"Evolution and Transformation: The American Industrial Metropolis, 1840-1940"
Sam Bass Warner
Editors' Introduction • Perhaps no place and time of urban history has been more exhaustively studied than the cities of the United States during the industrial transformation and after - that is, during the period from the mid-nineteenth century when industrial enterprises, which had originated in Europe, began to secure a foothold in North America to the period in the mid-twentieth century when the United States became a world power and its cities were regarded as the paradigm examples of advanced, "modem" urbanism. It was an extraordinary period of rapid transformation, both socially and technologically, and it is the subject of Sam Bass Warner's "Evolution and Transformation: The American Industrial Metropolis, 1840-1 940," an essay specially prepared for this edition of The City Reader. Warner summarizes the broad range of areas in which the very terms of urban life changed during the century after the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Among these were economic cycles of boom and bust culminating in the Great Depression of the 1930s, new types of power (from the muscle power of men and animals to water, steam, and electricity) and new types of transportation (from walking and horse-drawn wagons to railroads, inter urban tramways, and the first appearance of those extraordinary new machines, the truck and the personal automobile). He notes that these new technologies and economic changes led the way toward new urban spatial · arrangements - inner-city neighborhoods, suburbs, specialized industrial districts, and commercial downtowns with their department stores and soaring skyscrapers. He also notes the extraordinary, and often unexpected, social .transformations that accompanied and intertwined with these other developments. Among these were the . cultural accommodation of massive waves of foreign immigration, the growing power of labor unions, voting and employment rights for women, and the beginnings of the more gradual process of full enfranchisement for African Americans that began with emancipation after the Civil War and continued through decades of Jim Crow eegregation, discrimination, and inequality. . Born and raised in Boston, Sam Bass Warner graduated from Harvard in 1950, took a master's degree in jovmalism from Boston University, and received his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1959. What followed was a career as a teacher and scholar that would include professorships at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Michigan, Boston University, Brandeis University and, since 1 994, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along the way, he has been awarded fellowships at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has also served as a member of the Advisory Council of the United States National Amliives, the National Research Council, and the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research and has been • member of the Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians and President of the Urban liiatOfY Association. Warner's exceptionally distinguished career has been based on his skills as a teacher and mentor and on a · of books that place him in the first rank of historians of the city as a unique social, technological, and SAM BASS WARN ER
organizational complex central to the human experience. His first book, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi ty Press. 1962). broke new ground by radically expanding the common understanding of suburban growth away from a narrow post-W orld W ar II, automobile based phenomenon toward a more hi storically accurate view of the role that streetcar systems played, as early as the 1870s, in decentralizing the dense central cities. creating new resi dential options for the urban middle class, and thereby contributing to increased class segregation in American society . Streetcar Suburbs made a strong plea for better, more socially conscious planning in urban America, and Warner's next book was an influential edited volume, Planning for a Nation of Cities (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. 1966). That book was followed in 1968 by The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsy lvania Press, 1968), a masterful study of both the successes and failures of private enterprise and private philanthropy a6 the primary forces behind nineteenth -century American urban development. Four years later, Warner published The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), a sweeping overview that returned to his heartfelt themes: change as the one constant in the process of urban growth and i !; th e need for socially conscious pl anning. One reviewer called the book "a domestic policy brief," and urban historian Richard C. Wade wrote that The Urban Wilderness "is not a history of American cities, but rather a discussion of the need to transform them." Other books by Sam Bass Warner include The Way We Really Live: S ocial Change in Metropolitan Boston since 1920 (Boston, MA: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston: 1977), To Dwell is to Garden: A History of Boston's Community Gardens, with Hansi Durlach (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1987), Greater Boston: Adapting Regional Traditions to the Present (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001 ), and Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions, with Lawrence J. Vale (New Brunswick, NJ: Cen ter for Urban Research, Policy, 2001 ). Appended to Warner's "Evolution and Transformation: The American Industrial Metropolis, 1840-1940," is an annotated list of the major sources that the author relied on in preparing this essay for The City Reader. Needless to say, the literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban development is vast, and no brief list can do justice to its breadth and depth. For a world perspective, the best place to start is Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1961 ) an d Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York: Pantheor;, 1998). Also of interest is Joel Kotkin 's brief but stimulating The City: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2005). For the American perspective, consult Howard Chudacoff, Peter Baldwin, and Thomas Paterson, Major Problems in American Urban and Suburban History, 2nd edn (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004), Raymond Mohl, Th e New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harl an Davidson, 1985), and David R. Goldfield (ed.), En cyclopedia of American Urb an History (two vols, New York: Sage, 2006).
Never before in human history had people built a to an industrial one. so during the 1920s a wholly new society based upon steam-powered machines. urban society began to emerge. Friedrich Engels saw the beginnings of this process A parade of surprises characterize d the century. at its early stages. His was the moment when the Basic changes in the energy available to the city. first gathering of mechanized factori es established large steam and then electri ci ty, transformed the form of cities. He could not have known in l 844 th at as the urban se ttlement and the life within it. How migh t the process unfolded. all of England. and all modern anyone have imagined a city of lights. a downtown nations. would come to be organized by huge industrial and the crowds on its streets. a city of skyscrapers and metropolises of more than a million inhabitants. miles and miles of small houses? Thes e obvious This essay will pick up rhe story of the American surprises merely record the surface of ch ange because industrial metropolis in the years after 1840. It will tech nology. social and cu ltural in vention. politics. and follow its path of development in two stages rhe years historical inh enrances interact in complicated vvays ro l 920 and the years from 1920 ro i 940. Just as Engels A water pipe and a light bulb and a steel building picked up rhe sto1y of the merchant economy turning irarne are but the roois of complex social and cuiwral "THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS, 1840-1940"
