Elizabeth Blackmar. Manhattan For Rent, 1785-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, 1991.

Manhattan for Rent is a complex, layered monograph that weaves changing sex roles, race relations, and class formation around land usage and property ownership in antebellum New York City.  Arguing that housing patterns are a central category of analysis, Elizabeth Blackmar creates a social history of property relations.  Blackmar illustrates how property ownership influenced  social and class development in eighteenth century Manhattan, distinguishing between those who "managed real property as a form of wealth and those who used land and houses as resources for work and family life."  While many historians argue that the emergence of waged labor removed economic activity from the home, Blackmar identifies a subtle shift in such activity.  At the end of the eighteenth century, the waged labor system recast household economic activity into the commodification of domestic space and services.  Although our notion of a caring and nurturing home often clouds our analysis, Blackmar argues the activity occuring inside these walls should be regarded as "hard labor."  Between 1785 and 1850, as the notion of shelter was transformed into a commodity produced for profit, "the housing market organized class divisions as permanent features of the city's social landscape."  Inequality in Manhattan was based on the acquisition of land and how it was managed with "...the construction and preservation of social distance through distinct residential neighborhoods [becoming] a key strategy for ordering city land use into profitable investment."  By the 1840's, new construction meant improved housing for the middle class and deteriorating living conditions for the working class.  Further Blackmar argues that rent was the most influential factor contributing to the erosion of real wages for the working class. [J. Dusselier].