Annals of the Association of American Geographers

, 90(4), 2000, p. 763–771© 2000 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

In Memoriam

James E. Vance, Jr., 1925–1999

Paul Groth

Department of Geography and Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley

ames E. Vance, Jr., retired Professor of Geog-raphy at the University of California,Berkeley, died on August 3, 1999, inBerkeley, at age 73. Intellectually and per-

sonally, Vance was one of the most memorableAmerican geographers in the last half of thetwentieth century. He was a world authority ontransportation, the growth and change of urbanform, and the historical geography of NorthAmerica. He wrote enduring and highly originalbooks, still classics in their subjects. Vance wasthe first urban geographer to be permanently ap-pointed to the Department of Geography atBerkeley, where he taught from 1958 to 1992.He was the first geographer to receive the cam-pus Distinguished Teaching Award. His popularcourses influenced two generations of geogra-phers, historians, city planners, and architec-tural historians.

Vance commanded attention by his very be-ing. He stood over six feet three inches tall,even before he put on his cowboy boots. He hadan imposing frame to match his height, and alarge sonorous voice. He was never at a loss forwords, and spoke in measured, formal, and care-fully considered phrases, generously sprinkledwith wit and turns of phrase. He was an icono-clast and a man of many and strong convictions,which he stated at every opportunity. Vancenever seemed to worry if others agreed or dis-agreed with him, or if his views might isolatehim from others. Wherever he was—at a facultymeeting, in front of a lecture class, or at the bestrestaurant in France—he always seemed to becompletely at ease and at home. To his graduatestudents, he announced that he was “ProfessorVance” until they had finished their disserta-tion, and thereafter he was “Jay,” as he wasknown to his friends and colleagues.

Vance was born on December 2, 1925, inNatick, Massachusetts, a railroad suburb seven-

teen miles west of Boston. Vance later wrotethat during his youth in the 1930s, Natick wasstill a place whose “commuter trains offered tosuburban adolescents the chance to experienceand begin to understand a great city, somethingnow largely withheld from them,” and that “hisfascination with the world could never havearisen independent of railroads” (1995: xiii).Although Vance often joked that he briefly con-sidered a career as a professional chef, he began

J

Figure 1. James E. Vance, Jr., in January, 1988. Photocourtesy Department of Geography, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley.

764 Groth

undergraduate study in geography at Clark Uni-versity in 1943 and all his life continued to bean ardent promoter of geography and the impor-tance of geographical perspectives in under-standing history and culture. During World WarII, Vance withdrew from Clark to serve as a ser-geant in the U.S. Army. He saw action in Lux-embourg, and viewed the wartime destructionin Rotterdam and Frankfurt.

After the war, Vance resumed his study atClark, completing his bachelor’s degree in 1948,his master’s degree in 1950, and his Ph.D. in1952. His dissertation, on the relationships be-tween transportation and settlement form in theBoston area, set into place the two strongestthreads in his research and writing. Vancestayed on at Clark for a year, serving as the prin-cipal field investigator for Raymond Murphy’sinfluential Central Business District Study.Vance taught at the University of Arkansas inFayetteville from 1953 to 1955, was the first per-son to teach university geography in the state ofWyoming, at the University of Wyoming from1955 to 1957, and taught at the University ofNebraska for one year, 1957–1958.

In 1958, Vance was appointed as an AssistantProfessor at Berkeley and was one of the first ur-banists on the campus. The year preceding hisappointment, Vance’s graduate advisor Ray-mond Murphy had held a visiting post atBerkeley, but the Berkeley climate for urban ge-ography was by no means entirely receptive.The famously antiurban Carl Sauer had steppeddown as department chair, but continued tohave enormous influence. As faculty colleagueTheodore Oberlander remembered, “In the1950s, the organization of the department wasclear: Sauer was God. Then Jay Vance arrived,and theological disputes began” (

Celebrating 100Years

1999).In a failed attempt to foster fondness between

the senior titan and the junior professor, Vancewas assigned to share Sauer’s office in the Gian-nini Hall quarters of the department. Both sur-vived their close quarters, and not surprisingly:Vance shared many of the basic tenets of Sauer’sBerkeley School of geography—the importanceof intense fieldwork, the need for comprehen-sive geographical knowledge, a long sense of his-tory as a basis for geographical interpretation, areliance on inductive reasoning more than de-duction from abstract theory, the study of conti-nuity within change, and the courage to ignorecurrently fashionable paradigms.

