The Industrial City: Growth and the Physical Landscape,
In this section, the history emphasizes physical growth and development of the industrial city’s (Big Cities) physical landscape during the Gilded Age. This introductory theme introduces the reader to a neglected, but vitally important element of urban growth—its birth. Today the metropolitan area simply exists; for many readers they were born more than a hundred years from when it first formed. It seems natural that a young economic developer (and many older ones) might think it always existed this way. It didn’t, of course. Cities were created—by people—literally. Economists and urban geographers can talk about more abstract forces such as central place theory, but this history prefers to observe people behavior whenever we can. We regret we can only discuss them in a very cursory fashion.
Our presentation of growth of the industrial city and its physical landscape follows three sub-themes: (1) population growth from both farm-to-city and immigration, (2) movement to the city periphery propelled by innovations in transportation, and (3) the consequent formation of the characteristic elements of the industrial city’s physical landscape: the CBD, neighborhoods, and suburbs. During these years transportation modes changed radically and relatively often. A perhaps simplistic, but hopefully suggestive, observation is that regardless of poverty, inequality, and strife, this was a period of constant physical expansion of the Big City. For economic development this meant infrastructure, and increased goal-complexity to satisfy quite divergent needs and demands. Big City economic development goals reflected the heterogeneity of populations and industry sectors.
In contemporary America we have gotten out of the habit of thinking in growth terms about the central cities of North and Midwest, but grow they did during the Gilded Age—and to many it seemed not only explosive, but almost uncontrollable, limitless growth. For the most part these cities didn’t stop growing until the 1930’s Depression. In that both the population and the industrial city were “new”, loyalty and civic pride were “works in progress” and fluidity and change were constant. It is in the Gilded Age that the Big City urban hierarchies’ evolved and inter-city competition was as much defensive as offensive. No doubt, economic developers will anticipate this translates into something akin to business attraction and retention strategies—but this will be dealt with in Chapter 4.
Growth of the Industrial City: A Descriptive Overview
Let’s not waste time by proving the obvious; in 1860 there were 31.5 million Americans; in 1900 there were 76.2 million (nearly 142%). As far as immigration goes, no surprise, lots of immigrants piled into the entry ports of America. Between 1850 and1860 nearly 2.6 million entered, almost doubling between 1880 and 1890 (to nearly 5 million in that decade) and 3.7 million in the 1890’s[1]. From 1850 to 1900, the number of people living in incorporated municipalities greater than 2,500 rose from 6.6 million in 1850 to 44.6 million in 1900.—from nearly 20% of the population to almost 46%.[2]
Say it another way; in 1860 slightly over 6.1 million Americans lived in urban areas; by 1870 that figure was slightly less than 10 million—a growth of nearly 60% during the decade of the Civil War. In 1880 a little over 28% of the American populace lived in cities; by 1890 35%; and, by 1900, almost 40%., more than 30 million lived in American cities—a 300% increase in thirty years. So if Americans as a whole increased by 142% during the expanded Gilded Age, urban America grew by 300%. Things had to change in the city under such pressures; something had to give. Cities expanded outward—they pushed out their periphery and across their city boundaries.
To wonder which city grew the “mostest” is to miss a point important to supporting my notion of regional hegemony. By 1890 the only confederate city remaining in the top twenty-five cities was New Orleans, and it had dropped from 6th (1860) to 12th (1890)[3]. Also, in 1860 only one city west of the Mississippi was in the top twenty-five (San Francisco, 15th). By 1890 San Francisco (rising to 8th) was joined only by Omaha (21st). Twenty-two of the top twenty-five most populated cities in 1890 were located in Mohl’s “industrial heartland”—what I call the Northeast-Midwest regional hegemony.
Gilded Age Big City-Building
For John F. McDonald[4], two factors “combined to create America’s first cities: the invention of large scale production methods and the transportation revolution.
Factories with economies of scale were developed in several industries–textiles, apparel, iron, tools, ordnance, wagons, lumber, and food products such as flour and so on. The transportation revolution (on the other hand) was first based on the steamboat, and a few years later, the railroad. Production to build the railroads and companies to run them became major parts of the economy. These two factors made it economical to house large manufacturing enterprises at the transshipment points.[5]
Sounds great to any budding economist, but something was missing—the entrepreneur that could make it happen. So we must add to the mix those individuals who actually put the factors of growth together: the city-builders. City-building in some quarters of the profession are viewed as extremely questionable characters with an exceedingly dark side. City-builders are greedy SOB’s seeking to make personal profit. Nineteenth century city-building was engineered by businessman who made a fortune in hawking land and lots, often acquired by bribing state or territorial governments, and sold to down trodden masses (mostly pioneers and immigrants). Toss in railroads and robber barons and the picture is pretty dismal—or conventionally capitalist which is synonymous with dismal. All told, it is not too far from the truth—except that the downtrodden masses traveled far distances to buy this land of their own volition as part of their hope to build a new future in a virgin land.
Such folk as Chicago’s Ogden, are…how do we say it? “Complicated”! But if we interweave McDonald’s model with Ogden and the Dark Side of city-building, we can reconstruct the Gilded Age’s most fantastic success story. Being unplanned is the original sin of Privatist city-building and the “plans” as existed in 1830 Chicago (population 0) meant platting grids, installing key infrastructure, putting together advertising hoopla, and by hook or crook attracting business and residents—making in the process a personal fortune. Chicago, initially a seventeenth century fort, took off as a city after the Black Hawk War (1832). Glenn Hubbard, a trader with the American Fur Company, arrived and then recruited a number of entrepreneurs/businessmen from Western New York to plat and market the area to settlers. Included among Hubbard’s early transplants was a lawyer from Delaware County New York, William B. Ogden.
Hubbard’s team was helped greatly by Chicago’s first innovation, balloon frame housing construction devised by New Hampshire-born George Washington Snow in 1832. Snow transported Michigan logs to the treeless plains of Chicago and fashioned them into Chicago’s first functioning industry sector: housing construction. The balloon frame construction process minimized lumber and construction time resulting in an affordable, quality product that attracted new settlers. By the decade’s end the fledgling settlement grew to about 4,000. More was needed to achieve “take-off”. This is where Ogden came in.
