| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Holleran. Boston's "Changeful Times": Origins of Preservation and Planning in America. (Creating the North American Landscape.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 337. $39.95.

Boston is an excellent venue in which to study the development and growth of a self-conscious drive to control the forces of urban change. Bostonians were never far from some fragment of their colonial and revolutionary history. Throughout the nineteenth century, the city prided itself on cultural institutions of national significance, like the Athenaeum, that preserved its glorious past. So, between 1860 and 1930—years of commercial growth and rapid expansion—this old New England seaport became the focus of an intense debate on the control of laissez-faire redevelopment. 1

Michael Holleran's fine book is about how conservative pressures to preserve the landmarks of the past shaded, by degrees, into what we now call urban planning, or how a concern for the past served to arouse interest in the future. But fundamentally, this is a book about what change means. After the Civil War, for example, most Bostonians (and, one suspects, most Americans) approved of the wholesale destruction of old Georgian houses to make room for new business enterprises and speculative housing. Viewing the past with some distaste—weren't old houses firetraps?—they were confident that whatever commercial interests threw up would be a vast improvement upon the existing building stock. . . .

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