In the final decades of the nineteenth century, American cities began to catch up to themselves. The cities of the mid-1800s may be described as having rapidly gathered potential energy – by drawing in massive populations; installing the basic features of an industrial economy; and laying the foundations of a new kind of city government. By the 1880s, a set of technological advances allowed the cities tor elease this energy into expansion.

The cities began to climb upwards. Building construction was improved by the new metals made available through industrialization; new systems were devised for pumping water above the fifth floor; and elevators were invented in the early 1880s. All of this meant that upper-floor apartments in the city downtowns soared in value, and the “five-story city” of the mid-nineteenth century began to be overshadowed by the tall office buildings of the business blocks. “By the 1890s,” writes one historian, there was “a new kind of urban skyline” (Bender).

And the cities were exploding outwards as well. After the Civil War, the U.S. began to complete its telegraph networks and, crucially, its railways. Whereas, in the earlier parts of the century, few people had been able to use the existing rail service into and out of the major cities for any kind of commute to and from work – the trains stopped and gathered speed too slowly to make short-distance travel workable – late-century improvements to steam engine design eventually made commuter trains a reality. The cities spread quickly out along the railway lines radiating from their centers, forming suburb communities.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the city populations were steadily expanding and diversifying. Black people had always been a part of city populations during the nineteenth century, although their position as slave labourers in southern cities like Charleston curtailed their freedom of residence there. Black people living in the North may have been legally “free,” but racism and segregationist attitudes no doubt meant that neighbourhood boundaries separated black and white areas of residence even in the mixed-use city streets of the early decades. This separation must have intensified during the later years of the century, when in the 1890s “black migration to northern cities accelerated” (Bender). New York City’s Draft Riots were only the most famous of the many race riots to flare up in American cities throughout the latter half of the century especially. In 1869 there were serious riots in San Francisco, and white hostility to a growing Chinese population in San Francisco lead to the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

 

 

Even the central metropolitan areas could expand during the 1880s and ’90s. The plodding omnibuses of the early century had been replaced in the 1850s by “horsecars,” which were horse-drawn carriages seating 30 to 40 people, running on rails set into the surface of the major city streets. (Because these were much easier to pull than a regular cart, a single horse could pull each car; the ride was faster, smoother, and much cheaper than an omnibus could provide.) But it was the electric streetcars that really caught the enthusiasm of the American people. Beginning to appear in 1885, these new vehicles were “one of the most rapidly accepted innovations in the history of technology” (Jackson). They ran along overhead cables, more than doubling the speed of public transportation from a maximum of 13 km per hour on the horsecar to 32 km/h, and cutting the cost per passenger by half. They also “extended the bounds of the city to a radius of 10 miles [16 km]” (Bender).

 

 

Big business in America was expanding too, in what one historian calls a second industrial revolution (Chandler). This involved the newly completed railroad, telegraph, steamship and cable networks; the introduction of electric power to factory machines and lighting in the1880s; and chemical engineering in industrial processes. The new products of the second-wave factories needed to be marketed on national and international distribution networks to recover the costs of production; and the rail and steamship lines were useful for carrying this new large-scale flow of goods. The cities became hubs in an economy that had leapt into the production of not only steel, light and heavy machinery, oils, and chemicals, but also of the goods I think of today as being, somehow, quintessentially American: “packaged food, drug and tobacco products bearing brand names” (Chandler). (SB)

 

 

For further research:

Download and watch the early film clips, dating to the first years of the 1900s, from the Library of Congress Website:

Go to http://www.loc.gov/ammem

Enter as search terms:

“What Happened on 23rd Street, New York City”

“Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Parade”

“Sorting Refuse at Incineration Plant”

Select the early film clips of these titles from the lists of results, and enjoy!

 

 

Works Cited

Bender, Thomas. “The Reader’s Companion to American History – Urbanization.” Houghton Mifflin College Division. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_088600_urbanization.htm.

 

Chandler, Alfred D.  “The Reader’s Companion to American History – Industrial Revolution.”  Houghton Mifflin College Division. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_045300_industrialre.htm.

 

Jackson, Kenneth T.  “The Reader’s Companion to American History – Public Transportation.”  Houghton Mifflin College Division. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_072000_publictransp.htm.

 

 

Works Consulted

McSwain, James B.  Review of Sara E. Wermiel’s The Fireproof Building:  Technology and Public Safety in the 19th-Century American City.  Nov 2000.  Nov 14, 2005.  www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0313.shtml.

 

Morrison, Donald.  “Making Cities Work:  How Engineers Transformed Late 19th-Century American Urban Centres.”  www.eng.nsf.edu/mr/ret_2002/making_cities_work.pdf.

 

Osborn, Tracy. “Teacher’s OZ Kingdom of History – 19th-Century America.” July 11, 2005. Nov 14, 2005. <www.teacheroz.com>.