A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950

by Marta Gutman

Overview

American cities are constantly being built and rebuilt, resulting in ever-changing skylines and neighborhoods. While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from west coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises.

In A City for Children, Marta Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not tend to conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Instead, Gutman shows how, over and over, women turned private houses in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape—a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life.  The industrial landscape of Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequalities and racial prejudices, is not a neutral backdrop in Gutman’s story but an active player. Spanning one hundred years of history, A City for Children provides a compelling model for building urban institutions and demonstrates that children, women, charity, and incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures are central to the understanding of modern cities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226311289
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/19/2014
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Marta Gutman is professor of architectural and urban history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York and a member of the doctoral faculty of art history at The Graduate Center, City College of New York. She is also a licensed architect.

Read an Excerpt

A City for Children

Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850â"1950

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By Marta Gutman

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31128-9

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CHAPTER 1

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland

Let's start early on an August morning in 1888, as Elizabeth Betts readied herself for work. The kindergarten teacher, a graduate of the California Kindergarten Training School in San Francisco, lived and worked in the urbanizing flatlands in the western part of Oakland, California. In the early 1940s a former resident, evidently without sympathy for African Americans arriving during the Great Migration, recalled that only earlier in the city's history had West Oakland "contained many of the city's best citizens." To those men and women who, like Betts, were white, Protestant, and economically privileged in the late nineteenth century, the regular urban fabric spoke of successful city building; a success needed to cement their imperial ambition in the American West and to secure a good childhood for their children. In Betts's residential neighborhood, narrow wooden sidewalks separated gravel-covered streets from neatly fenced front yards, and the occasional empty lot, filled with tall grasses, yellowed from the long dry spell of a California summer.

I like to think that as the morning fog started to clear, Betts stepped out the front door, saw the foothills of the San Leandro Mountains shimmering in the distance, and perhaps imagined the fecund terrain beyond in the great Central Valley. She waved goodbye to her parents—William, a wealthy English immigrant who owned a carriage spring company in San Francisco, and Sarah, active in the Congregational Church—as she walked across the sidewalk and stepped into the waiting carriage. Even in this seemingly bucolic setting, railroad schedules and factory whistles outlined the rhythm of the day. At nine o'clock sharp, "Miss Lizzie" expected thirty boys and girls at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten (figure 1.1). Two years earlier she had set up the charity school for working-class children in Oakland Point, a neighborhood that was also in West Oakland but closer to the heart of the industrial machine than the capacious home of the Betts family on Myrtle Street. From the many properties for rent, Betts selected a sunny room inside an inexpensive building on Peralta Street, close to the Southern Pacific's sprawling railroad yards. Her decision to repurpose this place, remembered to have been "the former premises of a liquor-saloon," rendered explicit her intent to educate and to socialize children in need. "She didn't look for an elaborate house and in a location where she would be surrounded by her friends," an admirer wrote subsequently in the Sunday Call Magazine. "No, not she. Instead she went into the quarters of the poorest of Oakland's poor."

The author of the Call article, Madge Moore, may have exaggerated the poverty of Oakland Point in the late 1880s, but she nonetheless underscored with her backward glance this important point. Differences between the single-use neighborhood, where Betts lived, and the mixed-use neighborhood, where she worked, prompted women of her social class to venture to unfamiliar urban places to change the circumstances of workingclass childhood. The West Oakland Free Kindergarten was one result. It belonged to the charitable landscape for children—the physical network of buildings and spaces that women put together in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to improve cities for kids. In the gendered, mixed economy of social welfare that prevailed historically across the United States, state, county, and municipal governments counted on women to care for children in need, and women were more than eager to oblige. Although the precise configuration of responsibility varied from state to state, women relied on the same instrument to structure public-private partnerships. They organized voluntary associations, the element of civil society that Americans from all walks of life used in the nineteenth century to extend state power—in this case, to protect children.

The investments in childhood helped to make the American city a place for hope about the future, rather than only for despair about poverty, pollution, disease, crime, corruption, and injustice in the present. Charitable institutions for children, often housed in repurposed buildings and run by female volunteers, played a key role in addressing the social ills brought about by industrialization and urbanization, bringing order to the urban landscape, and creating reserves of public places freed from speculative development. However, not all problems were resolved. As America urbanized, the charitable landscape rendered public the architectural decisions of women and the social needs of children; it also inscribed physical reminders of the failures that had demanded its creation. Since children did not benefit equally from adult largesse, the physical spaces made for them in the charitable landscape served to ingrain inequalities and prejudices as well as to endow them with a special, idealized world. The process of giving and getting, the presence of many kinds of buildings, and the unpredictable relationships between people and places made the charitable landscape one of many intersecting cultural landscapes that gave an incomplete, tenuous, fragile, and imperfect order to nineteenth-century American cities.