In significant ways, however, Vance did notfit the Sauerian Berkeley model. He was notonly interested in cities, against the Saueriangrain, but also in the modernity, commerce, andindustrialism of the twentieth century as essen-tial geographical subjects. He eschewed traveland research in third-world countries, and neverpushed his students to do research there. Theradical Berkeley geographer Richard Walkerpoints out, in genuine respect, that Vance waspolitically and economically “a classic liberal, inthe Adam Smith sense,” which also put Vanceat odds with many of the Berkeley School, andespecially Sauer (

Celebrating 100 Years

1999).Vance could abide neither the radical left northe arch-conservative right.

Vance prepared the way for other urban andeconomic geographers at Berkeley. A veryyoung Allan Pred arrived on the faculty in 1962,four years after Vance, and Pred remembers,

Virtually every day in those first years, Jay took meout to lunch, and typically for coffee as well. Thelunches were often an expedition by automobile,since in those days there were not many good res-taurants near campus. However, I soon learnedthat eating a good lunch was basically a smokescreen for Jay’s teaching me the geography of theEast Bay.

Walker, who arrived on the Berkeley facultyin 1975, remembers Vance as “a big man, withbig ideas, who wrote big books, and left a verylarge bow wave for urban and social geographerswho followed him on campus” (

Celebrating 100Years

1999).Within the department’s course offerings,

Vance’s assignments came to be a two-semestersequence in what he called “urban morphogene-sis” (the changing form and growth of cities), agraduate urban field seminar, lecture courses andgraduate seminars in the historical geography ofthe U.S., a separate semester course in the his-torical geography of Canada, and transportationgeography. Vance’s undergraduate lecturecourses most vividly showed his intellect andmemory. He delivered cogently organized lec-tures completely without notes, and gave entiretwo-semester course sequences without refer-ence to a single piece of paper. When, on rareoccasions, he veered off course, he would con-fess that he was “guilty of a tangent,” and wouldquickly bring the lecture back on track.

Vance had genuine curiosity about every-thing he saw and read, rural landscapes and

Vance 765

physical geography as well as things urban. Hetaught himself exceptional observational tal-ents, and fostered them in his students.Throughout his life, by his own research exam-ple and in his field courses, Vance insisted onthe importance of observing site, situation, andconnections with first hand exploration. ClareCooper Marcus, a student of Jay’s at Nebraskaand later professor in the architecture and land-scape architecture departments at Berkeley, hadstudied with H. C. Darby in England, but foundthat “Jay’s field courses turned my head aroundcompletely. He showed us how small detailscould add up to important insights.” Vic Ryer-son, another former student, remembers, “Jaycould talk you into visiting the ends of theearth.” Melvin Webber, a faculty colleague fromBerkeley’s Department of City and RegionalPlanning, noted that Vance had introduced theWebbers to Paris, and that “he knew more aboutParis than the city’s own planners.”

Vance traveled widely, as often as possible,and often with his family, constantly and infor-mally adding new insights and corrections intohis courses, as well as developing the ideas forhis published research. While traveling and athome, Vance and his wife were inveterate buy-ers and readers of books. Every available verticalsurface in every room of their home eventuallyhad floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Although hewas an avid reader, blessed with an encyclopedicmemory, Jay Vance’s original written sources,after mixing with his own ideas and observa-tions, became so much his own that (with theexception of his

Capturing the Horizon

[1986])he frequently did not append the sort of long,learned footnotes that characterize academichistorical writing.

Vance chaired twenty-eight Ph.D. disserta-tions at Berkeley. The graduate students whoworked with him enjoyed a remarkable and gen-erous mentor. Vance always managed to balanceboth the supportive and cajoling roles of an aca-demic parent. In thesis and dissertation writing,his most constant advice was to “write as yougo,” rather than to think that at some point inthe future, you would know enough to commitwords to paper. He pushed his students towardcreativity over pedantry, encouraged students totake courses with other professors and, if pos-sible, to combine study in physical and humangeography. Vance insisted that his students findtheir own questions and style. Brian Godfrey hasnoted that, despite Vance’s own very clear opin-

ions, he did not require that his students agreewith him, and remained supportive as they tookdifferent views.

