Her work has received several awards, including the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Newberry Library fellowship, and the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2016 Bishir Prize. She previously worked as the managing editor of SAH Archipedia and taught at Rutgers University.
Boland Erkkila applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements, and reported the following:
Page 99 – Here we join Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson traveling on an immigrant train across the United States in 1879. A newsboy boards at the Ogden stop in Utah, and becomes a comforting guide to the train’s weary travelers, who otherwise had no way of knowing when or where the train would stop next, or if there would be amenities available. Stevenson, feeling ill at this point in the journey, is especially grateful for the newsboy, who offers him a free pear and lends him reading material while he languishes near the propped-open railcar door, gaining what little relief he could from the train’s stifling air. Another traveler notes the small, high windows on the railcar, a design that allowed railroad companies to ship freight eastward in boxcars and shuttle immigrants westward by adding benches to those same cars. These travel scenes are put into the context of the railway age—where the railroad altered not only the physical landscape itself, but also the 19th-century traveler’s perception of space and time.Follow Catherine Boland Erkkila on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well with Spaces of Immigration, and readers get a good idea of the book as a whole from that one page. One of my goals for this book was to strike a balance between the individual immigrant experience and the larger cultural and political processes shaping that experience (forces largely driven by conflicts of race and class). On page 99 specifically, Stevenson’s firsthand account of an immigrant train merges with a discussion of the larger capitalist forces at play, wherein white European immigrants were often treated similarly to the freight shipped along the railroad lines (the treatment of nonwhite immigrants is also covered in the book, just not on this specific page). The design of the railcar itself is also discussed on page 99, which clues readers into the fact that this book is written from an architectural history perspective. While this page focuses on immigrant trains, the rest of book uses a similar approach to present the network of physical spaces (ports, immigration stations, waiting rooms, boardinghouses) along an immigrant’s journey.
One of the coolest parts of the Page 99 Test was that this specific page discusses the underlying massive cultural shift that occurred during the railway age. My hope in writing this book is that readers consider how this history relates to the present day. There are so many parallels between the treatment of immigrants now, in 2025, and the racist and nativist rhetoric of the 19th and 20th centuries. Furthermore, we are in the midst of our own massive cultural shift—the digital era, which alters our own perception of space and time—that impacts American culture in an undeniable way. The physical space of detention centers (especially along the US–Mexico border), the relationship between capitalism and immigration, and the restrictive legislation against specific national groups are well rooted in history, and the structure of this book could readily be applied to the contemporary immigration landscape.
Finally, a note to readers: I would love to see this book reach a broader audience! So, please, if you are able to request a copy at your local library, I would greatly appreciate it. An audiobook version will also be available by July 2025.
--Marshal Zeringue
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