It really helped if the prospective resident could get “there” somehow—which meant transportation infrastructure was king. So McDonald was in 1840 half-right. The thing was someone had cause the transportation infrastructure to be installed. That was the role of the individual city-builder, such as Ogden. Ogden, elected as Chicago’s first mayor in 1836, persuaded the federal government to build piers on Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Chicago River where Ogden had conveniently established a shipping company with routes to Buffalo. Next, Ogden connived with East Coast investors to convince the state of Michigan into building the Illinois and Michigan Canal—this opened up the Illinois farm hinterland and Ogden now had grain he could ship grain to New York and bring back to Chicago new settlers.
To house new growth Ogden put his money where his mouth was, and personally provided the funds needed to build Archer Avenue. He then subdivided and marketed the Bridgeport neighborhood (future home of Mayor Daley). Recognizing, without a plan or an economic textbook that he had to also provide jobs through industry, Ogden set about stealing somebody else’s sectors and jobs. Today we call it business recruitment.
In 1845 Ogden saw potential in using Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper. The reaper, invented (dare we say innovated) in Virginia (1831), was first manufactured in Cincinnati where it caught Ogden’s attention. McCormick was recruited, relocating (with financing from William Butler Ogden) to Chicago in 1847[6]. As mayor as well as a businessman Ogden thoughtfully also tossed tax abatement and a site into the McCormick’s pilferage package, excuse me, incentive package. As both mayor and entrepreneur, Ogden operated a public-private economic development attraction and recruitment program which provided the needed sector to expand Chicago’s economic base. Ogden is an excellent model for how John McDonald’s city-building concept became real. Along the way, Ogden established the Chicago Lyceum, the Chicago Historical Society, Chicago Orphans Society, the first University of Chicago and Northwestern University. From Ogden’s Privatist city-building efforts Chicago’s population 4,000 in 1840, had mushroomed to 112,000 by 1860. Chicago in 1870, the nation’s fifth largest city (299,000) became the nation’s second largest city; its population slightly less than 1.1 million by 1890. Ogden, sadly, lost much of his wealth in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and with all the irony imaginable, he moved to New York City where he died (and is buried) in 1877. The Great Fire and Ogden’s departure, however, did nothing to stop Chicago’s explosive Gilded Age growth. At the turn of the century, Chicago was home to a wee bit less than 1.7 million residents.
Innovation and Transportation
The colonial and Early Republic city was a “walking city”. A walking (ok, biking) city is a modern city planner’s heaven: dense (an estimated 170 people per acre in 1840), compacted into diverse multi-class, tightly packed neighborhoods (as late as 1850 Philadelphia extended out only two miles)—with no cars or parking. But there were downsides to this heaven on earth. There was horse (and people) “do-do”, dust and mud, and surprisingly lots of congestion in the city center and waterfront areas. The separation of work from residence had commenced before the Civil War, and it left in its wake a physical mess with a labyrinth of unpaved streets and alleys with all sorts of illogical and undesirable mixed uses tossed into some noxious salad of no particular physical description or aesthetic beauty. “This pattern of mixed land usage in the pre-industrial city ‘produced an offensive stew of factories, furnaces and warehouses jumbled across a tangle of streets, alleys, canals and railroads”.
The constant harping about cities using neatly platted “grids” for street layout so that evil real estate developers could make more profit obscures their worst fault that all sorts of “paths and alleys” that followed the grid, turned most cities into mazes filled with unpredictable and not always pleasant surprises as one moved about. The huge pressure caused by the population increases described above, crammed residential units into every seemingly uninhabitable nook and cranny available. Someday someone would suggest zoning, and this untenable mess to which the industrial city had become, made that proposition quite acceptable. In the ”Gilded Age meantime” moving out into newly developed neighborhoods was the best answer. Needless to say, the hope, common to all classes, was to find decent homes to live–and this is what transportation innovation and infrastructure made possible. From the start, the innovating mode of transportation was the proverbial razor; the housing and subdivisions were the razor blade where the real money was made. The transportation mogul owned both.
The horse-drawn omnibus first appeared in Big Cities during the 1830’s[7]. The omnibus, a covered wagon with seats (sort of an early Volkswagen bus) operated on a fixed route, carried 12-20 passengers driven by two horses (sorry Mayor De Blasio), and was somewhat affordable. “By the 1850’s, omnibus service had become a regular feature of urban life in New York, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago and [the ever-alluring “Omnibus of Desire” found] in New Orleans”[8]. The omnibus facilitated residential movement, benefiting the middle and upper classes, to the city periphery. Separation of classes and the ceaseless push to move to periphery areas had commenced. Left behind were the beat up, old working class and immigrant neighborhoods–the ethnic wards of the new political machines.
Of more impact than the omnibus in the valuable and time-honored task of separating the rich from poor was the commuter railroad. The commuter railroad (a rail line which made stops in the central city and to nearby suburbs) appeared simultaneously with the omnibus, but was even more expensive. For example, “By mid-century”, about 20 percent of Boston’s business people used commuter railroads for the 10 to 15 mile daily journey to work”.[9] Among other factors (such as the Massachusetts legislature’s refusal to allow Boston to annex) commuter rail is why suburbanization hit Boston harder than most . Between the omnibus and commuter railroad, the drive to the city periphery and suburb had started with considerable seriousness much earlier than usually thought .
“(T)he development of the street or horse railway represented the most significant technological advance in urban transit in the mid-19th century”.[10] Hailed as revolutionary, the horse car railway (which from my perspective was a slightly more affordable omnibus on iron rails—still used horsepower) took over city transportation. By the 1880’s, 525 horse car lines were operating in 300 American cities extending the city periphery as far as five miles out—obviously into the suburbs. By the 1870’s, after successful experimentation in San Francisco by Andrew S. Hallidie (1873), the steam-powered cable car was quickly adopted by Big Cities across the nation. Some 626 miles of cable car track had been put in operation in over 20 American cities by the mid 1890’s.
