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The Misunderstood History
of Gentrification
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 Dennis E. Gale

The Misunderstood History

of Gentrification
People, Planning, Preservation, and
Urban Renewal, 1915–2020

temple university press

Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo
Temple University Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
tupress.temple.edu

Copyright © 2021 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System of Higher

Education
All rights reserved
Published 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gale, Dennis E., author.
Title: The misunderstood history of gentrification : people, planning, preservation, and
urban renewal, 1915–2020 / Dennis E. Gale.
Other titles: Urban life, landscape, and policy.
Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2021. | Series: Urban life, landscape,
and policy | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Offers evidence
that the phenomenon of American gentrification has much earlier historical roots than
many believe, and argues that a more thorough understanding of this history has
implications for how we should think about impoverished communities, “obsolete”
structures, and urban neighborhoods going forward.”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013136 (print) | LCCN 2020013137 (ebook) | ISBN 9781439920428
(cloth) | ISBN 9781439920435 (paperback) | ISBN 9781439920442 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Gentrification—United States—History—20th century. | Urban renewal—
United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HT175 .G353 2021 (print) | LCC HT175 (ebook) |
DDC 307.3/41609730904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013136
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013137

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 This book is lovingly dedicated to Diana S. Kash,
my soulmate and fellow wordsmith, for her forbearance
and understanding during the ceaseless hours
of my research and writing.
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

I Embryonic Gentrification: Case Studies and Examples

1 The Georgetown Neighborhood of Washington, D.C.,
1915–1945 23
2 The Greenwich Village Neighborhood of New York City,
1915–1945 60
3 The Beacon Hill Neighborhood of Boston, 1915–1945 85
4 Early Embryonic Gentrification: An Atlantic and Gulf Coast
Phenomenon 109

II Urban Redevelopment/Renewal Contends

with the Gentrification Paradigm, 1945–1980
5 Federal Policies to Reverse Urban Decline, 1949–1974 129
6 The Decade of the Neighborhood and the “Discovery”
of Gentrification 163
viii / Contents

III Dilemmas in Definition and Dialectics

7 Embryonic Gentrification and Advanced Gentrification,
1980–2018 179
Conclusion 198

References 209
Index 227
 Preface and Acknowledgments

M
illions of Americans are generally familiar with the much-­bally­
hooed urban crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. My generation of urban-
ists came of age, as it were, in the midst of this intensely troubling
period. Progressing even as the civil rights movement was in full swing
and the federal War on Poverty was at its zenith, the decline of American
­cities—physically, economically, and socially—posed a forbidding chal-
lenge to scholars, planners, and others. Consequently, when increasing signs
of what would later be known as gentrification appeared during the 1960s
and 1970s, a good deal of skepticism arose among some observers. It is dif-
ficult to convey to younger scholars today just how remarkable (and counter­
intuitive) was the appearance of thousands of mostly middle-class singles
and couples who were renovating and occupying older city sections often
labeled slums or ghettos. After all, for decades, millions of people had been
abandoning cities as numerous areas succumbed to disinvestment, crime,
and poverty. It was tempting, then, for some critics to dismiss gentrifica-
tion as an aberration or an outlier. And even though the national incidence
of gentrification today is still outpaced by suburbanization and urban dis-
investment, its most aggressive manifestations are profoundly redefining
cities such as Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Denver, San Fran-
cisco, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles. Thus, in many cities gentrification
has lost the astonishing, gee-whiz element we once associated with this
transformative urban phenomenon and has morphed into a quotidian, al-
beit seemingly enduring, trend. And yet, despite the appearance of endless
x / Preface and Acknowledgments

publications, podcasts, blogs, television programs, and films on aspects of

gentrification, there remains an important missing link in our understand-
ing of its full dimensions.
The inspiration for this book came shortly after I completed my doctoral
dissertation, “Restoration in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., 1915–1965” in
1982. Before that, as a faculty member in city planning at George Washing-
ton University, I had conducted some early research in Washington on what
was then referred to as the back-to-the-city movement. Aging neighbor-
hoods such as Dupont Circle, Capitol Hill, Adams Morgan, and Mount
Pleasant were undergoing intensive renovation, and it was clear that some
sections once viewed as liminal slums were attracting new residents and
investment capital. But my dissertation research on the Georgetown neigh-
borhood made clear that the phenomenon soon to be known widely in the
United States as gentrification did not originate in the 1960s or 1970s, as was
widely assumed. Rather, in Washington, at least, it first appeared in the
1910s and 1920s. Despite my efforts, however, I could find no comprehensive
documentation of Georgetown’s transition in print.
Early in my career, I authored several articles and two books on contem-
porary gentrification in the United States and Europe. But somehow, I never
got around to publishing an account of my dissertation findings. As my
academic career progressed, I assumed that someone else would write the
definitive study of Georgetown’s resurgence from a declining neighborhood
to the totally gentrified, elite enclave it became. As it turned out, nothing
quite like that appeared. Thus, “better late than never” is perhaps a fitting
rationale for the long-delayed book you now hold in your hands.
My scholarly debts are many. But they begin with my two principal dis-
sertation advisors at George Washington University, Frederick “Fritz”
Gutheim and Howard Gillette Jr. Fritz patiently helped me navigate numer-
ous historical thickets, using his mastery of the evolution of city planning
in the nation’s capital. Howard, then a resident of Washington’s gentrifying
Mount Pleasant neighborhood, was an urban historian of emerging na-
tional repute. Thankfully, he cured my myopic concentration on the intri-
cate details of Georgetown’s gentrification by nudging me to relate my ob-
servations to the larger currents of history across Washington and other
U.S. cities. Another George Washington University colleague and fellow
urbanist, Jeffrey Henig, alerted me to certain oversights in an early draft of
my dissertation, which opened an entirely new dimension for exploration.
It was Fritz, however, who first made me aware that early twentieth-century
U.S. gentrification was not unique to Washington. Indeed, Carolyn Ware’s
Greenwich Village, 1920–1930 ([1935] 1994) and Walter Firey’s Land Use in
Central Boston ([1947] 1968) documented comparable phenomena in New
York City and Boston, respectively. Although I did not include extensive
 Preface and Acknowledgments / xi

coverage of Ware’s or Firey’s research in my dissertation, I realized that the

scholarly depictions of American gentrification extant in the 1970s and
1980s were missing a crucial prologue. This book, then, is my attempt to
recontextualize American gentrification within the more expansive his-
torical framework it has so desperately lacked.
I am grateful for the generosity of five people who, approximately forty
years ago, provided me with oral testimonies on aspects of Georgetown’s
early revitalization: Grosvenor Chapman, John Gill, Everett Payne, Ar-
mistead Peter, and J. Bernard Wykoff. Their recollections helped clear the
fog around several matters related to the revitalization of Georgetown. Ab-
sent their insights, these details would likely be lost to memory today. Li-
brarians then at the Georgetown branch of the District of Columbia Public
Library, the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, and the Columbia Historical
Society (now the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.) turned up invalu-
able ephemeral items such as extant official studies and reports, news clip-
ping files, and local journal articles. Several historical records pertaining to
the city of Washington were provided to me at the Library of Congress, the
National Archives, and the National Capital Planning Commission. And
thanks to the Commerce Research Library, I was able to unearth long-­
forgotten records of Washington’s decennial censuses for the years 1910 to
1960. More recently, I benefited from research at the Boston Public Library
and the Beacon Hill Civic Association, as well as the New York Public Li-
brary and Columbia University’s Butler Library. Finally, over the past ten
years, I have plumbed the depths of Stanford University’s bountiful Green
Library and the Art and Architecture Library. I am indebted to all these
institutions.
Yet there is no substitute for firsthand experience, and I have been for-
tunate to have lived in or near Boston (1964–1969), Philadelphia (1969–
1971), and Washington, D.C. (1971–1989). During those years I rented
apartments, respectively, on Beacon Hill (1967–1968) and Society Hill
(1971), in Georgetown (1971–1973), and on Capitol Hill (1973–1974). All
four neighborhoods are discussed in this book, and my many excursions
through their streets and alleys provided me with insights that can come
only from direct observation. Similarly, my long-ago internships with the
Boston Redevelopment Authority (1968), the Model Cities Administration
of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (1969), and the
Philadelphia Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law (1969–1970)
shed light on the inner workings of the federal Urban Renewal and Model
Cities programs, which influenced my coverage of those topics in this book.
Moreover, it was my privilege to have become a fellow traveler with sev-
eral people who were among the first generation of scholars to conduct re-
search on U.S. gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s. Among those in our
xii / Preface and Acknowledgments

ranks were Daphne Spain, Shirley Bradway Laska, Greg Lipton, Howard
Sumka, Roman Cybriwsky, Phillip Clay, Rob Hollister, Tim Pattison, Rolf
Goetze, Neil Smith, Michael Schill, David Varady, and Richard Nathan.
Their research efforts contributed numerous insights into the dynamics of
gentrification and dispelled several misperceptions. Today, of course, a
small army of scholars, journalists, and others worldwide have probed this
phenomenon, ostensibly to the point of molecularity. But the more recent
work of two scholars, in particular, has made explicit that gentrification’s
U.S. origins date back earlier than the 1960s or 1970s. I acknowledge an
intellectual debt to both Suleiman Osman (The Invention of Brownstone
Brooklyn) and Andrew S. Dolkart (The Row House Reborn), whose research
on early gentrification in New York City inspired and energized my work on
this book.
I am grateful to Larry Bennett, professor emeritus at DePaul University
and a coeditor of the Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series at Temple
University Press, for his untiring efforts to help me chisel out a refined man-
uscript from the rough version I first shared with him. Familiar with Larry’s
extensive scholarship in urban studies, I was indeed fortunate to have the
opportunity to work with him in the writing and rewriting of this book. My
sincere thanks go to Aaron Javsicas, editor in chief of the press, for his con-
tinued encouragement. His faith in my ability to turn out a publishable
manuscript, despite my initial difficulties, propelled me forward with re-
newed enthusiasm. Three anonymous readers selected by the press scoured
my earlier drafts and shared their valued insights and suggestions. What-
ever the liabilities of this book, it is in considerably better shape thanks to
their scrutiny. Additionally, my longtime colleague and friend, David
Varady, of the University of Cincinnati, read an earlier version of my manu-
script and contributed several insights that helped me refine the narrative
and eliminate some fuzzy thinking on my part. Cartographer Michael Sie-
gel of Rutgers University ably rendered the neighborhood maps herein, add-
ing immeasurably to the spatial legibility of the three case studies. Despite
the collective contributions to this book from the aforementioned people,
any sins of omission or commission are entirely my own responsibility.
Finally, I offer a tip of the hat to my local Peet’s coffeehouse for plying
me with tidal waves of caffeinated beverages and providing a remote “office”
in which, over the years, I wrote and rewrote this book.
The Misunderstood History
of Gentrification
 Introduction

