Chapter 3 The City as Material Culture Dell Upton INTRODUCTION In 1963, Anthony N. B, Garvan published Propriesary Philadelphia as Artifact, an analysis of William Penn and Thomas Holme’s 17th-century city plan (Garvan 1963). Garvan recognized the Penn-Holme grid as an intricate pastiche of elements borrowed from many sources. Yet the plan was a consciously crafted mechanism intended to promote specific economic, social, and political goals. It was an idea given physical form: an artifact, in short. Nevertheless, Garvan doubted that the term artifact was appropriate t0 a city. An artifact is ‘a product of human workmanship," but “no reputable authority has yet extended it to include .. . the processes, social structure, and infinitely complex relationships of even the smallest urban community"” (Gervan 1963: 177) Garvan's diffidence was prudent, Although geographers regularly analyze the city artifact in terms compatible with Garvan’s, few students of material culture have done so. ‘To see the urban Iandscape through the geographers’ eyes is (0 understand it as a product of large social or economic movements or forces: the city is a pattern reflecting collective faction, To sce the city as artifact or, to put it another way, to apply material-culture methods to the city would be to raise different questions about the relationship between the object and individual makers. It would also require that we question material-culture practice, ‘which typically focuses on the cultural in a relatively limited sense. Most material culture scholars use discrete types and well-defined assemblages of artifeets to illuminate the social structures, cultural values, and patterns of learning and living among relatively small groups fof people. Since they are based primarily on collective patterns observable in objects, material culture studies typically emphasize the intentional and the consensual in a manner similar to the geographers.? They assume a clear, intentional, subjectiobject relationship "Por he eulural geographers approach tothe city, see Jackson 1969; Groh 1981; Lewis 1985; and Ley 1988 ‘Thus, Garvan assumed that Philadelphia was “an arlfct for which documents provide the equivalent of craft ‘anuals'” That i, the ety Was an artifact to the extent tha Penn or his sucessos conelousy shaped ity that i tas conroled by «single insligence with explicitly articulated intentions. Although the early republican city ‘hfe foe “cote peesures™ after the Peno Proprietary los contol, Garvan thought that it nevertheless ‘Ruled the eul f Proprietary Philodelphia, for be assumed that "ap urban conmanity which exists fr 8 peiod Ot yeas develope an overall cule whieh in part at least dominates the subcultures aod individual efferences (Grits resdens:” Individual vision became wbancultre, one that was the more cohesive because Penn carefully ‘sled colonists congenial o his views ax cutoralForeparens of epublican Philadelphia (1963: 179, 198, 201, 19), Garvan's essay thus Tinesod link betwoen the planning and material cute historians” sense of « coving individual intelligence and the geographers interest in socially determined ation, st2 The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology between a person and an artifact. However, such clarity undermines understanding, for it is precisely the connection between person and artifact that needs closest scrutiny in studying the urban landscape. Once the simple relationship between an artifact, a person, and an action or intention is questioned, the building blocks of material culture study — the artfuct-intention-person triad — must be recast to be adequate to the city-artfact. First, the class material culare must be redefined. In a resonant passage of In Small Things Forgotten, James Deetz rejected the intuitive definition of material culture as “roughly synonymous with (individual, tangible] artifacts" (Deetz 1977: 24-25). Instead, hhe argued, “‘A somewhat broader definition of material culture is useful in emphasizing how profoundly our world is the product of our thoughts, as that sector of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined behavior’ (emphasis his). Deetz then went on to claim modifications of living objects such as the butchering and breeding ‘of animals, ephemeral behavior such as bodily gesture and movement, and even speech and other alterations of the physical but invisible world as the province of material culture study. Second, we might step beyond even Deetz’s generous bounds and question the nature of the ‘culturally determined behavior" that creates material