GROWTH AND BIG CITY PHYSICAL LANDSCAPE: PLACES FOR PLACE-BASED ECONOMIC DEVELOPERS
Sub-state ED is, this history argues, at its core, place based. During these years, the key “places” that consume contemporary ED develop into recognizable forms: the downtown (CBD) neighborhoods (and subdivisions) and autonomous suburbs. They are the creatures of growth and a natural tendency of uses and functions to sort themselves out geographically. Zoning did not exist in the years in focus; every Big City was like Houston today. The diversity of mixed uses and housing styles that Jane Jacobs (1961) speaks lovingly about, however, also developed in this era. Kind of contradictory, you mutter—I agree. Such is history.
Suburbs and the tendency to “sprawl” across boundaries and urban peripheries also is apparent very early in the history of Big Cities. Mostly this is a function of pure, simple population growth in an age when building upward was limited to about four stories. But residential sorting out of classes also is evident early on. The affluent fled long before the Great Migration and the federal government got involved. So did the middle and upper working classes. Some version of Jackson’s “American Dream” (Jackson, 1985) likely existed even back then. Why they became “autonomous,” however, may or may not have been instinctive. In the next chapters, it will even be evident that the glory and inevitability of what we now call “central cities” will be questioned by the end of the Gilded Age.
Contemporary ED often speaks of “functions” that geographies can perform. This is no doubt correct as far as it goes. Structures and geographies can perform functions— but in our history they come and go, rise and fall, ebb and flow. They have never seemed as fixed. This is especially true of the downtown. Downtown development and downtown revitalization seem to be flip sides of the same coin. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, a future chapter will describe the first major nationwide movement to modernize and refunction the downtown that emerges in this chapter. CBDs seem more a process than a fixed set of buildings performing a cast-in-stone set of functions. That dubious truth, however, will require a century or better before it can be argued with some plausibility.
The Birth of the Big City CBD
The contemporary central business district (CBD, downtown) was an offspring of the Gilded Age. Serving initially as government center and marketplace, downtown became the metro area’s transportation hub—and its skyline the symbolic capitol. Finance, advertising, newspapers, offices, entertainment and retail gravitated to this strategic area—brimming with huddled masses and the oldest buildings. In the Gilded Age the confusing labyrinth of streets and alleys was replaced by grandiose rail stations (Grand Central Station, 1871), corporate headquarters and working waterfronts full of factories, warehouses and train tracks. The CBD concentrated the raw economic and political power of Gilded Age metropolitan elites.
Gilded Age CBDs developed into a magnet for workers and shoppers alike, becoming the visible heart of the new industrial city (Gruen, 1964). The CBD served as “commons” for all neighborhoods, and, like the flag, the symbol of metropolitan civic pride and optimism. Retail was the traffic generator. Innovations in retail first appeared in the downtown: first the chain, then the department store created vitality and prosperity. The first Walmart style corporation, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P to the oldsters) opened in 1864 New York—spreading quickly to
CBDs of all cities regardless of size. Woolworth and “5&10” Cent stores (sort of Five Below or Dollar General) opened in 1879 Lancaster Pennsylvania. Grocery stores and mail-order stores followed. The first American franchise, Singer sewing machine stores (the Apple of its day), started in 1851. General Motors (GM) car dealers made their first appearance in 1898. But it was the department store that cemented the Gilded Age downtown as the retail shopping district of the metropolitan area.
Lord & Taylor and Macy’s in New York City were formerly dry-goods stores that added new departments to form the department store. L&T officially launched New York’s first department store at Broadway and 20th in 1870. The adjacent blocks around L&T acquired the moniker “the Ladies Mile” when other retail shops settled nearby. Macy’s fixed-price innovation and its reliance on advertising (that financed newspaper growth) transformed it into the premier department store of the era. New York City was not alone in spawning department stores; each major city grew its own. Marshall Fields, its origins also in dry goods, created Chicago’s first department store in a Henry Hobson Richardson-designed seven-story building between Quincy and Adams streets in 1887. Boston established Filene’s and on and on.
Banks, hotels, office buildings and hordes of specialist retail, entertainment (theaters) and personal service stores flooded into the CBDs. Without fanfare residential neighborhoods, factories and warehouses in or immediately adjacent to the CBDs 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” (Mohl, 1985, p. 41). “The Loop” (coined to describe Chicago’s downtown after its 1895-97 elevated railway) in Chicago was born. Public buildings, museums and cultural institutions filled what few empty lots remained. By 1900 the CBD was in its robust glory, a center of hustle and bustle, of memories and traditions in the making.