I
t was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1979, and I was stripping pan-
els of evil-smelling asphalt siding from the exterior walls of our 1896
Queen Anne Victorian house. You have probably seen asphalt siding be-
fore. It was a popular material to cover aging wood frame houses and pro-
vide a bit of insulation. A composite of pressed fibers resembling cardboard,
each rectangular panel was overlain with a coat of asphalt imprinted in a
brick-like pattern. As the panels aged, however, they looked more like an
ill-fitting patchwork coat. Asphalt siding had the advantage of being cheap.
Plus, once it was installed, you never had to paint your house again. My
removal method was simple enough: using a crowbar, I pulled out the nails
holding the panels in place, peeled the panels away, and stacked them in
piles. Then I scraped the dried paint shards from the original clapboard
siding underneath. They fell to the ground like potato chips. This process
was repeated over and over until all the asphalt panels were removed. (Later,
in the evening darkness, I hereby confess, I hauled the panels a block away
to an industrial dumpster to make an unlawful nighttime deposit.)
Over the previous few weeks, I had spent untold hours perched high on
a thirty-foot ladder ridding the house of its ugly garb. Today, however, I
worked at ground level on our wraparound front porch, which lay just be-
neath the house’s second-floor turret. Wrenching another panel away, I sud-
denly made an odd discovery. The clapboard underneath was blackened. At
first I feared it was some form of wood rot. So I removed two more panels.
Then three. Then five. No, this was not rot. Instead, the clapboard was
2 / Introduction

charred, unlike the other sections of the house I had worked on. A little
probing with a screwdriver revealed that the burned area was only about an
eighth of an inch deep. Underneath, the wood was in good condition. There
must have been a brief fire, I surmised. Maybe the house had been struck by
lightning. And someone—probably in the 1940s or 1950s, when asphalt sid-
ing was still popular—had wanted to conceal this damage.
Just then, my neighbor, known to all as Mr. Medley, walked by. Retired
from the navy, Wilfred Medley was the “mayor” of our block. His wife and
he lived a few doors down the street. With many years of residence, Mr.
Medley knew a great deal about our neighbors. Curious, I pointed to the
burned area and asked him if he had any idea when the fire had occurred.
He hesitated, walked through the chain link gate, and stared at the scorched
siding. Then he looked at the ground, as though searching his memory. Fi-
nally, he looked up again and turned to me.
“Yeah, I remember that. They, uh, they tried to burn him out,” he re-
plied.
Puzzled, I asked, “Who tried to burn who out?” I could see that my
neighbor had no trouble recollecting this incident. No, his hesitation was
due to something else. He looked off into the distance for what seemed a
long time. Then he cleared his throat.
“Ya see, they didn’t want a colored family movin’ in here. It was all white
back then . . . this block was.”
“You mean,” I said, “that white families tried to set the house on fire?”
Medley simply nodded. “Some of ’em did, I guess,” he responded halt-
ingly. “Now, this was a long time ago,” he added, as if to reassure me.
“Well, who was living in this house when that happened?” I asked,
pointing to the charred area.
Medley smiled. “He was a vet like me. A retired army sergeant. And he
bought that house and moved his family in. One evening, he smelled smoke.
He could see flames through the window, and he ran out to his porch. He
saw people runnin’ off into the dark. He was lucky ’cause the fire hadn’t
burned too long. He got out his garden hose and put it out.”
“Did they ever catch the arsonists?” I inquired, knowing his answer even
before he gave it.
“No . . . no,” he shook his head. “The police came by, but nothin’ ever
came of it. Y’see, back then, things like that happened in D.C.”
I was somewhat familiar with the history of racial change in Washing-
ton, especially in the period after World War II, and I was not surprised that
the arsonists had escaped justice. But I had just learned that my own home
bore the ugly scars of racial conflict. I felt ashamed and embarrassed—­
especially in the presence of Mr. Medley, who, like his long-ago neighbor,
may have been the object of such aggression. My wife and I were one of only
 Introduction / 3

two white families living on our block. Ironic, I thought to myself, that de-
cades earlier, black folks like Mr. Medley and my home’s former occupant
were the pioneers on our block. Back then, many minority families in
American cities encountered block busting, redlining, racially restrictive
covenants, and open violence as they pursued the American dream. Now,
my wife and I were the newcomers. But in our case, our neighbors had wel-
comed us and seemed genuinely pleased at the improvements we were mak-
ing to our house. No one had harmed us or our property. How could they?
I asked myself. After all, directly across the street, our neighbor, Mrs. Green,
posted herself daily in her second-floor window, providing eyes on the
street. Very little escaped her attention. I did not know how to respond to
Mr. Medley.
Breaking the awkward silence, he continued. “Yeah, after that happened,
he decided to put that siding on the house. He wanted to cover up the burn
marks. I told him to put up asbestos siding ’cause it’s fireproof. But he said
it was too expensive. He just wanted to cover up that fire damage. So he
chose asphalt siding instead.”
After thanking Mr. Medley, I went inside, my mind racing. Before my
marriage, I had enjoyed renting apartments in Georgetown and on Capitol
Hill, both historic neighborhoods. Over 1977 and 1978, I searched for a
period house with character. Everywhere I looked, though, it seemed, peo-
ple were renovating houses in older neighborhoods. Many people had beau-
tifully restored their home to its former luster, with window shutters and
flower boxes, brass door knockers, new gingerbread-style ornamentation,
and refinished interior woodwork. Prices were rising quickly, and I soon
learned that several hot neighborhoods were already beyond my means.
Desperate, I began looking far afield from the most sought-after sections
and in 1978 bought a house in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast
Washington. The campus of Catholic University and the National Shrine of
the Immaculate Conception were blocks away. Long an enclave of white
Catholic families, Brookland had a population now composed predomi-
nantly of working-class and lower-middle-class blacks and whites. (Aside
from Mr. Medley, Mrs. Green, and several other African American families,
my immediate neighbors included a retired white blue-collar worker and a
South Asian couple.) As far as I could tell, there were few, if any, home
renovations going on in our neighborhood. Brookland was isolated from the
trendy areas of the city such as Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, and Capi-
tol Hill. I had purchased the three-bedroom, one-bath house for just under
$50,000. And I took some satisfaction in the fact that I had not forced any
renters out of their home.
Soon after I moved in, my fiancée and I were married. My wife became
my fellow handyman as we devoted evenings and weekends to scraping old
4 / Introduction

paint, patching plaster, and hanging wallpaper. (I pretended not to hear her
when she accused me of conscripting her for cheap labor.) From the neigh-
bors, we learned that 716 Hamlin Street NE, our address, had earlier been a
group home or commune inhabited by a half-dozen hippies, who threw
frequent parties. Their successors, a white professional couple from whom I
purchased the property, were fond of Day-Glo colors in the kitchen, with
orange and green trim around the windows. The patriarch, an electrical
engineer with a Ph.D., had jerry-rigged a fuse box with a delirium of wires
and cables in the cellar. Mr. Medley, a professional electrician, surveyed his
handiwork and muttered to himself in disgust. Soon he was under contract
to us to correct the engineer’s many mistakes.
The unsettling discovery that day was redolent with irony. It brought
home to me the realization that, although parts of Washington were under-
going reinvestment after decades of physical and economic decline, a darker
period had preceded this trend. As African Americans and other minorities
had moved into the city’s neighborhoods seeking decent housing, especially
over the first half of the twentieth century, all too often they were met with
animosity, if not outright violence. And our house offered one tiny example.
How, I wondered, did my neighbors feel about that? And how many of my
fellow gentry in Washington were even aware of the heavy burdens of dis-
crimination and segregation occurring a generation ago against minorities?
Over the four years during which my wife and I occupied our Victorian
home, I would never again take for granted our right to live there. The ugly
history of racism had mortgaged any feelings of entitlement we might have
held. A moral debt came with our home, and we would never forget the
warmth and hospitality our neighbors showed us, in spite of the cruelty and
incivility that had preceded us in an earlier era.

Gentrification
In the years ahead, these and other personal experiences would frame sev-
eral of my research projects on urban decline, reinvestment, and revitaliza-
tion. I would learn a great deal about the small-scale physical, economic,
and social transformations—of which my wife and I were now an infini-
tesimal part—taking place in several American cities. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, some researchers referred to it in phrases such as “neighbor-
hood revitalization” and “neighborhood resettlement” (Clay 1979a; Gale
1984). Soon, though, it became widely known in North America by a neolo-
gism coined more than a decade earlier by British sociologist Ruth Glass
(1964): gentrification. Glass observed the renovation of older housing by
young, white, middle-class do-it-yourselfers in at least seven working-class
sections of inner London. At the time, outmigration from London to the
 Introduction / 5