California was no exception. Americans held dear to the romantic sense of the West as a special region, even after Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed, the feature that he alleged defined the region. In California more than elsewhere, the natural beauty, astonishing landforms, and abundant plant and animal species stunned newcomers. Especially for children, they praised the advantages of a temperate climate and ready access to nature—the sense that this was a new Eden. Nevertheless Americans, hungry for land and greedy for gold, introduced a market economy and class structure to this place: they seized the province of Alta California in 1846 during the Mexican-American War, executed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which delivered the territory to the United States, and wrote a constitution during the Gold Rush, in anticipation that the territory would be admitted to the Union.

The victors had promised to respect Mexican civil law, which had banned slavery since 1823, but the status of slavery in this new territory of the United States erupted during the 1848 presidential election. Opponents to slavery's advance formed the Free Soil Party, while Whigs and Democrats, the nation's main political parties, waffled on whether to restrict slavery in California—the explosive issue that had at least in part inspired the Mexican-American War. Even though the proslavery Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, a war hero and slave owner from Louisiana, won the election, Free Soil sentiment took hold on the Pacific Coast. The conveners of the constitutional convention in Monterey voted to ban slavery in 1849, and California was admitted—as a free state, in 1850. In the face of ensuing bitter contests over land and water rights, huge capitalist enterprises based on the extraction of natural resources spread across the hinterland, railroads linked them to markets, and city builders began to make California urban. By the 1870s, California ranked among the ten most urbanized states in the nation. By then, women had put in place components of the charitable landscape for children. Their concern was the crises that damaged childhood during industrialization, urbanization, and migration even in a small city like Oakland.

During the heady years of the Gold Rush, Horace Carpentier and two other Yankee land speculators set out to plat this new city, eight miles across the bay from the booming town of San Francisco. They staked adjacent claims on the flatlands of the contra costa (other shore), north of an estuary that assured a sheltered harbor (figure 1.2). Most of the stately oak trees that gave the town its name were cleared, milled, and used to build on the 480-acre site. The town sat within the El Rancho de San Antonio, 44,800 acres of land that had once been home to the Miwok people. In 1820 the Spanish crown had given this huge parcel to Luís María Peralta in thanks for military service to the colony. Peralta and his sons retained ownership after Mexico won independence from Spain in the following year, but their claim to this property came to naught. Like other wealthy Californios, the family could not control its vast holdings in the face of the Anglo invasion. The commission in 1850 of a plat on the land stolen from this family, state approval in 1852 of the charter based on the illegal plat, and another action endorse the claim that the city was "conceived in iniquity and nurtured on corruption." In 1868, Carpentier bribed Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington, the directors of the transcontinental railroad, to terminate that railroad in Oakland. The deal they struck delivered to these men, the Big Four, all riparian rights, including those to the harbor.

The Big Four won control of a city with a prosaic plan (figure 1.3). Julius Kellersberger, the surveyor, delivered the expected and nothing more to Carpentier and his partners—an even grid of streets, rectangular city blocks divided into narrow building lots, four public squares, and one main street, Broadway, that linked the harbor to Telegraph Avenue and San Pablo Avenue. To the west, the skew of Market Street, off the Kellersberger plat, set the orientation for streets that would over time fill the area known as "West of Market."

Three years after the delineation of the plat, the city opened its first public school (a oneroom schoolhouse) and an educator set up a private academy (three kids enrolled in an institution that would become the nucleus of the University of California). The modest buildings indicated a remarkable change about to burst forth—one that would transform cities and alter childhood. Kids have always lived, played, learned, and worked in urban spaces. However, the provision of places purposefully made for children is an invention of the modern world. As a new understanding of childhood began to emerge in early modern Europe, privileged classes embraced a sentimental ideal that emphasized a child's innocence. The sentimental construction of childhood intersected with other revolutionary social changes—the separation of home and work, the modern concept of public and private life, the rise of consumer society—and a new belief that was a product of the Enlightenment. Positing an active relationship between buildings and people, it asserted that because material culture affects human beings, it should shape their behavior.