In 1888, Frank Sprague (an associate of Edison) successfully converted Richmond’s horse car lines to electricity, and we formally entered into the age of the streetcar. By 1902, 97% of urban transit mileage had been electrified and two billion riders rode on streetcars that year. In the meantime the first subway construction began; Boston opened the first, today’s infamous “T”, in 1897, followed by New York and Philadelphia (1908)—the last just in time for Henry Ford’s first 1908 Model T. The irony is delicious! Within twenty-five years three major transportation innovations were installed in our Big Cities, digging up streets and pavements each time, finishing up with a tangle of overhead wires, and a bewildering morass of pipes and wires underground.[11]
Transportation infrastructure, combined with water/sewer, street lights, electrification, and telephone infrastructures that had also been installed, suggest some interesting questions. Obviously, physical growth requires infrastructure, but it is not as obvious who, using what structures and powers put the stuff in, on, and over the ground. The answers to those questions were one of the most controversial and persistent issues confronted by Gilded (later Progressive) Age policy systems.
The History and Structures of Gilded Age Infrastructure
Water (distribution) infrastructure was the earliest (Early Republic) to be addressed. Cities have been confronting that need since ancient times; access to water is a fundamental urban prerequisite. As the American industrial city rapidly expanded, however, the need developed into a crisis. Water to drink and wash was one thing; water to manufacture and put out fires was another. Gilded Age cities exhausted nearby water sources and finding available water meant going many miles downstream, and incredible complexity/expense in getting it to the city. New York City had to go thirty miles out to the Croton reservoirs. Yellow Fever and Typhoid epidemics, by the 1890’s, also meant that filtration and sewers were needed. Water-related infrastructure, therefore, was installed in two bursts, immediately after the Civil War into the early 1870’s, and then after the 1890’s.
Up until the Gilded Age most municipal water systems were private—and very much unloved by consumers. Service, quality and cost were the chief concerns. After the Civil War most municipalities incrementally gravitated toward publically-owned water systems. Combined with the construction of the first municipal park systems (NYC Central Park, Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park, and Chicago’s park district’s acquisition of land), the impact upon city debt obligations was huge. City waterworks construction in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cleveland, and street improvements and sewer/water in Boston, led to skyrocketing municipal debt levels. “Between 1868 and 1873, the net bonded debt of New York City tripled, and between 1867 and 1871 the bonded indebtedness of Chicago likewise increased three-fold; Boston experienced a tripling of its municipal debt during the years 1868 and 1874; Cincinnati bonded obligations rose five-fold between 1868 and 1876; Cleveland’s net debt soared 1,200 per cent during the decade 1867 to 1877 … Combined debt to twenty cities having 100,000 or more population increased 176 percent from 1866 to 1876”[12]. Municipal debt structures imploded in the 1873 Panic, a Panic that continued through 1879.
Bankruptcies, serious reductions in taxable properties and sustained tax revenue reductions followed (Chicago’s for instance fell by one-third). Pittsburgh defaulted (1877) and Memphis defaulted twice (1873 and 1878) and became the poster child of municipal collapse. The state repealed the city charter and ran the city as a state taxing district (shall we call this “Little Mac”). For the next decade especially (the 1880’s) most Big Cities (and little cities as well) operated under the threat of possible bankruptcy. High levels of municipal indebtedness, caused by municipal ownership of key infrastructure strained municipal fiscal stability and provided a backdrop for further ventures into municipal ownership of infrastructure. By then, though, the trend to municipal ownership of water-related infrastructure was set in place. “By 1897 only 9 of the 50 largest cities, and only 42 of the 142 cities with a population of between 30,000 and 100,000 had privately-owned waterworks. In 1909 70 per cent of the cities over 30,000 owned their own plants”.[13] According to Griffith, the reason behind municipal ownership was not cheap rates, but the necessity of having sufficient water supply for fire protection and the need to reliably filter water to avoid disease. A disastrous fire or a horrible epidemic was usually all it took to overcome any fear of tax increases.
The other side of the argument regarding investments in water infrastructure is that Americans, in comparison to Europe and Germany its most prosperous industrial economy, demonstrated unequivocally that Americans enjoyed significantly greater access to water (although it was more dirty) than Europe. The argument could be made that American cities overbuild their water infrastructure and water was so plentiful that the flush toilet prospered, and few cities ever introduced meters, levying a flat rate instead. “Far from failing to provide [water] services, the municipalities of the United States offered a level of water supply and sewerage that ensured American city dwellers, especially middle class residents with the latest bathroom fixtures, the highest standard of living in the world”.[14] This abundance of water that made steroidal expansion of the peripheries beyond municipal borders possible.
Streets and bridges followed the policy route witness in water-related infrastructure. “(T)he area of paved streets in the largest cities of the United States was much greater than in European cities of comparable population … Chicago [for example] could claim more than three times the paved area of Berlin”.[15] The iconic landmark of the period, the Brooklyn Bridge, at its start, was managed by a private company backed by municipal funds; midway it was taken over by the cities of Brooklyn and New York and transferred into an independent commission with a board appointed by the mayors and comptrollers of the two cities. By the turn of the century, streets and bridges were municipal (and state) concerns and the result was similar to that associated with water-related infrastructure: higher indebtedness and operating costs, more miles paved than Europeans, and, in general, poorer quality of maintenance and quality, but more rapid use of new technologies.
Gas and electricity were tied into street lighting. Street lighting was related to crime reduction and cities often had to be prodded into providing it. CBD business would often be forced enter into contracts with a street lighting company. With electricity in the 1890’s, street lighting got complicated. Size of city was an important factor as scale reduced cost of service. Smaller cities faced prohibitive costs which inhibited private firms from effectively competing and so smaller cities tended to build municipal power generation facilities, especially for street lighting. Larger cities usually had energy service provided by private companies. Until 1895 only two large cities had municipally owned gas and electric plants (Chicago and Pittsburgh). In that year, however, Detroit, under Mayor Pingree started construction on its municipally owned plant. Public ownership of utilities after that became a major Progressive issue (and will be discussed in the next chapter). The telephone between 1876 to 1893 was a Bell Telephone patent monopoly. Bell licensed local firms and made enormous profit. When patents expired in 1893, over 1,000 independent telephone companies, financed mostly by local capital, sprang up over the next four years. Rates declined by nearly 50% and telephone use dramatically increased.[16] The telephone inherently was interstate, federally regulated, not subject to municipal franchise.