suburbs was a common mobility pattern for middle-class households. As

one scholar pointed out, however, housing rehabilitation had already been
under way in isolated small areas of London for at least a decade preceding
Glass’s observations (Moran 2007). Glass’s expression, “gentrification,” de-
noted not the random or occasional improvement of older city properties
but, rather, a more or less systematic and continual process leading ulti-
mately to the nearly complete conversion of a neighborhood’s physical, eco-
nomic, and social character. In short, gentrification was not merely amelio-
rative; it was transformative. More than a half century has passed since
Glass shared her observations of London’s regeneration, and it is remarkable
how prescient were her insights.
As for the United States, why was the specification of the process Glass
labeled gentrification significant in the late 1970s and 1980s? For much of
the early and mid-twentieth century, the expected and prevailing pattern of
change in the inner core of older cities was for buildings and spaces to de-
teriorate as they aged. Even before World War II, one of the nation’s most
respected economists, Homer Hoyt, described a process that would later
become known as filter or filtering theory (1939, 81–82, 95). This presump-
tion argued that as housing becomes older, it usually filters downward in
physical and economic terms when compared to other dwellings in the local
housing supply. As it does so, it deteriorates physically, and its value dimin-
ishes relative to other, newer homes. Its features—electrical and mechanical
systems and kitchens and bathrooms, for example—become obsolescent
(Hoyt 1939, 111). People with low and moderate incomes tend to inhabit
such properties, either as renters or owners. Meanwhile, the theory contin-
ues, most households will filter upward in terms of socioeconomic status as
they progress through the human life cycle. As they do so, they typically
inhabit increasingly “better” homes and neighborhoods.
Hoyt’s views were resolute on the feasibility of reversing downward fil-
tering in cities. Simply renovating scattered individual houses in the midst
of large slums, he opined, was futile. The middle-income home-seeker will
bypass even new inner-city properties and move to the suburbs “where his
children can associate with other children in his own economic and social
class, and not with the children of slum dwellers” (Hoyt 1966, 210). “Blighted
areas in the midst of cities,” Hoyt added, were “jungles of crime” and “train-
ing grounds for criminals” (211). He prescribed demolishing “houses in the
worst areas” and replacing them with entirely new neighborhoods. Once a
neighborhood’s houses reached an age of approximately a half century, he
noted, and a majority were in poor condition, complete clearance and re-
building was in order (600–601).
Filter theory continued to influence scholarly and professional under-
standing about older urban neighborhoods in the midcentury decades
6 / Introduction

(Lowry 1960; Ratcliff 1949). Housing economists William Grigsby and Louis
Rosenberg, for example, offered an explanation of how differential patterns
of housing quality evolve in a given community, from upper-income estates,
to middle-income subdivisions, to lower-income “slums” or “ghettos” (1975,
196–197). And while a dwelling’s age, per se, was not considered absolutely
determinative of its ultimate fate, Grigsby and Rosenberg considered it a
reliable indicator. Apparently, the U.S. Bureau of the Census agreed, for it
began collecting housing data (including the estimated age of each dwelling
unit) for the first time in the 1940 decennial census (Barnhart 1953, 5).
Implicit in filter theory was the assumption that housing, like automo-
biles or vacuum cleaners, depreciates in value as it ages and as newer, more
modern housing becomes available (Galster 1987, 235). At the core of filter
theory was what I term the obsolescence thesis—the expectation that as a
housing unit ages, its architecture becomes unfashionable, and its physical
and mechanical elements become dated (Hoyt 1939, 111, 121). Filter theory
was particularly associated with the mass production techniques arising
during the American industrial revolution of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Prior to this, housing units were typically built one at
a time by craftsmen for individual clients. Or, in many cases, families built
their own home.
The factory system, with innovations such as assembly line production,
made possible the creation of large numbers of consumer goods at lower
prices than was possible through earlier cottage-industry methods. Many
of the elements of a house or apartment—radiators, furnaces, or stoves, for
example—could be manufactured in large quantities and shipped to build-
ing sites for installation. The invention of wire nails and balloon frame tech-
nology replaced the slower, more arduous, mortise-and-tenon form of con-
struction. Plaster and lathe inner wall surfaces gave way to mass-produced
Sheetrock, or drywall.
Advances such as these contributed to substantially increasing U.S.
housing stocks. Unfortunately, they sometimes resulted in shoddy work-
manship and less resilient housing quality. With time, such units deterio-
rated more rapidly, hastening neighborhood decline. Additionally, as hous-
ing supplies mushroomed relative to demand, older dwellings were more
readily devalued, further eroding neighborhood conditions. Furthermore,
as middle-class outmigration to the metropolitan suburbs increased, own-
ers of property in the urban areas left behind often deferred maintenance
and subdivided single-family homes into apartments or rooms. Overcrowd-
ing and accelerated wear and tear were common outcomes (Gruen 2010,
91–92). On top of these factors, older residential neighborhoods built prior
to the advent of municipal zoning and building codes were not infre-
quently cursed by inconsistent land uses such as factories, warehouses, and
 Introduction / 7

unkempt vacant lots. As noise, smoke, truck traffic, and other hazards com-
promised neighborhood residential character, families fled to more tranquil
areas if they could afford to do so. Thus, by the mid-twentieth century, a
variety of influences added to the physical and economic decline of inner
cities, resulting in widespread vacancies, owner-abandonment, and even
arson.
In the argot of mid-twentieth-century economists, homes in such areas
suffered from diminishing marginal utility. Put another way, the devalua-
tion of housing led many people to believe that today’s silk-purse housing
would eventually become tomorrow’s sow’s ear. Because the phenomenon I
term embryonic gentrification defied these presumed norms—in effect
turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse through reinvestment and rehabilita-
tion—it was dismissed by many observers as an aberration. Filter theory,
together with its corollary, the obsolescence thesis, whether known by those
terms or not, pervaded the thinking of real estate agents, bankers, investors,
developers, and others whose opinions largely determined housing and
neighborhood outcomes. (As discussed further on, rent gap theory, a more
recent development, provides a satisfactory resolution to the oversights of
filter theory.)
Further altering the nature of American housing markets during the
industrial age was the pace of suburbanization. The construction of com-
muter rail and streetcar systems between the 1870s and 1920s opened up
vast areas outside city boundaries, where land and housing prices were af-
fordable to millions of consumers (K. Jackson 1985; Warner 1978). Later, the
mass production of automobiles from the 1920s onward accelerated this
pattern. New homes with spacious yards, modern kitchens and baths, and
garages, as well as up-to-date plumbing and electrical service, convinced
millions of home-seekers to forsake city living. Thousands of urban neigh-
borhoods were devalorized, leading to owner neglect and physical and eco-
nomic deterioration. The post–World War II economic recovery accelerated
suburbanization, and yesterday’s pristine neighborhood became tomorrow’s
city slum.
Responding to an epidemic of white flight, experts argued that these
migrants were being pushed out of cities by fears of decreasing property
values, racial and socioeconomic change, rising crime, decaying infrastruc-
ture, and declining public schools. At the same time, they were being pulled
by the suburban attractions of larger, more modern homes; safer streets;
better schools; escalating real estate values; and in some cases lower prop-
erty tax burdens than were available in cities (Kleinberg 1995, 123). These
trends reinforced the premises on which filter theory was grounded.
In London, as in many U.S. cities, gentrification in the 1960s and 1970s
was noteworthy (if not remarkable) precisely because it ran counter to
8 / Introduction

expected norms. Occurring in an era when American and British cities were
increasingly thought to be in decline, the presumptive trajectory for many
older neighborhoods was gradual physical and economic erosion and the
succession of middle-class residents by poor and working-class households.
However, gentrification inverted this process, resulting not only in physical
and economic renewal but in what I term upward socioeconomic transition,
or the succession of poor and working-class people by those of middle- and
even upper-class status.
Since the 1970s, the gentrification trend has accelerated to varying de-
grees in dozens of cities and towns across the American landscape. Larger
urban centers such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washing-
ton, D.C., Chicago, Columbus, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, and
Portland, Oregon, for example, all contain examples. So, also, do smaller
cities such as Charleston, Savannah, Miami Beach, Hoboken, Jersey City,
and Portland, Maine.
Most significant to public officials, gentrification injected desperately
needed private capital into city areas where disinvestment had become the
norm. And with capital came new tax revenues for city treasuries and em-
ployment opportunities for city residents. Despite these attractions, how-
ever, gentrification bore certain negatives. As neighborhood population
profiles transitioned from poor and working-class to middle-class status—
not infrequently driving out racial and ethnic minorities—local media cov-
erage raised questions about gentrification’s benefits and costs. And as af-
fordable housing stocks were whittled away by rising demand from more
affluent newcomers, community organizations and city administrations
struggled to find replacement dwellings.
Some researchers have contrasted gentrification with incumbent up-
grading, which involves home improvements by owners who have lived in
the neighborhood for a period of years, rather than by newcomers (Goetze
1979, 103–104; Palen and London 1984a, 8–9; Varady 1986). However, a
number of issues militated against the acceleration of such a trend. First,
incumbent owners in declining neighborhoods often proved reluctant to
renovate their home, fearing they would sacrifice their investment if prop-
erty values remained stagnant or declined. Similarly, landlords were hesi-
tant to improve their rental properties because demand among potential
tenants might not be sufficient to justify the higher rents they would have to
charge to amortize their renovation expenses. Second, even among incum-
bent owners who were willing to renovate a property, access to capital was
often constrained by the reluctance of banks to lend their depositors’ sav-
ings in areas perceived to be in economic and social decline (e.g., redlining).
Third, for incumbent owners in gentrifying neighborhoods, there might
be no need to renovate a property for subsequent sale, if demand among
 Introduction / 9

gentry was sufficiently high. This is especially true in areas in which new-
comers are rapidly bidding prices upward. As a result of these circumstances
and the difficulty of distinguishing empirically between gentrification and
incumbent upgrading, there appears to be little evidence that the latter has
developed as a significant trend in the United States.

