Port of Spain

When you think of a city, it's usually physical structures that come to mind: the New York skyline and Central Park, the boulevards and Eiffel Tower of Paris, Rio's Christ the Redeemer or even its favelas.So too Stephen Stuempfle's hefty Port of Spain; The Construction of a Caribbean City, 1888-1962 tells the history of Trinidad and Tobago's capital, through its buildings and neighborhoods, as they are shaped by the push and pull of political, economic, or cultural conflict from "the height of British colonialism ... through the independence of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962" (p. 1).From colonialism to independence, Stuempfle's narrative traces the growth of the city through the impact of Trinidadian nationalism, an expansion of his previous and equally detailed The Steelband Movement: Forging of a National Art Form (1995).Although the nationalism that pushes Port of Spain's narrative briskly along is more than political, he starts after the 1882 "Canboulay Riots," when Trinidad's postemancipation conflicts and shifting alliances between the British governing class, the French upper class, and the African lower class wore a cultural guise.Focusing on the built landscape, Part 1, "The Cocoa Boom Era, 1888-1920," treads lightly over the reactionary abolition in 1898 of the forum for local politics, the city's Borough Council.Instead, Stuempfle pays more attention to the 1903 Water Riots, when nationalist resentment with official high-handedness exploded into affray and the Red House, seat of Crown Colony government, was gutted.More constructively, the wealth of that period's economic boom funded many of the most well-known of the large planter's homes, including the eclectic and eccentric "Magnificent Seven" that line the West of the city's spectacular Queen's Park Savannah.Parts Two and Three, "The Interwar Era, 1920-1940" and "World War II and the Postwar Years, 1940-1962," cover the rise of the working class and the middle-class nationalists respectively.The interwar period saw its share of new buildings, both official and private, such as the Treasury Building and the many cinemas sprinkled throughout the city.But the material developments emphasized in this period were the squalid barrack apartments that housed the urban working class.World War II brought tens of thousands of American soldiers to bases outside Port of Spain, and they in turn brought money to the city's nightclubs and brothels.The narrative then follows the nationalist movement that carried the country to independence in 1962, and highlights the impact it had on the cityscape.Those were times of optimism bordering on naivety.For instance

Colonialism · Creole language · Economic history · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Resentment · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Urban and Rural Development Challenges