Transportation infrastructure was especially prone to privatization through franchises. Different routes could be franchised to different firms. Most Big Cities had a frankly incredible number of competing routes: Philadelphia had 39, New York City 19, Pittsburgh 24, St. Louis 19, San Francisco 16, and even small cities like Grand Rapids had 4.[17] As earlier alluded to, street car lines were loss-leaders, or “the razor”;the money in the form of profits for transportation companies and taxes for municipalities came from the residential and commercial development built alongside of at the end of the line. By this time population pressures from ever-increasing immigration pushed out the city peripheries, and real estate development was a gold mine. As the middle class moved to the periphery, an unanticipated new sector arose to meet its demands for recreation: amusement parks. So trolley companies built amusement parks as well. Only during the early twentieth century Progressive era did municipal ownership of street cars become a widespread municipal policy issue.
The franchise represented an early form of privatization; or, the franchise could be regarded as an early form of utility regulation. The franchise could be exclusive or competitive, tending to the former over the years. The franchise was for a term of years, could be renegotiated, and new regulations and rates instituted. Extra provisions, such as fire hydrants or paving of street, upgrade of pipes were common. Books could be inspected, stock issuance regulated (there was a major issue of stock speculation, and bribery of public officials). Rates and their burden on the urban poor and working class were only one of many very visible issues associated with franchises; safety and (in earlier years) animal cruelty were also issues. Cities received annual payments, similar to today’s payment in lieu of taxes. Property was assessed at negotiated levels. Given machine-dominated legislatures, franchise companies found many claimants for whatever profits they made.
Complexity of Infrastructure Policy-Making: Experimentation in Privatization
Our previous discussion describing Gilded Age capacity-building of municipal policy systems sensitized readers that policy outputs are shaped and limited by the capacity of the overall policy system. Our preceding brief reviews of the physical city’s expansion and the choice between municipal ownership or privatized franchise revealed the alternative structural solutions to the crisis of infrastructure which strikes at the heart of economic development policy in a period of rapid growth. One additional discussion is useful before moving on. Gilded Age infrastructure policy-making occurred in an environment of rapid and sustained population growth and constant infrastructure innovation—the former generating the need for immediate program responses, and the latter creating a complex decision-making calculus. Both tested the capacity of the Gilded Age municipal policy system.
Gilded Age cities usually issued franchises/privatization to private firms to install and manage the transportation systems; this was mostly true for electricity/energy and telephones. Over time, the privatized alternative evolved into something today called utility regulation. Street lights, and water distribution were chiefly taken on directly by municipalities. Streets and bridges became public matters in these years–or remained unpaved and filthy. Why the difference? In the Gilded Age, I suggest, the critical difference was constant and disruptive technology changes, mostly in transportation and communication. Water distribution “technology” change was more incremental in character, and water distribution systems (as well as streets and bridges), once installed, were expected to satisfy demand for long periods. Not so the other infrastructures.
The Gilded Age decision to subcontract infrastructure to private franchises has been a consistently controversial aspect of the Age; it also generated a great deal of concern at the time. The politics associated with municipal ownership of infrastructure will be discussed in the next chapter, but in the following paragraphs, I argue that most transportation/communication infrastructure certainly, were so complex as to make franchise the preferable option, whatever “equity” risk it may have created. The privatization of infrastructure, the foremost economic development-related issue/strategy of the Gilded Age, was not an inherently bad, or improper decision at the time. In that infrastructure over the century following will consistently involve privatization concerns (the Internet, for example), one can sense that Gilded Age physical infrastructure was our first experience with infrastructure as innovation and infrastructure inherently involving public/private structures and partnerships.
Understanding this was a Privatist Age, admittedly with a Progressive counterpunch brewing, and that infrastructure and economic development were mostly driven by businessman organizations and mayors. Since increasing taxes were the “third rail” of Gilded Age politics, and that infrastructure as it went through neighborhoods and wards would be subject to legislature/machine demands, making inherently expensive infrastructure, yet more expensive and vulnerable to scandal meant that infrastructure in its various forms involved considerable political risk—despite resident demands for the benefits and services provided by the infrastructure.
Services further complicate infrastructure policy-making, in that once installed, a service has to be indefinitely provided to all neighborhoods and even adjacent unincorporated/incorporated areas. The larger the geography, the lower the rates, and the higher the debt level generated. Someone has to pump and filter water, someone has to generate and maintain distribution of electricity, and someone has to ensure trains run on time. Putting the pipe in the ground is only the first step. Also, the varied functions involved required that anybody attempting to install and manage infrastructure had better know what they are doing—academics call this expertise—and have access to long-term financing/debt issuance. Under these constraints, municipal ownership of these infrastructures was far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, one municipality’s efforts to own the gas plant which powered its street lights, degenerated into the patronage base for Philadelphia’s Gas Trust Gang under McManes. Ironically, to break up that political machine, the infamous gas plant was returned to private ownership in 1894.
The complexity of municipal infrastructure policy-making hit city policy systems decades before the Gilded Age. The omnibus, for example, hit the streets in the 1830’s and 1840’s. So did water (and later sewers). The heritage of these early decisions set precedent and also yielded some experience to decision-makers. The reality that these energy, communication, and transportation infrastructure was developed by private inventors and innovators such as Edison or Sprague. Edison’s story is well known, but Sprague’s has been forgotten.
Sprague’s story illustrates the inherent complexity of infrastructure, the consequences of private ownership of innovation, and the hindsight failure to value the disruption of chronic innovation. Sprague, after successfully installing his experimental twelve mile electric street car line in 1887 Richmond, had a bonanza on his hands that sent Sprague down a road which crossed over hundreds of cities. In Sprague’s words: “When the Richmond contract was signed, we had only a blueprint of such a machine and some rough experimental apparatus. The hundred and one details that were essential to success were as yet undetermined. Fortunately for the future of electric railways, the difficulties ahead could not be foreseen or the contract would not have been signed”. Sprague went on to make his fortune through the sale/installation of his transportation equipment and system. Within five years of opening the Richmond line, 850 systems were in operation, with lines totaling 10,000 miles.[18] From our municipal policy perspective, cities were not free to “own” innovative infrastructure—they had to purchase it from its innovating entrepreneur.