Places and objects started to change as adults used them to ensure that children had a good childhood—one that was protected, happy, and playful. They also counted on all sorts of "stuff" to protect children from adult sexual desire, to display kids as valuable objects, and to insulate themselves from childish behavior and activities. In houses, middle- and upper-class parents expected children to play in nurseries and to sleep first in separate bedrooms and then in separate beds. Orphanages, schools, kindergartens, day care centers, hospitals, reform schools, and special prisons were built, followed by playgrounds, summer camps, museums, and libraries. Even if the metaphor of "islands" is sometimes used to describe this differentiation, children's places were not isolated from adult hopes and fears for childhood. Adults used physical spaces and material culture to set out and put in place their goals for childhood.

Taken together, changing ideals and changing places worked to define and prolong childhood as a time of dependency. The condition of dependence, tied to "powerlessness, submission, bodily inferiority or weakness," one historian has argued, set parameters for childhood in Western culture before it was described in terms of a specific biological age. As middle-class children became treasured for their emotional role in family life rather than for the market value of their wage labor, a broad consensus developed that kids should learn and play in settings made with those purposes in mind. This process, called the "sacralization of childhood" by Viviana A. Zelizer, galvanized reformers. They asserted the right of all kids to childhood as Americans struggled to reconcile demands for protection, charity, and dependence with the dearly held belief that liberty, rights, and independence go hand in hand in a democracy. These reformers refused to countenance resistance to the top-down call for protection even when it trounced on treasured prerogatives. One of those prerogatives was parental autonomy. In a patriarchal household, fathers, not a charity or the state, determined the course of childhood.

A photograph of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten gives some sense of the situation in the mid-1890s (see figure 1.1). Now the building is gone, cleared in the 1920s to make way for a public playground. Since this structure, like so many others, has been lost, it's necessary to use historic photographs to grasp the architectural character of the charitable landscape and to assess its effects on children. In this example the actual institution building process, the alteration of a saloon into a kindergarten, underscored the breadth of Betts's message. Her goal was not only to improve childhood, but also to reform the working class family.

Forty clean, neatly dressed children inhabited a place that had been made on purpose for them: the backyard of a school. Extraordinarily (remember that the US Supreme Court was about to declare that separate was equal), the charity was racially integrated. If the photograph portrayed these children as individuals by virtue of their demeanor and dress, they also belonged to an age-graded group, the kindergarten class. Supervised by three teachers and gathered to learn through play, these kids were protected from danger, disease, crime, immorality, and other contagions that kindergartners (as teachers and promoters of kindergartens were called) and other child savers believed were legion among the immigrants who lived in a neighborhood like Oakland Point. Reformers may have appreciated that working-class parents loved their children, but they could not grasp the manner in which these parents invested in childhood. Skilled railroad workers allowed their kids to attend the free kindergarten and gave them toys and pets to play with—and dolls and a dog are shown in the photo, an indicator that the right to play had emerged as a powerful site of identity formation by the 1890s. A parent with fewer resources to call upon—for example, a mother who worked in a cannery—may have struggled to do the same as she tried to strike a balance between competing areas of work, play, and education (and contested definitions of their value, too).

The relationships depicted in (figure 1.1) invite consideration of how the power produced through them shaped modern childhood. A useful concept is governmentality—offered by Michel Foucault to explain how we act in concert with others, and directed by Nikolas Rose toward children and families. The boundary between private and public life dissolved in the nineteenth century as the problems of children were construed to be social issues, subject to conditioning by the family, state, market, and civil society. Citizenship no longer inhabited one sphere, the political sector, in Rose's terms. That means the photo in figure 1.1 depicts a society on the cusp of change, as the social was invented, to borrow a concept from Jacques Donzelot. The human being, in this case the child, was not conditioned solely as a moral subject, an individual shaped by religious creed; nor was the child's body conditioned only by a normalizing gaze, directed by state authority. The child was becoming a social subject of solidarity, with citizenship rights that depended on adult protection and a childhood that needed spaces purposefully made for a young person.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A City for Children by Marta Gutman. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

ONE / New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland
TWO / The Landscape of Charity in California: First Imprints in San Francisco
THREE / The Ladies Intervene: Repurposed and Purpose-Built in Temescal
FOUR / The West Oakland Home: The “Noble Work for a Life Saving” of Rebecca McWade
FIVE / The Saloon That Became a School: Free Kindergartens in Northern California
SIX / The Art and Craft of Settlement Work in Oakland Point
SEVEN / “The Ground Must Belong to the City”: Playgrounds and Recreation Centers in Oakland’s Neighborhoods
EIGHT / Orphaned in Oakland: Institutional Life during the Progressive Era
NINE / Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland: Day Nurseries during the Interwar Years

