Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

Cover image for The Tears of Other People by E. M. Ippolito | Irrelevant Press

Why is it important to interpret Portsmouth’s history of urban renewal as a history of class? So far, historians who have published work on the subject have chosen not to take this angle. All contemporary writing on Puddle Dock and the North End—the city’s two neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal—notes those neighborhoods’ relative poverty but stops short of an encompassing class analysis. It’s clear enough that residents of both areas were disadvantaged by their immigrant status, religious affiliation, nationality, race, ethnicity, and language. It’s also clear that nearly everyone living there struggled to make ends meet, working in fields like sex work, manufacturing, fishing, hospitality, and mechanics. We can safely say that the neighborhoods uprooted by urban renewal were “working-class” neighborhoods. The ubiquitous “slum” label supports as much. It is more complicated, however, to make a historical argument about the other side of the class divide.

The people displaced were the working class, but were the people who displaced them the “ruling class”? Certainly, those who made urban renewal happen in Portsmouth were not all rich. They did not all own businesses or serve in public office. And if they did, would that matter? Some Puddle Dockers owned businesses and served in public office. Does that negate the neighborhood’s “working-class” identity? Why try at all to impose such a broad “class” label over any diverse group of people?

When we begin to make the claim, as I have, that some historical group of people in the city constituted a ruling class, or that urban renewal was an aggressive act of class-based domination, it is reasonable to have doubts as to where the lines are drawn, or even why class matters. When we make the claim that Portsmouth’s upper crust was at fault for great historical harm, it is easy to become indignant or defensive, especially for those readers who count themselves among a similar privileged class to the historical one I describe. To say that the people who brought about Puddle Dock’s destruction were a ruling class is not to say that life was always easy for them, nor that they lived without any social or political disadvantages. To say that there were people in town who used the privileges of their social, economic, or cultural position to dominate a politically vulnerable community is not to say that those at fault were necessarily “bad” people. As I found out through my conversations with Sherm and the Strawbery Banke staff, the biggest villains in the story of Puddle Dock’s urban renewal are not individual people but rather political and economic systems. That is not to say that individual people (or their descendants) are absolved of historical responsibility for the displacement of working-class people in Portsmouth, but rather that the problem of displacement transcends the fault of any single person or group.

The economic, social, and political systems at fault for displacement in Puddle Dock are defined, in part, by class. Seeing the story of Puddle Dock’s destruction through a class analysis is necessary to understand how this history factors into the much larger legacy of displacement in the city and in the United States. It is also crucial for placing Portsmouth’s local history of urban renewal where it belongs: in the national context of urban renewal as a fundamentally racist and classist mechanism in the capitalist oppression of working people. Finally, a class analysis of Portsmouth’s urban renewal is essential in clarifying the causes of such a complicated historical event, and to do so without ascribing feelings of confusion or genuine malintent onto historical actors where none probably existed. When Portsmouth destroyed two of its core neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century, it was neither a mistake nor an act of malice. It was a historical consequence of the settlement’s class-based economic, political, and social organization.

As the long, snowy winter of 1958 drew to a close, the City of Portsmouth was in trouble. On Thursday, March 20, readers of the morning paper were greeted with the headline: “City May Lose $836,205 in US Funds.” Development plans to turn Puddle Dock into garden apartments had failed at the eleventh hour, leaving the city with no viable plan for the soon-to-be-empty waterfront, and by extension no means by which to empty it. Portsmouth Housing Authority leader Edwin J. Abbott was in the hot seat. As the Portsmouth Herald reported, “Abbott said it was important that the colonial village proponents get together as a working group as quickly as possible, determine how they are to raise the money to purchase the cleared land and determine what their source of funds is to be in order to acquire, move, renovate, and rehabilitate their historical buildings of a period of years.” Unless action was taken “very shortly,” the Herald noted, Portsmouth could wave goodbye to the largest federal housing investment its waterfront had ever seen.

One week later, an urgent planning meeting took place between Abbott, City Manager Robert Violette, and members of the yet to be named “Colonial Village” project. Figures in the latter group included several individuals who would go on to form Strawbery Banke’s first administration. Serving as chairman of that group was Donald Margeson, one-time Portsmouth mayor and heir to his father’s furniture company, who would become one of the most pivotal (and divisive) figures in the early history of Strawbery Banke Inc. Working as a business owner, city councilor, and chairman in the Chamber of Commerce at the time of the working group’s meeting, Margeson was uniquely suited to broker a cooperation between Portsmouth’s political, capital, and cultural interests.

With the help of City Manager Violette, the group laid out the issue at hand: if Portsmouth was to save its funding for the urban renewal of Puddle Dock, it had to produce some kind of entity with the means of purchasing and developing properties in the area. Though flush with cash after a profitable war, the federal government had standards as to where it would put its money. The Urban Renewal Administration (URA) in New York City wasn’t going to allocate funds to just any small city asking for it. Each municipality had to prove it was operating under a tenable plan and working with a confirmed developer on the project before qualifying.

That was where Portsmouth’s Colonial Village came in. The idea of using urban renewal for historical preservation was yet untested in the United States, but Portsmouth was the perfect place to try it out. Abbott stated that he thought the URA would greenlight the idea, and the plan was set in motion. Despite not being formally organized yet, the entity that would become Strawbery Banke Inc. (and decades later, Strawbery Banke Museum) promised that it would find a way to reimburse the city for its part of the investment in urban renewal. This would entail founding a nonprofit company in which interested parties could purchase shares, raising $50,000 on its own as proof of concept, and then from there expanding into a national fundraising effort. The city would help by using taxpayer money to issue a bond in order to ensure the project’s completion. That bond would be repayable over twenty years, during which time the newly minted Colonial Village would establish itself on the purchased waterfront land and then renovate its structures to preserve Portsmouth’s oldest architectural relics—and newest tourist attractions.

Excerpted from The Tears of Other People: A History and Memoir of Displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire by E. M. Ippolito (Irrelevant Press, 2025). Used with permission.

Click here to read E. M. Ippolito’s conversation with Eva Szilardi-Tierney about her new book and writing against historical inevitability.