I AM EXTREMELY EXCITED ABOUT MY NEXT GIVEAWAY.

Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide sucked me in immediately with incredible prose and hugely compelling characters — the narrator, Griffon, is a furious young trans man in a dystopian North America, trying to tell the story of his revolutionary adoptive parents, Etoine and Zaffre, both painters and refugees from the unspeakably weird city of Stephensport.

This book made me feel held and seen and loved, but I do not want to want to undersell what an incredibly weird and delightful ride it is, for the history of uprising it recounts, the bizarre science/magic of the future, and the intertwined romances. IT IS SO GOOD.

If you would like to enter this giveaway for three paperback copies of Isaac Fellman’s incredible book, you can find the Google form here!

A note: alas, this giveaway is limited to folks in the U.S. While I am working on getting a book sent to a newsletter reader abroad from the last giveaway, I can’t afford that postage again. Forgive me!

Early September. We walked past the very narrow entrance to the very narrow street twice before finally spotting the minimal gray plaque set in the brick wall of the building at the corner. It was drizzling. The sky was gray and the street was gray and the trees were gray, the grayness sectioned by expanses of red brick, the defining texture of Boston’s oldest neighborhood.

The plaque advertised the Museum of African-American History, an eastern Massachusetts institution consisting of four historic buildings: the African Meeting House (built 1806) and the Abiel Smith School (built 1835), both on the north slope of Beacon Hill, and the house of Black weaver Seneca Boston (built 1774) and the African Meeting House (built 1824), both in Nantucket. My friend and I proceeded down the tree-lined brick passage to a brick courtyard, where we entered the ground floor of the brick schoolhouse. While there is an exhibit upstairs (right now, Black Voices from the Revolution is on), the bulk of the museum experience is a guided tour through the African Meeting House, which has been restored to its appearance circa 1855, when Frederick Douglass gave an abolitionist address standing on these boards behind this pulpit. Stories of the particular Black community which existed in this neighborhood from the early 1700s through the early 1900s accompanied the tour, painting a picture of a very different Boston than the one I know.

Massachusetts abolished slavery relatively early among the colonies (a low bar, admittedly), after several enslaved people, most particularly Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman and Quock Walker, brought cases in 1781 suing for their freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution ratified in 1780. Both won their cases, effectively outlawing slavery in the commonwealth, and the free Black population of Massachusetts grew.

A thing about Boston which may not be immediately obvious is that a significant portion of the land making up the city did not exist in 1781. Boston, in fact, consisted of a thin neck of land ending in a high, rocky hill, surrounded by marsh and seawater on all sides. This hill makes up what is now Beacon Hill, the Boston Common, and part of the North End. Much of the area around North Station was at that time a mill pond; Chinatown was largely docks and harbor. The hill itself used to be significantly taller, but the top bit was shoveled off and used for early fill. Neighborhoods to the south which now make up the majority of the city’s land area — Back Bay, Southie, Roxbury, and Dorchester — were also marsh or independent villages. (My first ancestor in North America settled in the village of Roxbury sometime between 1660 and 1680, where he dug tanning pits and served as town constable for a couple of years. Now his grave is on the Orange Line, and I occasionally bike by it on my way to visit the Arboretum.)

The surprising part of all that land creation and annexation for someone, like me, who only met Boston twenty years ago, is that the ultra-wealthy Beacon Hill neighborhood, where buying a house will set you back $5 million or more, was once split between the rich and powerful living on the south slope, and tradespeople, service workers, and laborers living on the north slope, including Boston’s burgeoning free Black population.

The Black community on the north slope of Beacon Hill was joined by increasing numbers of immigrants in the mid-1800s, including large number of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. In the 1910s and 20s, Black people started getting priced out of even the north slope of Beacon Hill, and converged on Roxbury with other Black people leaving the south as part of the Great Migration. The African Meeting House spent seventy years as a synagogue, before it was purchased by museum in 1972.