culture. If cultural alterations of the environment extend so far beyond the discrete artifact, might they not extend beyond the intentional to the incidental by-products of cultural action as well? That is, shouldn't ‘material culture include the flakes generated in extracting the projectile point from the raw ‘material, as well as the point itself? Ordinarily these accidentals are unimportant. In some cases, however, they directly affect the way we "‘cope with the physical world, facilitate social intercourse, and . . . benefit our state of mind" (Deetz 1977: 24), This is especially true of “invisible” material culture in the urban setting. If language is an intentional form of material culture, for example, the noises that we make in going about ur business, and the smells that arise from cooking, smoking, and garbage dumps, are equally aspects of the physical environment modified through ‘culturally determined be- havior.” ‘They tum back on us and demand a new round of responses. Moreover, as we will see, the intentional and the unintentional by-product are often conflated in responding to the urban landscape. Rather than examine simpte relationships between mental intention and physical creation, between a mind and an artifact, the study of the city as material Culture ought to investigate the reciprocal relationships among selves and human alterations Of the environment; it must take into account both intention and reaction, action and intefpretation. Thitd, we need to rethink the self's intersection with the landscape by recalling the variety of ways we relate to the material world. Because traditional students of material culture are most adept at reading the symbolic expression of social values, they tend to equate the I with the eye. Yet most people perceive the world through five senses. Cooking, smells may make us hungry, the feel of silk may make us feel pampered, the sound of & railroad train may arouse nostalgia. But we might also retch at the smell of tobacco smoke, develop hives when we touch certain fabrics, grow nervous and irritable when we live too close to the noises of an airport or a busy street, or be repulsed by the taste of certain foods. These physical responses to our material culture are interpreted within cultural categories, although the response generated by one of our senses may not agree with the response that another provokes. {In short, a material culture analysis can make a distinctive contribution to understanding the city-artifact by probing the experience of the urban landscape, of which intentional Creation is only one clement, The landscape articulates the individual and the social, as the Self constructs and interprets the body-in-space, the self in its surroundings. Our experienceUpron 33 of the material world is complex and multisensory; it is a reverberating, constantly per- ‘mutating tangle of I-ivit-me relationships, and it must be studied on all these levels. Since the terms of construction and interpretation are historically and culturally determined, close attention to the experience of bodies in space can help to illuminate the complex, discon- tinuous network of actions and responses that shape the physical city, ‘Of course, it is easier to demand this than to do it. Practically speaking, how can we account for the noises, smells, and textures of the past in the same way that we can study chairs, ceramics, building remains, or settlement patterns? For many past societies, the invisible landscape is long gone and probably unrecoverable. This is not universally true, however, If sounds, smells, tastes, and often textures do not survive, verbal and visual depictions of them sometimes do, By analyzing physical remains in terms of their surviving representations, we can say something about the ways selves constructed themselves in space. vAs Deetz has noted, the study of material culture is not merely enriched by the use of documentary sources. The evidence of culturally derived systems of taxonomy embodied in language is essential to understanding the material world (Deetz 1977: 10-11). In the view of some cognitive anthropologists and literary theorists, we are trapped in a net of language through which our experience of the material world is inescapably filtered (Whort 1956: 51-86; Culler 1982: 89-110). With respect to the material world, a more interactive view may be useful. Language filters our experience, but the language through which we interpret the landscape acquires specificity through the experience of specific material ‘configurations. I have borrowed and redefined the goographers’ term cultural landscape for this experiential interaction of word and thing.’ A working definition of cultural landscape fuses the physical fabric of the city and the material culture of its residents with the imaginative structures that urbanites use in constructing, explaining, and representing them, ‘The cultural landscape is a motley repertoire of disparate, concretized metaphors rather than a coherent system." From 1790 to 1860, a distinctive group of metaphors characterized the encounter of ‘Ameticans and their commercializing cities. Antebellum American cities are particularly appropriate for this sort of inquiry, since materialistic theories of human psychology were ‘widely accepted in the early national period, and explicit faith in material culture as a primary instrument of individual character formation and social location was widespread {(Boorstin 1948: 111-66; Ignatieff 1989: 60-61). Consequently, the self-space relationship was actively and explicitly discussed by many urban Americans. Recent historical literature has focused on republicanism as a central term in the political ‘and cultural discourse of the early national period (Shalhope 1982). In our context, repub- Ticanism constituted one set of specific terms within which the more general issue of self- in-space was discussed. Religious metaphors of sin and moral responsibility, evolving conceptions of economic system, and natural history, along with the political language of tepublicanism, offered specific lexicons within which to image a self independent of but taticulated with its surroundings (Isaac 1982: 293-97; Crowley 1974; Sellers 1980: 15-20; Kulik 1989: 3-5; Boorstin 1948: 169-234), So did urban space, through the persuasive metaphor of the grid, Grids had been employed in North America since the beginnings of the European conquest, of course, but after 1787 they took on near-mystical qualities as models of urban form so near to divine >among georaphes, he concept ofthe cultural landscape arose from a desi t inject interpretation and sive Pane eseet a etd tit hal long bee steed with descripive accounts of impersonal urban morphologies (Ley 1988), Foe «longer explanation ofthe cultoral landscape, see Upton 1.54 ‘The Art and Mysery of Historical Archaeology Figure 1, MAP OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1808, The map shows gridied adios tthe clonal ety Drojected before the IL Conmissionex’ pl plated th entire island of Manan. (Coutesy ofthe Library of Congres.) wisdom that they would make believers out of atheists (Brissot de Warville 1792: 243). In the early 19th century, grids structured additions to old cities like New York and New Orleans, as well as nevly founded cities from Washington to Salt Lake City (Figures ! and 2) (Hartog 1983; 158-75; Blackmar 1989: 94-100). Residents of old cities like Philadelphia strove to rationalize and revitalize their neglected plans (Beck 1820; Philadelphia 1827; Watson 1842: 1: 166~69). These plattings were accompanied by a mania for leveling tertain of which Boston’s destruction of the Trimountain was only the most dramatic example, and for equalizing space through public works that would make every property equally useful ‘These projects ranged from municipal gas and water works toa proposal to light Philadelphia from a single centrally placed tower that would render every exterior and interior space equally bright (Figure 3) (Whitehill 1968: 73-95; Latrobe 1984: 517; Blackmar 1989: 98— 99; Watson 1842: 1: 232-35; Lee and Beach 1834). All these urban projects testified to @ drive to ‘conquer space” that infused the age-old gridded city with new imaginative power (ohn C. Caltioun, quoted in Bryan 1989: 75) Unlike later visionaries who dreamed of technologies that would eradicate the bound- aries of space (and time), early republican urbanites thought of space, properly regulated, as essential to human society. The transparency and articulation of the grid set the self in 4 particular relationship to its surroundings, a relationship that was described in the ubiqui tous early republican language of classification and separation, Classification created ordet ‘and unity by organizing the otherwise chaotic juxtaposition of individual selves, substituting random access for the merely random, If classification promoted flexible, rational control, separation connoted liberty; it permitted the free operation of each citizen in his own sphereigure 2. MAP OF THE CUTY OF NEW ORLEANS IN 1815. Map drawn by J. Tansas, showing gees Fubourgs ai out up and dow iver Eom the