Epilogue
Oral Histories and Interviews
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

This beautifully crafted and original account describes the fraught creation of what became an everyday halcyon in Oakland, California: the building, beginning in the late 19th century, of a ‘charitable landscape’ to improve the lives of children.  Marta Gutman brilliantly brings to life a remarkable, and fortifying, coincidence of women’s will, civic spirit, and Progressive politics that ‘repurposed’ space to benefit—and create—the city’s smallest subjects.  Depicting a remarkable cohort that sought to remake the city by, among other things, converting saloons to kindergartens, this book uncovers a nexus of design and social life, rich with nuance and implication.  An exceptionally tender work.

Michael Sorkin

A monumental achievement.

Times Higher Education

Gutman puts forward an expansive view of the built environment that pays close attention to the ways that reforms in the urban environment and changes in attitudes toward childhood crossed with architecture, interiors, and material culture. . . . A City for Children offers . . . a point of view that asks us to penetrate facades and closely look at what happened in the streets to understand the social forces that shaped the landscape of society.

The Architect's Newspaper

The ‘charitable landscape,’ is just one of the multiple layers of urban history that Marta Gutman has recovered and brought vividly to light. She has also exposed the complicated and intertwined relations of race and gender that were built into the urban fabric.  By book’s end, readers will be richly rewarded with a poignant recognition of the everyday human triumphs and losses that gave shape to the physical spaces of our cities.

Johns Hopkins University - Mary P. Ryan

Gutman takes considerable pains to present the history of Oakland’s charitable institutions for children in the context of state, regional, national, and even international trends, broadening the book’s appeal and value. . . . [An] ambitious work that argues so compellingly for the importance of urban structures designed for the betterment of children, families, and public life.

Journal of American History

Synthesizing a rich blend of methodologies and primary sources, Gutman presents a meticulous investigation of how institutional spaces socialized orphans to follow ‘useful,’ gendered, middle-class narratives for life. . . . A great strength is Gutman’s ability to contextualize local events with larger intellectual currents within the US and abroad. . . . Recommended.

Choice

The book is an underground earthquake. So many of us forget that cities do not just happen, but rather are designed, mis-designed and misled, conceived on foundations that sometimes are, very simply, built upside down or on shaky grounds. I loved reading it.

Paola Antonelli

As is so often the case, the future lies latent in the past. A City for Children holds up a rich layer of the past for scrutiny and for our collective betterment, vividly demonstrating the power of history for understanding both the past on its own terms and the present through recourse to the past. Scholars of contemporary children’s environments are especially encouraged to seek out this text.

Youth and Environments Journal Children

A City for Children is a monumental achievement about non-monumental architecture. The book is monumental because it explores an entire century of children’s architecture in a single place, Oakland, California. Unlike most monuments, however, buildings for children remain largely invisible in our cities and histories. Gutman’s achievement is to uncover the complex landscape designed and re-designed to support children, explaining how these hidden spaces functioned and why they matter.

Planning Perspectives

With remarkable detail, nuance and clarity Marta Gutman recovers the history of Oakland’s charitable institutions for children in a way that offers transformative insights into the landscapes of age, gender, race, religion, philanthropy, and urban development. Gutman takes the ‘landscapes’ of her title literally—this is most powerfully a book about space, about the ideas, practices, and social and material conditions that enabled women to claim spaces for children.  In many instances they did this by repurposing buildings initially constructed with other intentions. Marta Gutman’s manner of writing history participates in this tradition of strategic repurposing garnering the materials of architectural history, women’s history, children’s history, and the history of urban reform to forge something new. This is a wonderful book.

Amherst College - Karen Sánchez-Eppler

Remarkable. Based on extensive research, A City for Children is a sophisticated historical investigation into a wide range of charitable institutions built by women in Oakland, California, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primarily to serve the needs of children. Gutman is particularly attentive to the racial politics that informed the development of these institutions, and like all of her work, this book promises to inform current public policy debates, not just about Oakland, but also about American cities in general.

