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Reviews
| Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial City: New Haven, Connecticut. Ed. by Preston Maynard and Marjorie B. Noyes; associate editors Sylvia M. Garfield and Carolyn Cooper. Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 2004. xii+223 pp., maps, numerous illus., tables, notes, bibls., index. $35 hb (ISBN: 1-58465-420).
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Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks is a comprehensive inquiry into the rise and decline of New Haven, Connecticut, as an industrial city. The book examines the impact of such factors as geography, immigration, and regional and national competition on the key processes of centering and decentering. Centering is defined by the convergence of three essential changes: the development of low-cost, high-reliability, fixed-path transport; an energy technology attaching a penalty to consumption at long distances from the point of generation; and the absence of high-quality, variable-path transportation. These changes appeared in New Haven in the period between 1830 and 1850.
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Contributor Douglas W. Rae further elaborates on the historical commercial evolution of New Haven when he writes,
Where these features came together, as they did in mid-century New Haven, one should expect a powerful compression of capital investments, people and activity around the transport of a central city. Where that city combines shipping and rail in a small area, one should expect to see the flowering of intensive manufacturing and all that goes with it (p. 80).
The process of centering made New Haven a major manufacturing area and a mecca for workers. New Haven continued to experience major population growth from the last half of the 19th century until the first decades of the 20th century. In 1850, New Haven had a population of 20,345. By 1920, this figure had grown to 162,567. As Rae points out, this period of rapid expansion created the physical structure of New Haven neighborhoods that is still visible in 2006.
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A great deal of Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks is composed of studies of individual industries located at a centering nexus of both transportation facilities and abundant industrial power. These industries produced a diverse array of products, ranging from carriages and clocks to beer, boilers, rubber goods, and hardware. The rise and decline of these industries is chronicled in detail. Included is an examination of the role that each of the manufacturers played in the overall development of New Haven's economy. Equally important, the architecture of the industrial buildings that remain from this period is thoroughly examined in order to establish its place in New Haven's built environment. In fact, this book may well be considered an extended plea for the preservation and adaptive reuse of these structures. According to the authors, the extant industrial buildings help to define New Haven and give it a sense of place.
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A significant feature of Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks is the interpretive essays by such noted scholars as Robert B. Gordon and Carolyn C. Cooper. They and the other essayists set the tone of this book through their investigation of such topics as industrial archaeology, technology, production, growth, and centered industrialization. Perhaps the most interesting of these essays is "Interweaving Carpet and Community" by Sandra Rux who chronicles the rise and fall of the New Haven Carpet Company and the community that was created by its workers:
Its story, however, is illustrative of several features of infant industries' experience in taking root in the new American republic: the importation of technology and technicians; the importance of family connections for financial support in the absence of a well-established banking system; the cushioning role of real estate investment; the frequency of holding public office and of contributions to civic amenities; and the eventual absorption of skilled labor into a larger pool of new industries. It was a time of challenge and flexible responses at the beginning of New Haven's shift of economic emphasis from commerce to manufacturing. Risks were taken; failures were frequent. The carpet factory pioneered in that shift and—despite its "failure"—left a valuable material, technical, and social heritage to the city in the development of physical plant and housing stock, in the skills of its workers, and in the civic contributions of their employees (p. 107).
Just as the process of centering helped make New Haven an early focal point of industrial development, decentering exerted an opposing effect. While centering development led to increasing core densities and increasing capital investment in city housing, commerce, and manufacturing, decentering development led to a dispersion of population around the central city and a relative dispersal of capital investment toward perimeter locations. From approximately 1920 onward, the decentering process was in ascendancy, and its ultimate result was a "hollowed out" New Haven that contained a rich legacy of former industrial buildings. The contributors to Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks all agree that the decentering process is continuing in New Haven and that, without a sustained effort to preserve the factory buildings of New Haven's industrial past, a golden opportunity will be lost for their adaptive reuse. Such buildings can give meaning and cohesion to struggling neighborhoods.
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Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks is an extremely well-written book that features a large format and many superb illustrations. Unlike some volumes of its type, it never strays from its central themes. This book will benefit historians as well as city planners, industrial archaeologists, other scholars, and, of course, the casual but interested reader. The processes of centering and decentering are universal themes that are relevant to the general study of the rise and decline of American urban areas. Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks can serve as an informative model for those individuals who would seek to understand such processes.
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