Historical Gaps and Back Stories

Like other researchers in the late 1970s, I assumed at that time that the
phenomenon we were just beginning to call gentrification was unprece-
dented in the American context. With more research, however, I was sur-
prised to learn that in a few American cities, gentrification’s roots dated
back at least to the World War I era. The manifestations of gentrification I
witnessed firsthand in Boston and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and in
Washington in the 1970s, then, represented not the birth of this phenome-
non in America but, rather, its continuance and expansion in an ongoing
but poorly understand process. Today the scholarly literature on U.S. gen-
trification contains countless books, articles, and research papers. Similarly,
copious online postings and podcasts, as well as radio and television cover-
age, have made gentrification a household word. A simple Google keyword
search of the term “gentrification” on March 27, 2018, produced more than
5.5 million hits. Even in the more rarefied atmosphere of university research
circles, Google Scholar yielded 20,300 keyword hits on November 2, 2018,
for publications on gentrification posted between 2014 and 2018. Yet little
attention has apparently been devoted to the phenomenon’s origins. Indeed,
there is a critical backstory here that has gone largely undocumented. This
book is my effort to create a more complete understanding of one of the
most influential urban dynamics of the past hundred years.
My research indicates that the first appearances of what later became
known as gentrification in the United States occurred about a century ago
in a handful of eastern and southern coastal cities. I contend that these early
examples inspired new conceptions of city living that ran counter to the
prevailing images of slums, blighted areas, and the poor and working-class
people (often racial or ethnic minorities) who inhabited them. In that re-
gard, this phenomenon put in motion—albeit glacially at first—a paradigm
that eventually became a counterforce to urban decline narratives. More-
over, in the post–World War II era, the gentrification paradigm, at first re-
jected by federal officials in favor of slum eradication through the Urban
Redevelopment, Public Housing, and Interstate Highway programs, was
later embraced as an alternative strategy for reversing urban decline. To a
considerable degree, then, the federal Urban Redevelopment (subsequently
renamed Urban Renewal) paradigm was eventually supplanted by policies
10 / Introduction

emphasizing reuse and rehabilitation of existing buildings. The former rep-

resented an attempt to distort conventional market dynamics, while the
latter served to harness them through the somewhat more organic process
of subsidized and market-based housing rehabilitation. And once the fed-
eral door to widespread rehabilitation was opened, the gentrification para-
digm thrived. Recognition of this important interplay has largely escaped
scholarly scrutiny.
By no means, however, do I contend that the failure of federal officials
to recognize the potential of the gentrification paradigm was, ipso facto, the
sole explanation for the demise of Urban Redevelopment. As copious re-
search has shown, other factors contributed to the program’s eventual refor-
mulation in 1954 and termination in the mid-1970s. Among these were the
high public and private expenses of acquiring and demolishing slums and
replacing them with new infrastructure and buildings; the byzantine poli-
tics unleashed as local officials contended with complex red tape and grow-
ing citizen resistance to the federal bulldozer; the disproportionate impact
of the program on poor and working-class people and racial and ethnic
minorities; resistance from the burgeoning historic preservation movement;
and the distaste held by many Republicans for urban-related programs,
which funneled federal funding to Democratic urban strongholds (Ander-
son 1964). Nevertheless, as I discuss later, it was the gentrification paradigm
that became a critical element of Redevelopment’s policy successors.
By the time the United States ended its involvement in the Vietnam
War, gentrification had been under way in a small number of cities for more
than a half century. But over the last quarter of the twentieth century, its
pace increased in those places and it appeared in many additional cities.
Media attention had risen significantly and empirical research was prolifer-
ating. Unfortunately, popular perceptions of gentrification in America
today are roughly comparable to a novel missing its first two chapters. The
roots from which grew the modern-day trend have remained largely unrec-
ognized and unexplored. To cite one example, two respected urban scholars
have contended that a first wave of American gentrification occurred in the
1970s (Hackworth and Smith 2001). Theirs is a widely held misconception,
but in fact this process dates back a half century prior to the 1970s. Further
on in this book, I attempt to fill in the blanks, so to speak, by resurrecting
some of the stories of the people and events that framed the genesis of U.S.
gentrification.

Embryonic and Advanced Gentrification

Not only has gentrification’s history been misunderstood; definitions of the
phenomenon have shifted in popular and scholarly use since the late 1970s.
 Introduction / 11

Today, scholars, journalists, and laypersons frequently apply the expression

to virtually any form of reinvestment—renovation or new construction—
leading to social and/or economic change. Put simply, gentrification has
become a synonym for urban development of almost any kind primarily
benefiting middle- and upper-class people. As the term’s meaning has be-
come increasingly fuzzy, not only have scholars and activists lost sight of
gentrification’s historical origins, but we have undercut the term’s utility for
understanding processes of urban growth, change, and decline.
For these reasons, I have chosen to organize this study according to two
periods—what I refer to as “embryonic gentrification” and “advanced gen-
trification.” Embryonic gentrification refers to gentrification occurring in
the period from the phenomenon’s U.S. origins a century ago to approxi-
mately the 1980s. And even though embryonic gentrification continued to
appear thereafter, the term “gentrification” acquired expanded meanings as
activists, media observers, and researchers have applied it to a more elabo-
rate collection of urban circumstances. I refer to these more extensive us-
ages as “advanced gentrification.”

Embryonic Gentrification
Several common elements were associated with embryonic gentrification
during the period from approximately 1915 to the 1980s. First, as pointed
out above, for the most part it involved the rehabilitation of aged buildings
(mostly housing) in older urban neighborhoods (Golden 1981, 429; Gold-
field and Brownell 1990, 420; Tonkiss 2005, 81–84). Most of the construc-
tion work was initiated by middle-income people (Feffer 2007, 302). During
the genesis of the gentrification process, the construction of new homes in
these enclaves was comparatively rare. This was due to the availability of
existing housing suitable for renovation, the attractions some found in pe-
riod housing styles, and the generally lower costs and skill levels associated
with renovation versus new construction. However, as gentrification ad-
vanced in a given neighborhood and the supply of properties suitable for
rehabilitation declined, continued demand for housing would eventually
justify the higher costs and greater risks of new infill construction. A second
element of embryonic gentrification in this period involves the geographic
locations of the earliest manifestations of the phenomenon. As I later ex-
plain, American gentrification first appeared in a few of the nation’s oldest
cities located on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. These places harbored most
of the nation’s oldest building stocks, with many structures dating from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As such, they showed greater signs of
obsolescence and wear and tear than cities settled at a later date. Age itself
helps explain why the earliest examples of embryonic gentrification
12 / Introduction

appeared in these places. It also helps us understand why the trend spread
only later to younger American cities in the South, Midwest, and West.
Third, in its earliest stages, embryonic gentrification was most closely
associated not with professional builders and large-scale projects but, rather,
with nonprofessional homeowner-occupants. These people did much of the
renovation work themselves, as time and resources permitted. Professional
tradespeople such as plumbers and electricians might be hired to deal with
challenges requiring technical expertise. This is not to insist that small-scale
commercial home improvement companies were absent from such neigh-
borhoods. With time, if demand for properties in the neighborhood rose
significantly, those with purely financial interests in gentrification would
indeed appear. Still, the essence of embryonic gentrification appears to have
been the do-it-yourself aspect of homeowner-occupants. Jane Jacobs char-
acterized her perceptions of the gentrification process in terms similar to
this, adding that in its early stages, relations between long-term and recently
arrived residents were relatively nonconflictual (1996).
Fourth, embryonic gentrification constituted a localized trend, rather
than a random and disconnected pattern of activities. Although in the ear-
liest stages the pace of renovation may have proceeded sluggishly, as inves-
tor confidence rose, the pace often gained enough momentum to constitute
a widely perceived local movement with dozens, if not hundreds, of par-
ticipants. Therefore, scattered and intermittent rehabilitation and routine
home improvement and maintenance activities did not, by themselves, con-
stitute embryonic gentrification.
A fifth characteristic often associated with embryonic gentrification in-
volved incumbent residents (i.e., those whose residency in the neighborhood
generally predates the arrival of gentry households). In the early stages of
gentrification, the dislocation of these households as a result of evictions,
sharp rent increases, lease terminations, or steep property tax hikes might
be partially ameliorated by the availability of alternative affordable housing
stocks in or near the gentrifying neighborhood. But as demand rose and the
renovation process progressed, the citywide supply of affordable dwelling
units dwindled and prices escalated. Landlords, some facing rising property
tax assessments, often raised their asking rents, disadvantaging low- and
moderate-income tenants. At this stage, incumbent households faced a
greater probability of being displaced. However, the challenges of determin-
ing the magnitude of localized gentrification-induced displacement have
proven to be all but intractable. As a result of a variety of factors, includ-
ing the generally high rates of mobility among rental tenants (Cox 2018),
parsing the influence of gentrification-related dislocation requires deep im-
mersion in the turbulent waters of assumption (Malach 2018, 116–117).
­Researchers thus become caught up in the eternal apples-and-oranges co­-
 Introduction / 13

nundrum so often beclouding social science analysis. And yet there is lit-
tle doubt that as embryonic gentrification progresses through a given city
section, the supply of affordable housing will eventually be reduced (Mar-
cuse 1986). This issue is explored in greater depth later in the book.
As embryonic gentrification progressed, certain associated trends often
appeared (Malach 2018, 113). In the early stages, real estate speculators, de-
tecting a trend, might flip properties, buying at lower prices and then
quickly selling them at a significant markup, with few, if any, improvements.
As the number of improved properties in a neighborhood rose, though,
realtors and building tradesmen entered the market, rehabilitating proper-
ties for sale or rental. At this point, renovation could extend to retail proper-
ties, as owners of restaurants, brewpubs, cafes, and clothing stores, for ex-
ample, took advantage of the neighborhood’s rising affluence. With time,
some corporate interests such as banks and insurance companies, now more
confident in the emerging, predominantly middle-class makeup of the
neighborhood, were willing to undertake the first tentative steps to renovate
larger, often vacant, properties such as mills, warehouses, factories, or sur-
plus schools for residential or commercial uses. Conversion of apartment
buildings to condominium ownership often occurred. Or these firms might
develop new infill apartment, condominium, or live/work studios involving
dozens, if not hundreds, of dwelling units. These dynamics are typical of
embryonic gentrification in its later stages.

