Description: How San Franciscans exploited natural resources such as redwood lumber to produce the first major metropolis of the American West.
Review Quotes: With this impressive new book, James Buckley shows just how important it is to take a spatial approach to architectural and urban history. From the great redwood forests of Northern California to the booming city of San Francisco, Buckley guides us through the class-differentiated physical landscapes that capitalists and workers, almost all of them white men, built of wood along the Pacific Coast. The unsparing narrative tracks the devastating effects of unrelenting resource extraction, an assault that decimated ancient forests, and, coupled with industrial production, married the urban core with the countryside, creating a veritable, ever-changing City of Wood. Buckley gives the great struggles between capital and labor their due and tracks the impact of money and material, new technologies, and consumer desire on the modernizing architectural landscapes of the urbanizing West. A great gift of this book is the care that Buckley takes to document the places of everyday life in the City of Wood--the lumber camps, mill towns, docks, lumber yards, planing mills, employer mansions, worker housing, and office buildings--and the attempts to conserve what remained of the grand trees from which they were built, before the forest disappeared entirely.--Marta Gutman, City College of New York, author of A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950