inventio n. The railroad and the steamship made the manufactures - like steel and pipes and shi pya rds American industrial metropolis into a crossroads fo r fo r iron and steel ships - brought with it an increase in the young people of Europe. This abundance of the proporti on of unskill ed laborers as opposed to youthful hands revived a system of garment manu craftsmen. fac ture as old as Shakespeare's ta ilor. Manufacturers Thus from l 840 to about 1920 during th is maj or gave out materials for famili es to sew and assemble surge of industrialization. every newcomer to the city in their own rooms. ln th is way international trans represented a gain. a fresh addition of a little biopower po rtation fostered the tenement sweatshop, but the to the human settlem en t. Yet, until the twentieth newcomers· unio ns gave the city new voices and fresh century, the city quite literally consumed young people expectations. These same machines. the railroad and and children. It injured and killed young men and th e steamshi p, connected and interconnected with all women workers with industrial accid ents and pollu manner of business institutions ofAnance. manufacture ta nts, malnutrition. overc rowded housing and disease. and marketing to press down upon American society [t kill ed child ren faster than they could be born. No and its ci ties a completely unstable economy th at large nineteenth-century city in the world could sustain alternated booms with dangerous economic collapse. itself by the natural reproduction of its resident population. Because large citi es drew their human resources THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL CITY from national and international trading networks, EMERGES changes at a distance impacted local conditions. The 1840s famine in Ireland and the appearance of Commonly a focus on factories and machines Teads crowded lrish slums and shanties in New York and a histori an to neglect the essential role of animals Boston is such a well-known case. The change in urban and humans in carrying out industrialization . [n fac t, survi val also followed upon di stance events. coal and biopower together fueled the growth of Fresh farmland in the western United States and the modern American metropolis. The coal -fired steam Europe, when tilled with new farm machinery and new engi nes of th e railroads and steamships tied the ci ty agricultural practices, produced a flood of inexpensive to the world's resources and markets. while coal-fired grain, hay and meat. Th e refrigeration of meat and fur naces and engines enabled facto ries to escape dairy products. the canning of meat, fruits and vege their water-powered sites so that they might locate tables. and the pasteurization of milk all owed the near the city's port or alongside the railroad lines. Later. nation's railroad network to fill the markets of the city subsequent to the 1890s, coal powered the generation wi th safe products. Here in the city a chain of very long of electricity for streetcars. subways, elevated railroads, term incremental municipal investments in water electric lights. elevato rs . and numberl ess small motors. and sewer systems and the introduction of pub li c health In th e twentieth century, petroleum joined coal as the inspection created an environment of plentiful and fu el fo r transportation. clean foodstuffs , even for the poor. To be sure. every Steam-powered machines have captured our man, woman and child dwelling in large American his torical imagination. but they all depended on bio cities at any given moment during the twentieth power to make th em work. The city of the nineteen th century did not have enough to eat. but the level and ea rly twentieth centuries depended on horses to of starvatio n and malnutriti on ceased to be a popula pull the streetcars. wagons. and taxi s, and to power tion control. Thereby, from th e early decades of the many construction tasks. Further. both the horses twen tieth century onwards, the large American city and and the machines depended upon the ci ty 's army of its equiva lents in modem Europe became hab itable men. women and children to tend them. Even the pl aces for humans. few automatic machines of the time, like rotary presses, looms and screw machines. require d constant atten tion. Most. like sewing machines. steam pressers, IMMIGRATION EXPERIENCES lathes. and saws, required a person to fe ed them In addition, every object that moved in the city was fi rst Overseas immi gra nts to American cities followed lifted, carried, or carted by a laborer. Indeed. hi storians the pathways of food. cotton and coal steamships have been surprised to notice that the increase in heavy to and fro m Europe. ra ilroads amo ng cities. The m SAM BASS WARNER
immigrant parade itself depended upon the sequential SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS and so destruction oflocal peasant economies by the railroad unions and its delivery of cheap grain and inexpensive manu The women traditionally took up domestic service. and those c factured goods to the villages and towns. First, modem many immigrant girls worked in factories before Englist agricultural methods and land enclosures destroyed maniage. During the 1840s and subsequently, manied Bee the old rural economies of Great Britain, Ireland and women often supported their families by leasing they le Germany. sending these country folks to America a house and running it as a boarding house. The house Amelie and Britain's new factories. Then as the transportation keeper offered single rooms and two meals a day. actions network spread. Norwegians. Swedes, Danes. Poles. Toward the end of the century. women found fresh in man Hungarians, Italians. Russians and Greeks. and peoples opportunities selling in stores. nursing, elementary burned of the Mediterranean followed. school teaching and staffing telephone switchboards. at the The degree of survival of these immigrant peoples In all these roles. the customs and prejudices of Homes revealed itself only slowly in the cities' census statistics. men kept the women's wages well below those of the strike ir Nevertheless. parallel and unconnected events accom men. in New panied this remarkable demographic change. By 1920 Children helped out their families in home manu Patters; the progress of mechanization had proceeded so factures and in family stores. Many worked as office dividinf far that the addition of a new pair of willing hands and and errand boys. One future governor of New York fellow' a strong back did not add to the city's wealth. The city Al Smith, upon the death of his father. ran about becausE continued to seek skilled workers. but the unskilled Lower Manhattan carrying messages to teamsters workers proved redundant. During this same post-World telling them where their wagons should go for the next In lS War I decade. fear of foreigners. fears of European load. legality< socialist and communist ideas, anti-Semitism and labor Social connections have always been valuable, people unions' desire to cut back on competition among and the help of family, friends and neighbors proved a regula: workers combined to pass federal legislation severely the most reliable source of jobs. There were private remaine rationing overseas immigration. The rationing itself employment offices, to be sure. but they were expen cians bl favored the early comers- Germans. Irish, and Britons. sive. unreliable and often fraudulent. Once the job protect In consequence. the history of the metropolis from had been found. the fate of the worker depended upon of work• 1920 to 1940 differs markedly from its earlier experi the patronage of the owner and the tyranny of the order dt ences. During the 1930s, the major urban migrants foreman. There were few remedies for mistreatment, for soci<: were native American farmers driven off their farms harassment, short wages. false clocks and extra hours. that pen by low prices and drought. Those already settled in the lutionar} city subsequently spent many of the following decades democn learning to master their ethnic. religious, and racial THE ROLE OF LABOR twentiet prejudices. for the 1 In a new continent rich in untapped natural Since the eighteenth century, carpenters and masons monopo resources and prolific inventions, the returns to capital had organized themselves into unions. and later. others far exceeded those to labor. Consequently, extremes - especially printers. shoe and textile workers - of wealth and sharp class divisions emerged as the continued the union movement. At mid-century, THE Pt century wore on. For those with capital or access to however. many courts held strikes and workers' DOWN