Advanced Gentrification
Embryonic gentrification persists into the twenty-first century and contin-
ues to emerge in a number of U.S. cities. But at least since the 1980s and
1990s, the term “gentrification” has undergone a metamorphosis. Originally
associated primarily with inner-city housing rehabilitation trends, the G-
word is now applied to almost any form of urban development. Scholars and
the mass media have associated it with the creation of new museums, gal-
leries, aquariums, sports facilities, performing arts centers, and music halls.
Other examples include convention centers, enclosed downtown shopping
malls, street rail systems, waterfront parks, hotels, gaming casinos, and fes-
tival marketplaces (Teaford 1990, 275–279). Even new coffee houses, dog
parks, community gardens, and bike paths are considered by some critics to
cater to middle-income newcomers and therefore to represent gentrifica-
tion. Virtually any attractions designed to increase municipal revenues and
business development by drawing suburbanites and tourists to the city
might be so identified. Even luxury condominiums and office towers have
become captive to the all-encompassing nomenclature of gentrification.
Small wonder, then, that one influential source referred to this “definitional
14 / Introduction

overload” as “political, politicized, and politically loaded” (Lees, Slater, and

Wyly 2008, 155).
What had happened? Many who misapplied the term seized on one part
of gentrification’s identity—upward socioeconomic transition, or the grad-
ual replacement of a neighborhood’s incumbent residents by newcomers,
usually of a higher social class and not infrequently of a different racial or
ethnic identity. This form of residential succession often became the defini-
tional fulcrum on which the meaning of gentrification was balanced. While
these are critically important empirical matters, the myopic emphases on
upward socioeconomic transition and displacement have peeled away im-
portant layers of connotation. As a result, the original properties associated
with what I term “embryonic gentrification” have seemingly faded into the
mists of memory. These include the reversal of neighborhood disinvestment
and physical deterioration, the enhancement of city revenues, the environ-
mentally commendable reuse (rather than the wasteful destruction) of older
structures (including historic resources), and the reduction in incidents of
serious crime. Thus, the concept of gentrification now connotes virtually
any form of urban development that fails to directly benefit poor and
­working-class people and minorities. To typologize these modern usages of
the G-word from earlier meanings, I refer to them collectively as “advanced
gentrification.”
In doing so, by no means do I intend to minimize the deleterious prop-
erties of this transformational urban phenomenon. These include the loss of
neighborhood institutions such as religious congregations, community or-
ganizations, and mom-and-pop stores offering local patrons informal lines
of credit; the erosion of long-standing political coalitions providing public
benefits to incumbent residents; the disintegration of extended-family and
friendship networks offering free or low-cost care services for children, the
disabled, and seniors; and the disappearance of blue-collar bars, inexpen-
sive eateries, and service stations providing part-time and seasonal work for
low-income residents, as well as loci for social interaction (Tissot 2015, 203–
206, 209–210). These and other impacts may be associated with all forms of
gentrification. Nevertheless, my concern is the slippery slope of reduction-
ism that has developed, thereby consigning a complex and multifaceted
physical, social, and economic phenomenon of inarguably positive, as well
as negative, impacts to a binary construct grounded in “simplistic frame-
works of good and evil” (Goldstein 2017, 14).
The more inclusive gentrification’s definition has become, the less pre-
cise its meaning. Or to paraphrase W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The
Gondoliers, when everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody (“The Gon-
doliers” 2020). If nearly all forms of urban development are gentrification,
then what is there about gentrification that is truly distinctive? How
 Introduction / 15

is discourse about urbanization furthered if our lexicon is increasingly

muddled? As if to remind us of this conundrum, a recently published an-
thology identifies at least nine subcategories of gentrification (Lees 2018).
Despite my concerns, I hasten to add that advanced gentrification does,
indeed, bear certain markers that distinguish it from its embryonic origins.
These include a greater reliance on corporate and institutional capital and
professionalized project management; the blurring of lines of authority and
responsibility between public and private sector actors; and a stronger em-
phasis on larger-scale new construction, even in the earliest stages of the
reinvestment process, rather than the less-risky property-by-property reha-
bilitation process characteristic of embryonic gentrification. Later, I expand
on the several connotations associated with advanced gentrification.

Purpose of the Book

The primary purpose of my study is not to contend with the numerous is-
sues that have arisen among gentrification scholars, such as production ver-
sus consumption theories or the existence of third-wave gentrification. Pro-
duction theory emphasizes the primacy of the rent gap (i.e., the difference
between a property’s current value and its “highest and best use” value) in
understanding the root causes of gentrification (N. Smith 1979, 1996). Con-
sumption theory, on the other hand, accounts for the appearance of gen­
trification as the result of shifting demand factors (such as rising rates of
educational attainment or household income) that contribute to the revalori-
zation of formerly declining inner-city properties (Hamnett 2003b). Third-
wave theories differentiate successive historical phases of urbanization and
purport to identify shifts in the pace and/or character of gentrification
(Hackworth and Smith 2001; Hetzler, Medina, and Overfelt 2006).
It is also not my purpose to grapple with the issue of the extent to which
gentrification induces household displacement versus other factors that im-
pinge on housing supplies and costs. Matters such as these have undergone
extensive scholarly scrutiny since the late 1970s (Freeman 2009; Marcuse
1986).
Instead, my central goal is to correct misunderstandings about gentrifi-
cation’s historical origins in the United States. I show that this phenomenon
first appeared in a few urban neighborhoods about a century ago (albeit
then referred to under terms such as “remodeling,” “rejuvenation,” or “re-
building”), rather than in the 1960s or 1970s. This recontextualization ob-
ligates us to examine gentrification from a fresh perspective. For example,
there is the poorly understood interrelationship between gentrification as a
form of neighborhood revitalization and the federal Urban Redevelop-
ment and Urban Renewal programs. This leads to my second purpose: to
16 / Introduction

articulate how federal officials initially rejected building rehabilitation strat-

egies, including the gentrification paradigm, in favor of a clearance-and-
redevelopment strategy, and only later reversed course, shifting to an em-
phasis on neighborhood conservation and renovation, with redevelopment
as a limited and localized option. Although not originally a creature of na-
tional public policy, gentrification would become its captive by the late
1970s and 1980s.
Recontextualization opens the door to my third purpose: examining
popular misperceptions about the necessary preconditions spawning gen-
trification in the United States. In doing so, I argue that the roles played by
matters such as deindustrialization, the globalizing economy, and the post-
war baby boom have been misinterpreted in the gentrification literature.
Issues of causality and catalysis are explored. Finally, my fourth purpose is
to point out that popular interpretations of gentrification have undergone a
semantic transmutation over the past forty-odd years. Consequently, the
term has largely been rendered ineffective in scholarly and popular dis-
course, now consigned as it is to a kind of definitional promiscuity.

Organization of the Book

The Misunderstood History of Gentrification is organized in three parts. Part
I covers the period from approximately 1915 to 1945, addressing the emer-
gence of embryonic gentrification in three case study cities—Washington,
D.C.; New York; and Boston. (Brief mention is made of parallel trends in
Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans.) Each case study documents
key demographic elements, geographical patterns, and neighborhood mo-
bilization activities associated with the earliest stages of the gentrification
paradigm during the interwar years. It also contrasts each community in
terms of the relative influence of social elites and bohemians in propelling
its transition forward. The critical role played by the fledgling city planning
movement in protecting and restoring neighborhood built form is briefly
explored. The fundamental purpose of Part I is to present what I hope will
be received as solid empirical evidence supporting my contention that gen-
trification’s American origins date back to the early twentieth century, not
to the 1960s and 1970s.
Part II encompasses the period extending from the end of World War II
to about 1980. With only a few exceptions, my research uncovered no pub-
lished studies on U.S. embryonic gentrification prior to the mid-1970s. But
thereafter, scholars, reporters, and writers would propel a tsunami of case
studies demonstrating the incidence and extent of embryonic gentrifica-
tion in a number of American cities. It was in this interval that the nation
 Introduction / 17

discovered this phenomenon and, at first, adopted a more or less uniform

nomenclature by which it became widely known. I discuss how embryonic
gentrification migrated in Washington, New York, and Boston from its ori-
gin neighborhood to other areas of those cities. By this time, however, em-
bryonic gentrification was appearing in a few other cities, as well, and I
briefly make reference to those examples.
An irony of the postwar decades was the fact that, even as embryonic
gentrification was commencing what might be termed its second genera-
tion of activity, federal officials were launching what would become a
­multibillion-dollar campaign to reverse urban decline. Composed of several
programs, but most prominently Urban Redevelopment (later renamed
Urban Renewal), this effort constituted a fundamentally divergent approach
to revitalizing American cities. In fact, it could be said to have been in direct
opposition to the then-emerging trend of embryonic gentrification, at least
conceptually, if not politically. Part II continues, therefore, by tracing the
interrelationships between Redevelopment/Renewal and gentrification, in-
cluding the federal program’s faulty conceptual underpinnings.
Part II shows how the rise of a national historic preservation movement
contributed both to the demise of the Redevelopment/Renewal paradigm
and to the success of the more politically palatable gentrification paradigm.
Part II concludes with an accounting of the “decade of the neighborhood,”
a period centered in the 1970s during which federal officials enacted a smor-
gasbord of programs, most of which were intended to fill the gap left by the
termination of Redevelopment/Renewal. Nearly all of these initiatives, I
contend, had goals that were either commensurate with, or not inconsistent
with, the promotion of urban gentrification.
Part III probes in depth the similarities and differences between embry-
onic and advanced gentrification. It begins by comparing the Urban Rede-
velopment/Renewal paradigm to the embryonic gentrification paradigm,
arguing that the former generally proved more controversial than the latter.
Among the explanations for this were several economic variables that
clearly advantaged gentrification. Additionally, gentrification was associ-
ated with several noneconomic characteristics that further distinguished it
from Urban Redevelopment/Renewal. These matters contributed to the
eventual demise of the Redevelopment/Renewal paradigm and the accel-
eration of its successor, the gentrification paradigm.
Yet, as Part III points out, once Redevelopment/Renewal was elimi-
nated, the resistance movement associated with it was not as easily trans-
ferred to the gentrification paradigm. Often lacking transparent parameters
of agency, the newly adopted form of reversing urban decline led to compli-
cations in the gentrification dialectic. Among these was an enigma: whether
18 / Introduction

middle-class households disadvantaged poor and working-class families by

decamping to the suburbs or whether they did so by remaining as city resi-
dents and living in close proximity to those families.
Part III concludes the book with several summations. It emphasizes that
gentrification must be understood as an urban phenomenon with historical
roots in the very early twentieth century, rather than the 1960s or 1970s.
This understanding, in turn, raises questions about how we interpret a trend
that in some cities has proven to be transformational. Among other matters,
history, architecture, and place offer core concepts for understanding gen-
trification’s origins in the American context. Moreover, I contend, we need
to dispense with misperceptions about the extent to which forces such as
deindustrialization, globalization, and the postwar baby boom were causal,
as opposed to catalytic, factors in gentrification’s growth.
Part III continues by tracing the interrelationships between the federal
government’s Urban Redevelopment/Renewal programs and the essentially
private market process of embryonic gentrification. It points out that those
programs were founded on the basis of faulty conceptual understandings
about urban real estate markets, which the gentrification paradigm ulti-
mately refuted. In the end, to a considerable extent, at least, the gentrifica-
tion paradigm supplanted the Redevelopment/Renewal paradigm. None-
theless, this transition resulted in a kind of semantic transmutation in
which an essentially privatized process of gentrification complicated both
criticism and opposition. Often proceeding with only hazy lines of public
agency, gentrification undermined the sharply etched polarity between
­Redevelopment/Renewal authorities and their opponents. And as gentrifi-
cation was incorporated into the more or less laissez-faire dynamics of
privatization and devolution, enabled in part by newer federal policies, its
opponents were disadvantaged in their efforts to organize resistance.

