As American cities grew larger and more crowded, thereby aggravating a host of social problems, practical forces operated to bring about improvements. Once the relationship between polluted water and disease was fully understood, everyone saw the need for decent water and sewage systems. (See Mapping the Past, “Cholera: A New Disease Strikes the Nation,” pp. 498-499.) While some businessmen profited from corrupt dealings with the city machines, more of them wanted efficient and honest government in order to reduce their tax bills. City dwellers of all classes resented dirt, noise, and ugliness, and in many communities public-spirited groups formed societies to plant trees, clean up littered areas, and develop recreational facilities. When one city undertook improvements, others tended to follow suit, spurred on by local pride and the booster spirit.
Gradually the basic facilities of urban living were improved. Streets were paved, first with cobblestones and wood blocks and then with smoother, quieter asphalt. Gaslight, then electric arc lights, and finally Edison’s incandescent lamps brightened the cities after dark, making law enforcement easier, stimulating night life, and permitting factories and shops to operate after sunset.
Urban transportation underwent enormous changes. Until the 1880s, horse-drawn cars running on tracks set flush with the street were the main means of urban public transportation. In 1860 New York City’s horsecars were carrying about
100,000 passengers a day. But horse-cars had serious drawbacks. Enormous numbers of horses were needed, and feeding and stabling the animals was costly. Their droppings (ten pounds per day per horse) became a major source of urban pollution. That is why the invention of the electric trolley car in the 1880s put an end to horsecar transportation. Trolleys were cheaper and less unsightly than horsecars and quieter than steam-powered trains.
A retired naval officer, Frank J. Sprague, installed the first practical electric trolley line in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887-1888. At once other cities seized on the trolley. Lines soon radiated outward from the city centers, bringing commuters and shoppers from the residential districts to the business district. Without them the big-city department stores could not have flourished as they did. By 1895 some 850 lines were busily hauling city dwellers over 10,000 miles of track, and mileage tripled in the following decade. As with other new enterprises, ownership of street railways quickly became centralized until
The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 was a community spectacle.
A few big operators controlled the trolleys of more than 100 eastern cities and towns.
Streetcars changed the character of big-city life. Before their introduction urban communities were limited by the distances people could conveniently walk to work. The “walking city” could not easily extend more than twenty-one-and-a-half miles from its center. Streetcars increased this radius to six miles or more, which meant that the area of the city expanded enormously. Dramatic population shifts resulted as the better-off moved away from the center in search of air and space, abandoning the crumbling, jam-packed older neighborhoods to the poor. Thus economic segregation speeded the growth of ghettos. Older peripheral towns that had maintained some of the self-contained qualities of village life were swallowed up, becoming metropolitan centers.
As time passed, each new area, originally peopled by rising economic groups, tended to become crowded and then deteriorated. By extending their tracks beyond the developed areas, the streetcar companies further speeded suburban growth because they assured developers, bankers, builders, and middle-class home buyers of efficient transport to the center of town. By keeping fares low (five cents a ride was standard) the lines enabled poor people to “escape” to the countryside on holidays.
Advances in bridge design, notably the perfection of the steel-cable suspension bridge by John A. Roebling, aided the ebb and flow of metropolitan populations. The Brooklyn Bridge described by a poet as “a weird metallic Apparition. . . the cables, like divine messages from above. . . cutting and dividing into innumerable musical spaces the nude immensity of the sky,” was Roebling’s triumph. Completed in 1883 at a cost of $15 million, it was soon carrying more than 33 million passengers a year over the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Even the high cost of urban real estate, which spawned the tenement, produced some beneficial results in the long run. Instead of crowding squat structures cheek by jowl on twenty-five-foot lots, architects began to build upward. Stone and brick apartment houses, sometimes elegantly known as “French flats,” replaced many dumbbell tenements. The introduction of the iron-skeleton type of construction, which freed the walls from bearing the immense weight of a tall building, was the work of a group of Chicago architects who had been attracted to the metropolis of the Midwest by opportunities to be found amid the ashes of the great fire of 1871. The group included William Le Baron Jenney, John A. Holabird, Martin Roche, John W. Root, Louis H. Sullivan, and Daniel Burnham. Jenney’s Home
Daniel Burnham's Flatiron Building (1902) was one of the first to use steel girders to hold up the building; this allowed the outside masonry to be decorative stone. In mid-century, architects eliminated the outside wall entirely, encasing steel-framed buildings in walls of glass.
Insurance Building (completed in 1885) was the first metal-frame edifice. Height alone, however, did not satisfy these innovators; they sought a form that would reflect the structure and purpose of their buildings.
Their leader was Louis Sullivan. Architects must discard “books, rules, precedents, or any such educational impediments” and design functional buildings, he argued. A tall building “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation. . . from bottom to top... a unit without a single dissenting line.” Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in St. Louis and his Prudential Building in Buffalo, both completed in the early 1890s, combined spare beauty, modest construction costs, and efficient use of space in pathbreaking ways. Soon a “race to the skies” was on in the great cities of America, and the words skyscraper and skyline entered the language. Daniel Burnham, another of the Chicago-school architects, designed the twenty-two-story Flatiron Building in New York which, when completed in 1902, was one of the tallest in the city.
World History
