Technology and Society in an Urban Environment: The Case of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway

Abstract

Third Avenue Elevated Railway Through the analysis of some population data from the city of New York in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, I propose to test some of the concepts involved in the new urban history.' I believe that in order to understand the relationship between physical environment and human behavior, and to differentiate the effects of a specific urban environment from the general process of social change in the making of American society, population data must be urbanized. Although limited in scope, the material presented in this paper is designed to study an important technological change in late nineteenth-century urban America and to test whether this type of urban history is valuable.