A Few Words about Words

I employ the terms “rehabilitation” and “renovation” interchangeably to de-
note the repair and improvement of existing structures (especially housing).
In my usage of “Urban Redevelopment” or “Redevelopment” and “Urban
Renewal” or “Renewal,” I refer specifically to matters associated with the
federal government programs under those labels existing between 1949 and
1974. Uncapitalized, those terms have taken on a generic quality in popular
usage as a synonym for urban development or real estate development,
whether encompassed by federal programs or not. Unless that usage ap-
pears in a quotation, it is not adopted in this book. In referring to Urban
Redevelopment, I mean the process by which residents, businesses, and
other organizations were removed from officially designated project areas
 Introduction / 19

and buildings were demolished and cleared, later to be supplanted by new

buildings, spaces, and inhabitants. Unless otherwise noted, my use of the
term Urban Renewal encompasses both the policies of demolition and re-
building and the added alternative of reusing existing structures through
their rehabilitation and improvement. This includes the preservation and
restoration of historic resources.
Of course, the often-implicit corollary of both Urban Redevelopment
and Urban Renewal was the demographic imperative: the assumption that
removing all or most poor and working-class residents was a necessary pre-
condition to successfully revitalizing a formerly declining (i.e., blighted or
slum) neighborhood. In reference to residents whose neighborhood tenure
generally predates those of gentrifiers, I employ the noun “incumbents.”
Underlying this usage is the presumption that for the most part, incumbents
are poor and working-class households, often, though not always, racial or
ethnic minorities. Some may be homeless and/or suffer from substance
abuse, disabilities, or mental illness, while others may include penurious
seniors living on a fixed income. I employ the terms “gentry” or “gentrifiers”
interchangeably, referring to those mostly middle-income in-movers to an
older neighborhood who occupy a home or start a business, imposing new
class, racial, ethnic, and/or socioeconomic tastes and standards. These in-
movers invariably include so-called creative-class workers (Florida 2005),
artists (Zukin 1982), and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer
(LGBTQ) people (Doan 2018).
Although my research is centered on gentrification in the United States,
cities in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and New Zea-
land, for example, have experienced varying degrees of gentrification. Read-
ers wishing to examine comparable trends in other nations would do well
to consult authoritative sources such as Gentrification (Lees, Slater, and
Wyly 2008), Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism
(Atkinson and Bridge 2005), Planetary Gentrification (Lees, Hyun, and
Lopez-Morales 2016), Unequal City (Hamnett 2003b), Urban Regeneration
in Europe (Couch, Fraser, and Perry 2003), and Whose Urban Renaissance?
An International Comparison of Urban Regeneration Strategies (Porter and
Shaw 2009).
 I

Embryonic Gentrification
Case Studies and Examples
 1

The Georgetown Neighborhood

of Washington, D.C., 1915–1945

O
ne of the earliest incidences of U.S. embryonic gentrification oc-
curred in the Georgetown neighborhood (Figure 1.1) of Washington,
D.C. (Goldfield and Brownell 1990, 420). Settled by Scottish immi-
grants approximately forty years before the nation’s capital city was located
adjacent to it, Georgetown was a freestanding colonial port town situated
on the Potomac River. It had a small harbor giving sailing vessels access to
the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Its streets were laid out in grid
fashion along terrain that gradually slopes upward from the waterfront to
the community’s northern heights. When the United States, by then a sov-
ereign nation, chose to establish the new national capital city at the conflu-
ence of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, a plan was drawn by the French-
man Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who was assisted by the surveyor Benjamin
Banneker. L’Enfant envisioned a great city inspired by European Baroque
city planning conventions. Washington would be laid out with grand di-
agonal boulevards overlaying a grid street system (Gutheim 1977, 24–36).
Georgetown was incorporated into the plan at its western edge. At key
intersections in the new capital, parks, statuary, memorials, and fountains
were to be situated on circles, squares, or ovals. A “President’s House” and
a “Congress House” were included as well. A huge National Mall would
stretch across the lower section of the city, destined someday to accommo-
date important public buildings such as museums and galleries, as well
as water features, memorials, monuments, and sculpture. Although the
24 / Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 The Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. (Map by Michael

Siegel.)

L’Enfant plan was later modified by the surveyor Andrew Ellicott, many of
its elements remained.
As the new capital city expanded, Georgetown took on greater impor-
tance. Its inns and homes provided the most civilized setting then available
for visiting colonial dignitaries. Among them were George and Martha
Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, John Marshall,
and Henry Clay. Authors such as Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, and
Louisa May Alcott found lodgings there. And Francis Scott Key, later the
composer of the national anthem, lived for a time in Georgetown.
Over the nineteenth century the capital city grew amoeba-like in all
directions. But its growth into Georgetown was checked by the stream val-
ley known as Rock Creek, which delineated the old port town’s eastern pe-
rimeter. On its southern edge, Georgetown was further buffered by the Po-
tomac River and on the west by the young Georgetown University campus.
Only along its northern edge did the little port town’s built form blend
somewhat anonymously into the spreading fabric of Washington. Thus,
morphological elements served as Georgetown’s bulwark against invasive
development, growth, and change and contributed to its identity and dis-
tinctiveness.
From Georgetown’s founding in 1751 to the mid-nineteenth century,
hundreds of frame and brick homes were built, mostly in the Federal,
 The Georgetown Neighborhood of Washington, D.C., 1915–1945 / 25

Figure 1.2 The M Street NW commercial corridor in Georgetown illustrates some

of the architectural variety appearing in the neighborhood. Among the most
sought-after dwelling types was the Federal style, as displayed in the Thomas Sim
Lee Corner (center), dating from 1794 to 1810.

Georgian, and Greek Revival styles. In the decades after the Civil War, rows
of townhouses in the Queen Anne, Italianate, and French Mansard styles
sprung up along its streets. Shops and hotels lined the intersecting main
commercial streets known today as M Street NW (Figure 1.2) and Wiscon-
sin Avenue NW. On the community’s upper elevations wealthy families
erected mansions on large estates, but elsewhere most buildings were lim-
ited to two- and three-story brick townhouses or single-family detached
dwellings. Despite its physical distinctiveness, Georgetown lost its capacity
for self-governance over the last three decades of the nineteenth century
and came under full control of the District of Columbia government (K.
Smith 1989, 10).

Georgetown’s Decline
Although Georgetown prospered over most of its early existence, its for-
tunes began to change as the twentieth century approached. By 1910 the
little community was showing worrisome signs of decline (Zeitz 1979, 34).
Its one-time elegance now seemed anachronistic, more suited to the post-
bellum era than to the approaching Roaring Twenties. Though Washington
26 / Chapter 1

bustled with fashionable new housing and rising numbers of federal govern-
ment employees, many of the buildings in Georgetown were aged, roofs and
cellars leaked, and plumbing and wiring systems (where they existed) were
primitive. One former resident, the son of a machinist, lived there during
World War I. “Georgetown,” he said, “was a poor, working-class neighbor-
hood. I was very conscious of the difficulties of working people” (Morley
2011, 223). Years later an issue of National Geographic described the com-
munity as once having been a “cheap-rent neighborhood,” “dilapidated,”
and full of “second-class boardinghouses” (Kinney 1953, 513).
The decline was even true of some of the grand old mansions. One
Georgetown patrician, a descendant of Martha Washington, offered an ex-
ample in a 1980 interview. Pointing through a window of his magnificent
Palladian estate, Tudor Place, Armistead Peter said, “There was a house,
across the street. It was a big old brick house, and, in my memory, it was
completely disreputable. Every glass in the windows was broken [pauses]
boys throwing rocks through the windows” (Peter 1980). One of the com-
munity’s most respected families, the Dodges, owned a flour milling busi-
ness that had declined by the 1920s. Their mansion was left vacant for sev-
eral years and it, too, became derelict. Peter recalled that “crystal chandeliers
were destroyed and windows were broken in every direction” (Peter 1980).
Urban economist Homer Hoyt, in reference to American cities such as Chi-
cago, lamented the special problems imposed by decaying mansions such as
these, noting that they caused “a deterioration of the neighborhood and a
further decline in value” (1939, 121).
The availability of more modern housing in Washington and its suburbs
was one factor contributing to Georgetown’s decline. Some families relo-
cated to newer city neighborhoods such as Dupont Circle and Kalorama or
to Bethesda and Chevy Chase in nearby Maryland. But a more fundamental
influence was the earlier erosion of Georgetown’s economy over the late
nineteenth century. This was due in part to competition from other regional
ports such as those in Alexandria, Virginia, and in Baltimore. Moreover,
Georgetown’s Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, connecting Washington to the
trans-Appalachian hinterlands, gradually lost ground in its competition
with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. By 1924 all commercial canal traffic
had ended. Similar small port cities with access to the Atlantic Ocean, such
as Newburyport, Massachusetts, were buoyed by the industrial revolution,
which enabled them to reinvent themselves as nineteenth-century manufac-
turing centers. Georgetown, however, never became much of a factory town.
Consequently, its modest industrial base diminished between 1880 and
1920. Even its role as a retail center faded. Once a market town for nearby
Maryland and Virginia farmers, Georgetown suffered as their patronage
ebbed, in part because of the consumption of agricultural land by Wash­
 The Georgetown Neighborhood of Washington, D.C., 1915–1945 / 27