In short, municipal ownership, franchise/regulated utility, and private ownership were the alternatives available. We have painted a picture that however desirable municipal ownership might be in hindsight, cities were fiscally stressed, technological innovations/expertise were firmly lodged in private ownership/patent protection, innovation was constant, disruptive and expensive, and infrastructure involved not merely installation but indefinite service delivery associated with bureaucracies, higher taxes, and increased opportunities for machine political intrusion. Franchise or regulated industry is a not unreasonable decision by not fully formed municipal policy systems. This is not to say franchises didn’t have their failings.
The horror stories happened in every city, I’m sure. The first street railway franchises were apparently made by New York City in 1851 and 1852. Fares were set a five cents and the first boilerplate for a franchise agreement was drafted. It was vague and incomplete and was improved upon by each new city entering into a franchise over the next fifty years. The term of agreement for these early franchises were fifty to one hundred years; Albany would grant a franchise for one thousand years, which exceeded Buffalo’s whose term was nine hundred and ninety-nine years. Gas lighting started in 1816 Baltimore, and by the 1820’s cities issued franchises to private firms for that. When electrification arrived in the 1880’s, cities redrafted gas/street light franchises to accommodate electrification. Even the Brooklyn Bridge cable streetcar railway, originally owned and managed by New York City and Brooklyn, was transformed into a franchise in 1889[19]. Cities were saved from these franchises when, in the 1890’s and after, the franchise companies consolidated (or went bankrupt) to achieve efficiencies of scale and to take advantage of new, more expensive innovation. Whatever the corruption and inefficiency, franchises involved, the trade off was the urban population got some of the best infrastructure the world had to offer in the Gilded Age.
Neighborhoods
The push to the city periphery by industry and middle/upper classes fostered new neighborhoods and housing. Residential class segregation became a simple fact of American urban life. Housing, more expensive in the newly-created neighborhoods, required an ability to pay the price, which now included a daily round-trip streetcar ride—about a dime. Neighborhoods became class enclaves, as well as ethnic ghettos. Some immigrant neighborhoods were settled almost exclusively by a single ethnic group, most by the latter Gilded Age, were mixtures, micro-melting pots. Within these more or less culturally cohesive neighborhoods schools, churches, ethnic small businesses, and social/cultural institutions served as foundations for future social, economic, and political change. Sub-municipal geographic entities (neighborhoods) engendered new opportunities for economic development. Neighborhood-level economic development suggested new goals and programs suitable to its limited area. An advantage of neighborhoods to Gilded Age proto-economic developers was that it permitted a focus on “people”, redefining economic development so that it could help groups of people confront the industrial age and its problematic, but opportunity-filled industrial city.
Some needed help more than others. That was unmistakably evident just observing the housing in which they lived. Neighborhoods, located chiefly (but not always) in older and central areas of the industrial cities, were adjacent to the emerging CBD and downtown or sprang up on and between transportation lines. Social Darwinism, popular in this age certainly played its role, but the never-ceasing horde of impoverished immigrants, clustered so densely, was sufficient to destroy whatever glimmer of innovation the housing industry could muster to improve life in immigrant neighborhoods. The apartment house, row housing and tenement housing were overwhelmed, transformed into human and residential disasters. Residue from these slums (crime, disease, fire, unemployment and guilty consciences) and the pure human misery within them, fueled proposals for reform and change. From those pressures several “wings” or movements would spring up within our slowly-forming profession. We will pick up these wings in the course of Chapters 4 and 5.
the Birth of the CBD
The central business district (CBD, downtown) was an offspring of the Gilded Age; it served as the terminus for each transportation innovation. Financial, advertising, newspapers, office, entertainment, and retail gravitated to this strategic, but eldest, most decrepit, and least expensive area of the city—knocking down the city’s worst physical deterioration in the process. The confusing labyrinth of streets and alleys were replaced by grandiose rail stations (think Grand Central Station), and, as industry concentrated, headquarters facilities also located in these emerging business centers. The CBD concentrated the raw economic power of the Gilded Age–including affluent owners and managers. While our image of downtown is that of our largest Eastern cities, CBDs developed in cities of all sizes.
The CBD developed into a magnet for workers and shoppers alike. It became the visible heart of the new industrial city. The CBD served as the “commons” for all neighborhoods, and, like the flag, the symbol of civic pride and optimism. Retail was the traffic generator. New innovations in retail, first the chain and then the department store, created vitality and community spirit. The first Wal-Mart style corporation, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P to the oldsters) started in 1864 New York and spread across the nation. Woolworth and “5&10” cent stores (sort of Five Below or Dollar General) opened in 1879 Lancaster PA. Grocery stores and mail-order stores opened up. The first American franchise, Singer sewing machine stores started in 1851; General Motors car dealers in 1898. But it was the department store that “anchored” the Gilded Age’s downtown CBD as the retail shopping district of the metropolitan area.
Lord & Taylor and Macy’s in New York City expanded their original dry-goods stores adding new departments to form the nucleus of the future department store. L&T officially launched New York’s first department store at Broadway and 20th in 1870; the strip around L&T quickly acquired the moniker of “the Ladies Mile” when other retail shops settled nearby. Macy’s fixed price innovation and its reliance on mass advertising (which financed newspaper growth) soon made that store the premier department store of the era (sorry Gimbels). New York City was not alone in spawning department stores; each major city grew its own. Marshall Fields, its origins also in a dry goods store, created Chicago’s first department store in a Richardson-designed seven story building between Quincy and Adams streets in 1887.
Comparable, locally-owned department stores sprang up in the large central cities in short order—as did banks, hotels, all sorts of office buildings and hordes of specialized retail and entertainment (theaters) and personal service stores. Secondary business districts formed along the streetcar routes, and one block in from these main drags were the new multifamily apartment buildings and a host of retail and service stores. Streetcar routes became commercial spokes radiating to the city periphery–where ample room permitted manufacturing firms to build more modern, land consuming facilities—laced with railroad sidings and worker housing.
