Search

The article presents titles and abstracts of papers submitted at a meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1938. The paper "The Sequent Occupance of a Boston Suburban Community," presented by Edward A. Ackerman focuses on areas surrounding the Boston metropolitan district. The proximity of a large city market, plots of level land and fertile soil determine the existence of these suburban fanning communities. The article "The Recession of Victoria Falls," by Wallace W. Atwood. The world famous falls on the Zainbesi have had a strange and remarkable history in recession. The gorge is serpentine with many curious off-shoots, and located on the floor of a broad and much older flat-bottomed valley. Today the water tumbles over a ledge, fully a mile in length, and into a very narrow chasm 350 ft. deep.

The built forms of New York City and Boston differed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper focuses on the changing forms of their retail districts and evaluates the divergence in those patterns in relation to their socioeconomic context. Historical atlases and city directories identified the locations of department stores, which were used as indicators of the retail districts while primary and secondary historical sources related locational decisions to their economic position and the structure of their elite classes. New York's unstable elite classes continued to move their residences north on Manhattan Island throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and were unable and unwilling to stop the northward expansion of the retail district. Boston's stable ruling class was able to control retail expansion through various political acts limiting development and through social barriers that limited displays of conspicuous consumption. The importance of the structure of elite classes in mediating the processes of land allocation suggests that findings of New York, as a city of competitive capitalism with a splintered elite, and Boston, as a city of controlled capitalism with a ruling elite, might provide a useful framework for understanding the specific contexts within other urban built forms.