Gateway Cities: Seattle and Vancouver on the Pacific, 1896-1939

Abstract

“Gateway Cities” explores the cultural and material production of settler colonialism in the urban waterfronts of Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, between the 1890s and 1930s. It charts the making of modern, imperial settler cities from Indigenous settlements and mill towns on the shores of the Salish Sea and the establishment of a permanent, settled society with respectable, white, property-owning settlers at the top of its social order. Since at least the 1890s, white settler colonists in the coastal Pacific Northwest have attempted to fix ambiguous—or amphibious, in the case of the urban waterfront—spaces and identities and naturalize the status of settler colonial cities through forms of regulation, including criminalization, exclusion, and engineering. “Gateway Cities” reorients orthodox land-centered approaches to settler colonial studies, urban history, and the regional study of the North American West to the shoreline in order to better understand the place of the Pacific Northwest in the Pacific and how colonization has operated at the threshold between them. It argues that settlers pursued interrelated strategies of cultural and material production, municipal engineering, and legislative action in order to stabilize their assets, define the boundaries of belonging, and assert social, political and economic dominance within the Seattle and Vancouver waterfronts. These waterfronts functioned both literally and rhetorically as gateways for the continuously rising number of settlers in the urban coastal Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century and served as a nexus of competition over the right to determine the public images and futures of these cities and the Pacific, one that transformed the waterfront from a chaotic, subversive zone into a space that remains tightly regulated today.