Without much fanfare the oldest residential neighborhoods, factories and warehouses were torn down one by one. “In Pittsburgh some 428 buildings were constructed in the CBD between 1888 and 1893 and another 356 between 1894 and 1906. The building boom in downtown Pittsburgh typified the experience of industrial cities across the nation.”[20] Railroad terminals (Grand Central Terminal was built in stages between 1899 and 1913) as the railroad system reached its apogee. “The Loop” (which was coined to describe Chicago’s downtown after the 1895-1897 elevated railway) in Chicago was born. Public buildings, museums and cultural institutions filled in what few empty lots remained. By 1900 the CBD was in its robust glory, a center of hustle and bustle, of memories and traditions.
The innovation that made the CBD famous, however, and that created the never to be forgotten skyline of the modern industrial city, was the skyscraper. New York, not Chicago drew first blood. Otis innovated his first elevator-driven building in 1853 Yonkers, and commercialized it as an exhibit in the 1854 New York World’s Fair[21]. At 488 Broadway in 1857, he installed his first elevator. Four years later the first steam-powered elevator for a new department store (E. W. Haughtwhat) became the first known public use elevator. New York City (in the 1870’s), using traditional masonry construction, constructed both the Western Union Building and the New York Tribune Building (each reaching 260 feet). But elevators and masonry construction alone did not a skyscraper make.
The first “true” skyscraper, the ten story Home Insurance Building (1885), using an internal steel skeleton and light masonry “curtain” walls, was built by William LeBaron Jenney—in Chicago.
Jenny’s innovative achievement touched off a wave of late 19th century skyscraper construction in Chicago in the new architectural style—a style that emphasized efficiency and economy and has come to be called the ‘Chicago School of Architecture” …. Such Chicago architects as Louis Sullivan and Daniel H. Burnham ‘covered the whole business district with a new architecture and changed the entire face of a great modern city’.[22]
New York would catch up and surpass the Chicago skyscraper—but not in the nineteenth century. The skyscraper meant that for the first time, the city could be built “up”, not just out.
Suburbs
Arguably there are few more controversial topics than suburbanization.[23] Too many suburbs are responsible for the decline of Eastern central cities; consequently they have been a multi-decade open sore within several professions and disciplines relevant to economic development. For many to this day, suburban development can be reduced to one word: sprawl. In that atmosphere, the reader ought to understand the approach we adopt as we deal with suburbs. This history will reference the issues which make this topic so controversial, and it will describe/assess the effects on cities and the profession. But suburbs, like the poor, have always been with us from the very beginning. Suburbs did not begin with Levittown in 1947; in some form they have been with us through our history. In fact, suburbanization may be considered the single most important twentieth century transformation in our urban landscape. Suburbs, to me, reflect a poly-nucleated metropolitan reality.
In this section, I will present a brief outline of American suburban history through 1900; secondly, in the course of that history several key suburban-related concepts, such as annexation, suburban autonomy and residential succession, will be broached; thirdly, make the point that suburbs are not identical and are a legitimate element of our metropolitan landscape. The sum total of each of these conversations is that suburbs exist, are more than just sprawl and enclaves of the rich, and deserve to be treated on their own terms if we are understand economic development policy systems.
Nineteenth Century Suburbs
Henry C. Binford[24] suggests nineteenth century suburban development occurred in three overlapping, but distinct, phases: (1) 1789-1837-43 during which suburbs were a “booming fringe economy—a zone of manufacturers and commercial activity—related to the city, but not requiring contact”; (2) 1837-1850 when omnibus/rail commuter lines pushed into urban fringes and suburbanites built bridges/roads to connect to the central city, thereby integrating the fringe areas with central city economic and population flow; (3) 1843-1900 a period when the fringe area evolved into suburbs by accommodating commuter residence preference, making housing construction its prime industry sector. Dolores Hayden agrees that “The periphery of the city in this era (pre-Civil War) was not the country. The edge was neither rural nor urban. It formed a distinctive gateway between city and country. Entrepreneurs in this zone ran industries that required extensive space … and more noxious ones…. Residents might have entertained bucolic fantasies about moving to the countryside, but they entered a zone of ‘improvement enterprise and the fringe economy”[25].
Post-Civil War suburbs pushed further out from central cities than ever due to transportation innovations which upper classes could well afford. The affluent enclave characterized Gilded Age suburbs. Bernadette Hanlon estimates affluent suburbs to be about 10-12% of current inner-ring suburbs[26] suggesting a solid core of longstanding, stable suburban communities.. After the Civil War (thru World War II) suburbanization expanded to include middle class as well as wealthy—both “escaping” to a pastoral wonderland. Some pre-World War II suburbs were an expression of garden city-bourgeois utopias[27]
As garden city residential escapes, exclusivity and order, not growth, were prioritized and permeated DNA of elite/affluent suburban enclaves. Economic development per se was not valued. These, now aged suburbs are still fairly vigorous–and they still pursue exclusivity rather than growth. Llewellyn Park (1857), New Jersey is an example; it is still an unincorporated gated residential community; Glencoe Illinois 1869, (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles were filmed there) is another. Its village manager government includes no EDO which is also similar to Chevy Chase, Maryland (1918) whose town government includes no EDO. Suburban elite enclaves then are the first jurisdictional type we can say with some confidence afford low priority to economic development in their policy system.
Nineteenth century suburbs, therefore, did exist. The same cast of characters that dominated Big Cities was also prominent in post-Civil War Eastern suburbs; speculators, do-it-yourselfers, boosters, railroads-street car operators and attraction marketing types appear. The example of Henry Whitney of Boston[28] will suffice to outline the mechanics of these pre-1900 suburban developments[29].
The Push to the Periphery: Crossing City Limits
Whitney (in the 1880’s) owned Boston’s West End Street Railway and its subsidiary, the West End Land Company—the perfect set of vehicles to accomplish suburbanization. By 1886, Whitney owned most of Brookline (George Romney’s home—and residence of many a high-income Harvard-MIT professor). His market was the rich and wealthy. Frederick Law Olmsted prepared Brookline’s landscape plan. Order and security necessary to preserve property values was achieved and maintained by “restrictive covenants”—enforced against the Irish, of course, because at that time there were few blacks on hand in Boston. In any case, Whitney needed little marketing, contenting himself with selling land to small-scale developers who actually built the homes to order[30].
