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Book Review
| Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston. By Nancy S. Seasholes. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. xiv + 533 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $49.95.
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| The growth of American cities has always required dramatic transformations of their natural environments. Hills, ravines, rivers, marshes, deserts—the irregular in nature must be leveled (often literally so) to speed the march of commerce. Seattle hosed away a major hill, Providence buried (and later disinterred) a river, and Chicago ... well Chicago has pursued nearly every possible method to tame its swampy environs. |
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But Nancy Seasholes argues in Gaining Ground that Boston wins the prize for the sheer quantity of new land that has been made, most often by filling tidal flats, marshes, and other low-lying wet areas. The original Shawmut peninsula from which the city expanded is now almost 50 percent larger than it was when Europeans settled there in 1630. Seasholes has scoured a huge array of original documents, including hundreds of maps, company archives, and public records in order to reconstruct in incredible detail the history of Boston's landmaking projects over more than three centuries. Trained in both history and archeology, she also makes extensive use of the physical evidence of modern archeological explorations to document the changing technologies adopted to turn wet areas into dry, buildable land. |
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The result is a handsome, lavishly illustrated volume. Individual chapters present detailed accounts of landmaking projects in the various neighborhoods of the city, from the central waterfront, where filling began in the seventeenth century, to areas along the Charles River and the former South Bay. Seasholes' clear descriptive text is accompanied by a wide range of illustrations: modern maps of the city upon which she has superimposed the shoreline of the 1630 city, original maps and property plans that detail specific projects, and historic images of work in progress, often showing the details of construction technology. |
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Seasholes sets a high standard with the meticulousness of her research and the quality of its presentation. Students of Boston history will find it an invaluable resource for seeing the layers of human activity that surround and underpin the city. But the book falls a bit short as an interpretive guide to the significance of this kind of urban environmental change. Seasholes does point out that local and state officials usually sanctioned and encouraged these private projects in order to promote commercial development or, less often, to solve sanitation problems or provide new areas for speculative housing construction. And she hints that political opposition and corruption often accompanied landmaking projects. But her detailed, street-by-street focus leaves little room for locating the Boston experience in the larger history of growth and environmental change in America's capitalist cities. What were the political and economic consequences of this state-sponsored transformation of nature? Who benefited and who suffered? How did these ad hoc projects shape the prospects for urban and regional planning? Seasholes does not address these more general questions, but her research will provide fruitful new avenues for scholars interested in the history of the development of capitalist cities. |
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Robert M. Rakoff is professor of politics and environmental studies at Hampshire College. His recent work looks at the meanings of farmland preservation programs. |
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