orignal Vieux Care cee) (Couresy ofthe Library of Congres.) Figure 3. LEVELING THE TRIMOUNTAIN: THE DEMOLITION OF BEACON HILL, Lithograph by 1. W. Baton from a denwing made *0n the spot” by J. R, Smith in 1811=12 fon foeaton between Hancock and Temple sets, Boston, (Courtesy of the Libary of Congress)56 The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology ‘Along the streets of the separated city, each person could carry on her business on her private property without interference. ‘The gridded early republican city, then, provided a Spatial scaffolding for the articulation of self and setting, which might be expressed in a vatiety of specific terms, ranging from those of the republican social vision of individualism, within @ general similarity of condition and interest, to those of economic or administrative convenience (Hartog 1983: 158-75; Blackmar 1989: 94~100).* As materialists, moreover, early 19th-century Americans assumed that the grid could ereate the ideal urban society by guiding citizens’ actions into socially beneficial channels. In shor, the grid was understood as a single-order spatial system that eradicated natural ‘inequalities of topography by providing equal access to every location within it. It was nnonhierarchical: the parts were clearly defined, but the connections among them were ‘rticulated and flexible, and could thus accommodate an unlimited number of separate networks of meaning and activity, ‘The grid was conceived, therefore, as neutral among users, transparently depicting their relationships, and transparent, as well, in making social knowledge and spatial access available to everyone. Although the city was commonly conceived as rational, articulated, transparent, visual space, early republican cities offered only fragmented versions ofthis imagined landscape. ‘The visual order of the grid was subverted by the commercial activities it was designed to Promote, Where the philosophy of the grid saw the street as neutral space offering free ‘access to individual cells of private development, small businesses systematically claimed the streets as part of their business space, displaying their wares on the sidewalks and using the curbs as loading docks where parcels were stacked waiting to be picked up (Figure 4) ‘They blurred the boundaries among individual cells by covering the facades of their buildings with signs and constructing others that stood on the roof and projected over the streets (Dickens 1842; 26) (Figure 5). Many of the smallest traders were not located at all, but simply set up in the street itself. More important than simple transgressions of spatial transparency were the landscapes Perceptibility to the other senses, landscapes that were neither transparent nor visible. Where one landscape order was evident (o the eye, in the arrangement of buildings and Spaces, others spparent to the ears and the nose slashed through the boundaries defined by bricks and mortar, Early republican city dwellers were increasingly aware of the volume and variety of sounds that characterized the new commercial city, The dramatic increase in size und commercial activity in the early 19h-century city brought familiar sounds more insistently to the ear. Church bells tolled deaths, holidays, and the arrival of distinguished visitors (Philadelphia 1789-93: 75), Street vendors hawked their fruits and vegetables, matches, singerbread, oysters, and bread, while knife and razor sharpeners and chimney sweeps advertised their own services, and criers announced auctions, all with a variely of vocal cries, bells, hors, or klaxons (Lang Syne 1828: 261) (Figure 6). The sounds of small-scale ‘manufacturing spilled from the upper stories of buildings lining downtown streets, At night, 4s recorded in Cries of Philadelphia, watchmen etied the houts, broke up drunken brawls, and called for firemen to come running with their handcarts (Anonymous 1810). These Sonic episodes stood out against the constant din of wooden- and metal-tired vehicles moving through stone-paved streets, ‘‘a ceaseless rush of the tide of life,"” wrote the Physician Frank Johnson in 1867. ‘*Year after year, surging masses of beings and objects, man and beast and vehicle, are promiscuously slipping, scrabbling, and jolting, ratling, ‘Outsiders sometimes mised the individualistic conotatioes that Americans fund in the ri. The English troveler ‘Thomas Hamiton complained that Philadelphia's plan was “a mathematealinfingement on te sights of individual eccentricity — a rigid end possi derptiem of right angles and patllograns” (Flaiton 1833 