It was at Clark that Vance met Jean Laing, ageographer with an undergraduate degree fromthe University of Nottingham in England. AtClark, Jean was also working on a Ph.D. withRaymond Murphy, and completed her disserta-tion on Nottingham’s Central Business Districtin 1958. Jay and Jean were married in 1954. Inher own right, Jean Vance was a committedteacher, a highly respected geographer, and anactive member of the

Landscape

magazine edito-rial board. She began teaching full-time in theDepartment of Geography and Human Envi-ronmental Studies at San Francisco State Uni-versity in 1967, and resigned as a professor andDepartment Chair in 1991.

Jay and Jean Vance were complete partnersin both their work and their home lives. Theyhad parallel interests in American and Euro-pean cities, enjoyed frequent research travel to-gether, and were devoted parents to their daugh-ter Tiffany, born in 1958. The Vances jointlyentertained students, faculty, and visiting schol-ars with frequent, ample, and very high-qualitymeals. Even before their daughter was born,their house in the Berkeley hills, first onNorthampton Avenue and later on San LuisRoad, was a second home for their graduatestudents.

Jay Vance not only loved food as a cook andhost, but also as a gourmand. As William Codestates, “James Vance knew the best restaurants,the best wines, and the most interesting hotelsin most cities of North America and Europe”(Code 1999: 1). For European trips, specific

Michelin Guide

two- and three-star restaurantswere carefully written into the Vances’ itinerar-ies. Food figured prominently, too, in Jay Vance’slectures in historical geography. Crops and in-dustries were mentioned, of course, but Vancealso noted, in the U.S., the existence of a “pieline”: good pie could most readily be found westof the meridian that passed through Kearney,Nebraska. The only muffins worthy of the namewere found east of the Hudson River. Montreal’sseven-meat pies were worth the visit to the city.In a letter to the department secretary, Vancewrote of his pleasure with the scenery of Ver-mont, and that it was “nice to return to theplace where doughnuts have both taste and sub-stance” (Vance to Martha Moon, July 1969).

Around the dinner table at the Vance home,

766 Groth

or at a restaurant table anywhere, or in his office,Jay Vance loved lively and intelligent conversa-tion. Vance’s faculty colleague, David Hooson,noted that, “Any time you asked a question, yougot an answer, even if it were part of a more com-plicated thought. Vance often saw that a ques-tion was connected to other issues.” Jay Vanceoften characterized himself as, and in fact, wasovertly proud to call himself “a professional cur-mudgeon,” and as Hooson remembered:

Jay did, for sure, wear his prejudices on his sleeve.He would say, “I’ll be very honest,” and indeed hewas. You always knew where Jay stood on an issue.

Vance clearly liked to go against the grain ofpopular movements. He disliked any show ofpompousness, arrogance, or inherited privilege,and delighted in referring to Queen Elizabeth IIof England as “Betty Windsor.” He had a succes-sion of great dogs, most of them dachshunds.And what Vance himself called his “bullheaded-ness,” he balanced with his lively sense of hu-mor. He coined memorable terms and quips. Asocial event was a “do,” as in “the ‘do’ last weekat the Parsons’ house.” The Bay Area RapidTransit (BART) system was “a gold-platedsewer.” Although the local newspapers continu-ally referred to San Francisco as “The City,” forVance, San Francisco was “the other city,” incontrast to his beloved Oakland. He categorizedSauerian field work as “muddy boots geography”in the “hot and sticky countries.” One year,when his urban lecture course had not reachedthe twentieth-century city, he simultaneouslyshrugged and chuckled, saying, “Life will goon—yours, and mine, too.”

Vance was a prolific and innovative writer.He published thirty-two articles and book chap-ters, five monographs, and four substantialbooks. Within these, he worked out the interre-lationships between four subject areas: CentralBusiness Districts, the geography of wholesalingand the urban settlement distribution, the his-tory of urban form, and the historical geographyof transportation.

