From gateway to getaway: Labor, leisure, and environment in American maritime cities (Florida, Texas, Alaska)

This dissertation is a comparative history of Key West, Florida; Galveston, Texas; and Ketchikan, Alaska, and it analyzes the evolution of these seaports from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It combines environmental history, urban history, and social history to explore transformations in modern U.S. cities and to examine the changing relationships between American communities and the ocean. These three port cities are located at the nation's farthest edges, but they share a common history with many maritime communities, because they have been defined by their dependence on the sea. A century ago, these three seaports were leading cities in their regions, and they functioned as gateways for ocean-going trade and commercial fishing. But by the mid-twentieth century, maritime industries declined in importance, and rival industrial cities based upon railroads and automobiles surpassed these commercial seaports.; Key West, Galveston, and Ketchikan were among the losers in the fierce urban rivalries of the modern era because they could not maintain their positions as economic gateways when industrialization remade the nation's cities. The residents of these seaports were forced to reconfigure their environmental relationships, and they reinvented their communities as tourist getaways. No longer sites of labor and production, these seaports are now dedicated to leisure and consumption, and tourists find their historic waterfronts to be nostalgic escapes from the nation's suburbs and industrial cities. The evolution of these seaports from gateway to getaway reveals the dramatic redefinition of the links between American cities and the ocean, and it demonstrates the power of industrialization, consumer culture, and tourism to remake the nation's economic and environmental relationships.