338-29; reference courtesy of Diane Shaw)Upton s NEWMARKET HARDWARE CUTLEHY NALD STORE. ame RTD = Figure 4. NEW MARKET HARDWARE, CUTLERY AND NAIL STORE, PHILADELPHIA, 1846, (Courtesy ofthe Libary Company of Pilaelphia.) ‘and thundering along, with nought whereon to tread or roll but endless piles of stones’” ohnson 1867: 12) ‘While some aural confusion was generated by increased activity, other intrusions were the products of increased population density in cities where residences and businesses, public and domestic activities, as well as classes and races of people, were only beginning to be separated spatially. The tranquility of the new luxury hotels was undermined by the sounds that bled through the walls (Eliot 1830: 17). Gentee! Philadelphians objected to the tries of chimney sweeps, while upper-class New Yorkers were disturbed in their parlors by the curses of Irish draymen on the street, and in their sickbeds by street traffic (Johnson 1867; 82-83; Anonymous 1810; 31-32). For many upper and middle-class Americans these were welcome signs of commercial growth and rapid industrial development. The prosperous republican city was a “*humming city” (Johnson 1867: 81). Sound was also a necessary form of communication. It com- ‘municated news, initiated business transactions, and marked the divisions of the day. Even street noises warned pedestrians of approaching vehicles (Nicolson 1855: 14). While the humming city was a good thing, however, "the thundering city"” and ‘‘the deafening city”” ‘were something else altogether Johnson 1867: 81). Merchants were forced to move their offices to the backs of their buildings to enable the clerks to concentrate, while traffic was 0 noisy that it made courtrooms “inconvenient for the transaction of the business of the Courts,” accasioning ‘serious interruption and the delay of business,"* according to the Philadelphia City Council Gohnson 1867: 82; Philadelphia 1828: 88; Philadetphia 1831:58 The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology oS LE TIN WARE| EMPORIUM. 4 City & Country Dealer SUPPLIED slic LOWEST RATI [ature S: MELLOY AND FORD WHOLESALE TIN WARE MANUFACTURERS, PHILADELPHIA, 1849, (Courtesy ofthe Library Company of Philadephia.) 56), At a meeting of the New Orleans city council, Benjamin Henry Latrobe was “‘exces- sively annoyed for nearly an hour by hearing successive cracks of s Whip, each followed by a Seream, and as the tone of the Screams varied, I presume it was a day of execution At the jail, which is behind the Principal {city hall)" (Latrobe 1799-1820: 212). Almost ‘wrenty years later, beatings were moved toa new prison atthe edge of the city, tothe reat ‘lief of the priests of the Roman Catholic cathedral. The crack of the whip and the cries ofthe victims “troubled” them and ther parishioners during prayers, owing tothe “scans dalous proximity” of cty hall and Cathedrat (Boze 1832: n.p.), Hy ciddition to the visual and aural landscapes, a third was inescapable for the early Feeublican urbane, The relative locations of bakeries, tanneries, breweries, and slaughter. houses could be plotted with the nose. Decaying food inthe public markets was particularly fie on warm days. The odor of cargo rotting in waterfront warchouses tized with the smell of sewage discharged directly into rivers and harbors (Parrish 1849: 471). SewersUpton Figure 6, THE OYSTERS MAN, Origin watercolor by Ncolin Cayo (1799-188) dawn in New York, cx 1BAD-44, (Courtesy ofthe New York Histor Soiry, New York City) ‘were badly designed, and often backed up in rainy weather (Parrish 1849: 471). Piggeries in alleys and courts contributed the smell of live animals, while the bodies of dead ones ‘were dumped into open sewers (Parrish 1849: 474; Condie and Folwell 1799: 6-9). Open ponds of “stagnant or putrescent water... which in summer send forth pestlential ‘yapours™ collected in neglected public squares (Philadelphia 1830: 334~35; Parrish 1849: 470). Latrine pits were dug in the basements and back yards of businesses and residences (Philadelphia 1849: 4; Partish 1849; 464). Garbage and excrement were deposited in open creck beds, and in streets for human and four-legged scavengers to collect (Annals of Philadelphia 1828: 191; Dickens 1842: 86-87) (Figure 7). The former commonly dumped this refuse in vacant lots at the edges of the city and in poor neighborhoods (Philadelphia 1830; 335-35; Parrish 1849; 472-73). In the streets, the passerby would confront the Ubiquitous smell of tabacco smoke mixed with that of men’s urine casually deposited in doorways and against walls, and of one’s neighbors, few of whom bathed regularly (Davis 1803: 355; Philadelphia 1849: 19; Larkin 1988: 157-69; Parrish 1849: 478) (Figure 8).