The innovation that made the CBD famous, that created the never to be forgotten skyline of the modern industrial city, was the skyscraper. New York, not Chicago, drew first blood. Elisha Otis pioneered his first elevator-driven building in 1853 Yonkers, and commercialized it as an exhibit in the 1854 New York World’s Fair.1 At 488 Broadway in 1857 he installed his first elevator. Four years later his first steam-powered elevator for department store E.W. Haughtwhat became the first known public-use elevator. New York City (in the 1870s), using traditional masonry construction, constructed the Western Union and the New York Tribune buildings (each 260 feet). But elevators and masonry construction alone did not a “real” skyscraper make. The first “true” skyscraper, using an internal steel skeleton and light masonry curtain walls, was built by William LeBaron Jenney in 1885—the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago.
Jenny’s innovative achievement touched off a wave of late nineteenth-century skyscraper construction in the new architectural style—a style that emphasized efficiency and economy, and has come to be called the Chicago School of Architecture: Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Daniel H. Burnham “covered the whole business district with a new architecture and changed the face of a great modern city” (Mohl, 1985, p. 45). New York caught up and surpassed Chicago—but not in the nineteenth century. The skyscraper/elevator meant that, for the first time, the city could build up, not just out.
Neighborhoods: Subdivisions and Slums
Streetcar routes became commercial spokes radiating to the city periphery, where ample room permitted manufacturing firms to build modern, land-consuming facilities laced with railroad sidings and worker housing—working-class residential neighborhoods were as common as affluent neighborhoods. Secondary business districts formed along streetcar routes: one block in from the streetcar line were multifamily apartment buildings and a host of retail and service stores; many a mom and pop pioneered food products in these early years—potato chips in George Crum’s (half African/half Native American) 1853 Saratoga Springs restaurant (Waller, 1966).
The push to the city periphery by industry and the middle/upper classes fostered new neighborhoods, making residential class segregation a simple fact of American urban life. Housing, more expensive in newly created neighborhoods, meant paying the price that also included a daily round-trip streetcar ride. Neighborhoods became class enclaves as well as ethnic ghettos. Although a few immigrant neighborhoods were settled almost exclusively by a single ethnic group, by the Gilded Age most were micro-melting pots. Within 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 (Hoffman, 1996). How Gilded Age neighborhoods came into existence is demonstrated through example—from our old friend, Boston’s Henry Whitney.2
As mentioned earlier, in the 1880s Whitney owned Boston’s West End Street Railway and its subsidiary, the West End Land Company—the perfect set of vehicles to develop an 1880 subdivision. By 1886 Whitney also owned most of Brookline, home to today’s wealthy (George Romney). Frederick Law Olmsted prepared Brookline’s landscape plan. To preserve its property values “restrictive covenants” were enforced— against the Irish, of course. Whitney was content with selling land to small-scale developers who built homes to order—the typical pattern of many Gilded Age suburbs (Ward, 1998, p. 86)
While Whitney’s Brookline goings-on unfolded, a non-Whitney initiative also happened on Boston’s other side of the tracks—in Roxbury (annexed 1868), West Roxbury (annexed 1873) and Dorchester (annexed 1870).3 These subdivisions were working class, developed only after annexation by the City of Boston. Without annexation, they could not afford the water-related infrastructure; they were dependent upon Boston installing it. Restrictive covenants were also characteristic of these working-class suburbs—covenants sensitive to class not ethnicity. These landscapes differed from that of Brookline in that:
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 percent of them. (Ward, 1998, p. 86)
Gilded Age periphery subdivisions differed in size, quality of construction and physical layout. Subsequent generations of city dwellers would be able to “move up.” This move up formalized into a pattern of residential housing succession that arguably continues in ebb and flow to this day.
There were other neighborhoods; some called them ghettos or slums. These neighborhoods were located chiefly (but not always) in older, core areas of industrial cities, adjacent to the emerging CBD in-filled with a maze of alleys on, and between, streetcar lines. The never-ceasing horde of impoverished immigrants clustered so densely into these units that housing could never be maintained. Whatever glimmer of innovation the housing industry mustered to improve conditions in these immigrant neighborhoods was destroyed by extreme density. Apartment houses, row housing and tenement housing (innovations all in their day) were overwhelmed; these neighborhoods evolved into human and residential disasters. Residue from these slums (crime, disease, fire, unemployment and guilty consciences) fueled reformers from whom the community development approach would develop.
Ron W. Coan 