life—the illusion of control.

Given the anxiety of nineteenth-century New Englanders about civic matters (Bostonians were especially slow to solve their water problems), Smith gives their valuations more space. Smith excels in his close reading of printed texts, paintings, sculpture, and public architecture, using the tools of cultural anthropology, art history, and literary criticism to explore abstract concepts alongside feats of engineering. Smith’s interpretation of Philadelphia artworks, for instance, reveals how city leaders celebrated water’s purity and power even as they reveled in their triumph over nature by diverting water from its natural courses. The book succeeds in its rendering of urban infrastructural history through insightful conclusions about prevailing ideas that were often in tension with one another.

In his introduction, Smith is forthright about his circumscribed research methods. First, he eschews manuscript sources, relying mainly on the voices of the elite. Evidence from public celebrations gives a fleeting sense of the broader populace, but some historians may be disappointed by the narrowness of his source base. Furthermore, Smith’s declaration that he “largely avoids retrospective evaluations” of historical actors accurately reflects the tone of the book (9). Nonetheless, the narrative unmistakably raises questions about social inequality and environmental disruption that are as relevant to current debates as they were in the past.

The tight structure and style aid the book’s clarity, though the organization also forces it into some repetition. Urban historians may already know a great deal about the construction of waterworks in individual cities, but this collective examination of three cities allows for a broader understanding of the meanings that American city-dwellers attached to their aqueducts, pipes, pumps, and faucets, and the water that these public works delivered.