Book Review

Canada and the United States

Like so many urban districts that blossomed during the nineteenth century in industrial cities, the South Side of St. Louis, with its neat brick rowhouses, tiny lawns, back alleys, and corner taverns, evinces the romantic ideal of neighborhood as tight-knit community. But as Eric Sandweiss deftly argues, the process of linking community to place in St. Louis was both contested and fluid. In bricks, mortar, and asphalt, the South Side neighborhoods articulated a struggle to balance individual liberty and the common good. During the most active period of construction, the years between 1850 and 1910, that struggle found expression in the tension between two opposing physical expressions of community: the "fenced-off corners" of the home and street and the "wider setting" of the larger urban environs.

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The debate wasn't always framed that way. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the conflict between local interests and broader civic goals was muted by the fact that the people who developed private land on the South Side and the people who spoke for the community at large in an official governing capacity were one and the same. A handful of elites furthered their own interests, and in their minds those of the city, by placing responsibility for urban development almost entirely in private hands. Even as city government became more actively involved in determining the contours of urban development, selling off lots in the St. Louis Common and ordering the improvement of certain streets, the overarching model of the city as a field for speculative investment imposed a unity upon all land within the city limits.

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