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A City for Children

Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950

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.

448 pages | 120 halftones, 14 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2014

Color images are included in the e-book edition only.

Historical Studies of Urban America

Architecture: American Architecture, History of Architecture

Education: History of Education

History: American History, Urban History

Women’s Studies

Reviews

“A monumental achievement.”

Times Higher Education

“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, senior curator, Architecture & Design, director, R&D, Museum of Modern Art

“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

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

Awards

Langum Charitable Trust: Gene E. and Adele R. Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism
Won

Center for Historic Preservation - University of Mary Washington: Historic Preservation Book Prize
Won

Urban History Association: Kenneth Jackson Award
Won

Society of Architectural Historians: Spiro Kostof Book Award
Won

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