The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21)

by Joel Kotkin

  By the turn of the century, wrote Liverpool’s Thomas Baines, cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Bradford—for all their undoubted ugliness, polluted skies, and terrible slums—could not be dismissed merely as crude places spewing out goods. They now constituted, like Tyre or Florence in the past, “nurseries of intelligence” whose inventions were improving the lot of mankind.19 Wealth allowed these once dreary cities to erect magnificent new public buildings—town halls, libraries, and hospitals—that in the words of one Bradford writer rivaled “the far famed palaces of Venice....”20

  URBANIZING THE “GARDEN OF THE WORLD”

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, no European country came close to matching Britain’s industrial might. Paris, the largest city on the continent, remained mainly a city of small enterprises. After 1850, the conscious policy of Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, fearful of proletarian unrest, actually discouraged large-scale industrial growth in the capital.21

  The new focus of industrial growth lay instead in the still largely underdeveloped expanses of North America—a place some Europeans romanticized as the “garden of the world.” Here the factory town not only took root, but did so on a scale exceeding that of Britain itself.22

  Industrialism would bring many changes to the United States, ultimately transforming a primarily rural landscape into one of large cities. As late as 1850, the United States had only six “large” cities with a population of over one hundred thousand, constituting barely 5 percent of the population. This reality would change dramatically in the next fifty years. By 1900, there were thirty-eight such cities, and they now housed roughly one in every five Americans.23

  The spectacular growth of American cities was driven by several factors—immigration, investment from Europe, the overall growth of the North American consumer base, and most of all, the rapid development of manufacturing industries, particularly in mass production. The country had proved uniquely suited to the rapid evolution of capitalist enterprise. Adam Smith’s “voice had been ringing in the world’s ears for sixty years,” wrote one observer in 1838, “but it is only in the United States that he is listened to, reverenced, and followed.”24

  NEW YORK’S NINETEENTH-CENTURY INDUSTRIAL AGE EMERGENCE

  Large numbers of British and other European immigrants sought new lives in this booming capitalist economy, especially in the great port city of New York.25 By 1860, Gotham’s population had topped 1 million, 42 percent foreign born.26

  Some of these immigrants lived in squalid conditions comparable to those found in Britain. Disease was rampant throughout the crowded working-class sections of Manhattan: Between 1810 and 1870, the rate of infant mortality in New York doubled.27 Class distinctions, defined more by wealth than pedigree, persisted as well in the new land. “A few moments from salons superbly furnished in the style of Louis XIV,” noted the writer Lydia Child, lay the abodes of “dreary desolate apartments” inhabited by “shivering urchins.”28

  Yet what most impressed many observers about New York was its extraordinary social mobility. A manual worker in an American factory still enjoyed a far better chance, and his offspring an even better one, of rising into the middle or even upper class than his European counterpart.29 Lowly artisans and mechanics, many of them immigrants, were prominent among the owners of the more than four thousand manufacturing establishments on Manhattan island, which at the time may well have been the most rapidly industrializing place in the world.30

  CITIES OF THE HEARTLAND

  Equally dramatic changes took place out on the western frontier, where Americans were moving to in massive numbers. New cities appeared seemingly overnight on places hitherto only lightly settled by native peoples. Among the first was Cincinnati, located on a bend in the Ohio River, which grew from a tiny frontier settlement of barely 750 residents in 1800 to a booming city of more than 100,000 forty years later.

  Cincinnati and other midwestern cities proved ideally suited for manufacturing growth. The region’s huge agriculture surplus created an opportunity for mass production of animal products on a hitherto unimagined scale. Soon dubbed “Porkopolis,” Cincinnati boasted vast slaughterhouses that dropped “rivers of blood” into Deer Creek and from there into the Ohio.

  Other cities enjoyed similarly rapid growth.31 St. Louis, home to a few hundred hardy souls at the opening of the nineteenth century, was by century’s end a mature metropolis of half a million. Detroit, a rugged outpost of barely 20,000 in 1850, shot up to more than 200,000 fifty years later. Chicago’s explosive growth outpaced them all. A settlement of barely 350 in 1835, it expanded to 100,000 at the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and housed over 1 million forty years later.

  These midwestern cities differed in many ways from the older coastal hubs. Unlike New York or Boston, with their thousands of small industrial shops and thriving mercantile districts, the heartland metropolis was more often dominated by giant factories, sometimes with thousands of workers, producing such hard goods as steel, agricultural implements, and cars.32 The United States was becoming the world’s leader in heavy manufacturing—and its beating heart lay in the cities of the Midwest.33

  These cities competed ferociously, and often recklessly, with one another for preeminence. Chicago, following the panic of 1837, one speculator wrote, “resounded with the groans of ruined men and the sobs of defrauded women who entrusted all to greedy speculators.” Undaunted, the city’s elites proved relentless in their ambition, lobbying Washington and Wall Street for dominant position in the burgeoning east-west trade. St. Louis businesspeople, noted the Chicago Tribune in 1868, “wore their pantaloons out sitting and waiting for trade to come to them,” while Chicago’s “wore their shoes out running after it.”34