© "Thus the street plan and the buildings constructed along it, which invariably appear so placid in formal prints and photographs of the antebellum city, were only the shel of the tirban artifact. The sights, sounds, and smells of the commercial city constituted intangible attributes that were, as much as any shop, ship, or sherd, culturally produced. Nevertheless, if cheos, eacophony, and putrescence were only colorful or annoying, they would merely be picturesque detsls of the urban history of the early 19th century. Simple solutions could alleviate many of these nuisances, afterall, Philadelphia and New York paved the streets adjacent to their court rooms, council chambers, and other public meeting places with wood blocks, macadam, of smooth granite blocks, while the rich aluin Cobia has vividly doped the variety and origins of urban smells, and changing rections to tem, Io Covbia 1986.o The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology Lined aman ve Meht eles Wil BMW, prt We bans NEW-YORK AS IT Is. Figure 7. NEW YORK AS IT TS. Hogs oot among the garbage us pedesians wade through mudd sees ‘8p to ther knees inthe mir, An ilusraion “Respectlly dedicated to the Corporation ofthe City of New York by Sere & Peckins.” (Courtesy ofthe Libary Company of Philadelphia) stewed tan-bark in the streets to silence cart wheels when a family member was sick (Bowen 1838: 82, 202; New York City 1838: 666, 671; Johnson 1867: 83). Hotels advertised the use of plaster between their floors and horsehair in their walls “to secure for the inmates (of the establishment exemption from noisy interruption, and 10 lessen the contrast which Benerally exists between the bustle and confusion of a public establishment and the quiet retirement of a private residence" (Eliot 1830: 17). Investment in better sewers, spatial separation of noxious activities, and the strict enforcement of public cleanliness might alleviate many urban odors (American Medical Association 1849: 43142), But in ricoheting back at the urbanite in often unexpected ways, these by-products of turban activity demanded to be acknowledged, to be placed in a larger framework, to be interpreted, evaluated, and represented, The process entailed relocating these experiences within propositions about the urban self-in-space, As a cultural landscape — an interpreted artifact — the frenetic, disorderly, noisy, smelly city seemed to challenge some fundainental self-conceptions of the early republic, As a result, annoyance was transformed into disrup- tion and, ultimately, into danger In the early republic, the self-in-space was triangulated within three linguistic or cultural domains. They were the person or social self, whose highest state was characterized by Virtue, meaning unimpaired moral capacity and will; the body, ideally characterized by ‘health, oF unimpaired natucal capacity; and space, ideally characterized by order — the transparency and articulation previously described. Materialist propositions about the phys-Figure 8. PUBLIC SMOKERS IN NEW YORK AND REACTION 70 THEM, 1837 In his illustration drawn by Euwaad Clay, smokers lay claim t the vinwes of diferent types of stoking devices (ef. “follow in the fRostee of ny ileus predecessor, the grestest and best, — and smoke a pipe” vi. “Tsay, Josh, wot you rake dem long nines for, why con't you awoke Half Spanish Ike ge’leman?”) and women comment upon them (Oh, the monsters, ' al Blinded and soffoested “What @ nasty practice, i's enough to make 0 dog Sok"). (Courtesy ofthe Library Company of Philadeiphi.) iological nature of morality — ‘“the connection of the body with the mental and moral faculties” — justified linking the three (Trumbull 1796: 33; Boorstin 1948: 140-51; Ignatieff 19: 60-61). The moral sensibility was presumably governed by the same mech- anisins as physiological health. This meant that ‘*a man's morals must, in some measure, depend on the proportion of case and comfort the body enjoys": a poor or sick person was Tikely to be an evil person (Trumbull 1796: 33; Rosen 1952: 32-44). Moreover, the body, the locus of health and morals, was at the mercy of its environment, through which the body and the moral sense could be attacked. Physiological and moral health were understood in the light of prevalent medical theories. Traditional Hippocratic ideas, which interpreted the general susceptibility of a population to disease according to the degree to which its environment and government