ington’s spreading suburbanization (K. Smith 1989, 17–46). Too, the ex-
panding downtown retail area of Washington drew customers away from
Georgetown’s stores.
Once its cash cow, Georgetown’s canal and waterfront area, located
south of M Street NW, became an odoriferous backwater. It housed a ren-
dering plant, a waste incinerator, warehouses, flour and sawmills, a cooper-
age, lumberyards, sand and gravel firms, and derelict industrial and com-
mercial buildings. Poor families were scattered about the waterfront. Many
lived in squalor, some crammed into tenements that were once the man-
sions inhabited by ship captains and importers. Others lived in tiny two-
story homes without central heating or sewer and water service.
By the early twentieth century the canal had become a waste-befouled
backwater trench (K. Smith 1989, 27, 76). So abject did waterfront housing
conditions become, a book appeared describing slums there and in other
sections of Washington. Neglected Neighbors: Stories of Life in the Alleys,
Tenements and Shanties of the Nation’s Capital (1909) was written by Charles
F. Weller, who headed the Associated Charities of Washington, D.C. The
book was an account inspired by How the Other Half Lives (1890), authored
by the renowned muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. For his efforts on behalf
of the poor, Weller was thanked by President Theodore Roosevelt, who sub-
sequently appointed him executive secretary of the President’s Homes Com-
mission.
Like Riis, Weller included in his book numerous photographs—ninety-
six of them—most depicting crowded pockets of penury (Figure 1.3). Poor
and working-class whites and blacks were crammed into shacks, stables,
tenements, rooming houses, and cellars in small enclaves dubbed Tomcat
Flats, Factory Hill, Cissel Alley, Cherry Hill, and the like (Weller 1909, 166–
167, 212–213, 226–228). Some of these warrens were occupied entirely by
formerly enslaved people or their descendants, while others were inhabited
by Irish or Italian immigrants. Very few were racially integrated. Indoor
plumbing was rare, water was drawn from outdoor spigots or hand pumps,
and overflowing box privies abounded. Lacking plumbing, some inhabi­
tants poured their wastewater out of second- and third-floor windows onto
the homes of their neighbors. Through interviews with occupants, Weller
found examples of out-of-wedlock births, crime, hunger, alcoholism, dis-
ease, and grossly unsanitary living conditions. In one hovel, he found three
families living in three rooms:

In one room which was not locked up there were then living two
adults and five children, the youngest, two weeks old. This “home”
measured ten by twelve feet. It contained a bed, a pile of rags and a
broken stove whose three lengths of stove pipe, being of different
28 / Chapter 1

Figure 1.3 This early twentieth-century photograph exemplifies both the abject
poverty and the physical deterioration of Georgetown’s erstwhile slums. (From
Weller 1909.)

sizes, were jointed together by the aid of cloths and paper. Near the
glassless window, the house-mother was washing, with water car-
ried from a hydrant a block away. The odor from the overflowing,
vile wooden toilets standing twenty-five feet behind the row, with
their broken seats covered with excrement, could be distinguished
occasionally. (Weller 1909, 169)

Though Georgetown’s most miserable living conditions were centered

in the waterfront area, there were pockets of poverty in the residential sec-
tions north of M Street NW, as well. Houses on diminutive lots located
along the narrow secondary streets were often occupied by poor or working-
class whites. Some of the first- or second-generation Irish or Italian immi-
grants were disadvantaged by anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments
held by native white Protestants. However, Washington never attracted the
large numbers of immigrants found in other East Coast cities such as Bos-
ton or Baltimore. In large measure this was because it was neither a major
port nor a manufacturing city and thus did not offer the large number of
unskilled or low-skilled jobs found in other eastern cities. Moreover, lying
closer to Virginia and other southern states, Washington was more acces-
sible to northward-migrating African Americans. Not surprisingly, a larger
 The Georgetown Neighborhood of Washington, D.C., 1915–1945 / 29

share of the capital city’s population was composed of black families than
might be found in other eastern cities.
Many of these people resided in the tiny brick or frame houses crammed
into Georgetown’s alleys behind the comfortable homes. Overcrowding was
common and living conditions were sometimes only marginally better than
those in the waterfront area. Nonetheless, such dire circumstances were not
unique to Georgetown. A police census in 1897 had counted almost nine-
teen thousand people in Washington who were living in alley dwellings.
Nearly 90 percent were African Americans (Weller 1909, 11).
Certainly, author Weller was no bleeding-heart liberal, for he wrote un-
charitably of one abject tenement, “The whole settlement was clearly a low
congregating place, a kind of human rabbit-warren, for degenerate, idle,
parasitic people who ought long ago to have been cleared away as one would
disinfect a pest hole” (Weller 1909, 214). About twenty years later William
Henry Jones, an African American sociologist at Howard University, car-
ried out a more comprehensive survey of Washington’s alley dwellings. It
was sponsored by an interracial committee of the Washington Federation
of Churches. Visiting nearly seven thousand homes—including several in
Georgetown—Jones and his researchers found that poor African Americans
occupied the vast majority of addresses, though most properties were owned
by whites (Jones 1929). Like Weller, Jones displayed little sympathy for these
people. The alleys, he wrote, were rife with crime, immorality, illegitimate
children, unwed mothers, high mortality rates, disease, bootlegging, and
thievery. Yet Jones found few alley residents who expressed a desire to leave
these cramped slums. It would be many decades before a more benign study
of Washington’s alley dwellings was published (Borchert 1980). It was prob-
ably scenes such as those experienced by Weller and Jones that inspired
“The Tenement Pool,” a poem written in the 1920s by a Georgetown Univer-
sity student. The poet described the sight of tenement children playing in a
pool of dirty water and lamented that “the shadow of the building cast a
shadow of the grave” (Casey 1927, 67).

Renovation Comes to Georgetown

By the turn of the twentieth century it was common for newcomers to
Washington to reside in the townhouses and apartment buildings of newer
neighborhoods such as Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Mount Pleasant, and
Kalorama. Elderly Georgetown was fraying at the collar, and to many peo-
ple some sections appeared shabby, inconvenient, and obsolescent. Real
estate firms were reluctant to direct home-seekers there because of its de-
teriorating conditions and decrepit older homes. But one such business
defied the odds and published a pamphlet titled Genial Georgetown
30 / Chapter 1

(Miller-Shoemaker Real Estate Company 1905). It extolled the virtues of

life (and real estate) in the neighborhood. Gushing extravagantly, it de-
clared that Georgetown was soon to undergo a veritable renaissance. “All
of Georgetown property will yield a profit in the near future,” the authors
promised. Indeed, the publication’s rhetoric proved to be prescient. Not
only would a real estate boom appear; it would do so with no little impact
on the area’s most vulnerable residents—renters. The pamphlet noted,
“Stronger and stronger is growing the spirit that encourages home owner-
ship. Soon on the door of every tenant will be written, clear to the eye of
the true man, ‘Sluggard.’”
Despite their exuberance, however, the authors would have to wait sev-
eral years before their promises could be realized. It was during and after
the United States entered World War I in April 1917 that Georgetown’s for-
tunes began to change. Thousands of workers and military personnel
flocked to the capital to contribute to the nation’s defense effort. By the end
of the summer, an estimated 60,000 to 75,000 workers resided in the city. At
the war’s end, Washington’s population had swelled to 526,000, about dou-
ble what it had been in 1914 (Asch and Musgrove 2017, 227).
Housing, especially rental units, was soon at a premium, and the estab-
lished District neighborhoods most accessible to the federal offices quickly
filled up. In desperation, some workers found apartments in Georgetown,
where rents in certain areas were modest because of the neighborhood’s
tired image. Nonetheless, these newcomers soon discovered its advantages.
Workers could walk or take the M Street NW trolley to the National Mall
and federal office buildings. Shopping for groceries and household goods
was conveniently located along Georgetown’s commercial corridors, M
Street NW, and Wisconsin Avenue NW. Rock Creek Park and Montrose
Park, both on the periphery of the neighborhood, were readily accessible for
picnics and recreation. And there were several restaurants, taverns, and
lounges for dining and relaxation.
Most surprisingly, though, it was not just working- and middle-class
families who moved in. Despite Georgetown’s diminished reputation, fam-
ilies of considerable social prominence began to arrive. They were aware
that Georgetown still harbored a few small clusters of old families—locally
known as “cave dwellers”—who lived quietly on their estates or in the
grander homes and townhouses located north of M Street NW and east of
Wisconsin Avenue NW. It was clear to the new arrivals that an elite society
held forth in Georgetown, in spite of the neighborhood’s downhill slide.
Elegant dinner parties and receptions were still held in these homes, and
their residents supported respected churches and private clubs that appealed
to some of the newcomers. Too, many of the latter recognized the august
Another random document with
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— in Ukerewe 211.
—, Stock- 202.
Schleuder der Wambugwe 185.
Schisu 48, 50.
Schröpfen 173.
Schweinitz, Graf 105, 145.
Schwesinger, Dr. 105.
Schmiede 207, 232.
— der Wataturu 172.
— der Massai siehe Elkonono.
— in Usinja 72, 211.
Schmuck der Wafiomi 174.
— der Wanyamwesi 229.
Schmuck der Warundi 218.
Seliman bin Masud 105.
Semu-Fluss 63.
Serengeti 35, 142.
Sesam 198.
Sewah-Haji 3.
Shaw 103.
Sike 105, 107, 237.
—, Stammtafel des 234.
Simangori-Berg 27, 136.
Simbiti 64, 139.
Simityek 168, 171.
Simiyu 37, 61, 66, 141.
Singisa-See 111, 138, 189.
Sklaven 179, 242.
— am Tanganyika 94 ff.
Sklavenhandel 57, 58, 243, 244,
245.
Sklaverei 187.
— bei Massai 164.
— bei Wanyamwesi 237.
— bei Wataturu 173.
— in Urundi 224.
Sogonoi 19, 135.
Soïebus 175.
Sonyo 157.
Sorghum siehe Kulturpflanzen.
Sotik 174.
Sprache der Wafiomi 174.
— der Waschaschi 196, 202.
— der Wasinja 210.
— der Wataturu 170.
— der Watussi 205.
Sprachen 193.
Speer 178, 185, 186, 190, 192.
— der Massai 161.
— der Waha 226.
— der Wandorobo 167.
— der Wanyamwesi 232.
— der Warundi 220.
— der Waschaschi 203.
— der Wasinja 211.
— der Wataturu 172.
Speke 74, 144, 148, 207, 214, 227.
Speke-Golf 143.
Spring, Kapt. 46, 51.
Stammesmarke der Wambugwe
182, 186.
Stanley 48, 73, 76, 110, 145, 147,
148.
Sterne, Ansichten der Massai über
163.
Stockkämpfe 202.
— der Wanyaturu 191.
Stockschild der Wanyaturu 190.
Stokes, Mr. 45, 73, 74, 106.
Straussfedern 247.
Stuhlmann Dr. 73, 110, 111, 143,
144, 146, 149, 204, 205, 208,
214, 227, 235.
Suess 133, 136, 137.
Sudanesensoldaten 2, 24, 125.
Suguti 141.
Suguti-Bach 52.
Sunguisi 108.
Swahíli-Soldaten 6.
— -Träger 124.

