City Water, City Life by Carl Smith

Author:Carl Smith [Smith, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 19th Century, Literary Criticism, American, Technology & Engineering, Environmental, Water Supply
ISBN: 9780226022659
Google: WnWHHftxdqQC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-04-17T04:09:24+00:00

6

THE FLOW OF TIME

City Water as Cultural Anticipation

Nineteenth-century city life marched to a new sense of time. Its participants became accustomed to living by the dictates of the clock and the artificial rhythms of an increasingly scheduled workday. The continuous expansion and alteration of the built environment and the changes in the size and nature of the population made even the recent past seem irrelevant. This was especially true in Chicago, whose urban history was both so brief and yet so intense, as it grew exponentially on waves of newcomers. Since most residents were born and, in many cases, raised elsewhere, they had had little local heritage or memory. Taking office in March 1847, Mayor James Curtiss, who himself was in his thirties when he came to Chicago from Maine, stated, “We are not delegated to act for an old and established community—for a community whose interests and whose character have been firmly settled by a gradual and almost imperceptible process.” On the contrary, he explained, “we are to furnish precedents and speak for, to bind and control, the affairs of a city which but yesterday had no existence.”1 Bostonians and Philadelphians with local roots believed that they were rich in settled traditions, but they were a shrinking minority by the time Curtiss was sworn in. The only urban history that appeared to matter was the future that cities were making with each new day. On a deeper level, however, urbanization instilled a new understanding of the relationship between the past, present, and future, one that was clearly revealed in the ways in which they dealt with the exigencies of city water.

Cultural Anticipation

It was only natural that people living in rapidly expanding cities developed a distinctively forward-looking state of mind, a way of seeing that can be called cultural anticipation.2 As opposed to cultural memory, cultural anticipation consists not of broadly held understandings of the nature and meaning of the past, but of shared notions about the future—not recollections of what happened, but expectations of what will be. Cultural memory influences cultural anticipation, since the attitudes and beliefs that past experience inculcates always inflect how individuals conceptualize the future. Likewise, the way people think about the future often affects how they remember the past.

As the growing populations of urban centers came to include more and more people who arrived from many disparate places, the cultural memory of cities like Philadelphia and Boston, like so much else about urban life, became more fragmented, and the desire to honor and preserve the past less powerful, even in long-settled families. The heirs of merchant and patriot John Hancock were not above selling tons of earth from his large holdings on Beacon Hill to be used as fill in order to create new and valuable real estate. The excavation undermined the foundation of architect Charles Bulfinch’s 1789 monument to the Revolution, a sixty-foot column on which an American eagle defiantly perched, so that it had to be removed in 1811 because it no longer had reliable ground to stand on.

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