funds. hard work luck and leverage enabled business boycotts of offending firms to be criminal offenses. Yet ~ A mix o people to amass substantial ~rofits from new resources. despite the legal obstacles in boom years. the craft new inventions, new business methods, and the unions and working people's politics made progress. organiza appreciation of land values in the rapidly growing But when economic depressions set in and thousands metropc city. The migrant. however. whether from overseas of men and women became unemployed, organized Only ste or an American farm. who anived in the city without labor and its programs collapsed. Cumber: money had somehow to find a way to advance from So the movement to establish a ten-hour workday the main horse-dr unskilled labor jobs. Machine tending in a factory or fell in the depression of the 1850s, and its revival wa~ construction work offered many a working-class later squelched by the deep depression of 1873 that private c income. Also. white native Americans often found jobs persisted in the form of low wages and prices until the 1850s la as clerks in offices or as sales people. mid-1890s. Yet, bit by bit. craft unions of skilled workers commut "THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS, 1840-1940"
and some factory operatives made headway. Secure streetcars during these same years in time enabled the unions often could be built upon ethnic solidarity. like ci ty to double 1ts settlement radius. those of the German cigar makers and the Philadelphia Even before these transprntation changes had taken English cotton workers. effect. more business and new business began ro create Because factories grew ever larger. and because a new urban element. the modern downtown. The they located within and next to la rge cities. every former merchant and warehouse area split into parts American metropolis experienced massive labor as it grew. The warehouse area expanded and began actions. The railway workers strike of 1877 broke out to attach itself to the new railroad yards. The former in many cities. especially Pittsburgh where workers all-purpose merchant counting houses divided and burned the railroad cars and fired rifles and a cannon subdivided into offices of wholesale and commission at the troops sent to quell the strike. Later the merchants. importers, commodity traders. bankers, Homestead strike in Pittsbu rgh ( 1892). the Pullman insurance and real estate offices. stock brokers. lawyers strike in Chicago ( 1894). the garment workers' strike and surveyors. From this multiplication arose a in New York City (1910). and the silk workers in downtown office concentration of four- and five-story Patterson. New Jersey. ( 1913) proved major events office buildings. Large hotels settled next this co n dividing middle-class voters from their working-class centration~ and dry goods merchants who began to fe llow citizens. These strikes often turned violent expand their offerings for the well-to-do settled their because employers hired private police to attack the stores on the downtown fringe. Nearby, there was often workers. a street of inexpensive stores that catered to th e In 1914. the Clayton Anti-Trust Act established the downtown clerks and working class customers. legality of unions in the United States. but until business Altogether. this downtown base of the mid people and the general public regarded unions as nineteenth century grew and elaborated into a a regular element in American business. labor relations gathering of newspapers. hotels. skyscraper offices remained an urban battleground. Frightened politi buildings, and downtown department stores: Macy's cians built armories next to elite neighborhoods to and Gimbel's in New York. Wannamaker's in protect them from the possible dangers of mobs Philadelphia, Jordan Marsh in Boston, Marshall Field's of workers and established state police corps to keep in Chicago. Only railroads, shipyards, foundries, coal order during strikes. The demands of some workers yards and gas works required large spaces. Everything for socia li sm unleashed a long-standing media attack else fitted into the small lots along the city's streets. that persists to this day. It consci ously muddles revo Whether old like Boston and New York, or new like lutionary socialism and anarchism with sensible social Chicago. small shops. two- and three-family houses, democratic reform proposals. Indeed, during the early boarding houses. factories. workrooms and livery twentieth century. "gas and water socialism" - the call stables mixed in together. This pepper and salt mix for the municipal ownership of streetcar and utility of work and residence created a city of multiethnic monopolies - found acceptance in a number of cities. neighborhoods as immigrants and natives alike settled near their workplaces. A local mortgage market financed much of thi s mixed urban fabric. City THE PHYSICAL CITY AND THE NEW residents with a little capital lent sma ll sums for short DOWNTOWN terms of five to ten years through the agency of downtown brokers to builders and homeowners. By A mix of transportation change and changes in the such a union of small savings, local builders and organization of work set the geography of the new local brokers the beginning of the industrial metropolis metropolis. In the city of 1840, most people walked. was built. Only steam ferries carried any volume of passengers. Cumbersome large coaches called omnibuses ran on the main streets but they were expensive. as were the THE SEGREGATED CITY horse-drawn taxis. Only the rich could afford to keep a .. private carnage The new railroads of the 1840s and In these mid-nineteenth-century decades. only three I'" 1850s laid out what later would become important groups of residents lived separated from everyone else: commuter lines, and the in troduction of horse-drawn the poor (mostly new immigrants). free African m SAM BASS WARNER
Americans. and the wealthy. These years may have and elevated railroads to deal with inner city crowding aside la been the meanest and nastiest time for housing for the and to cany the downtown workers and shoppers to brand pr poor. Landlords cut up old houses into single rooms, their homes. These public carriers allowed the product some in the basement, others without an outside industrial metropolis to spread outwards in a rough cigars a window; a tap for cold running water appeared only in social geometry of poor and African Americans in the flour am some buildings. and privies sat in the back yard Where old inner sections of the city. the working class in date tht there had been an open yard. owners filled the rear multiple housing along the transit lines, and the middle investee spaces. Since these slums grew in the oldest sections class in single and double homes beyond. The resi A&Pg1 of town. they stood near the port and in the shadow dential hallmarks of the twentieth-century metropolis even as of the new downtown. Free African Americans settled were such places as New York's Brooklyn and the stores. T along a few poor streets. poor because they were Bronx, Philadelphia's West Philadelphia, Boston's of fanta: confined by white prejudice to low-paying servant, Roxbury and Dorchester. Chicago's South Side, San billboarc peddler, and wharf-side jobs. A few had managed to Francisco's West Portal and Sunset districts, and the Purer become doctors. lawyers and owners of small busi ever-widening towns and suburbs that were to become ing revo nesses, but they too were not welcome to live among the vast metropolis of Greater Los Angeles. manufac whites. Successful old merchant families and the newly to a cust' rich set themselves apart from the general run of mixed for them neighborhoods. Developers laid out small sections YET ANOTHER STAGE OF URBAN introduc' designed in the latest fashions to cater to these buyers: EVOLUTION custome1 Boston's Beacon Hill and Back Bay, New York's began SE Gramercy Park and Fifth Avenue, Chicago's Gold Because the depression of the 1930s slowed the pace mobiles I Coast, and San Francisco's Nob Hill. of change. from World War I to 1940 the American these ret From these partially differentiated beginnings. industrial metropolis continued along the pathways compani the functionally specialized and socially segregated laid down earlier. Yet. aided by hindsight. it is possible interest r. modem industrial metropolis emerged. Changes in to observe the beginnings