A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (review)

A River and Its City examines the historical relationship between the Mississippi River and the city of New Orleans. Kelman explores several episodes of environmental history involving the River (representing the physical natural environment) and New Orleans' levee-waterfront (representing the human cultural landscape). Thus does he show how New Orleans and its Mississippi River site evolved as public and private space between 1807 and the 1960s. It is a story about human movers and shakers eager for development, not preservation, and the geomorphic stubbornness of a river with a mind of its own.

Chapter one explains the integral importance of the batture, a mysterious mud flat of land that lies between the actual river and the natural levee crest, the conflict of ownership and land use that centered around it during the nineteenth-century. Chapter two explores the commercial impact of the steamboat on the riverfront. Chapter three graphically covers the yellow-fever epidemic of 1853. Chapter four deals with post-Civil War reconstruction, the coming of the railroads, the opening of the Mississippi's mouth, and commercial warehouses on the riverfront. Chapter five concerns the 1927 flood and a history of the man-made levee system. The epilogue examines battles surrounding the proposed interstate highway for the riverfront during the 1960s. Each episodic chapter does justice to the events of the time as seen through a multifaceted lens focused on the New Orleans riverfront. Kelman tells the stories in lucid prose that brings the changing relationship between the city and its river to life.

Kelman makes no mention of the relationship between the city and its adjacent riparian hinterland of sugarcane plantations, or even the presence of raw sugar or molasses on the New Orleans riverfront. He does not cite Rehder, Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape (Baltimore, 1999), which discusses the origins of sugarcane technology and the importance of New Orleans in its relationship between sugar plantations, their riverfront landings, and an entrepôt market in New Orleans.

Yet, Kelman generally avails himself of good references from geographers, historians, journalists, and primary sources. A River and Its City is an easy read and an engaging book with issues woven into a fabric of clear concise development.