Abbie Van Slyck

In A City for Children, Marta Gutman explores how charitable institutions housed in repurposed buildings attempted to replace ‘damaged’ childhoods with ‘good’ ones. She documents in meticulous detail the buildings and spaces that the women of Oakland created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to take care of kids. . . . This is a well-written book, more accessible than many social histories because Gutman mixes theoretical references to Foucault with colloquial language. . . . She pays attention to the intersection of economic, political, and architectural history, as when she acknowledges the connection between real estate cycles and the ways women saved many places from speculative development. Gutman also weaves toged1er the stories of whites and blacks, native- and foreign born, and Catholics and Protestants. The book’s style and comprehensive coverage make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of urban history and women’s history.”
 

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

The central motif of A City for Children is that a charitable landscape developed as a spatial entity with various “nodes” in a shifting urban network. Gutman reconstructs the presence, appearance, and experience of institutions, most of which are now long gone. Using archives, oral histories, photographs, fire insurance maps, city directories, and census and tax records, Gutman gives spatial coherence to a story that is by nature fragmentary. Her own architectural renderings and schematic drawings of neighborhoods are especially helpful in reconstituting a story that is simultaneously architectural, urban, and social.

CAA Reviews

A City for Children should generate exciting new avenues for historical inquiry. Most importantly, it points to some innovative ways to conceptualize various educational and social welfare landscapes of the past and to utilize more spatial, visual, and cartographic evidence to deepen our understanding of how historical space and human experience interacted. The extensive use of illustrations as part of the narrative offers a primer for how to use maps, photographs, and building plans to interpret the changing social relations of a neighborhood. Historians of education interested in how schools shaped, and were shaped by, their social and physical surroundings, as well as children in classrooms, will likely find much of interest in Gutman’s methodology.

History of Education Quarterly

An outstanding book, based on creative research and innovative historical framing, A City for Children is the most comprehensive and nuanced study of the cultural landscape of charitable institutions.  Gutman’s expertise in the history of childhood, gender studies, and architecture make this an ambitious and path-breaking work.

Carla Yanni

Gutman provides a remarkably detailed portrait of the built environment and of the strategic reuse of existing structures. The repurposed and newly erected charity buildings, Gutman argues, represented the political influence of women who were, in theory at least, denied access to politics and social power. Gutman wants to celebrate these elite women reformers while also noting their racism and class-determined politics. She makes her case with exhaustive research and exemplary images.

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

What makes this book so important, ultimately, is the contribution it makes, as a work of history, to our present and our future. Through its consideration of the everyday landscape, the interconnections between buildings and people, it recovers the past, warts and all, peopled by intensely human, hopeful, and dedicated women, flawed figures who supported and worked within structures of inequality and racism. It is a story of success and failure, of conflict and change, of the relationship between private effort and public responsibility. A City for Children provides a framework for understanding the importance and possibilities of preservation, repurposing, and grassroots reform.

Building & Landscapes

Much like the charity women who transformed old to new, Gutman breathes new life into our understanding of women, children, and architecture—adding, raising, and repurposing theoretical and historical scholarship—to make an important contribution to our understanding of charity in the American West. . . . This thoroughly enjoyable and informative read is likely to find a place on the shelves of those most interested in the history of architecture, childhood, women, and reform. Gutman’s penetrating analysis plugs a gaping hole in our understanding of the charitable landscape of the West and United States more broadly.

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

With remarkable detail, nuance and clarity Marta Gutman recovers the history of Oakland’s charitable institutions for children in a way that offers transformative insights into the landscapes of age, gender, race, religion, philanthropy, and urban development. Gutman takes the ‘landscapes’ of her title literally—this is most powerfully a book about space, about the ideas, practices, and social and material conditions that enabled women to claim spaces for children.  In many instances they did this by repurposing buildings initially constructed with other intentions. Marta Gutman’s manner of writing history participates in this tradition of strategic repurposing garnering the materials of architectural history, women’s history, children’s history, and the history of urban reform to forge something new. This is a wonderful book.

Amherst College - Karen Sánchez-Eppler

With remarkable detail, nuance and clarity Marta Gutman recovers the history of Oakland’s charitable institutions for children in a way that offers transformative insights into the landscapes of age, gender, race, religion, philanthropy, and urban development. Gutman takes the ‘landscapes’ of her title literally—this is most powerfully a book about space, about the ideas, practices, and social and material conditions that enabled women to claim spaces for children.  In many instances they did this by repurposing buildings initially constructed with other intentions. Marta Gutman’s manner of writing history participates in this tradition of strategic repurposing garnering the materials of architectural history, women’s history, children’s history, and the history of urban reform to forge something new. This is a wonderful book.

Karen Sanchez-Eppler