Vance’s earliest set of publications built noton his dissertation, but on the limits and inter-nal structure of land uses in the Americandowntown. With Raymond Murphy and Bart J.Epstein, he published important articles that es-tablished a fieldwork and mapping method fordelimiting the boundaries of the Central Busi-ness District in nine cities with 1950 popula-tions ranging from 150,000 to 250,000 people,

including Worcester, Massachusetts; Mobile,Alabama; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Sacra-mento, California. One or more of the productsof this work—in particular, “Delimiting theCBD,” “A Comparative Study of Nine CentralBusiness Districts,” and “The Internal Structureof the CBD” (1954a, 1954b, 1955c)—quicklybecame required reading for students of cityplanning and for urban policymakers. In the1950s, the precise location of the edge of theCBD, and the links between its various uses,were of core concern. The CBD had (and stillhas) the most diverse and complicated physi-cal structure to be found in the city, and wastypically the one area of the city that had con-tinuously been subject to rebuilding. The NewDeal-era Real Property Surveys, challenges be-tween corporate office growth and retailing foruse of downtown land, and concern with out-moded commercial space and the need forstronger automobile and truck access were coa-lescing into the urban renewal movement. TheMurphy-Vance-Epstein CBD work gave geogra-phers and planners not only ways to preciselydefine the core of the downtown, but also tocompare downtowns across the U.S.

Vance’s particular contribution to the CBDliterature was particularly his historical perspec-tive. The CBD studies formulated very usefulconcepts and terms: the “point of attachment”for the earliest link with long-distance trade(port, canal basin, or railyard); the “zone of as-similation” for the growing edge of new down-town land uses extending into former residenceareas; and the “zone of discard,” the blockswhere downtown landowners were leaving be-hind structures which devolved to lower-rentuses (1955c).

Parallel with his growing understanding ofthe internal structure of the downtown, Vancesought to find a historically informed alternativeto the dominant paradigm of settlement and ur-ban distribution geography. In the decades afterWorld War II, urban geographers were possessedby the nomothetic, abstract, quantitative, andlargely static and highly deductive models ofCentral Place Theory, gravitation slopes, andland-rent gradients. Vance pursued inductive,qualitative, and historical studies of the generalprocesses of urban change. As William Code haspointed out, in the 1960s, Vance and Pred atBerkeley were virtually alone in their search foralternatives to the closed, internally based Cen-tral Place Theory (Code 1999: 7). In

The Mer-

Vance 767

chant’s World

(1970a), Vance set forth an alter-native system, a Mercantile Model ofSettlement, based on the study of wholesaletrade and the entrepreneurial activity of mer-chant wholesalers. Picking up on leads fromCarl Bridenbaugh, Henri Pirenne, and HaroldAdams Innis, Vance asserted that wholesaling,not retailing, led the genesis of trade after about1600. As Vance put it, “trade did not grow

out

ofAmerican economic development, rather it in-duced that development,” including industrialdevelopment built in response to wholesale or-ders. Wholesaling worked “not on hierarchicallines, but on historical ones” (1970a:11, 49, 78).Initial advantages of the “unraveling points” oftrade often led to those cities becoming earlylarge entrepôt cities; regional structures of urbanlocation remained “in accordance with the his-torical geography of transportation” (1970a:86–87, 110).

Vance saw the city not only as a center ofbusiness leadership and long-distance trade, butalso as a cradle of political and personal inde-pendence, and as a place of great continuity aswell as great change. His initial routes into thiswork were a series of path-breaking articles thatlinked the journey to work with worker’s hous-ing (1960b, 1966b, 1967). Simultaneously,Vance was developing his interest in typicalbuildings (as opposed to monumental cathedralsor palaces), the contrasts between everyday ur-ban form and more conscious urban design, andthe types of districts and stages of growth thatcould be found in American cities. During1960–1961, when Vance was a visiting lecturerat Cambridge University, he wrote to James Par-sons that the dean of urban morphologists inEngland, M. R. G. Conzen, had “kindly takenme around to demonstrate his approach to ur-ban geography” in Newcastle (Vance to Parsons,June 30, 1961). But Vance wanted a strongeremphasis on process and economics than did theEuropean morphologists.

Vance’s distinctive approach to the twentieth-century North American city took early form ina brilliant but terse eighty-nine-page mono-graph,

Geography and Urban Evolution in the SanFrancisco Bay Area

(1964a). When he wrote it,the initial ring of California freeways was justabout to completely encircle the Bay Area.Vance, observing the scattered and multicen-tered nature of Bay Area settlement and landuse, reminded his readers that San Francisco was

not

the center of the Bay Area city:

The big difference between San Francisco andnearly a dozen focal points is that San Francisco isthe one that is most newsworthy and the mostprized by the power elite. . . . As much as SanFrancisco has tunneled, bridged, cut down, andfilled, it still has an eccentric location and a roughsite (“UC Prof: . . .” 1964).