of economic and social Urban work and transportation again set the frame. Office changes that would transform these urban regions to planm work, retailing, business services and financial insti once again. Just as it required half a century after 1840 propertie tutions multiplied and expanded to build the crowded for the industrial metropolis to realize its mature estate bo dow11town of large buildings and skyscrapers. The organization, so it took another fifty years for the the subur railroad lines out from the city center became industrial metropolis of the 1920s to fully assume its later patterns gas static corridors for meat packing, railroad equipment of a controlled and government-supported market next to a building. automobile assembly, lumber yards, printing, economy, the dispersed geography of the automobile homes. D piano factories. and shoe and textile mills. Some of and the open social forms of full citizenship for African impingini the largest enterprises, like steel mills and oil refining, Americans and women. like the Ee established satellite cities of their own at the outer During the 1920s, new marketing techniques powering edges of the metropolis: Gary. Indiana; Oakland, addressed the failings of industrial production. At the interests California; Quincy, Massachusetts; Newark and heart of the problem lay the manufacturers' ability to accordin~ Bayonne. New Jersey. make more goods than the wages they paid would and retail The railroads that supported these concentrations allow people to purchase. In consequence, the indus types. Ne • also facilitated the expansion of the earlier elite settle trial economy fluctuated between full production at 1915. and ments, while the high cost of rail commuting kept robust prices and over-supply, distress prices, lay-offs. on by fe• most residents out. Luxury suburbs extended outwards unemployment and the inadequate aid of municipal metropoli from their old inner bases: Boston's Brookline and soup kitchens and wood yards. mentplar western suburbs, Philadelphia's Main Line. New York's A partial solution lay in understandings among firms A post Long Island, and Chicago's North Shore communities. to keep prices uniform and steady while competing in urbs that r Most residents in the late nineteenth century and marketing. Two steps needed to be taken. Wholesale and elev< the early decades of the twentieth depended initially distributors needed to be eliminated because they ' did not on the horse car and then. after 1890, on its improve manipulated prices to their advantage when a glut Suburban ment. the electric streetcar. Boston. New York, occurred. Manufacturers, therefore, must undertake modest in Philadelphia, and Chicago also constructed subways their own distribution. Second, manufacturers must set process c 'THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS, 1840-1940'
aside large budgets for advertising, packaging, and borhoods began during these years. The popularity of brand promotion. Nationally advertised and distributed the new machine and its rapid diffusion brought daily products multiplied during these years: soft drinks. traffic jams to the downtown. Cities spent enormous cigars and cigarettes. automobiles. radios. packaged sums to pave streets and make traffic improvements flour and cereals. Investment bankers began to appre since in these years neither state nor federal funds were ciate the possibilities of large-scale retailing and they available for use on city roadways. By 1940, glimpses invested in chains of stores like Woolworth's and of the future automobile metropolis appeared. The A & P groceries. The banking firm. Lehman Brothers. immensely popular General Motors Futurama exhibit even assembled a chain of downtown department at the New York World's Fair in 1939 demonstrated a stores. The city's downtown now attained a new level region of continuous automobile flow. Even then, some of fantasy with elegant store windows. advertising new highways had been built or were building: the billboards and bright theater lights. Pasadena Freeway in Los Angeles. the Pennsylvania Purchases on time contracts completed the market Turnpike, the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. and ing revolution. With sales of goods "on time," the the first miles of Boston's circumferential highway, manufacturer and storekeeper literally give their wares Route 128. to a customer in return for the patron's promise to pay for them sometime in the future. John Wannamaker introduced charge cards for his department store THE MODERN URBAN ECONOMY customers. others soon followed. Until General Motors began selling cars on time payments in 1919, auto Neither the federal government nor the states mobiles had been bought with cash. Soon. alongside restrained the banking system dwing the 1920s so that these retail innovations, consumer installment loan developers over-borrowed to build city apartment companies sprang up to lend small sums at high houses and suburban homes. Some developers even interest rates. established small banks to furnish themselves with Urban housing underwent a similar transformation capital. During the boom that peaked in 1926, the to planned marketing. Developers of large suburban local mortgage market became more and more one properties and owners of expensive center city real of banks and insurance companies and less and less estate both wanted security for their investments. In one oflocal lenders and their brokers. [n consequence. the sub u rb~. the enemies were the cheap house. store. the overextension of mortgages and consumer credit gas Stcttion. bar or apartment house that might settle on time purchases joined the uncontrolled inter next to an area planned for medium to high priced national banking, stock and bond markets in a disas homes. Downtown. fear took form of factory buildings trous collapse. By contrast, during the 1970s the new impinging on a retail street. or a monster building, metropolis was sustained in its building and prosperity like the Equitable Life Insurance Company offices over by federal regulation of banks and mortgages. Also powering their neighbors. In consequence. these the federal Cold War budget financed extensive gov interests promoted zoning laws that controlled la nd ernment purchases that in tum made up for any according to categories of use like residential, industrial shortfall in consumers' ability to buy. and retail. and also set forth some limits on building The American public and American business people types. New York City assumed the innovator's role in have never been able to settle upon an institution 1915. and soon zon ing spread from state to state urged that would counterbalance the power of employers. on by fed eral encouragement. The uniformities of Owing World War I. in order to maintain full produc metropolitan suburbs have their origins in these invest tion, the federal government oversaw labor relations ment planning and marketing strategies of the 1920s. and even nationalized the railroads to see that they A post-World War l housing boom filled out sub were managed efficiently. The experience offered urbs that railway commuters and streetcar and subway some precedents that might have been adapted to and elevated ri ders had begun. but the automobile peacetime. Instead. the Russian Revolution and fears did not yet alter the shape of rhe metropolis. of socialism fostered a violent attack on unions as they ,.., Suburbanization in the 1920s did draw many famili es of launched strikes in 1919-1922 to offset wartime price I ' modest incomes outward, and in consequence the long inflation. The union movement did not recover from process of reduci ng the density of inner-city neigh- these attacks until the 1930s and the massive industnal S AM BAS S W ARNER