  THE CHALLENGE OF “PROGRESS”

  As in Britain, America’s early period of rapid industrialization left in its wake a pitifully barren urban landscape. After two years in Cincinnati, the British writer Frances Trollope wrote, “every bee in the hive is actively employed in the search for honey . . . neither art, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from their pursuit.” Chicago, a Swedish visitor commented in 1850, was “one of the most miserable and ugly cities” of America.35

  The existence of grinding poverty was even more disturbing than the degraded environment. Two journalists writing in the late 1870s, in language reminiscent of Engels’s picture of Manchester a generation earlier, described one St. Louis slum:

  Some of the largest and worst tenement buildings . . . are built on back lots, and instead of fronting on the street, they look out upon dirty alleys that always emit a foetid odor. They are dilapidated, grimy and foul beyond our powers of description.36

  Such gross inequality, particularly in an avowedly egalitarian country, sparked intense class conflict. In the 1870s, St. Louis workers marched down the streets singing “La Marseillaise” and speaking of revolution. The city, the British consul warned, was “practically in the hands of the mob.” Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other, smaller midwestern cities experienced similar, often violent distrubances.37

  As in Britain, some prominent citizens questioned the fundamentally utilitarian values associated with the industrial age. Some, like Josiah Strong, a Protestant minister from Ohio, even challenged the American faith in “progress.” Rather than embrace economic change, Strong abjured it, believing that the industrial expansion was pushing the nation toward the “final doom of materialism.”

  Others, such as Chicago’s Jane Addams, believed only massive intervention could address the rampant crime, deepening class conflict, and growing evidence of deviancy, from alcoholism to prostitution, common among the working poor. A host of American cities soon followed her example of providing recreation and educational opportunities in slum areas.

  Reformist urges also spilled into the political world, transforming often corrupt governments in cities such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.38 Cities everywhere in America b
egan modernizing their administrations. In 1853, for example, New York, following London’s lead from a generation earlier, introduced uniformed policemen. In many cities, services such as fire protection and transportation were organized systematically for the first time.39

  Attention now also turned to improving the urban environment, nowhere more so than in the Midwest’s great metropolis of Chicago. Rebuilding after the devastating fire of 1871, the city embarked on an ambitious program of civic improvement, constructing over the next three decades a major library system, a new home for the Arts Institute, the Field Columbian Museum, and a large expansion of the University of Chicago.40

  Reformers also began to make concerted efforts to save some of the natural environment for their increasingly harried, city-bound citizens. In the 1870s, St. Louis acquired what would later become Tower Grove and Forest Park. Similarly ambitious efforts were made in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.41 “One great purpose” of New York’s Central Park, noted Frederick Law Olmsted, a leader in this movement, was “to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers . . . a specimen of God’s handiwork.”42

  NEW YORK: THE ULTIMATE VERTICAL CITY

  Owing to their nation’s awesome industrial power, America’s cities now stood out as the cutting edge of the world’s urban civilization. Nowhere was this more evident than in New York, which by 1900 enjoyed an economic and cultural preeminence unprecedented in American history. Twice as populous as second-place rival Chicago, Gotham controlled well over 60 percent of all the bank clearings in the entire nation. Its port accounted for upwards of 40 percent of all the trade into and out of the United States.43

  Located on a granite island in the midst of a great natural harbor, Manhattan was peculiarly suited for the construction of “a vertical city.” The tight boundaries of the island had placed a premium on the use of space.44 Rising demands for space by the diverse sectors of the city’s economy—light manufacturing, trade, finance, and other services— fostered irrepressible pressure for concentration.

  Manufacturing still employed many New Yorkers, but the most dramatic increases in the workforce now took place among white-collar employees as well as a swelling army of “pink collar” female clericals. The opening in 1904 of the subway system allowed increasingly large numbers to be shuttled between residential neighborhoods elsewhere on the island and the downtown and midtown office districts.

  New York’s annexation of Brooklyn and other adjacent areas in 1898 provided Manhattan with a sprawling hinterland from which to draw even more workers to its congested streets. Burrowing under the East River, New York’s subways carried ever more commuters, inciting more office construction. New York, the writer O. Henry famously remarked, would be “a great place if they ever finished it.”45

  The burgeoning demand required structures accommodating hundreds and even thousands of office workers. The first skyscraper went up in 1895 and was quickly followed by others.46 The key breakthrough came with the erecting in 1902 of the Flatiron Building, widely known as “Burnham’s Folly,” after its designer, the Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham, because some thought it would fall of its own weight. Within a decade, an even larger building, the sixty-story Woolworth Building, rose in lower Manhattan. 47

  “LIKE A WITCH AT THE GATE OF THE COUNTRY”