Vance much preferred Oakland to San Fran-cisco because it was less pretentious and a moretypically American place.

From the 1960s, long before others were talk-ing about edge cities, Vance emphasized that theAmerican city had become noncentric and multi-nodal. He noted that the term

city

after 1960 nolonger accurately represented what urban placeswere like. Cities, he said, had quite simply aban-doned their traditional form and taken on a rad-ically new one, the “city of realms”:

The city of realms came into existence when . . .the majority of persons living in an outlying sec-tion of the city no longer had constant direct tiesto the central city [and] the trip “downtown” be-came exceptional (1977:409). . . . [In urbanrealms] daily life can be carried on without normalresort to external locations in other realms. . . . in-creasingly, most residents of large metropolises donot make use of the entire urban area, save for ex-ceptional needs; instead, they live and operatewithin a realm that is geographically confinedenough to allow them to function relatively effi-ciently in spatial terms (1990b: 502).

Each realm was largely dependent on automo-bile connections, and the majority of housingexisted without the residential congestion ofearlier city forms (see also 1964a: 70–89; 1977:409–16). Vance’s city of realms model remainsone of his most important contributions to ur-ban geography.

For the next dozen years, the city continuedto dominate Vance’s writing. He published a se-ries of articles that each, in turn, honed his mainthemes about the culture and geography of cit-ies, often with the sweep of Lewis Mumford, butwritten as a direct antidote to the writings ofMumford and to the Christallerian modelers.Of these articles, the most salient are “Land As-signment in the Precapitalist, Capitalist, andPostcapitalist City” (1971a), “California andthe Search for the Ideal” (1972), his monograph

The American City: Workshop for a NationalCulture

(1976a), written to introduce the fourvignette volumes of the AAG’s ComparativeMetropolitan Analysis project, and “Demo-

768 Groth

cratic Utopia and the American Landscape” inMichael Conzen’s

Making of the American Land-scape

(1990a).The latter article is an apt summation of

Vance’s balance of practical analysis and cul-tural interpretation. “The two clearest examplesof ‘utopias’ in America—the

family farm

and the

American suburb

,” Vance wrote, “are hard to per-ceive because they are so widespread” (1990a:211, 220; emphasis in the original). With thesetwo environments, Vance noted, Americans de-liberately and forcefully rejected the relics offeudal social structure and landholding practice.Vance traced the stages of the detached suburbas encouraged by “basically utopian objectives”:the search for health, a strong belief in thecountryside as a social asylum, cheaper housingwith the possibility of vegetable gardening tohelp reduce living costs, sweeter air, more gener-ous space, “rest less disturbed,” and sport andrecreation made simpler (1990a: 218).

In 1977, in

This Scene of Man

, Vance summedup nearly thirty years of teaching and researchabout the history of the city in Western civiliza-tion. He later provided an extended and much-improved version,

The Continuing City

(1990b).In these projects, Vance sought to establish “aform of questioning, observation, ordering, andanalysis” for the roles of cities, and proposed an“integrated set of processes that explain theshaping of cities, today and throughout time”(1977: 13). From embryology, Vance borrowedthe term

morphogenesis

for his geographicmethod, in part to distinguish it from city plan-ning, which he frequently criticized. A morpho-genetic approach, he said, studied not city plan-ning, but entire city form:

The notion of morphogenesis should be drawn insharp distinction to that of planning: sometimesplanning is involved in the shaping of the city, butat all times the act of creating morphology mustoccur. . . . Thus social, political, religious, cultural,and economic practices are at work, and theseprocesses normally stem from society at largerather than the ideas of a small elite (1977: 4).

The morphogenetic processes he identified in-clude land-use assignment, connection, the ini-tial making of form and its adaptation over time,capital accumulation and transfer, speculation,planning (the preconception of form), and or-ganic growth which relates more directly to mar-ket forces. Vance distinguished between segrega-tion (people forced together by exclusion from

elsewhere) and congregation (voluntary associa-tion) (1977: 33–36; 1990b: 33–38). As Vancealways maintained, to counter the tendency forenvironmental determinism in writing about ur-ban design and architecture history, “settlementmorphology was not the instrument of socialchange but rather the consequence of what be-gan as a social objective,” not artistic, philosoph-ical, or elite utopian schemes (1990a: 209).

