Designed Segregation: Racial Space and Social Reform in San Juan’s Casa de Beneficencia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

see attached, love the topic and my sense is that the author has good instincts, but the article needs some work; it is really between the "Accept after minor revision" and "Reconsider after major revision" levels

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The essay contributes to scholarship on 19th-century architecture in the Caribbean by focusing on an important, if not canonical, building, using archival resources, and drawing on theories of racial exclusion and medical/social control. It is particularly valuable as and addition to scholarship on neoclassicism. It would be interesting to know more about the roles of medical and social-welfare professionals in shaping the design. St. Elizabeth's hospital (1852) in Washington DC offers an interesting comparative example. Racial segregation was designed in from the beginning, and doctors were closely involved in the planning. (Yanni discusses this, I believe.) To what extent does the PR example resemble practices and buildings elsewhere in North America?

The suggestion that the Casa de Beneficia descended conceptually (in part) from missions is intriguing. Is it a distinctive Spanish/Portuguese-American type, therefore, that stands at the intersection of colonial types/practices and 19th c Enlightenment institutionalist programs? 

The discussion of the history of the foundling hospitals could be condensed. The essay would be strengthened by the inclusion of primary source accounts of racialized/class-conditioned social interactions in San Juan.  The lithographs (please give its specific date in prose) are helpful, but a one or two more such examples, visual or textual, would be useful.  I would also wonder about how admissions to the Casa de Beneficia proceeded - who brought people here, and how, in the context of a cultural landscape in which domestic labor was highly racialized, did the care/control dynamic in the CdeB mimic or diverge from that in domestic settings.

Please edit date in caption for figs 2 & 3 to note that upper story is built in late 19th c.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are several sections where the prose could be clearer, ex:  lines 155-157; 260-262.

Author Response

This reader had no critiques to which I felt there needed to be a response.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The revisions address all the comments and have made the article much clearer with a more forceful and compelling argument, narrowing the focus in a convincing way. 

I am attaching notes about (1) typos; (2) some issues with figure captions and in-text references to those figures (stemming from errors in the PARES database, I believe); (3) a few suggestions of minor structural edits for clarity (swapping the order of a couple of paragraphs, mostly for chronology); and (4) a handful of places to add a paragraph topic sentence or paragraph concluding sentence to more explicitly state argument/guide readers through the article. 

Will be delighted to read this in print, and am also looking forward to reading work on the architecture from broader times and places that made the earlier article version a bit overstuffed but are clearly part of a super interesting larger project.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for the constructive feedback and revisions.

1) I have attended to all the typos indicated.

2) I have fixed the problem with the image captions given the errors in PARES; I have reversed figure 5; I have noted that the map is oriented to the south in fig. 9 and the other directional issues; I am investigating options to include an outline or highlighting to indicate the casa de beneficencia's location in the two city plans, which will likely be done in Adobe Photoshop and uploaded with the images (permissions are still pending on these images from Spanish collections)

3) I have reorganized the suggested paragraphs for clarity and chronology; I have kept the funding paragraph because of what it says about the material landscape of race as it relates to building, which might be of interest to architectural historians; I have made the adjustment you noted with respect to visibility and the dialectical relationship between the Casa de Beneficencia and the Plaza de Armas; please check that I have followed this direction accurately; as I make my corrections, the template seems to get corrupted as it did last time; I have amended the introduction with the point about managing behavior via social welfare and managing visibility of non-whites; I have added a stronger topical sentence to the beginning of the paragraph formerly at line 415; formerly 468-469, I have added a sentence explaining why these prints were useful to the argument; formerly p. 19, I have attended to the comment about how the Casa would conceal undesirables while the Plaza would showcase members of the white population, according to these mythologies

5) I have attended to each of these cases, to suggestions of additional citations and softening assertions where evidence is not included