~ I rikes 111 1he dlllun1obik: J11d s1n:l 1n< fu;;tries. /\ 1cfrHllH.'d Lve11 the Lowell cot ron sµ111ning and >.,\'eav1 rig girls. iL·<.krJI udn 1ir1is1ral io11 Jlso L'SldblishcJ the 1ulcs r·ot :;ub1ects ol a 111uch-admirccJ pdlCll1ill is! ic rna11agcrnen t. r 01ga11iz11 1g JrtJ colll'cliVl' ba1gil1ni ng. Thl'rc'. lol lU\·icd wc!ll ou t 011,; t11kc i11 183·'1 dlld 1836. Aiso. rrndolc-class the Wot id Wa i 11 uniot111<1t10 11 ol J la r;:c sq.(111c1li ol d nt.! \Vl'dithy WOllll'll livi11g Ill li te /\!Yll'llCdl) illt:trnp 1.vo tkcrs thd! µroved <111 i111cgrJl l'icincnt i1! Ilic.' Ii.Iler oli~; es hctd d long and disringui:>hcd his1ory ot dwrny I 1 C factories and mean streets and slum houses of the mid An account by a woman who went to the villages and nineteenth centu1y gave few clues for what lay ahead. saw the rural destruction process in action is Emily Although automobiles sold by the millions before Greened Balch. Our Slavic Fellow Ci1izens ( 191 O: reprint. 1940. it was only with the building of the interstate New York: Arno Press. 1969). highway system tha t some of the possibilities of an On the role of boarding houses . see Thomas Butler automobile-dominated metropolis began to reveal Gunn. The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses themselves. Once again the machme and its roadways (1857: reprint. New Brunswick. NJ Rutgers University disguised the complex processes of economic. social Press. 2009) and cultural adapta tion: the destruction of the inherited downtowns. the collapse of urban public education, On the role of labor, see David Brody. Jn Labor's Cause. the heightened segregation of race and class. the Civil Main Themes on the History ofthe American Worker(New Rights and Feminis t movements. the isolation of York: Oxford University Press. 1993). For the impact of fami lies and the rush of women into the workplace. labor strife on the urban landscape, se e Robert M . Fogelson, Amen·ca's Armories: Architecture, Society and Public Order (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS Press, 1989). On the new downtowns. see Mona Domosh. Invented For a study of the parallel changes in two surprise cities. Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth Century see Harold L. Platt. Shock Cities: Th e Environmental New York and Boston (New Haven, CT: Yale University Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago Press. 1996). and Robert M. Fogelson. Downtown. (Chicago. IL University of Chicago Press, 2005). its Rise and Fall 1880-1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2001). A wonderful novel about the Russian Jewish immi grants' move into the garment industry in New York Kenneth A Scherzer provides a very careful and City is Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky convincing qualitative study of urban settlement ( 191 7; New York: Harper & Row. 1960). patterns. The reader will be helped by accompanying it with some picture histories in his The Unbounded On biopower and the use of animals. see Clay Community Neighborhood Life and Social Structure McShane and Joel A. Tarr. The Horse and the City in New York City. 1830-1875 (Durham, NC Duke (Baltimore. MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. University Press, 1992): also see John A Kouwenhoven, 2007). Th e Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Garden City. NY: Doubleday. 1953) and Harold M. Mayer and For a detailed portrait of the ways of a fully indus Richard C. Wade, Chicago. Growth of a Metropolis trialized city at the tum of the nineteenth century with (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1969). excellent illustrations, two volumes are especially relevant: Paul Underwood Kellogg, Pittsburgh Survey. On the methods whereby the nineteenth-century six vo ls. (New York: Charities Publication Committee, metropolis was built. see Elizabeth Blackmar. 1909- 1914): Crystal Eastman. Work-Accidenis and the Manhattan for Rent J 785- 1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Law. vol 2; M argaret F. Byington, Homestead The University Press. ·1989) and Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Households of a Mill Town , vol. 4. Suburbs (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 1962). The full report on Fogel's urban demographic research For descriptions of mid-nineteenth-century slums. is in Robert William Fogel. The Conquest of High see John H. Griscom. The Sanitary Condition of the Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America. NBER Laboring Population ofNew York with Suggestions for its Working Paper Series on Histoncal Factors in Long Run Imp rovement (1848; reprint. New York: Amo Press, Rates of Growth. Histonca/ Paper J6 (Cambridge. MA: 1970) and Oscar Handlin, Boston's immigrants. 2nd edn National Bureau of Economic Research, 1990): a short (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 1967). summary appears in Robert William Fogel. The Escape ,, from Hunger and Premature Death, I 700- 2100. Europe, On the African American Big City Experience. se e ' America and the Third World (New York: Cambridge Roger Lane, William Dorsey's Phi!ade!phw and Ours ' University Press. 2004). (New York: Oxford Universi ty Press, 1991 ). . .; ~; ,, i ~- ;' < .: 1 Kenneth T. Jackson Editors' Introduction As Friedrich Engels (p. 46), Sam Bass Warner (p. 55), Robert Bruegmann (p. 211 ), Robert Fishman (p. 75) , and others have shown, suburbia has a long history, extending back at least as far as the European and American railway suburbs that arose as retreats from the polluted industrial cities for the comfortable middle class. But suburbanization took on new form and historical significance in th e 1920s and in the years following World War II. The initial locus was the United States, and the catalyzing technology was the automobile. In Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson, sometimes called the dean of American urban historians, provides a sweeping overview of the "suburban revolution" in the United States. In the chapter entitled "The Drive-in Culture of Contemporary Am erica," he lays out a devastating critique of the mostly negative social and cultural effects that the private au tomobile has had on urban society. Kenneth Jackson did not originate the critique of suburbia. Indeed, the suburban developments of the 1940s, t 950s, and 1960s in North America and elsewhere gave birth to a massive literature, most of it highly critical. Damned as culturally dead and socially and racially segregated, the post-World War II suburbs were called "sprawl" and stigmatized as "anti-cities" (to use Lewis Mumford's term to describe Los Angeles). Titles such as John Keats's The Crack in the Picture Window (1956), Richard Gordon's The Split-level Trap (1961), Mark Baldassare's Trouble in Paradise (1986), Robert Fogelson's Bourgeois Nightmares (2005), David Goetz's Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburb from Killing Your Soul (2007), and Saralee Rosenberg's Dear Neighbor, Drop Dead (2008) capture the tone of much of the commentary. Indeed, James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere (1993) calls the automobile suburbs "the evil empire," Joel S. Hirschhorn titles his analysis Sprawl Kills (2005), and another radical analysis screams Bomb the Suburbs (2001) ! Nevertheless, Jackson's well-documented analysis of the artifacts of suburban culture - everything from three-car garages to drive-in churches - stands as the definitive statement on how the automobile transformed both the structure and social life of modern cities. Kenneth T. Jackson (b. 1939) is the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University. He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago and is a past president of the Urban History Association and the Organization of American Historians. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 201 O) and the author of several influential books including The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (Chicago, IL: I. R. Dee, 1992) and Cities in American History, with Stanley Schultz ., (New York: Knopf, 1 972). Jackson has been called an "urban pessimist" because of his dark view of suburbanization ,.., - a cu rrent work in progress on American transportation policy is entitled The Road to Hell - but in a recent I interview he noted that he now sees "a ray of hope" for cities "after a long decline." m KENNETH T. JACKSON Classic works on suburb~ include Herbert Gans, The Levittowners (New York: Pantheon, 1967), remarkablf3 · " wheel dri" for its overall positive view of middle-class tract-home life, Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of engines. Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Al thou; Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). For a representative collection of analy1ical American essays on the subject, see Becky Nicolaides and Andrew W ieze (eds), The Suburb Reader (London: Routledge, John B. Re 2006). that "mod< Other studies of suburbia include J. Eric Oliver, Democracy in Suburbia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University and could Press, 2001 ), Mark Salzman, Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia (New York: Vintage, 1995), Valerie fundarnent C. Johnson, Black Power in the Suburbs (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: in the Unit1 Life and Politics in the Working-class Suburbs of Los Angeles (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), advised hi~ Adam Rome, The Bulldozer and the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism carandbui (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ), Oliver Gillham, The Limitless City: A Primer on the Urban course, the Sprawl Debate (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), and Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields in the Ami and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003). For a different view - spirited defenses of "sprawl" Morgan no as an age-old natural process of urban expansion - see Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago, to serve a IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) (p. 211) and Paul Barker, The Freedoms of Suburbia (London: Frances "a complett Lincoln, 2009) . • THEINTE The postwar years brought unprecedented prosperity nonfatal injuries per year. Automobility proved to be far The most pc to the United States, as color televisions. stereo more deadly than war for the United States. It was as in 1939 wa. systems. frost-free freezers. electric blenders. and if a Pearl Harbor attack took place on the highways twenty-five automatic garbage disposals became basic equipment every two weeks. with crashes becoming so common like flight th in the middle-class American home. But the best place that an entire industry sprang up to provide in hour-long symbol of individual success and identity was a sleek, medical. legal, and insurance services for the victims. walkabove1 air-conditioned. high-powered. personal statement on The environmental cost was almost as high as Bel Geddes wheels. Between 1950 and 1980. when the American the human toll. In 1984 the 159 million cars, trucks, automated< population increased by 50 percent. the number of and buses on the nation's roads were guzzling millions model cities their automobiles increased by 200 percent. In high of barrels of oil every day, causing traffic jams that impressive a school the most important rite of passage came to be shattered nerves and clogged the cities they were building the the earning of a driver's license and the freedom to supposed to open up and turning much of the country energies, ou press an accelerator to the floor. Educational admin side to pavement. Not surprisingly, when gasoline it will come i istrators across the country had to make parking space shortages created long lines at the pumps in 197 4 The pron for hundreds of student vehicles. A car became one's and 1979, behavioral scientists noted that many people roadways a identity. and the important question was: "What does experienced anger, depression, frustration, and in including the he drive?" Not only teenagers, but also millions of older security, as well as a formidable sense of loss. state-highwa persons literally defined themselves in terms of the Such reactions were possible because the auto the America number. cost. style, and horsepower of their vehicles. mobile and the suburb have combined to create a American Pa 'Escape." thinks a character in a novel by Joyce Carol drive-in culture that is part of the daily experience of the road, the Oates. "As long as he had his own car he was an most Americans . .. Moreover. the American people the journey. ": American and could not die." have proven to be no more prone to motor vehicle legislation to Unfortunately, Americans did die. often behind the purchases than the citizens of other lands. After rather than c wheel. On September 9, 1899. as he was stepping off a World War II . the Europeans and the Japanese began transit. In 19 streetcar at 74th Street and Central Park West in New to catch up. and by 1980 both had achieved the same American Re York, Henry H. Bliss was struck and killed by a motor level of automobile ownership that the United States Motors as tht vehicle, thus becoming the first fatality in the long had reached in 1950. In automotive technology, enterprise s< war between flesh and steel. Thereafter, the carnage American dominance slipped away in the postwar industry. By t increased almost annually until Americans were sus years as German, Swedish. and Japanese engineers most broad-b taining about 50,000 traffic deaths and about 2 million pioneered the development of diesel engines. front- the oil. rubber "THE DRIVE-IN CULTURE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICA• m wheel drives. disc brakes, fuel-injection, and rotary car dealers and renters; the trucking and-bus concerns; engines. the banks and advertising agencies that depended Although it is not accurate to speak of a uniquely upon the companies involved; and the labor unions. American love affair with the automobile, and although On the local level. professional real estate groups John B. Rae claimed too much when he wrote in 1971 and home-builders' associations joined the movement that "modem suburbia is a creature of the automobile in the hope that highways would cause a spurt in and could not exist without it." the motor vehicle has housing turnover and a jump in prices. They envisaged fundamentally restructured the pattern of everyday life no mere widening of existing roads, but the creation in the United States. As a young man. Lewis Mumford of an entirely new superhighway system and the advised his countrymen to "forget the damned motor initiation of the largest peacetime construction project car and build cities for lovers and friends." As it was. of in history. course. the nation followed a different pattern. Writing [... ) in the Amen·can Builder in 1929, the critic Willard Sensitive to mounting political pressure. President Morgan noted that the building of drive-in structures Dwight Eisenhower appointed a committee in 1954 to serve a motor-driven population had ushered in to "study" the nation's highway requirements. Its con "a completely new architectural form." clusions were foregone. in part because the chairman was Lucius D. Clay. a member of the board of directors of General Motors. The committee considered no THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY alternative to a massive highway system, and it sug gested a major redirection of national policy to benefit The most popular exhibit at the New York World's Fair the car and the truck. The Interstate Highway Act in 1939 was General Motors' "Futurama." Looking became law in 1956. when the Congress provided for twenty-five years ahead, it offered a "magic Aladdin a 41 ,000-rnile (eventually expanded to a 42.500-rnile) like flight through time and space." Fair-goers stood system. with the federal government paying 90 percent in hour-long lines. waiting to travel on a moving side- of the cost. President Eisenhower gave four reasons . walk above a huge model created by designer Norman for signing the measure: current highways were unsafe; Bel Geddes. Miniature superhighways with 50,000 cars too often became snarled in traffic jams; poor automated cars wove past model farms en route to roads saddled business with high costs for trans . model cities ... The message of "Futurama" was as portation; and modem highways were needed because impressive as its millions of model parts: "The job of "in case of atomic attack on our key cities. the road net building the future is one which will demand our best must permit quick evacuation of target areas." Not a energies, our most fruitful imagination; and that with single word was said about the impact of highways on it will come greater opportunities for all." cities and suburbs. although the concrete thoroughfares The promise of a national system of impressive and the thirty-five-ton tractor-trailers which used roadways attracted a diverse group of lobbyists, them encouraged the continued outward movement including the Automobile Manufacturers Association, of industries toward the beltways and interchanges. state-highway administrators. motor-bus operators. Moreover. the interstate system helped continue the the American Trucking Association. and even the downward spiral of public transportation and virtually · American Parking Association - for the more cars on guaranteed that future urban growth would perpetuate the road, the more cars would be parked at the end of a centerless sprawl .. . the journey. Truck companies. for example. promoted [ . .. ) legislation to spend state gasoline taxes on highways. The inevitable result of the bias in American rather than on schools. hospitals. welfare. or public transport funding. a bias that existed for a generation transit In 1943 these groups came together as the before the Interstate Highway program was initiated. American Road Builders Association. with General is that the United States now has the world's best road .