  As with past mercantile cities such as Athens, Alexandria, Cairo, and London, New York’s commercial growth also engendered an efflorescence of cultural life.48 More and more the global center of marketing, advertising, and mass entertainment, New York sent around the world melodies, images, and ideas for every level of cultural taste. One turn-of-the-century British writer complained that “our jokes are being machine made in the offices of New York publishers, even as [British] babies are fed on American food and their dead buried in American coffins.”49

  New York’s culture also transcended European norms. Reflecting an increasingly polyglot society, Gotham served as the nursery for a wide diversity of ethnic humor, jazz, and all forms of modern art. “New York,” noted James Weldon Johnson, the Harlem Renaissance poet, “is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a witch at the gate of the country.”50

  New Yorkers themselves often saw their town as the progenitor of a new kind of city.51 The city’s glass towers and darkened streetscapes seemed to reflect a new, bold expression of the modern metropolis. The novelist John Dos Passos drew the setting in the mid-1920s:

  Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spider-web bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink.52

  AMERICA GOES HIGH-RISE

  In much of the world as well, these images became synonymous with urbanity itself. George M. Cohan may have remarked that “after you leave New York, every town is Bridgeport,” but other American cities—not only Chicago—sought to imitate Gotham’s urban landscape.53 Within a year of the completion of the Woolworth Building, Seattle had constructed the forty-two-story Smith Tower, bringing architectural giantism to the Pacific. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis all rushed to erect new monuments to their commercial vitality.54

  Even lesser cities raced to make their statement. At a time when neither London, the world’s largest city, Berlin, nor Paris boasted a single high-rise, steel-framed towers were rising in such obscure places as Bangor, Maine; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Galveston, Texas. More tradition-bound Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C., imposed height limits, but in most places the only restraint was the exuberance of the local downtown real estate market. A “real metropolis,” The Denver Post argued, needed such structures to assert its status.55

  Still, the center of the new urban world lay in New York. Its growing dominance of international trade, finance, and media had made it the unsurpassed business capital of America and increasingly the world. The journalist A. H. Raskin remarked that “in a single afternoon in a single Manhattan skyscraper,” decisions would be made that would determine what movies would be played in South Africa, whether or not children in a New Mexican mining town would have a school, or how much Brazilian coffee growers would receive for their crop.56

  The soaring high-rises of America’s great cities lifted the steel-and-concrete façade of the factory town to the sky. In physical terms, and as inspirers of awe, they represented the commercial city’s answer to the great spired cathedrals of Europe, the elegant mosques of the Islamic world, and the imperial complexes of East Asia.57

  Still, these towers of concrete and steel could not provide the sense of sacred place that had so shaped the urban past. Essentially structures for business, they presumed to say little about an enduring moral order or social justice. Constructed largely for profit by private interests, they could not shield the city from attack by those who now sought to impose other, radically divergent visions of the urban future.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  INDUSTRIALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  After disembarking from his ship at Kobe in the fall of 1922, G. C. Allen boarded a train bound for the Japanese city of Nagoya. For the first few hours, the twenty-two-year-old British scholar traveled through an exotic and thoroughly alien landscape of terraced rice fields, tea plantations, and misty, forested hillsides.

  Gradually, as the train chugged toward its destination, the scenery turned increasingly familiar. Suddenly, Allen saw a city “submerged by a swelling wave of factories, tall blocks of offices, concrete elevated roads and new tracks and bridges for high speed trains.” It was almost as if he had transported back home to the great industrial metropolis of Birmingham.1

  In Nagoya, as in Britain, the industrialization of the urban landscape had transformed the city that had existed before. “Beauty and squalor rubbed shoulders,” Allen noted, often on the same block. Hidden amid the factories and creaking trolley cars could be found the running of a tiny stream or a well-kept garden tucked amid the “dull and featureless streets.”2

  THE GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF INDUSTRIALISM />
  As industrial growth spread across the world, it ushered in a new era of rapid urbanization on an unprecedented scale. By the late nineteenth century, large urban centers were appearing on every continent, in South America, Africa, Australia, and, most portentously, Asia. More than 5 percent of the world’s population now lived in cities of more than one hundred thousand, nearly three times the percentage of a century earlier.3

  In much of the world, this growth was driven by that of administrative services, trade, and export of raw materials. Industrial expansion remained limited by the mercantile policies of colonial powers and the underdevelopment of transportation systems and other modern infrastructure. In much of continental Asia and Africa, the exceedingly low cost of labor and lack of a large consumer base also discouraged the local use of machinery in favor of more dispersed, primitive rural industry.4

  Far more dramatic progress took place in other regions. By the early part of the twentieth century, three critical countries—Japan, Germany, and Russia—boasted large and expanding industrial cities. Tokyo, Osaka, Berlin, and St. Petersburg now competed directly with New York, Manchester, and London, not only locally but often on a global scale.

  As Allen noted on his way to Nagoya, these cities shared the outward appearance—the crisscrossing train tracks, the smoky factories, the office buildings—of the Anglo-American manufacturing centers. Yet they would respond to industrialism in ways strikingly different from those of Britain or America, seeking to forge alternative paths to the making of modern cities.