If you were a New Yorker walking down Broadway in 1874, you would find a very unusual shop display when you reached the intersection with Houston Street. A cider shop window featured a dog chained to a kind of treadmill. The animal was seemingly doing the grueling work of powering a cider press beneath the shop. Word spread about the display, and it initially attracted curious onlookers—and then, eventually, outrage. Animal welfare advocates only became angrier when it turned out that the window display was merely a publicity stunt—the belt was not actually attached to anything underground.
This incident and the fascinating court case it spawned is one of many illuminating stories in Andrew Robichaud's Animal City. The book details the centrality of the animal industry to the nineteenth-century city and traces the ultimate expulsion of livestock and most working animals during the second half of that century. Nevertheless, the city remained more than human. Horses became vital to moving people and goods locally, while other creatures became important as objects of affection (dogs, cats) or entertainment (circus elephants, sea lions, bears). Robichaud draws from a range of methods, including spatial, cultural, and urban history. But the story is in many ways a business history. The “domestication of America,” to borrow the book's subtitle, was largely about regulating animal industries (e.g., dairy, beef) and policing animal labor. The second half of the story is about business as well; circuses were vast for-profit operations, and acquiring circus or zoo animals was a thriving trade. For instance, capturing sea lions off the coast of Santa Barbara was a surprisingly lucrative, if predictably dangerous, endeavor.
The remaking of the animal city reflects broader urban transformations: expanding state power, emerging professional organizations, and the separation of sites of production from sites of consumption. Robichaud gives fascinating and illuminating animal detail to this story; he explains that “tracing the specific history of human and animal interactions in cities offers a powerful new lens in understanding the history of American culture, law, commerce, politics, and urban development” (p. 4). We learn about sanitation from the remaking of the New York City dairy industry, about zoning from the disastrous creation of San Francisco's “Butchertown,” and about public-private partnerships from the travails of Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
Perhaps most impressive is Robichaud's strong sense of geography and the spatial analysis he employs throughout the book. Though Robichaud's book provides insight on a range of cities, he focuses particularly on New York and San Francisco, and readers will learn much about the evolution of space within each. Animal City is filled with maps revealing spatial transformations, including changing locations of cattle slaughter, shifting sites of milk sales, and the evolving geography of animal law enforcement (pp. 80, 120, 149). These analyses are the product of work done with the Stanford Spatial History Project, itself the source of endlessly fascinating spatial work.
Fundamentally, this history is one of the increasing invisibility of animal labor and exploitation. Animal exploitation did not cease; it just left the city. Robichaud explains that urban animal reformers, “unable to entirely police this massive set of animal industries, . . . often settled for improving human life by separating and rendering invisible certain unpleasant relationships with animals from their more civilized human lives downtown. Humans were spared the sight of animal suffering, but the suffering continued” (p. 268). Yet the legacy of these urban animals remains. Robichaud uses the particularly evocative idea of “animal ghosts” to highlight how long-gone processes still shape cities: abandoned slaughter districts or stockyards became low-income neighborhoods or sites for new (and undesirable) urban infrastructure, whether sewage treatment facilities or industrial warehouses.
Regarding invisibility, I did want a bit more clarity about, or perhaps meditation on, what was driving this process. Robichaud identifies important processes within cities shaping slaughter locations and sites of animal industry, but there were also important forces beyond the city. These could be changes in the relationship between city and hinterland or city and suburb, or simply structural changes in the American economy. As much as local sanitary reforms or animal welfare campaigns, the national centralization of commodity markets and changing transportation technology would remake the animal city. Robichaud acknowledges these forces, but I was hoping for a more scalar analysis that would discuss more directly how they shaped (and were shaped by) the local changes. On that point, the cities themselves felt a bit too self-contained at times, with the notable exception of the author's illuminating discussion of connections between country and city in chapter 1.
Animal City unites the vibrant fields of urban environmental history and animal history. Within urban environmental history, it sits alongside books like Catherine McNeur's Taming Manhattan (2014) and Matthew Klingle's Emerald City (2007). It also fits with histories of working animals like Ann Norton Greene's Horses at Work (2008). There is even the foundation for comparative conversations; Thomas Almeroth-Williams's recently published City of Beasts (2019) studies animals in Georgian London. To this literature, Robichaud brings strong spatial analysis and a sense of how local stories aggregate to a bigger whole. He also reveals that there is a lot to gain from the cross-fertilization of animal history and business history: remaking the animal city was also about remaking American business. In that sense, the ultimate removal of the dog from the window of Walker's Cider Shop—not without a few additional shocking wrinkles to the story—was as much about the changing significance of dogs in American society as about changes in business practices and marketing.