The existing upper middle and upper class residents understood (restrictive covenants) as a consolidation of elite Brookline. Both they and aspirant new residents recognized it would be a social and ethnic rampart, secure against invasion by Boston’s poor Irish immigrants.[31]
While Whitney’s Brookline goings-on were occurring, a second, non-Whitney initiative was also happening on the other side of Boston’s tracks (so to speak) in Roxbury (annexed 1868), West Roxbury (annexed in 1873) and Dorchester (annexed in 1870). These subdivisions were meant for a different audience—one not alluded to in our opening paragraph. These were working class neighborhoods that developed only after being annexed by the City of Boston. They are examples of our earlier mentioned movement to the city periphery. Interestingly, restrictive covenants were also characteristic of these working class suburbs–covenants were sensitive to the class structure of its clientele, not its ethnicity. [32]
Instead of elegant brick built houses and apartment blocks, there were modest wooden single family detached cottages along with two and three family houses. Instead of Olmsted’s elegant centerpiece boulevard there was a myriad pattern of small developments offering lots and residences of varying sizes and graded by price. Roughly 22,500 dwellings were built in these three suburbs between 1870 and 1900, yet no one developer was responsible for more than 3 per cent of them. There was no equivalent of Henry Whitney.[33]
The point is that subdivisions on city peripheries also included working class neighborhoods. Gilded Age housing, its size, quality of construction and physical layout of the subdivision reflected their different clienteles. Subsequent generations of city dwellers would be able to “move up” to suburban housing as they acquired some wealth. This formalized into a pattern of residential housing succession. Housing succession is not, however, a Gilded Age phenomenon. In Chapter 5, however, I will return to this topic with relish and more detail.
Annexation and Suburban Autonomy
Annexation, no matter what period of history, has always been the first and the most effective counter to suburbanization. Northern and Midwestern Big Cities annexed intensively during the Gilded Age, not quite as robustly as Oklahoma City or Dallas in later years, but sufficiently robust to chase their populations. There were exceptions of course. Remember Brookline Massachusetts in the previous section; it refused to be annexed as early as 1874. But then again, Chicago’s largest annexation in 1889 netted 125 sq miles and over 225,000 new tax payers—not too shabby. New York used another device, borough consolidation in 1898 and the five boroughs become our proverbial “New York, New York”. The courts and even state legislatures were approachable. So at first, central cities could chase their foot-loose population through annexation. But in their own good time, Gilded Age suburbanites increasingly rejected central city annexation attempts, demonstrating an independent frame of mind that today is dubbed “suburban autonomy”.
Every big city had residential suburbs before the Civil War. Every big city also changed its boundaries dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century, sometimes absorbing empty space, sometimes annexing neighboring communities. The nine United States cities that contained more than 100,000 in 1860 fell clearly into two categories with regard to their histories of suburban growth and annexation…. Two cities (New York and Baltimore) contained large amounts of territory from an earlier date and thus had ample room for many years of residential expansion within their own boundaries. The other group of seven (Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, New Orleans, Cincinnati, St Louis and Chicago) … annexed some of their first residential suburbs but found their overtures resisted by others. Proposals for annexation usually found strong support in cities, but generated heated controversies in the suburbs …. In general, the more prosperous and mature a suburb … the less its likelihood of being annexed.[34]
Why the push-back? Richardson Dilworth[35] presents a reasonable rationale for the noticeable rise in suburban autonomy in the later years of the era—he blames it mostly on political machines in the central city. But Dilworth interweaves machines with another intriguing factor, relevant to an economic developer, the need for life-sustaining infrastructure—water especially. Suburban reaction against the machines revolved about the latter’s potential impact on the politics and finance of infrastructure.
An intimate relationship between central city infrastructural development and political corruption generated the [nineteenth century] motivation for suburban autonomy. New public works projects in [central] cities made millions of dollars available to politicians who used that money to build their power and enrich themselves …. For instance, political ‘bosses’ … Tweed in New York, William Bumsted in Jersey City, and James Smith Jr. in Newark—put themselves personally in charge of the agency that had responsibility for public works. One result was that large infrastructure projects in [central] cities were often accompanied by well-publicized political scandals. As cities then attempted to expand their borders through by annexing outlying communities, they met resistance from suburbanites who did not want to be taxed at exorbitant levels to support what they viewed as venal political organizations.[36]
In Dilworth’s mind, suburbs manifested their desire for autonomy through resisting annexation and eventually incorporating in order to protect the fiscal soundness, quality and accountability of managing their own core urban infrastructures. Ironically, as Dilworth observes, the pioneering experience and expertise of the central cities in developing and managing (water) infrastructures lowered the cost of infrastructure installation and operation for the suburbs, making the infrastructure affordable to the smaller suburban communities. The easy availability of expertise, the cost effectiveness of providing their own infrastructures allowed many suburbs to escape perceived machine corruption and inefficiency through suburban incorporation. Further, this infrastructure installed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century made possible the very earliest manufacturing, warehousing, retail and office decentralization to suburban sites in the pre-World War I period. Infrastructure meant a suburb could take a stab at building its own economic base. Dilworth also admits that other motivations beside antipathy toward the machine were also at play:
For instance, nativism may have motivated the suburbanite ‘Yankee middle class’ to prefer municipal autonomy in order to remain free of the city’s ‘Celtic machines’. But suburbanites also wanted adequate water and sewerage…. Suburban officials were able to provide public works … they were able to do so only because technological advances based on experience from public works in the cities, had made infrastructure systems affordable for smaller communities…. Disregarding questions of economies of scale, it makes no difference whether an area is served by one or several sewage systems ….[37]
If Dilworth is essentially correct, economic developers can appreciate that their nineteenth century counterparts in inner-ring suburban public works departments played a serious role in facilitating the incorporation and autonomy of early suburbs. An additional lesson is that infrastructure can be a means to an end—i.e. serve not so obvious purposes and goals.
