Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan (review)

Some of the Civil War’s first casualties fell on Baltimore’s Pratt Street. In Taking the Land to Make the City, Mary P. Ryan situates this event not in the national conflict, but in the local contexts of street politics, municipal finance, and infrastructure maintenance. After decades of friction between the city and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Baltimore City Council restricted steam locomotives from traversing the city. Passengers thus had to disembark at the city’s eastern depot and proceed down Pratt Street to reboard at Camden Station. On April 19, 1861, soldiers bound for Washington, D.C., encountered this detail of urban governance in conjunction with another of the city’s mundane tasks: street repair. Paving stones became projectiles on Pratt Street, but the traditions of street politics ultimately saved the day. The mayor walked among the public to calm tensions, stopping the ambush from becoming a full-fledged battle.

In her deeply researched history of Baltimore and San Francisco, Ryan explores how events of national or municipal import are produced by hyperlocal politics and urban space. Ultimately, this “bicoastal history” illustrates just how differently the two cities developed, even as Ryan highlights key similarities, especially in the processes of dispossessing indigenous populations and converting land into private real estate and publicly shared space. Ryan is ultimately more concerned with the process of “taking the land,” through which she traces the emergence of capitalist cities whose governments care more for private property than democracy among citizens.

In the first part of the book, Ryan takes great pains to establish that the spaces that become Baltimore and San Francisco had long been the productive homes of the Powhatan and Ohlone peoples, respectively. This attention to Native American settlements and land use is an important corrective to urban and planning histories, which often start with European ideas about and plans for cities in the Americas. Despite this promising start, Native Americans largely disappear from Ryan’s narrative after colonists encroach on each shore. The implication is that once Native Americans no longer controlled the land through use or ownership, they ceased to actively make the cities.

Part 2 documents the early creation of European settlements in both spaces, and part 3 focuses on the emergence of “capitalist cities” in the early decades of the nineteenth century. By working carefully through municipal documents and legal conflict—nearly every endnote refers to a primary source—Ryan illustrates the halting and piecemeal process of urban development, in which residents, politicians, and real estate developers responded to particular local issues, especially those of environment and finance. This approach especially shines when Ryan uses testimony before the U.S. Land Commission to illustrate that knowing property and boundaries was a vernacular and social process between neighbors before the federal government arrived in California with surveyors to make maps. Ryan demonstrates that town and city creation followed vernacular logics more often than it adhered to any grand vision for urban space. Thus San Francisco was never a Spanish-style city organized around plazas, no more than Baltimore replicated the urban conditions of England.

By narrating the development of the two cities in tandem, Ryan also illustrates how the explosive growth of San Francisco created tremendous problems of municipal governance, which were solved by selling off public lands. While Baltimore struggled as it expanded, its government had more time to grapple with and create solutions for emerging problems. The difference is evident in city streets: Baltimore’s streets were created through the donation of narrow slices of private property to the public, whose paving was primarily financed by property owners in compliance with what a majority of their neighbors decided by voting. In comparison to this “practical lesson in democratic citizenship” (160), wherein Baltimoreans learned to collaborate with one another and take part in municipal governance, San Francisco’s streets were...