Using this system,

This Scene of Man

and

TheContinuing City

look at three fundamental eras:first, the classical Greek city-state, Etruscan cit-ies, and the decline of Roman urbanism; second,the merchant’s city of medieval Europe and thebastides (fortified new towns, mostly built as partof medieval colonization programs); and finally,the renaissance city of princely display, the mer-cantile city, the industrial metropolis, and themodern city of realms. Within this survey, Vanceparticularly loved to discuss bastides, whose ex-pression of anti-Catholic and protoliberal viewsso mirrored Vance’s own positions. As with hisinitial writing about the CBD, Vance also main-tained his eye for continuity within change:

Buildings are among our more plastic creations,surviving changes in geography and style thattransform Diocletian’s palace at Split into slums,and the mews of Victorian coachmen into the flatsof Bentley-driving gentry in today’s London. . . .How wonderfully flexible the urban fabric is!Once we reject the canon of modern architecture,which decrees generational shift and destructionwith change, we find that instead of this ratherrootless nature for cities we have a real continuity(1977: 22, 24; 1990b: 19, 21).

The Continuing City

did more than revamp theearlier

Scene of Man

; it also served as a comp-anion volume to a similarly scaled book ontransportation.

The historical geography of transportation—particularly railroads—always enjoyed a promi-nent place in Vance’s research (see 1951, 1961).Vance was a master at arranging his travels toconnect the most interesting possible routes. In1961, he wrote to Parsons that, “After a longand fruitless fight with Scandinavian Airlines Ihave given up trying to stop in Algiers. They didnot show any enthusiasm for my habit of readingtime-tables and diagrams of costless alternativeroutes” (Vance to Parsons, June 30, 1961). AsWilliam Code remembers, Vance “loved talkingto the crews on the Union Pacific, or the Cana-dian National or the myriad other lines he

Vance 769

loved.” At one time, Code adds, Vance “per-suaded the Canadian National Railway to allowhim to ride the caboose on local pulp and paperruns, across the clay belt in the far north of On-tario and Quebec. . . . The bumper sticker on hisold Ford (he would have no other—out of prin-ciple) read ‘my other car is Amtrak’” (Code1999: 2). Vance also talked Canadian rail lines,on occasion, into rescheduling freights to workin daylight hours so that he could study theirroutes. Jean and Jay Vance crossed the Atlanticat least once on a containerized freight ship.

Not just any rail scheme earned Vance’s sup-port, however. In the early 1960s, Vance be-came an outspoken critic of the planning, de-sign, consulting fees, and construction fundingof the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), whoseinitial cost estimates proved to be too small andwhich has continually run at a loss—both ofwhich Vance predicted. Vance felt the BARTsystem should have made use of the preexistinginterurban rail systems in the East Bay, and thatBART was conceived by and for only those of-fice commuters and shoppers who wanted toreach downtown San Francisco or Oakland.The system, he said, did not serve either the in-dustrial workers of the Bay Area or the existinglargest concentrations of potential users (1986:415–16). As usual, against the fashionablenorm, Vance was a staunch supporter of auto-mobiles as an essential part of American indi-vidual mobility. He saw the trolley, and evenmore the later automobile, as essential tools ofdemocracy and freedom.

Vance culminated his lifetime of transporta-tion study with two large-format and hand-somely illustrated books.

Capturing the Horizon

(1986 and 1990) begins with the transportationrevolution of the 1500s, and traces the subse-quent development, use, and implications of ca-nals, turnpikes, railroads, omnibus and horsecar,trolleys, shipping lanes, roads, and airwaysthrough the late twentieth century.

