| This dissertation presents the first systematic study of how modern American urban growth during the first half of the long 19th century depended on structural changes in food provisioning and consumption. It explores how the transition from a public-market to a free-market model of provisioning affected the material conditions of everyday life in an emerging metropolis. In four thematically organized and methodologically innovative chapters, the dissertation reopens discussions about the theory and practice of early Republican and Antebellum city governance, the underlying temporal and spatial structures of modern urban life, the standards of living of residents, and the development of modern urban space.;Chapter one examines the political economy of New York City's traditional market system, which ensured citizens' access to food as a "public good." It explains how and why during the second quarter of the 19th century, consumers, retailers and municipal officials colluded to deregulate the food trade, shifting the responsibility of urban provisioning from the public to the private domain. Moving from cause to consequence, chapter two traces the temporal and spatial relations of residents' shopping journeys. It reconstructs both what persisted and what changed in the seasonal, weekly, and daily schedules of marketing, and with the aid of Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis, it systematically maps Gotham's ever more fragmented landscape of provisioning. Chapter three inquires into the biological standard of living of residents by recording how the quantity and quality of the city's meat supplies declined from the late 1830s. In addition, it describes the process by which intensifying residential segregation caused increasingly unequal access to food among customers of different socioeconomic status. Finally, chapter four, through an historical ethnography of one marketplace and its vicinity, shows how the transition from a public-market to a street-based retail structure reconfigured everyday neighborhood life and the experience of urban space. |
