Chapter 4. The Age of Industrial City

• In 1820, after two hundred years of settlement, the vast majority of Americans lived in rural areas. After that, decade by decade, the urban population swelled until, by 1900, 20% (one of every five) Americans was a city dweller. Nearly 6.5 million people inhabited just three great cities: New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia
• Factories were always built next to rivers, making exports and trade easier
• The city was where the factories went up and where the new immigrants settled, constituting one-third of all big-city residents in 1900. Here, too, lived the millionaires, and a growing white-collar class
• For all these people, the city was more than a place to make a living. It provided the setting for an urban culture unlike anything seen before in the United States. City people, although differing vastly among themselves, became distinctively and recognizably urban
• Urbanisation


  Until the Civil War, cities were the places where goods were bought and sold for distribution into the interior or out to world markets. Early industry, by contrast, sprang up mostly in the countryside, where factories had access to water power, nearby fuel and raw materials, and workers recruited from farms and villages
• As industrialization proceeded


  City and factory began to merge
• Once steam engines came along, mill operators no longer depended on water-driven power. Railroads enabled factory builders to locate at the places best situated in relation to suppliers and markets
• In 1879, the first elevated railroads went into operation on Sixth and Ninth Avenues in New York City. Chicago developed elevated transit most fully. Other cities looked below ground. It was the completion in 1904 of a subway running the length of Manhattan that demonstrated the full potential of the high-speed underground train
• The first "skyscraper" to be built on this principle was William Le Baron Jenney's ten-storey Home Insurance Building (1885) in Chicago. Chicago pioneered skyscraper construction, but New York, with its unrelenting demand for prime downtown space, took the lead after the mid-1890s. The fifty-five-story Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, marked the beginning of the modern Manhattan skyline
• The first use of electricity, in the 1870s, was for better city lighting. The nightlife was possible, amusement emerged, nights were less dangerous
• Electric lighting then entered the American home, thanks to Thomas Edison's invention of a serviceable incandescent bulb in 1879. Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone (1876) sped communication beyond anything imagined previously
• Private City, Public City


  City building was mostly an exercise in private enterprise. The investment opportunities looked so tempting that new cities sprang up almost overnight from the ruins of the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906
• America gave birth to what one urban historian has called the "private city," shaped primarily by many individuals, all pursuing their own goals and bent on making money
• Constitutionally, it was up to municipal governments to draw the line between public and private. City governance improved impressively in the late nineteenth century. In the space between public and private, however, was an environmental no-man's land. City streets were often filthy and poorly maintained. In New York City, the dreadful result was five- or six-story tenements, structures housing twenty or more families in cramped, airless apartments
• Reformers recognized the problem but seemed unable to solve it. Some favoured model tenements financed by public-spirited citizens. But private philanthropy was no answer to escalating land values in downtown areas. The landlords of the poor expected a return on their investment, and that meant high-density, cheaply built housing
• Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York City's Central Park, wanted cities that exposed people to the beauties of nature, but It was an entire creation to increase hygiene, health care
• Urban Elite


  In the early republic, class distinctions had been embedded in the way men and women dressed and demonstrated by the deference they demanded from or granted others. As the industrial city grew, these marks of class weakened. In the anonymity of a big city, recognition and deference no longer served as mechanisms for conferring status. Instead, people began to rely on conspicuous display of wealth, membership in exclusive clubs, and, above all, residence in exclusive neighbourhoods
• An established elite dominated the social heights, even in such relatively raw cities as San Francisco and Denver. It had taken only a generation — sometimes less — for money made in commerce or real estate to shed its tarnish and become "old" and genteel
• New York thus came to be a magnet for millionaires. The city attracted them not only as the nation's preeminent financial centre but also for the opportunities it offered for display and social recognition. There followed a curious process of reconstruction, a deliberate effort to define the rules of conduct and identify those who properly "belonged" in New York society
• Suburban World


  Since colonial times, self-employed lawyers, doctors, merchants, and proprietors had been the backbone of a robust American middle class. While independent careers remained important, industrialism spawned a new middle class of salaried employees. Corporate organizations required managers, accountants, and clerks. Industrial technology called for engineers, chemists, and designers, while the distribution system needed salesmen, advertising executives, and store managers. These salaried ranks increased sevenfold between 1870 and 1910 — much faster than any other occupational group. Nearly nine million people held white-collar jobs in 1910, more than one-fourth of all employed Americans
• Some members of this white-collar class lived in the row houses of Baltimore and Boston or the comfortable apartment buildings of New York City. More preferred to escape the clamour and congestion of the city. They were attracted by a persisting rural ideal
• Suburban boundaries shifted constantly as working-class city residents who wanted better lives moved to the cheapest suburbs, prompting an exodus of older residents, who in turn pushed the next higher group farther out in search of space and greenery. Suburbanization was the sum of countless individual decisions. The suburbs also restored an opportunity that city-bound Americans thought they had lost. In the suburbs, home ownership again became the norm
• Middle-Class Families


  In the pre-industrial economy, work and family life were intertwined. Farmers, merchants, and artisans generally worked at home. The household encompassed not just blood relatives, but everyone living and working there
• As industrialism progressed


  Family life and economic activity parted company. Middle-class families became smaller, excluding all but nuclear members, and consisting typically by 1900 of husband, wife, and three children. Within this family circle, relationships became intense and affectionate
• During the 1890s, the artist Charles Dana Gibson created the image of the "new woman." In his drawings, the Gibson girl was tall, spirited, athletic, and chastely sexual. She rejected bustles, hoop skirts, and tightly laced corsets, preferring natural styles that did not disguise her female form. In the city, women's sphere began to take on a more public character
• For the urban middle class, children were no longer regarded as an economic asset. Parents stopped expecting their children to be productive members of the family. The family was responsible for providing a nurturing environment in which the young personality could grow and mature. Childhood became longer
• Preparation for adulthood became increasingly linked to formal education. School enrollment went up 150 percent between 1870 and 1900. As the years before adulthood began to stretch out, a new stage of life — adolescence — emerged. While rooted in longer years of family dependency, adolescence shifted much of the socializing role from parents to peer group. Most affected were the daughters of the middle class, who, freed from the chores of housework, now devoted themselves to self-development, including going to high school for many
• The explosive growth of America's big-city population — a jump from about six million in 1880 to fourteen million in 1900—meant that cities were very much a world of newcomers. Many came from the nation's co
• Parents stopped expecting their children to be productive members of the family
• The family was responsible for providing a nurturing environment in which the young personality could grow and mature
• Childhood became longer
• Preparation for adulthood became increasingly linked to formal education
• School enrollment went up 150 percent between 1870 and 1900
• A new stage of life — adolescence — emerged
• Adolescence shifted much of the socializing role from parents to peer group
• The explosive growth of America's big-city population — a jump from about six million in 1880 to fourteen million in 1900—meant that cities were very much a world of newcomers
• The biggest ethnic group in Boston was Irish; in Minneapolis, Swedish; in most other northern cities, German
• The immigrants had little choice about where they lived; they needed to find cheap housing near their jobs
• Some gravitated to the outlying factory districts; others settled in the congested downtown ghettos
• Italians crowded into the Irish neighbourhoods west of Broadway, while Russian and Polish Jews pushed the Germans out of the Lower East Side