Old Wheelways: Traces of Bicycle History on the Land by Robert L. McCullough (review)

Abstract

separated the city by race and class, which seems obviously true, goes unelaborated, a shortcoming that mars other chapters as well. In the last chapter, “Clearing the Lungs of the City,” McNeur discusses the usual suspects associated with this story, including Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children’s Aid Society, who argued that the creation of Central Park would benefit poor laborers. To this more familiar narrative of Central Park, McNeur adds the life and work of ragpickers, a “large system of entrepreneurs who acted as middlemen” for a network of junk shops and second-hand stores, together forming “a crucial link in the urban recycling network” (190). In an Epilogue, McNeur concludes her investigation with the Draft Riots of 1863 and a look at New York State’s Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, which opened the door to much stricter regulation of waste. One limitation of Taming Manhattan for readers steeped in nineteenth-century urban or social history is McNeur’s heavy reliance on previous scholarship, especially when discussing class—although she does make use of copious new primary sources, tracking a street-trees ordinance through multiple committees in 1833, for example, and crosschecking the names of those arrested in the Draft Riots with her own database of squatters and piggery owners. A larger problem is weak cultural analysis. Too often she relies on stock assertions about battles for control over urban spaces—and the racial and class implications of those battles—without offering fresh insights into how they manifested themselves on the landscape. More generally, while McNeur is to be commended for restoring waste-centered businesses that poor residents created and relied on to the history of the antebellum city, she devotes too little attention to the question of how these activities change the way we understand the history of that urbanizing landscape. Nonetheless, the work is lucid and jargon-free, with occasional flashes of vivid, even suspenseful, writing and evocative scene-setting. Taming Manhattan will be prized as a concise and incisive compendium of battles over urban space in one nineteenth-century city as seen through the lens of municipal legislation.