As I have been researching 1820s Paris for my next book, I have been struck again and again by how misleading the modern face of the city can be. In an old, well-preserved (or convincingly restored) neighborhood, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that what you see is what has always been there, both buildings and occupants. But neighborhoods which last long enough are reborn again and again, accumulating tiny and catastrophic changes to their physical and human fabric.

There are a huge number of maps, engravings, paintings, and photographs of Paris, some from exactly the right year (see this street map from 1821) and some, despite being nearly a century off, giving some vital information (the Turgot map of 1739 shows the entire city in axonometric view. While the proportions are tweaked to let the viewer see details more clearly, this map gives a far clearer sense of the height of proportions of the city overall.) Felicia Davin sent me toward the photos of Charles Marville, who, while working about forty years after my period, documented many claustrophobic medieval and early-modern streets which no longer exist.

Why don’t they exist? The 19th century brought cataclysmic change to the medieval city fabric, particularly at the hands of Baron Haussmann, who demolished huge swathes of buildings in the 1850s through the 1870s to make way for the wide boulevards which now characterize Paris. He continued work started by Napoleon I at the beginning at the century, though very little of it had been accomplished by the time of the emperor’s imprisonment on the Isle of Elba and death (the street map linked above shows that the Rue de Rivoli, which would later slice through the blocks between the Rue du Roi de Sicile and the Rue Saint-Antoine, in 1821 ended at the eastern end of the Tuileries.)

This initial slice in some ways reflected a burgeoning change in ideas about city planning in the 18th century, discussed by Anthony Vidler in his long essay on the development of Paris, The Scenes of the Street. (I have been reviewing this book and to be honest I don’t necessarily recommend it; there is discussion of Foucault.) Pierre Patte, an architect and student of Jacques-François Blondel, published a futuristic plan of Paris in 1765 which performed surgery on the existing city fabric to create multiple focal points in different neighborhoods, connected by radiating avenues instead of a dense maze of dark streets. This plan was a predecessor to the Plan des artists published in 1793, which, significantly for my purposes, contained a street on the current route of the Rue de Rivoli.

I’m currently spending a lot of time trying to understand the evolution of the Marais, a very old neighborhood on the right (northern) bank of the Seine. I stayed in the Marais in 2011 and 2013 and have visited it a couple times since then, but while the streets I experienced were studded with buildings from the 15th through 17th centuries that would have definitely been there in 1820, the interstitial fabric of the city between those buildings has shifted significantly: pavement, railings, and above all wooden structures appended to the brick and stone of more permanent buildings.

The Marais’s evolution is one which reflects both top-down intervention and the more gradual, contingent inflow and outflow of different groups. From Alfred Fierro’s Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris, I learned that the construction of new bridges in the 1600s, particularly the Pont Marie, as well as the Place Royale (now the Place de Vosges), led to a number of wealthy nobles and bureaucrats building their fancy houses in the neighborhood between those two spots, creating the initial grand fabric of the Marais of looming turrets and smooth stone walls. But by 1750, the noble population of the Marais had decamped for newly fashionable neighborhoods to the north and west. A century later, the construction of a synagogue nearby on the Rue des Tournelles signaled the area becoming more heavily Jewish (which it still is; I ate my first falafel in the Marais.)

I have been looking for older images of my favorite street in the Marais, the Rue des Barres, and engravings like this one from 1866 show an extra wooden building on the left which wasn’t there in 2011. This engraving from 1862 showing a street near the Rue des Barres gives an idea of how much a wooden extension on the front of an old building can shadow and constrict an already-narrow street, making Paris is the early 19th century a much darker and less breathable city than the one we can visit now.

In the U.S., it’s almost time to vote. I implore you: figure out which of your available candidates will fight for immigrants and trans people, or at the very least which candidate can be badgered into doing so, and PICK THAT ONE.

Thank you, and best of luck to all of us,

Sharon

P.S. What is a neighborhood whose transformation surprised you? What was it like before? What is it like now?