Gilded Age Suburbs
Arguably, suburbanization is among the most controversial topics in the urban-related professions. Suburbs, like the poor, have always been with us. Suburbs did not begin with Levittown New York in 1947. They reflect a poly-nucleated metropolitan reality that is a normal feature of the industrial city. In this section, I present a brief outline of American suburban history through 1900. Several key suburb-related concepts— annexation, suburban autonomy and residential succession—will be broached. I also make the point that there are several types of suburb.
Henry Binford (1985, p. 10) suggests that nineteenth-century suburban development occurred in three overlapping but distinct phases:
- 1789–1837/43, when suburbs were a “booming fringe economy—a zone of manufacturers and commercial activity—related to the city, but not requiring contact” with the city;
- 1837–50, when rail commuter lines pushed into urban fringes and suburbanites built bridges/roads connecting to the central city and integrating fringe areas with the central city;
- 1843–1900, when fringe areas evolved into suburbs by accommodating commuter residential preferences and institutionalizing housing construction as its core industry cluster.
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. (Hayden, 2003, p. 22)
Still, stereotype can mirror reality. The “affluent enclave” characterized many Gilded Age suburbs. Bernadette Hanlon estimates affluent suburbs to be about 10–12 percent of current inner-ring suburbs (Hanlon, 2010, pp. 114, Table 8), suggesting a solid core of longstanding, stable suburban communities. Garden city residential suburbs value exclusivity and order, not growth. Economic development was not prioritized; yet these, now aged, suburbs are still fairly vigorous—and still pursue exclusivity rather than growth.
Glencoe Illinois in 1869 is another example (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles were filmed there). Its village manager government includes no EDO. Llewellyn Park New Jersey, conceived by Llewellyn Solomon Haskell in 1853 and opened in 1857, is thought to be the nation’s first planned suburb (12 miles outside New York City). Despite some future garden city-like elements, Llewellyn Park is more a Privatist gated community—a high-income subdivision housing the likes of Thomas Edison, George Merck and the Colgate family. Its Ramble, a 50-acre common park, owes much to New York’s Central Park which had just opened. Also in 1869 Olmsted and his business partner Calvert Vaux planned and incorporated the Riverside Improvement Company to build a new residential community 9 miles north of Chicago. Acquiring 1600 acres with access to commuter trains, they platted 2500 individual half-acre lots on which they proposed construction of single-family detached housing located on a winding, tree-lined (non-grid) road system sprinkled with several parks. They called Riverside a “garden city.” It was meant for workers as much as anyone, and was advertised as “a perfect village in a perfect location.” The project entered bankruptcy in 1873 and was incorporated into a Cook County village in 1875. Olmsted subsequently tried developing a New York City suburb, Staten Island.4 He finalized a proposal to transform “that malaria-ridden swamp into a system of winding tree-lined roads and parks suitable for residential speculators” (Boyer, 1986, p. 41).
Annexation
Annexation has always been 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 robustly to capture escaping populations. There were exceptions of course. Whitney’s Brookline Massachusetts refused to be annexed in 1874; but, then again, Chicago’s largest annexation in 1889 netted 125 square miles and over 225,000 new tax payers—not too shabby. In 1898 New York used another device, borough consolidation, and its five boroughs become our proverbial “New York, New York.” At first, courts and state legislatures were amenable—and, contrary to myth, central cities chased their footloose population through annexation.
Every Big City changed boundaries dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century, sometimes absorbing empty space, sometimes annexing neighboring communities (Jackson, 1972). The nine United States cities that contained more than 100,000 people in 1860 fell clearly into two categories with regard to 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 existing boundaries. The other group (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. (Binford, 1985, pp. 10–11)
At some point suburbs began to resist annexation. Why?
Suburban Autonomy
Why the push-back? Richardson Dilworth (2005) presents a reasonable rationale for the noticeable rise in suburban autonomy in the late Gilded Age: he blames it mostly on central city political machines—and water. Suburbia reacted negatively to ethnic political machines, perceiving potential impacts on their financing of suburban infrastructure. To Dilworth, an intimate relationship between central city infrastructural development and central city political corruption generated nineteenth-century Big City 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 … political “bosses” … [William] 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 … annex 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. (Dilworth, 2005, p. 5)
In Dilworth’s mind, suburban autonomy was a reaction to the threat of political corruption that led to resisting annexation and suburban incorporation to preserve fiscal soundness and accountability by managing their urban infrastructures. Ironically, Dilworth observes, the pioneering experience and expertise of central cities in installing/managing (water) infrastructures lowered suburban infrastructure costs: making infrastructure affordable to smaller suburbs justified suburban incorporation. Infrastructure meant a suburb could build its own economic base.
So, in summary, metropolitanization (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 25 metropolitan districts existed and that 10 percent of the population lived in suburbs (McKelvey, 1963, p. 51).
Ron W. Coan 