Enframing Infrastructural Place: Manhattan's Waterfront, 1686-1921

In 1870, Manhattan’s waterfront was a mixed-use site of abattoirs, storage-yards and factories. These buildings lined the rotting wooden boards of dilapidated too-small piers built on privately-owned land. This close-in, messy waterfront was unambiguously part of the rest of the city in terms of law, operation, and governance. Over the next 50 years, the waterfront would be trans-formed. By 1921, the waterfront was dominated by publicly-owned and built concrete and steel piers on parcels that were legally distinct from the rest of the propertied urban landscape. The world’s largest steamships tied up at exclusive berths governed by an institution that sought to ensure their frictionless circulation in and out of the city. By 1921, Manhattan’s waterfront was the exclusive site of large-scale transportation circulation – an infrastructural place. In this re-search I ask how the mixed-use urban waterfront became infrastructural place: the exclusive site of transatlantic circulation. I examine how state and private sector actors negotiated, contested, and cooperated to enframe the waterfront as infrastructure – a space ruled according to the logic of circulation– that enabled global-scale flows through Manhattan. This involved on a process of enframing which relied on the separate legal categories of property leveraged to produce new conceptual, institutional, and material boundaries separating the waterfront from the rest of the city. These processes were articulated through power geometries to produce the waterfront as infrastructural place. This research demonstrates how an analysis of infrastructure as place allows us to examine it as an ongoing process of social production.Ph.D