The NorthAmerican Railroad

(1995), Vance’s last publica-tion, is a labor of love and, in many ways, themost approachable and most elegantly producedof Vance’s books. Always an ardent Americannationalist, he sets out to explain the distinc-tion between British railways, which “arose be-cause of the crowding and stressing of existingtransportation, found concentrated on canals,”and the railroads of the U.S. and Canada, which“grew in a very different soil, as a new develop-ment in the absence of any good prior transpor-

tation” (1995: xi). He shows how, in 1833, eightyears after the completion of Britain’s first line,the South Carolina Railroad had become theworld’s longest line; how Boston, by 1835,served by three separate radiating rail lines, hadbecome the first rail junction city, and how anumber of technological accomplishments (useof the telegraph and the common rail spikeamong them) came first on the North Americanrailroad. The revised editions of

Capturing theHorizon

and

The Continuing City

, which bothappeared in 1990, completed at a continentalscale what Vance had begun with his disserta-tion at the scale of the urban region: explicationof the geographical processes which link settle-ment and transportation in western civilization.

Although Vance’s considerable contribu-tions have yet to be fully appreciated and incor-porated by the discipline, his publications gar-nered official recognition late in his life. In1979, he was awarded Honors of the Associa-tion of American Geographers for his mercan-tile model of settlement and study of urban mor-phogenesis. In 1987, he received the Van CleefMemorial Medal from the American Geograph-ical Society, whose award citation noted Vance’swork as “marked by analytical rigor and humaneconcerns” and “conceptual models that areamong the most forceful to have emerged inpresent-day geographical scholarship.” In 1996,the Transportation Specialty Group of theAAG gave Vance their Edward L. UllmanAward for outstanding career contributions tothe field of transportation geography.

Jay Vance was a man of great constancy andmoral convictions, but also of great contradic-tions. He was a lifelong New Englander eventhough he lived in California for more thanforty years. He eschewed fancy designers and de-sign questions, but in Berkeley, he and Jeanchose an elegant Monterey-style home built in1931 with gardens designed by the high-societylandscape architect, Thomas Church, and withfountains added by the Vances from their trav-els. As David Hooson and others have re-marked, the Vances—two of the most urbaneand city-centered people in Berkeley—madetheir summer home in a very remote location onthe northern coast of Canada’s Queen CharlotteIslands, looking across Dixon Entrance toPrince of Wales Island at the southern tip ofAlaska. Finally, for someone seemingly so inde-pendent and iconoclastic in temperament,James Vance was also someone highly depen-dent upon and appreciative of his family and

770 Groth

friends. This was a side of Vance that few peoplesaw. His friend, the anthropologist MargaretMacKenzie, noted that “as Jean Vance began tobe ill, Jay too began to fade.” Jean’s death in1992, at the age of 64, was a body blow to Vance,and also ended their plans of coauthoring a bookabout Oakland and San Francisco, althoughtheir individual writings suggest the shape thatbook might have taken (Vance 1964a; JeanVance 1976). Vance’s genuine recognition ofthe people he relied upon, and a clear farewell,can be seen in the acknowledgments to his lasttwo books, in which he thanks those “with a sur-passing geographical curiosity,” including hiswife Jean, “whose patience has endured the fill-ing of a great number of locks [and] the slowprogress of a multitude of watched trains,” to-gether with his students and his daughter Tif-fany, “who brought purpose and pleasure to thatwork” (1986: v). He remembered that “innu-merable people have helped importantly in thiswork, and for that I thank them most sincerely.The failings must be mine, the strengths areclearly theirs. To all of these true friends I sendmy deepest appreciation” (1995: xvi). JamesVance has left geography a lasting legacy of ideasand friendships.

Acknowledgments

Compiling the material for this article was mademuch easier, and much more vivid, with the com-ments made at two memorial gatherings for Jay Vance,one held on September 25, 1999, in the entry court-yard of the Vance home, and another held on October15, 1999, just before the beginning of the two-daysymposium marking the 100th anniversary of the De-partment of Geography at the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley. Quotations with no other attribution arecomments made at these two gatherings. The Vanceletters quoted here are in the department’s archive bio-graphical file for James Vance. In addition, for theirhelp in compiling information and correcting errors,my thanks to Tamsen Anderson, Roger Barnett, BlairBoyd, William Code, Brian Godfrey, David Hooson,Chris McGee, Melvin Webber, Allan Pred, RichardWalker, Tiffany Vance, and Natalia Vonnegut.

References

Celebrating 100 Years of Berkeley Geography.

Sym-posium, Berkeley, CA, October 16–17, 1999.Five VHS video tapes available from the De-partment of Geography, University of Califor-nia, Berkeley.

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Correspondence:

Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley 94702 (email pgroth@uclink4.berkeley.edu).