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Dirty Deeds: Land, Violence, and the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee

monopoly on beef sales came to end. After 1843, the public markets atrophied and the number of private food vendors exploded. These changes had a detrimental effect on the quality and quantity of food for many lower-income New Yorkers. Baics argues that increasing disparities in access to high-quality food was the third leg of the stool of urban inequality, along with the more familiar culprits—poor sanitation and inadequate housing. He views this diminishing access to food, particularly meat, during the 1840s and 1850s as a principal cause of what historians have called the antebellum puzzle—the coincidence of increasing economic growth and the deterioration of biological standards of living, such as higher mortality and reduced physical stature. The antebellum puzzle is only one of the larger historical questions that Baics tackles. He offers a nuanced interpretation of the privatization of food provisioning in New York, counseling that historians should avoid the temptation to view the decision as part of a broader trend toward economic liberalization. On several occasions, Baics mentions the city’s decision to construct a public water system, the first stage of which was completed in 1842, only one year before the city lifted the public markets’ monopoly. He concludes that “the balance of public and private goods was a subject of case-by-case negotiations” (155). Although Feeding Gotham is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary scholarship—given Baics’ considerable mapping and statistical skills—it is not a particularly readable study. Baics explores the plight of the city’s poor, but he largely fails to include their voices. This top-down work focuses in large part on those at the bottom end of society. Social historians seeking an account that vividly brings to life the warp and woof of urban life should look elsewhere. But those who are interested in the economic and political transformations roiling nineteenth-century urban America will find many tempting morsels on offer in this study of food provisioning in New York City.