T.
Tabak 171, 178, 184, 198, 199,
219, 231, 251.
Tabora 104, 105, 234, 242.
— -Handel 242.
Talama 126.
Tambarale 106, 107.
Tandala 181.
Tanga 1, 8.
— -Insel 1.
— -Leute 125.
Tanganyika 91, 152, 153.
Tanz der Warundi 79, 81.
— der Waschaschi 202.
Tänze der Warundi 224.
Tarangire 123.
Tatoga s. Wataturu.
Tauben 226, 231.
— -schläge 102.
Tauschwaaren 3.
Telekesa 14.
Tembebau, Entstehung des 175.
Temben 171.
— der Wambugwe 182.
— der Wanyamwesi 230.
— der Wanyaturu 189.
— der Warangi 183, 184.
— der Wassandaui 192.
Tembe, unterirdisches 177.
Thomson 157.
Tippo-Tip 93, 244.
Tod 163.
Töpfe 184.
— der Wafiomi 178.
— der Warundi 219, 220, 221.
Töpferei der Watwa 215.
Träger, Anwerbung der 3, 7.
—, Desertion von 38.
—, Disziplin der 83.
—, Eigenschaften der 124.
—, Verhalten der 36.
Trommeln der Waha 226.
— der Waschaschi 202.
Tschem-tschem 123.
Tschyambo s. Kirambo.
Tuga Moto 104.
Turu 110, 138, 249, siehe auch
Wanyaturu.
Tusso-Kette 14.
Tuyui 111.

U.
Uakilinda 76.
Uanekera 55.
Uaschi 56, 142.
Uassi 115, 137, 181.
Uduhe 65, 66.
Ufiomi 116, 121, 249.
— -Berge 28, 137.
Uganda 208.
— bei Ujiji 152.
Ugulula 71.
Uha 76, 99.
Uhemba 142.
Ujiji 153, 243.
Ukara 47, 48, 143, 197, 208.
Ukerewe 208.
—, Insel 46.
—, Wataturu von 169, 170.
Ulembera 98.
Umba-Nyika 14.
Umbugwe 18, 21, 117, 137, 249.
Ungroïme s. Ngoroïne.
Unguu 125.
Unyambeïu 169.
Unyamwesi 249.
—, Granit-Plateau von 134, 141 ff.
Unyamwesi, Name von 227.
Unyanganyi 111, 138, 191.
Unyange 89.
Unyanyembe, Häuptlinge von 234.
Urambo 102.
—, Watussi in 204.
Urigi-See 75.
Urin 171, 185.
Urundi 77, 78 ff, 151, 249.
Urungu 59.
Usagali 104.
Usagara 242.
Usambára 1, 13, 260.
Usegua 126.
Usenye 39, 142.
Usige 96.
Usinja 69 ff, 249.
Usmau 66.
Ussandaui 111, 112, 138, 249.
Ussongo 108, 169.
Ussui 73 ff, 209, 236.
Ussure 110, 139.
Usukuma 249.
— (im engeren Sinne) 67.
Utavuka 91.
Uthungu 74.
Ututwa 59.
Uyogoma 76.
Uyui 106.

V.
Vali von Tanga 8.
Verpflegung der Expedition 14.
— der Mannschaften 11.
Victoria Nyansa 40, 143.
—, Dampfer am 43.
—, Gezeiten im 42, 46, 143.
—, Kanus am 44.
Viehseuche 36, 135, 165, 251
Viehzucht 177, 183, 192, 251.
— der Waha 226.
— der Wanyamwesi 231.
— der Warundi 219.
— der Wataturu 171, 172.
— der Watussi 206.
— der Wasinja 210.

W.
Wabondeï 38.
Wabwa 187.
Wachdienst 12.
Wadigo 13, 125.
Wadi-Halfa 149.
Wafioma 209, 228.
Wafiomi 173 ff, 194, 195.
—, Aeusseres der 174.
—, Charakter der 175.
—, Sprache der 174.
—, Wohnungen der 175 ff.
Waffen der Massai 16.
Waffeneinfuhr 252.
Waganda 203, 205.
Wagaya 197.
Wagogo 180, 186, 194.
Waha 225 ff.
Wahuma siehe Watussi.
Wahumba 165.
Wahutu 88.
Wakara 49, 189, 197, 198, 200,
202, 208.
—, Pflanzungen der 198.
Wakerewe 208.
Wakonongo 228.
Wakuavi 157, 175.
Wakwaya 52.
Wald 154.
Wambugwe 157, 180 ff.
Wanderungen der Massai 157.
— der Nilquell-Völker 237.
— der Stämme 194.
— der Wataturu 169.
Wandorobo 20, 32, 35, 124, 166 ff.
Wanege 63, 167, 191, 193, 194.
Wangoni 227.
Wangoroïne 197.
Wanonega 168.
Wanyairamba 194, 197, 238.
Wanyamwesi 227 ff, 238.
Wanyamwesi, Eigenschaften als
Träger 125.
— -Kolonie in Umbugwe 122.
— -Kolonien 111, 112, 253.
Wanyaturu 188 ff, 194, 197, 202,
238.
Wanyoro 203, 205.
Warangi 180 ff.
Warongo 207.
Warundi 203, 215, 216 ff, 238.
—, Begeisterung der 86.
Waruri 197.
Waschaschi 37, 188, 196 ff, 238.
—, Befestigungen der 51, 56.
—, Felsdörfer der 55.
Wasinja 203, 208 ff.
Wassandaui 191 ff.
Wassegeju 125, 157.
Wassekera 165.
Wasserscheide 98.
Wasumbwa 228.
Wasukuma 59, 228.
Watakama 228.
Wataturu 46, 168 ff, 194, 208.
—, Aeusseres der 170.
—, Gebräuche der 172.
—, Geräthe der 171.
—, Körperbau der 169.
— von Meatu 61.
—, Nahrung der 171.
—, Niederlassungen der 171.
—, Sprache der 170.
— von Ukerewe 169.
—, Wanderungen der 169.
Watindiga s. Wanege.
Watussi 203 ff, 238.
—, Kämpfe mit 88, 90, 96.
Watuta s. Wangoni.
Watwa 82, 98, 215, 237.
Wegweiser 9, 15, 29, 75, 97.
Weiber bei Wataturu 172, 173.
— der Karawane, 65.
— der Wafiomi 178, 179.
Weizen 250.
Welse 104.
Wembere 63, 64, 109.
— -Graben 139.
Werther, Lieutenant 61, 138.
Wild 20, 27, 31, 35, 41, 123, 135,
140, 155.
— in Ussui 76.
Wilson 48.
Windermere 145.
Wise, Mr. 44.
Wolf, Eugen 65, 253.
Wuruhukiro 89.

Y.
Yavigimba 76, 77, 209.
Yuma, Insel 44.

Z.
Zahlworte 193.
Zauberdoktor bei Wanyamwesi
235.
— der Wafiomi 179.
— der Wambugwe 187.
— der Wataturu 173.
Zähne 167, 172, 174, 178, 190,
209, 228.
— bei Waschaschi 197.
Zelewsky 70.
Zuchtwahl 160.
Zulu 227, 238.
Zwerge siehe Pygmäen.
Zwillinge 190.
Zwischenseen-Völker 194, 238.
— siehe auch Nyansa-Völker.
 Druckfehler-Berichtigung.

Seite 17 Zeile 13 von oben lies »Globetrotter« statt

»Globetrodder«.
Seite 51 Zeile 8 von unten (und Illustrationstitel) lies »Irera«
statt »Irea«.
Seite 98 Zeile 5 von oben (und Illustrationstitel) lies
»Kiyonso« statt »Kiyonzo«.
Seite 140 Zeile 6 von oben lies »Tura« statt »Turu«.
Seite 142 Zeile 15 von oben lies »Krystallinisches Schiefer-
Gestein« statt »Krystallinisches Gestein«.
Seite 195 Zeile 3 von unten lies »Fulbe« statt »Fuebe«.
Seite 209 Zeile 8 von oben lies »Wafioma« statt »Wafiomi«.
Seite 222 Abbildung lies »Klapper der Zauberdoktoren in
Urundi« statt »Klapper der Zauberdoktoren in Warundi«.
Seite 238 letzte Zeile lies »konnte« statt »konnten«.
Seite 262 Zeile 3 lies »No. 111« statt »No. 110«.
Gedruckt bei OTTO ELSNER, Berlin S.,
Oranienstrasse 58.
 Berichtigung.
Durch ein Versehen des Herrn Dr. Hassenstein wurden dem Autor
keine Korrekturabzüge der Farbenplatten der Karte zugesandt,
wodurch einige störende Fehler stehen geblieben sind. Dieselben
werden nachfolgend richtig gestellt:
Auf der ethnographischen Skizze, Zeichenerklärung, sind die »Bantu
mit nordsüdlicher Wandertendenz« mit g r ü n e m Ton, die »mit
südnördlicher Wandertendenz« mit b la u sch r a ffir te m Ton statt
umgekehrt zu lesen. Auf derselben Skizze ist die Landschaft
Burunge mit dem Ton der »Hamiten mit hamitischer Sprache«, also
r o t h p u n kt i r t, zu bezeichnen. Auf dem geologischen Karton ist das
Alluvium des Wembere-Grabens auf die Sohle dieses Grabens zu
beschränken, und nördlich vom Manyara-See eine kleine Kalkzone
anzubringen.
Dr. Oscar Baumann.
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