Kyle Riismandel. Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001

Abstract

It the library of anyone interested in suburban history the history of David Schley’s rigorous, carefully researched book is a critical analysis of how the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) Railroad, founded in 1828 as an urban development project rooted in the specificities of the city of Baltimore and funded by municipal coffers, became a private corporation that traversed state borders, opted for the payment of dividends to stakeholders rather than infrastructural improvements in its home city, and called upon federal troops to put down labour unrest. A scholarly contribution to the new history of capitalism, Steam City insists upon the urban origins of this railway company, initially designed to respond to the particularities of its home city, but which, over time, shed its local character and became a corporation with national ambitions. This book is also a reflection on the powers bestowed on private enterprise by governments and, in this sense, constitutes a warning about the dangers we face today in this second “Gilded Age,” when companies unmoored from local constraints, untouched by municipal regulation, and unresponsive to local needs criss-cross the globe in search of profits. Steam City consists of eight closely argued chapters, organized according to a structure that is both chronological and thematic. Readers of the Urban History Review/ Revue d’histoire urbaine will probably find most compelling the detailed portrait of Baltimore streets and neighbourhoods to be found in Chapter 2, entitled “Tracks in the Streets,” and in Chapter 5, entitled “The Smoking, Puffing Locomotive.” Here we see local conflicts between carters, draymen, hackmen, and pedestrians, on the one hand, and railways, on the other. Schley describes in detail the horses startled and the residents kept awake by hissing steam whistles and clanging railway bells, the accidents involving young boys hitching rides on railway cars, and the pedestrians tripping over the iron tracks newly embedded in the thoroughfares that they had used for decades.