Book Review

Domesticating the Street is an eye-catching title that does not evoke the argument of Peter C. Baldwin's book. Baldwin surveys eighty years of efforts to shape urban space in Connecticut's capital, challenging urban historians who privilege technology over ideas as the source of change. His title seems to suggest that ideas about gender carried special weight, but what he describes is not the domestication of the streets—their conversion to uses associated with home life—but growing spatial segregation. Unpaved lanes that accommodated commerce, sociability, and various kinds of traffic in 1850 became by the 1930s smooth asphalt channels for automobiles. Reformers chose to solve urban problems by removing unwelcome activities from the street, sometimes by creating alternative spaces and sometimes by outright bans.

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Segregation was not the only model available. Baldwin begins his study with Horace Bushnell, who campaigned for Hartford's first public park to be "an outdoor parlor," promoting class harmony by bringing citizens together in a feminized urban space. But the choice to set apart space in the city became a precedent. Bushnell's island of natural beauty gave way by the twentieth century to an array of specialized parks attentive more to class than to gender: ball fields, playgrounds, and parkways for recreational drives.

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