~otors as the largest contributor. to form a lobbying system and very nearly its worst public transit offer enterprise second only to that of the munitions ings. Los Angeles, in particular. provides the nation's industry. By the mid-1950s, it had become one of the most dramatic example of urban sprawl tailored to most broad-based of all pressure groups. consisting of the mobility of the automobile. Its vast. amorphous lhe oil, rubber. asphalt. and construction industries; the conglomeration of housing tracts. shopping centers. m KENNETH T. JACKSON · inaustrial plirks, freeways; ·and "irrdependent towns similar to a horse - dependable amHmportant, but. -"arc blend into each other in a seamless fabric of concrete not something that one needed to be close to in the Fror and asphalt. and nothing over the years has succeeded evening. in t<: in gluing this automobile-oriented civilization into By 1935, however, the garage was beginning to of th any kind of cohesion - save that of individual routine. merge into the house itself, and in 1937 the Architectural gari' Los Angeles's basic shape comes from three factors, Record noted that "the garage has become a very mote all of which long preceded the freeway system. The essential part of the residence.· The tendency accel A first was cheap land (in the 1920s rather than 1970s) erated after World War II. as alleys went the way of mote and the desire for single-family houses. In 1950, for the horse-drawn wagon. as property widths more city. example, nearly two-thirds of all the dwelling units often exceeded fifty feet. and as the car became not eve!) in the Los Angeles area were fully detached, a much only a status symbol. but almost a member of the size. I higher percentage than in Chicago (28 percent). New family, to be cared for and sheltered. The introduction granc York City (20 percent), or Philadelphia (15 percent), of a canopied and unenclosed structure called a "car or NE and its residential density was the lowest of major port" represented an inexpensive solution to the were . cities. The second was the dispersed-location of its problern. particularly in mild climates. but in the 1950s the CE oil fields and refineries, which led to the creation the enclosed garage was back in favor and a necessity comn of industrial suburbs like Whittier and Fullenon and of even in a tract house. Easy access to the automobile hotel• residential suburbs like La Habra. which housed oil became a key aspect of residential design, and not only businE workers and their families. The third was its once for the well-to-do. By the 1960s garages often occupied Bel excellent mass transit system. which at its peak about 400 square feet (about one-third that of the numbi included more than 1, 100 miles of track and constituted house itself) and usually contained space for two auto ovemi the largest electric interurban railway in the world. mobiles and a variety oflawn and woodworking tools. first tOl [... ] Offering direct access to the house {a conveniently the roa placed door usually led directly into the kitchen). ground the garage had become an integrated part of the and ou THE GARAGE dwelling, and it dominated the front facades of new which houses. In California garages and driveways were arrang1 The drive-in structure that is closest to the hearts, often so prominent that the house could almost be trees. I bodies, and cars of the American family is the garage. described as accessory to the garage. Few people, lishmer It is the link between the home and the outside world. however. went to the extremes common in England, by 192 The word is French, meaning storage space. but where the automobile was often so precious that living them. n its transformation into a multipurpose enclosure rooms were often converted to garages. internally integrated with the dwelling is distinctively [t \\ American. and W< [ .. J THE MOTEL Inn" on After World War I, house plans of the expensive that. in variety began to include garages, and by the mid- As the United States became a rubber-tire civilization, had COJ 1920s driveways were commonplace and garages a new kind of roadside architecture was created establis! had become important selling points. The popular 1928 to convey an instantly recognizable image to the outside Home Builders pattern book offered designs for fifty fast-moving traveler. Criticized as tasteless, cheap. MotE garages in wood, Tudor, and brick varieties. In affluent forgettable, and flimsy by most commentators, typical E sections, such large and efficiently planned structures drive-in structures did attract the attention of some than th E included housing above for the family chauffeur. In talented architects, most notably Los Angeles's for price less pretentious neighborhoods. the small, single Richard Neutra. For him, the automobile symbolized ing publ purpose garages were scarcely larger than the vehicles modernity, and its design paralleled his own ideals of were 26 themselves ... Although there was a tendency to precision and efficiency. This correlation between Hard-we move garages closer to the house, they typically the structure and the car began to be celebrated in t:tie families. remained at the rear of the property before 1925. often late 1960s and 1970s when architects Robert Venturi, a figure with access via an alley which ran parallel to the Denise Scott Brown. and Steven Izenour developed an old h street. The car was still thought of as something such concepts as "architecture as symbol" and the America 'THE DRIVE · IN CULTURE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICA' m. "architecture of communication." Their book, Leaming urban America '. a plastic and glass Shangri-La was From Las Vegas. was instrumental in encouraging a shift rising to take its place. in taste from general condemnation to appreciation [ . . .) of the commercial strip and especially of the huge and garish signs which were easily recognized by passing motorists. THE DRIVE-IN THEATER A ubiquitous example of the drive-in culture is the motel. In the middle of the nineteenth century, every The downtown movie theaters and old vaudeville city. every county seat, every aspiring mining town. houses faced a similar challenge from the automobile. every wide place in the road with aspirations to larger In 1933 Richard M. Hollinshead set up a 16-mm size. had to have a hotel. Whether such structures were projector in front of his garage in Riverton. New Jersey. grand palaces on the order of Boston's Tremont House and then settled down to watch a movie. Recognizing or New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel. or whether they a nation addicted to the motorcar when he saw one. were jerry-built shacks, they were typically located at Hollinshead and Willis Smith opened the world's first the center of the business district, at the focal point of drive-in movie in a forty-car parking lot in Camden community activities. To a considerable extent, the on June 6, 1933. Hollinshead profited only slightly hotel was the place for informal social interaction and from his brainchild, however. because in 1938 the business, and the very heart and soul of the city. United States Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal Between 1910 and 1920, however. increasing against Loew's Theaters, thus accepting the argument numbers of traveling motorists created a market for that the drive-in movie was not a patentable item. The overnight accommodation along the highways. The idea never caught on in Europe, but by 1958 more than first tourists simply camped wherever they chose along four thousand outdoor screens dotted the American the road. By 1924, several thousand municipal camp landscape. Because drive-ins offered bargain-base grounds were opened which offered cold water spigots ment prices and double or triple bills. the theaters and outdoor privies. Next came the "cabin camps." tended to favor movies that were either second-run or which consisted of tiny, white clapboard cottages second-rate. Horror films and teenage romance were arranged in a semicircle and often set in a grove of the order of the night ... Pundits often commented trees. Initially called "tourist courts.