The decline and fall of Richmond Hill: Commodification and place-change in late 18th–early 19th century New York

Abstract

This essay focuses on the mutations of a place. It looks at some small disappearances involved in large urban transformations by examining how a notable New York place called ‘Richmond Hill’, an estate centered in an 18th-century Georgian-style mansion and the hill on which it stood, was embroiled over its lifetime in commodifying or monetizing practices. These practices worked their way through it over time via certain transformative (and potentially transformative) situations, acts, events and personal financial difficulties. The essay looks, in particular, at the role of Aaron Burr, a key resident of the house, in this process; it considers the objectification of his personalized social values in the place and tensions for him between holding Richmond Hill intact and extracting its wealth in the form of monetary value by releasing it or parts of it to others. However, the discussion is concerned more generally with place-change. Examining change along three complex dimensions – a place’s material-sensual features/qualities, identity and location – it explores how commodifications came to decimate Richmond Hill’s primary mode of existence as a place. An old question about sameness and difference arises: when, for those who have known a place, does it become a different place? In concluding, the essay considers how the problematics emerging in place-change are recast as a spatiotemporal disturbance in the consciousness of two partly fictive New Yorkers attempting to revisit the place about 1830.