Understanding Late Nineteenth-Century American Cities

Abstract

IDEAS about the character of modern American cities may be traced to origins in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After mid-century, the crowding of industry and people in the large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest produced a rapid reorganization of the urban landscape that was marked by a concentration of business activities in a downtown core, by a crowding of ethnic neighborhoods around that core, and by an extension of suburbs for middle-income groups far into the countryside along radial lines of public transportation.1 Those developments had definite evolutionary links with previous urban forms, but the recent emergence, the massive scale, and the problems of late nineteenth-century urbanism appeared to be dramatic indicators of a new urban realm. The period was a time when the traditional vocabulary for images of the urban landscape proved increasingly inadequate for dealing with an altered geographical reality. The need to fashion some semblance of order from the apparent chaos of the urban scene led to the formation of a host of new images and ideas about the city in magazine articles, novels, professional journals, guidebooks, local histories, reformist polemics, and various other types of literature that proliferated during that era. In a context that was marked by sharp divisions of class and ethnic origin, those writings sought to address the diverse elements of urban society in an effort to counter the divisive socioeconomic forces that seemed to be on the verge of rending the fabric of American cities.2 Even the most objective landscape descriptions in that charged atmosphere seemed somehow to become laden with cultural meaning. What were believed to be culturally mandated attitudes toward certain key landscape elements-the business district, the tenements, the suburbs, and public transit-came to dominate the efforts to make an intelligible metropolitan landscape. The imagery of the urban landscape found in late nineteenth-century writings comprises a valuable resource to enhance present-day understanding of the initial response to the modern American city. Through a critical reading of a broad range of writing that dealt with the American city and with the city of Boston in particular, it is possible to identify the key elements of that response as they took form in the social, technological, and ideological context