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Reviewed by:
  • Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001
  • John P. McCarthy (bio)
Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001. By David L. Pike. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii+377. $27.95.

As an urban archaeologist I have always been drawn to that which is underground, that which is unknown. Beginning first with the basement of his boyhood home near Louisville, Kentucky, David Pike too has been fascinated by the unknown underground spaces that are part of the fabric of the urban world. This volume, like his previous Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945, considers underground spaces and attitudes about such spaces that have affected the ways that we see, think about, and live in the modern city. His argument, in essence, is that contemporary attitudes about urban places were forged in the experiences and fears of the nineteenth century.

Following a preface and acknowledgments, the book is presented in four chapters. In the first, “The Devil, the Underground, and the Vertical City,” Pike expands on concepts briefly introduced in Subterranean Cities. The vertical city and its complementary modes of perception, the view from above and the view from below, define the range of vision of the underground spaces of the modern city. More than cemetery, the underground became a place of subways, sewers, and enclosed arcades made possible by advances in engineering and construction technologies.

The central sections, “The Devil Comes to Town” and “Mysteries of the Underground” set out these two perspectives in more detail. The first focuses on the evolution of the Devil as an object of folklore and theology to a figure that was used to negotiate ambivalent relationships with new technologies. Then Pike considers attitudes that developed as new images of the city were rooted in its subterranean spaces and the truths that were thought to be hidden there. Nineteenth-century society is depicted as torn [End Page 1057] between its celebrations of technological achievements (the banquet held in the Thames Tunnel) on the one hand and its fear of what lurked in the dark (the Highgate Tunnel became a notorious hiding place of highwaymen) on the other.

The final chapter, “Through the Looking Glass,” focuses first on the threshold spaces that divided below-and aboveground London and Paris and how these allowed for contact across class, sex, and racial divides in new ways. These same technologies then made possible industrial-scale warfare in the trenches of World War I, leading to further expression of the vertical city in film from the 1920s through the present. While the city has changed dramatically in the years since the vertical city and its views from above and from below emerged, these modes of conceptualizing urban space persist.

Pike draws on a wide and rich array of sources in weaving this narrative. Numerous visual media, most of it English and French, are mined for material, as are the writings of authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn, among many. He builds from a solid grounding in a critical reading of modernity and capitalism, including Lewis Mumford, Siegfried Giedion, and, of course, the Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin. This is an engaging and erudite volume throughout. Pike avoids becoming overly mired in a quagmire of theoretical considerations, and his arguments are firmly grounded in the urban landscapes that are the subject of his analysis. His work is a welcome addition to a long line of literature critically concerned with the rise of the modern industrial metropolis.

If I have a criticism to offer, it is that the analysis is limited to the West, and to Europe almost exclusively. While the images of London and Paris are telling, even compelling, I would have appreciated seeing the analysis extended more fully to North America. Was, for example, the experience of nineteenth-century New Yorkers or Chicagoans the same or significantly different from that of Europeans? Are these phenomena particular to their time and place or are they a product of technology and human needs? Perhaps Pike will further extend his analysis in a future volume. In...

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