Second-Hand Cities: Unsettling Racialized Hierarchies of Mainstream and Marginal Commerce

The antique and second-hand trades serve as a lens for understanding the politics and economy of preserving and redistributing American heritage, whether home furnishings, buildings, or land.  I explore the relationship of these preservation industries to the racial reconfiguring of cities and regions.  Key demographic upheavals—the Civil War; intensive immigration and urbanization of the late 19^th century; the Great Migration; the depression; urban renewal; suburbanization and “white flight”—resulted in the massive recirculation of used goods at every scale, from old furniture to old neighborhoods.  Uncovering such stories identifies the recycling dynamic of regional change and urban inheritance.  My larger project centers second-hand culture, preservation, and recycling, and the role of material goods, within the telling of American history.   I focus on the role played by the second-hand in an American economy presumed to be driven by new markets.

The politics of second-hand were complex.  Nativists avidly collected early Americana, yet African American antique dealers were leaders in creating the antique Americana trade in the 1890s (a trade also open to immigrants, Jews, and women).

This paper concentrates on race- and class-based declension narratives that became inherent to tales of the second-hand.  Examples include:  “invasion/succession” models of neighborhood change; post-Civil War Southern elite white family decline and the recirculation of home furnishings; urban renewal; and the second-hand trade itself.  I will experiment with framing land and neighborhoods as second-hand artifacts, in part by analyzing declension narratives, and in part by reading 1950s-1960s real estate appraisals.  In dislodging declension narratives, and avoiding the positive values carried by recycling and conservation, I retrieve a more balanced account of how second-handedness and redistribution are as significant to American history as new frontiers.