Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920

Abstract

Since the mid-19th century, the United States has been transformed from a rural society of small communities into an urban nation where most people live in cities. Surprisingly, writes Alexander von Hoffman, this transformation has not destroyed and created an impersonal atomized society. Instead, these attachments have flourished in the fundamental unit of urban society - the city neighbourhood. In Local Attachments, von Hoffman explores the emergence of the modern urban neighbourhood in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by examining Boston's outer-city neighbourhood, Jamaica Plain. Like other American urban neighborhoods of the era, Jamaica Plain experienced the arrival of many ethnic groups, a house-building boom for members of every social class and the creation of commercial, industrial and recreational boundaries within its boundaries. Despite this diversity, a vital neighbourhood culture bound the residents of the neighbourhood together. Businesses, churches, schools, clubs, charitable societies and political organizations spun a web of social ties that fostered a powerful sense of allegiance to the local community. Yet, in the end, political reformers and 20th-century mores shattered the unity of the turn-of-the-century neighbourhood and contributed to a decline in the quality of urban life.