generated a healthy or an epidemic constitution, remained persuasive to some practitioners (Delaporte 1986: 18). Others adhered to the more recent infectious theory of disease, which frgued that specific ailments were caused by miasmata emitted by filthy, low, dark sites and caried on damp, stagnant airs to those vietims with weakened constitutions. The best protection against miasmata was to open up close, dark places. Despite differences in style find detail of reasoning, both Hippocratic and infectious theories promoted an environmental “approach to health. Proponents of contagion, another and, at that time, less widely accepted carly 19th-century medical theory, argued that disease was created by organisms commu- ricated directly from one person to another, and that the best remedy was to quarantine the carrier (Delaporte 1986: 7, 155-60; Ackerknecht 1948: 562-93).a The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology Separation isolated the contagious, exposed the city to beneficial breezes that dispelled infectious miasmata, and prevented the creation of crowded conditions that generated new infection and allowed contagion to spread. Whichever medical theory one accepted, the transparent and the separated were physically salubrious, a8 well as socially desirable ‘While philosophers and physicians might have recourse to specifically materialistic and physiological explanations of public health and public order, these widely discussed ideas ‘were used more freely by lay people. They accepted a transitivity among the three linguistic domains, so that the qualities of each of the three parts could be used to characterize the others. In addition to healthy bodies, virtuous persons, and orderly spaces, one might think of virtuous or orderly bodies, healthy or orderly persons, and healthy or virtuous spaces, By definition, certain kinds of spaces or spatial arrangements were intrinsically bad, regardless of their empirical characteristics Thus, disorderly spaces were also unhealthy spaces. Disease festered in the crowded, hidden spaces of the city (Dickens 1842: 88-89). Tt was the filthy, undisciplined lives of the people who inhabited these spaces that generated disease, Epidemics, in particular, Struck “the dirty, debauched, and intemperate classes of society" first and hardest (Phila delphia Board of Health 1832: 11). Significantly, from the point of view of miasma theory, it was not that the dist or dampness bred bio-organisms that caused disease, but that the emanations themselves — the smells of the poor, the corrupt, and their surroundings — Were responsible. Thus, the smell of poverty was literally the smell of disease. Crowding led to disease, and disease led to political and moral corruption. To Thomas Jefferson, for example, the poor, “piled up on one another in large cities,"* formed mobs of the politically tuudisciplined that were like “'sores" tothe state (Jefferson 1787: 442; Jefferson 1780: 158). ‘Throughout his long career, Jefferson's numerous (if offhand) observations on cities were permeated with similar spatio-medical-moral metaphors. Disorderly spaces fostered moral as well as physical illness. In alley housing, in the bars and taverns and the brothels often housed above them, in black-run oyster cellars, in the warehouses and grog shops of the waterfront, blacks and whites, women and men of all stations jn life mixed, unseparated and unclassified. Immoralty was both infectious and contagious. Settings such as these generated moral miasmata that brutalized the moral Sensibility and thus undermined the moral constitution of their denizens. Evil could also be communicated individually, by the hardened criminal who corrupted the novice, the petty criminal who enticed the innocent; the man who seduced the wornan, ‘The medium of moral miasma and contagion was sound, which was dangerous in both passive and active ways. Sound conceated as easily as it communicated vital information. ‘The incidental cacophony of the commercial city erected walls where none were visible, Placing the body in a space as opaque, and potentially dangerous, as if it were enclosed oF without light, While sound-as-noise masked urban life through disorder, sound+as-language ‘was opaque in a more systematic manner. It was intentionally and specifically deceptive. ‘The whispering city was even more sinister than the thundering city. In this spirit, Thomas Jefferson argued that the incompatible political opinions of immigrants would be passed on ‘o their children in their native languages, uncorrected by public discourse (Jefferson 1780: 83), Jefferson's moderately expressed views were consonant with the faintly hysterical attention his contemporaries devoted to another foreign language, the eriminal’s peculiar slang, in the 19th century. The longstanding study of the cant, patter, or flash language epitomized the dangers of the opaque city to early republican commentators (Wilde 1889: 301-6).