So in summary, formation of metropolitan areas (central cities and suburbs) is an early feature associated with the industrial city—not a post-World War II distortion inflicted upon central cities. The existence of metropolitan areas was noticed at the time. The federal Bureau of the Census acknowledged in 1880 the existence of suburbs by demarcating the New York “metropolitan district” composed of central city and suburbs. The Bureau did not provide statistics for these districts until 1910 when it reported that twenty-five metropolitan districts existed and 10% of the population[38] lived in suburbs[39].
Wrap-Up and Segueway
This chapter outlined the foundations and preconditions pertinent to modern economic development. These included: growth of the industrial city through immigration and industrialization, Gilded Age jurisdictional policy system capacity-building, the physical evolution of the metropolitan area, the nationalization of the American economy, and oligarchy and the profit cycle of industries and sectors. These are the shoulders upon which twentieth century economic development would stand.
[1] The golden decade of immigration was 1900-1910 with nearly 6.3 million immigrants (before falling to 2.5 million during the decade of World War I). Post 1920 Immigration reformed virtually shut the door.
[2] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Edition) ((New York, Macmillan Publishing Co, 1983), p. 112.
[3] There had been three in 1860 (Charleston and Richmond—plus New Orleans, of course).
[4] John F. McDonald, Urban America: Growth, Crisis, and Rebirth (Armonk, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 2008)
[5] John F. McDonald, Urban America: Growth, Crisis, and Rebirth op. cit.,. p. 6.
[6] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p. 71.
[7] They originated in France and first appeared in 1829 New York City. Philadelphia opened one in 1831, Boston 1835, and Baltimore in 1844. The Omnibus overlapped with the horse-iron railway, but their greater cost and physical disruption affected the rate of increase in their use.
[8] Raymond H. Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 29.
[9] Raymond H. Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 30.
[10] Raymond H. Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 31.
[11] Raymond H. Mohl, The New City, op. cit. pp. 32-35. Statistics used in this paragraph are each drawn from Mohl. I could have rubbed salt into the wound by mentioning that in 1903 Wilbur and Orville successfully flew their new-fangled “powered flights” at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—and by 1908 successfully flew 2-seated planes. Almost seems like Moore’s Law was at work for transportation innovation at his time.
[12] Jon C. Teaford, the Unheralded City, op. cit., p.285.
[13] Ernest S. Griffith, A History of American City Government, op. cit., p.180.
[14] Jon C. Teaford, the Unheralded City, op. cit., p.223. See Teaford, pp. 219-227 for detailed specifics and data on both comparison with Europe and individual municipal water-related infrastructure investment.
[15] Jon C. Teaford, the Unheralded City, op. cit., p.227. See pp. 226-234 for intensive discussion of technologies and specific projects of individual cities—as well as comparison with European large cities.
[16] Ernest S. Griffith, A History of American City Government, op. cit., p.184.
[17] Ernest S. Griffith, A History of American City Government, op. cit., p.183.
[18] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Edition), op. cit., p. 160. The reader should be informed that each city operated many lines under independent ownership. So 850 systems does not mean 850 cities. Glaab and Brown also note one additional issue in municipal ownership of these transportation infrastructures. In 1907 New York City “in twenty-seven days there had been 5,500 accidents on street railways … 42 people were killed outright, 10 skulls fractured, 10 limbs amputated…” (p. 161).
[19] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Edition), op. cit., pp. 189-192.
[20] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 41.
[21] Otis didn’t invent the elevator or the elevator shaft—he invented the brake which stopped the darned thing and made it safe to ride. Alexander Miles, of Duluth, a black inventor, patented the first electric elevator in 1887.
[22] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 45.
[23] Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; and Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York, Vintage Books, 2003) are among the most well-received; see also Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese (Eds), The Suburb Reader (New York, Routledge, 2006) .
[24] Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985) p. 10.
[25] Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, op cit., p. 22.
[26] Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, op cit., p. 114. Table 8.1
[27] Rybczynski,, Makeshift Metropolis; Thomas J. Vicino, John Rennie Short, and Bernadette Hanlon, Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the United States (Routledge, 2009); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000, NY, Pantheon Books, 2003); and Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier: the suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985).
[28] We draw our detail from Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: the Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850-2000 (New York, Routledge, 1998). See especially his chapter “Mass Transit and Healthy Homes”.
[29] We could have used Samuel Eberly Gross of Chicago as another example. By 1896, Gross subdivided and sold over 44,000 lots and built 7,500 houses outside Chicago. Gross’s usual business plan consisted of speculative land purchase, installation of limited infrastructure, employment of contractors-builders, use of an early form of installment financing, alliance with rail and street car owners—and marketing and advertising which in today’s parlance promised the American Dream. He went bankrupt eventually—but not because of his real estate business; his personal life is worth reading about.
[30] By the way, Brookline, Massachusetts does have a one person Division of Economic Development within its Department of Community and Economic Development. It follows a five year economic development plan, operates a façade program, provides walking tours and kiosks, and liaisons with firms in zoning and planning. In short, economic development in these wealthy suburban enclaves was, and likely still is, planning-oriented or non-existent.
[31] Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places, op. cit. p.86.Ward, by the way is basing much of his description from that provided by Sam Bass Warner in Street Car Suburbs.
[32] Another example is Queens New York Led by its borough chamber of commerce it produced a sort of “real estate guide” a catalog of houses and associated industry complex advertising which extolled the advantages of living in Queens. This was in place previous to 1914 (see Ward, Selling Places, op. cit. p. 93). It too was annexed.
[33] Stephen V. Ward. Selling Places, op. cit. p.86. Again Ward draws from Bass’s Street Car Suburbs.
[34] Henry C Binford, The First Suburbs, op. cit. pp. 10-11. Binford claims the only overall surveys of annexation are Kenneth T. Jackson’s “Metropolitan Government versus Suburban Autonomy: Politics on the Crabgrass Frontier”, included in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz (eds) Cities in American History (New York, 1972).
[35] Richardson Dilworth, The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005)
[36] Richardson Dilworth, the Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy, op. cit. p. 2.
[37] Richardson Dilworth, the Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy, op. cit. p. 5.
[38] Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1963) p. 51.
[39] Boston, interestingly, had 55% of its metropolitan district living in suburbs
Ron W. Coan 