GROWTH AND INFRASTRUCTURE: MIDWIVES OF BIG CITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The industrial city grew spectacularly during the Gilded Age, fueled by population growth from farm to city and immigration. There were 31.5 million Americans in 1860, and 76.2 million in 1900 (a 142 percent increase). Lots of immigrants piled into America’s entry ports: between 1850 and 1860 nearly 2.6 million entered; and nearly 5 million (1880–90) and 3.7 million in the 1890s. From 1850 to 1900 the number of people living in incorporated municipalities greater than 2500 rose from 6.6 million to 44.6 million—from nearly 20 percent of the population to almost 46 percent (Glaab and Brown, 1983, p. 112).
Say it another way: In 1860 slightly over 6.1 million Americans lived in urban areas; by 1870 slightly less than 10 million—nearly 60 percent growth during the Civil War decade. In 1880 a little over 28 percent of the American populace lived in cities; by 1890 it was 35 percent; and by 1900 almost 40 percent, more than 30 million, lived in American cities—a 300 percent increase in 30 years. America increased by 142 percent during the Gilded Age, but urban America grew by 300 percent. Under such pressure something had to give. Cities expanded outward—they pushed out their periphery and city boundaries. Given the lack of municipal public governmental capacity in this era, most ED, especially infrastructure, required heavy doses of private sector involvement.
An important Chapter 3 topic, infrastructure and hybrid EDOs, will be continued within our Big City discussion. The nineteenth century as a whole can be considered the Big City Age of Infrastructure, and nineteenth-century infrastructure, as detailed in the previous chapter, is dependent on devising an effective public–private partnership— hence the need for a hybrid EDO (HEDO). An obvious consequence of immigration and migration was the demands they placed on infrastructure. Water came first, and eventually (post-1890) sewers; but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The separation of work from residence and the obviously inevitable extension of neighborhoods across city boundaries created yet another dimension to the infrastructure crisis.
Transportation infrastructure—which ranged from horse-drawn omnibus to subway—was constantly in flux, and will be treated separately. A case study of Boston’s and New York’s subway race will detail how transportation infrastructure ED policy-making was made; who was involved; and how the fight for ED tools to do the job was critical. Later, shortly after the Gilded Age, new infrastructures (gas streetlights, electricity and the telephone) will enter, and complicate the picture immensely. These later infrastructure forms will be briefly introduced in the next section, but described more in a later chapter. The final infrastructure topic will be the municipal franchise, which was quite prominent in streetcars (and subways) and was the most refined, and hated, HEBO of the Gilded Age. Franchises became a platform for either regulated private utilities or municipal/regional public ownership during the twentieth century. Indeed, franchise elimination became a central plank of Progressive Movement mayors (discussed in the next chapter).
Gilded Age Infrastructure
Water (distribution) was the earliest (Early Republic) infrastructure. Since ancient times access to water was an urban prerequisite. As the American industrial city rapidly expanded, however, water distribution developed into a crisis. Potable water was one thing; water for manufacture and putting out fires another. Gilded Age cities soon exhausted local water sources. Finding water meant going miles downstream, incurring incredible complexity/expense in getting it to the city. New York City tunneled 30 miles out to the Croton reservoirs.
Until the Gilded Age most municipal water systems were private—and very much unloved by consumers. Service, quality and cost were the chief concerns. The underlying reasons behind municipal ownership, however, were not cheap rates, but the necessity of having an adequate and predictable water supply for fire protection and the need to reliably filter water to avoid disease. As those needs became increasingly intense, municipal, rather than private, ownership was preferred. A disastrous fire or a horrible epidemic was usually all it took to overcome any fear of tax increases. Municipal-owned, water-related infrastructure was installed in two bursts: after the Civil War to early the 1870s; and after 1890, when yellow fever and typhoid epidemics meant that expensive filtration and sewers were also needed.
After the Civil War, municipalities gravitated toward publicly owned water systems. Generally, a water board or commission was established—a forerunner of today’s public authority. The municipal water board/commission is considered in this history as a more public version of an HEDO. Governance of the entity was predominantly private (political machines were always trying to butt in, however), and staff (mostly civil engineers) were professional even by modern standards. Planning, incorporation of new technologies and a measure of public accountability became associated with these HEDOs. Later in this chapter we will describe how they affected, and in turn were affected by, Gilded Age suburbanization. In the next chapters readers will discover that these HEDOs incubated the first blossoms of public economic development as a profession. Dominated by civil engineers, their approach to ED was different from HEDOs dominated by architects and landscape designers associated by the Parks Movement. In short, they may not feature much in this section, but fully expect to hear more about ED-related boards/commissions in the future.
City ownership of water facilities, however, led to a fiscal disaster. City waterworks construction in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cleveland, and street improvements and sewerage/water in Boston, led to skyrocketing municipal debt levels. Combined with the construction of the first municipal parks systems (e.g. NYC’s Central Park, Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park and Chicago’s park district’s acquisition of land), city debt obligations exploded and cities plummeted into fiscal crisis.
Between 1868 and 1873, the net bonded debt of New York City tripled, 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 percent during the decade 1867 to 1877 … Combined debt to twenty cities having 100,000 or more population increased 176 percent from 1866 to 1876. (Teaford, 1984, p. 285)
Bankruptcies, serious reductions in property assessments and sustained tax revenue reductions followed (in Chicago’s case by one-third). Pittsburgh defaulted (1877) and Memphis defaulted twice (1873 and 1878), becoming the poster child of municipal collapse. Its municipal charters suspended, the state ran the city as a state taxing district.
