“We gain a great deal by studying, as Lasdow does here, the transformation of urban space . . . Early republic urban redevelopment opens a vista on such larger historical processes as the rise of capitalism and the solidification of gender and racial hierarchies.” - Seth E. Rockman, Brown University, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
“Wharfed Out . . . reveal[s] in vivid detail how the very fabric of the urban waterfront nurtured the growing inequality that characterized the young United States.”- Emma Hart, Professor of History and Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World
How urban waterfront development in the early republic displaced working-class communities, creating lasting patterns of inequality and resistance
In the early years of American nationhood, civic leaders undertook the construction of thousands of acres of man-made land along urban coastlines—a process known colloquially as “wharfing out,” in which landfilled blocks increased a city’s surface area by pushing outward into deep water. Workers cleared wetlands and dredged harbors in service of ever-expanding ports and waterfront workspace in cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. But not everyone shared in the benefits of these so-called improvements. Poor and working-class people, many of whom had done the hard labor, became physically displaced and economically dispossessed. Many pushed back against this gentrification, organizing protests and launching reclamation efforts.
Drawing on an innovative combination of architectural, social historical, and material culture methods, Kathryn Lasdow is the first scholar to delineate both the gentrification and the contestation of American waterfront landscapes in the early republic. In so doing, she reveals how conflicts over design, development, and access — and over who gets to tell the story of these places today — represent not new phenomena but rather the latest iteration of a centuries-old struggle over who should control the future of urban space in America.