* In the flash language, flask means in the know, and in the early 19th century it connoted secret "For lengthy dscusion ofthe marl lessons stached to epidemic disease, see Rosenberg 1962; 40-54 ‘Cao dictionaries had been published since the 16th centuryUpton 6 knowledge, knowledge used as a weapon by some citizens against others. It was thus the ‘opposite of the open, visible, transparent, public knowledge of the virtuous. Cant permitted criminals to communicate with one another, secretly, in the very presence of their victims. William Going, a jailer at the Massachusetts state prison at Charlestown, had learned it from some horse thieves. In 1806, he accompanied the warden into the yard at Charleston and “overheard [a convict named Collins] say he could ciff the swell cove, for he had as lief die as not; and knowing him to be a bad-tempered fellow, and understanding the flash Tanguage, I called the Major to me, and told him that Collins had threatened to stab him ‘with @ knife’ (Going 1841: 20-21), ‘Sludents of the flash language linked it to an imagined countersociety, a vast criminal conspiracy against respectable society. Cant was assumed to be a universal language of criminals, impossible to understand fully except by those who had leamed it from birth, yet comprehensible to any criminal in the world, no matter what his nationality (Matsell 1859: ii). It was said to resemble no other language, but it was widely believed to have been invented by the Gypsies, as recorded in the Scoundrel's Dictionary (Anonymous 1754: 7; Matsell 1859: ili, v).? Popular writers often conflated the criminal underworld and the Gypsy world in the 8th and 19th centuries and transposed their characteristics as a matter of course. Gypsies were, in a sense, the absolute countersociety and thus tainted in every aspect of their Tifeways, not merely in their relationship to the law. They were thought to be descendants of the Egyptians ejected by God from their native land, condemned to wander until the second coming of Christ; to eat only meat of animals that had died of distemper; and to be natural criminals (Roberts 1836; 42-44; Hoyland 1816: 42). Gypsies served as the well- spring of evil, taking in non-Gypsies and educating them in crime and criminal customs. Conversely, malefactors without Gypsy connections were often described, or even described themselves, as Gypsies." ‘Cant, the criminals’ secret language, enabled them ¢o infiltrate the republican city and to lay plots against the visible, respectable society with impunity (Figure 9). Like the immigrants’ foreign languages in Jefferson's view, the malefactor's secret language was cut off from the breezes of public scrutiny and criticism that could dispel moral miasmata. ‘Some believed not only that criminals could conspire secretly in the midst of civilian society, but also that their diseased language could convert the innocent to crime and bring victims under their control through the creation of false consciousness, a process called wheedling (Shirley 1692). ‘Thus, simple, direct solutions to incidental noises or odors did mot seem adequate to ‘cope with a series of phenomena that linked bodies, selves, and spaces in a sinister shadow landscape of epidemic disease and criminal conspiracy. Increasingly, early republicans ooked to comprehensive responses 10 the complex experience of urban life, The so-called therapeutic institutions for social rehabilitation that loom so large in the social history of the Euro-American Enlightenment are excellent examples of the totalizing, spatialized response to the shadow landscape.” ‘te great similar in argument and lexicon among the cant dictionaries from the 17H to the 19th exnturies ipl tht ment autos, however vehemenly they asserted ther experience ofthe criminal subculture, di most esr esearch inHrales, This reliance on previous authors a primary informants only emphasizes the extent {b which comsretons of the criminal world were prodvets ofthe cultural imagination, "sce fr example Cerew 1802, one of several early 19th century reissues 723F a ate 18th century text ‘on therapeutic insttions in America, see Rothman 1971, On the importance of space in reform, see Foveaslt 1918: 141-68.