The deed had been done, though. 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 percent of the cities over 30,000 owned their own plants” (Griffith, 1974, p. 180). Municipal debt structures imploded in the 1873 Panic, a Panic that continued through 1879. After 1880, however, Big Cities—always on the edge of bankruptcy aggravated by ownership of the water infrastructure—were reluctant to further expand municipal infrastructure ownership. This was the behind the scenes decision to employ HEBOs such as the franchise wherever possible to avoid direct municipal expenses, excessive debt burdens and operational liabilities.
But, reluctant or not, municipalities continued with previously established municipal ownerships using boards and commissions for infrastructure such as streets and bridges. At its start, the iconic landmark of the period, Brooklyn Bridge, was managed by a private company backed by municipal funds. Midway it was taken over by Brooklyn and New York, and converted into an independent commission with a board appointed by the mayors and comptrollers of the two cities. Its completion (1883) prompted another herd imitation of municipal bridge ownership. By the turn of the century, streets and bridges were also municipal concerns, with the result similar to water-related infrastructure: higher indebtedness and operating costs.
Gas and electricity were next; they were necessary to provide street lighting. Street lighting was associated with crime reduction, and cities were often prodded into providing it. Previously, central business district (CBD) business was forced into private contracts with a street lighting company. With the advent of electricity in the 1890s, street lighting got complicated. The size of the city was an important factor as scale reduced cost of service. Smaller cities faced prohibitive costs that inhibited private firms from effectively competing, and so smaller cities tended to build municipal power-generation facilities for street lighting. Larger cities usually retained energy services provided by private companies.
Until 1895 only two large cities had municipally owned gas and electric plants— Chicago and Pittsburgh. In that year, Detroit, under Mayor Pingree, started construction on its municipally owned plant. Public ownership of utilities after that became a major Progressive issue. Between 1876 and 1893 the telephone was a federally (interstate) regulated Bell Telephone patent monopoly, and Alexander Graham Bell could license local companies—making 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 percent, and telephone use dramatically increased (Griffith, 1974, p. 184).
Transportation Innovation
Colonial and Early Republic cities were “walking cities.” 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 2 miles. But there were downsides to this heaven on earth. There was horse (and people) “do-do,” disease, dust and mud, and surprisingly lots of congestion. Separation of work from residence had started long before the Civil War, and workers simply couldn’t get downtown to their jobs.
The horse-drawn omnibus, originating in France, first appeared in New York City in 1829. Philadelphia operated one in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844. The omnibus—a covered wagon with seats (sort of an old 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 1850s, 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” operating] in New Orleans” (Mohl, 1985, pp. 30–31). Hailed as revolutionary, the horse-car railway (a slightly more affordable horse-powered omnibus on iron rails) replaced the omnibus. By the 1880s, 525 horse-car lines operated in 300 American cities— extending the city periphery as far as 5 miles out.
The omnibus facilitated middle- and upper-class residential movement to the city periphery. Separation of classes and the ceaseless push to periphery areas had commenced. Left behind were beat-up, old working and immigrant neighborhoods— the ethnic “wards” of political machines.
Of more impact than the omnibus in the time-honored task of separating rich from poor was the commuter railroad. The commuter railroad (running to nearby suburbs) appeared simultaneously with the omnibus but was more expensive. By mid-century about 20 percent of Boston’s business people used commuter railroads for the 10–15-mile daily journey to work (Mohl, 1985, p. 30). Between the omnibus and the commuter railroad, the drive to the city periphery/suburbs started much earlier than usually thought.
After a successful experiment in San Francisco by Andrew S. Hallidie (1873) the nation’s cities increasingly adopted the steam-powered cable car. Some 626 miles of cable car track served 20 cities by the mid-1890s. In 1888 Frank Sprague (an unhappy associate of Edison) successfully converted Richmond’s horse-car lines to electricity, and we officially entered the streetcar age. Sprague made a fortune through the sale/installation of his transportation equipment. Within five years of Richmond’s opening, 850 systems were in operation, with lines totaling 10,000 miles (Glaab and Brown, 1983, p. 160). Most Big Cities developed an incredible number of competing routes: for example Philadelphia 39, New York City 19, Pittsburgh 24, St. Louis 19, San Francisco 16; and even small cities like Grand Rapids Michigan had 4 (Griffith, 1974, p. 183). By 1902, 97 percent of urban transit mileage was electrified and 2 billion passengers rode on streetcars.
Streetcar lines were loss-leaders, or “the razor” that opened the periphery to subdivisions. Transportation company profits (and taxes for municipalities) came from residential/commercial development built alongside or at the end of the line. Such estate development was a gold mine. As the middle class moved to the periphery, an unanticipated new sector arose to meet the demand for recreation: amusement parks. So trolley/streetcar companies built amusement parks. Within 25 years five disruptive/ expensive transportation innovations were installed in our Big Cities, digging up streets and pavements each time, leaving behind a tangle of overhead wires and a bewildering morass of underground pipes and wires (Mohl, 1985, pp. 32–5). To rise above this tangle, the elevated (El) made its appearance, first in New York City in 1878. However, the El solved as many problems as it created. Small wonder streetcars were the most disruptive urban political issue in the Progressive Age. For example, 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” (Glaab, 1983, p. 161).
But we are still not finished with transportation innovation. During the last decade of the Gilded Age, the subway made its appearance. Streetcars were disruptive, ugly, unsafe, congested and grossly uncomfortable, making street-level life unbearable. Up or under were alternatives; cities tried both—at the same time in the same city. Boston and New York were the first in America to attempt the subway (underground)—London, Paris and Berlin already had them). To learn from this saga we tell the story of “an unlikely pair of brothers from a tiny town in Central Massachusetts [who] came from a long line of Puritans” (Most, 2014, p. 2): the brothers Henry and William Whitney.
Ron W. Coan 