· these estab that there was a better show in the cars than on the lishments were cheap, convenient, and informal. and screen. by 1926 there were an estimated two thousand of In the 1960s and 1970s the drive-in movie began to them, mostly in the West and in Florida. slip in popularity. Rising fuel costs and a season that [.. l lasted only six months contributed to the problem, but It was not until 1952 that Kemmons Wilson skyrocketing land values were the main factor. When and Wallace E. Johnson opened their first "Holiday drive-ins were originally opened, they were typically Inn" on Summer Avenue in Memphis. But long before out in the hinterlands. When subdivisions and shop that, in 1926, a San Luis Obispo, California. proprietor ping malls came closer, the drive-ins could not match had coined a new word. "motel," to describe an the potential returns from other forms of investments. establishment that allowed a guest to park his car just According to the National Association of Theater outside his room ... Owners, only 2,935 open-air theaters still operated -Motels began to thrive after World War II, when the in the United States in 1983, even though the total lypical establishment was larger and more expensive number of commercial movie screens in the nation, than the earlier cabins. Major chains set standards 18,772, was at a thirty-five-year high. The increase for prices, services, and respectability that the travel picked up not by the downtown and the neighborhood ing public could depend on. As early as 1948, there theaters. but by new multiscreen cinemas in shopping we~ 26,000 self-styled motels in the United States. centers. Realizing that the large parking Jots of indoor Hard-won respectability attracted more middle-class malls were relatively empty in the evening, shopping families, and by 1960 there were 60.000 such places. center moguls came to regard theaters as an important I figure that doubled again by 1972. By that time part of a successful retailing mix. al old hotel was closing somewhere in downtown America every thirty hours. And somewhere in sub- "THE DRIVE·IN CU LT URE OF CO NTEMPOR ARY AM E RICA ' u1ban shopping. Pro totypicai ot rhe new bree d was way of lite .'.lS they searched for work. :rny work. Tht:y fyso 11's Corner. on rh c Washington Beltway in Fa 11fox lound that these t. empo1a1y trailers on rubber tn es Cou nty. Virginia. Anchored by Bloomingdale·s. it did provided th e necessa1y :;helter while also meeting their over $ 165 million in business in 1983 and provided economic and migratory requirements. rvteanwhile. employment to more th an 14.llOO persons. Even W ally Byam an d orher designers were streamlining la rger was Long Isla nd's Roosevelt Field. a 180 -sw re. the mobile home into thl' cla~·:s ic rear-drop lomi made 2 2 million square foot megamall that Jrtractcd 27 5.000 fa mous by Airstream. visitors a week an d did $230 million in business in During World War If. the United Stutes government I l lJBO . Most e! pdt'~ -'. d _: /~- L·n in;)it ·· ~ e \·.-' !r!; in1cr il:r !1Jn~~: , hi11 f :,:-: _ c, if~li:L; _ third. !)o!h :n C .. :lifuinid_ upt·ned ! 1 1 1 :hd! ··::ould u ;~ ICl\ \" '.': 1 _ !~~l\t .' hct: 1: ~ 1 ".: .. :iL:i :k· IU biuc- ! !V :: !O/t lh of irnil~l!ur~; _ !.dtl.' ill J()H :L Ori dP intvr:--. tdil' i j c11!!; ir .,,; nfkei :< t:c\\~\' tnil!!~t:d :.:o:.:;1les .•l! !d rcti;c:d hi~_J1v-:dy north of \li11nc.Jpo! ;\. ~lcl) .:.n~dltf~ ~)C~!1 dn nl·r <..: llfJ:-, cn1!>,!ruct1on ot' the 1110 ;:.: r cornplc!c dl"iVL~-:r1 co1npk'\ in ihc ., ·.:01icL ·ru he l_·allt.;d \lcStnp. i{ v;i!i J'c~11u n ; ,J ;nutt~L gd :--: st<.1ti on, ccHl'd..:nicnc1 ' :-:. ro rt?. i.l11d. u! co1.u-:~t'. A DRIVE-IN SOCIETY d '.\lcI)ona!d\ !L'siauranL [. .J Drive-in n~ofl•i s. d rive-in rnovie.-.-.. d!Jd ~! 1 · ivc - :n .'t hOpp!r ~-~ fdt'i!i1ics \\"t.:n: only Si li con VJlley. Stretch ing rrurn Palo Alto on the north Manufacturing is now cimong rhe most cfopersed tu 1he garlic and lettuce fieids of Cilroy ro 1he south. of nonresidential activities. As the proportion of indus Sdnta Cl ar:1 County has the v,·oricL; rno':t ex tensive trial 1obs m the United States work force fell from c onct ~ lltration of electronics concerns . In I 940. how 29 percent to 23 percenr of the total in the 1970s. those €: ve r, it was best known tor prunes Jnd apricots, and rnanufacrnnng emerprises that survived often re ;r was nor um.ii after World War II that its largest city, located either to the suburbs or to the lower-cosr South San Jose, al so became rhe nanon 's largest suburb. With and West f(;wc r than 70.000 residents in 19,10, San Jose exploded Office functions. once rhoughr to be securely w 636.000 by 1980, superseding San Francisco as the anchored to the streets of big rn1es. have followed r.he :·egion's largest municipality . suburban trend. fn the nineteenth ce ntury, businesses The numbers were larger 1n California. bu t rhe tried to kt•ep all their operations under one centralized pancm was the same on the edges o f' ev f:ry American roof. ft was the most efficient way to run a company ·~ lty . from Buffalo Grove and Schaumburg near Chicago. when the mails were slow and uncertain and communi rn Germantown and Collierville near Memphis, to cation among employees was limited to the distance Creve Coeur and Ladue near St. Louis. And perhaps that a human voice could carry. More recently, the 111ore important than the growing number of people economics of real es tate and a revolunon in commurn \ivrng outside ot ciry boundaries was rhe sheer physical carions have changed these circumstances. and many sprawl of metropolitan areas. Between 1950 and 1970, companies are now balkarnzing their accounting the urbanized area of W ashington, DC grew from departments, data -process ing divisi ons. and billing 18 l to 523 squa re miles, of Miami from 116 to 429, departments. Just as insurance companies. branch while in the larger megalopolises of New York, banks, regional sales staffs. and doctors' offices have Chicago. and Los Angeles. the region ot settlement reduced their costs and presumably increased their was measured in the thousands of squa re miles. accessibiliry by moving to suburban locations. so also have back-office fun ctions been splining away from front offices and moving away from central business fHE DECENTRALIZATION OF FACTORIES districts . ~ND OFFICES [. l Si nce World War fl. the American people have rhe deconcentrarion of post-World War If American experienced a transfo rmation of the manmade :iti es was not simply a ma tter of split-level homes and environment around them. Commercial. residential. ieighbmhood schools. [t involved almost every facet and industrial stru ctures have been redesigned to fit if national lite. from manufacturing to shopping to the needs of the motorist rather than the pedestrian irofess1onal services. Mosr impo1tantly. it 1w1oived the Garish signs, large parkrng lots, one-v1ay streets, d1ive xauon of the workplace. and the erosion of the in windows, and throw-away fast-food buildings - all oncept of suburb as a place from which wage-earners associated with the world of suburbia - have replaced omrnuted daily to jobs in the cent er. So far had the the slower-paced. neighborhood-oriented ins ti tutions ·end progressed by 1970 that in nine of the filteen of an ea rl ier generation. Some obse1-vers of the auto 1rgest metropolitan areas suburbs were the p1incipal mobile revolution have argued that the car has created uurccs of employment, and 1n some ci ti es . like San a new ancl better urban environment and tha t the ranci sco. aimost three--fourths of all work tnps were change in spanal sc ale. base d upon swift tra nspor Y people who neither lived nor worked in the core lati on. has focmed a ne'..v kind of organic entity, ty. ln Wilmington. Delaware, 66 percent of area jobs speeding up personal communication and rendering 1 l 940 were in the core city; by 1970. th e figure had obsolete the older urban settings. Lewis Mumford, dien below onc-·q uaner. And despite the fact that writing from his small-wwn retreat in Amerna, New bnhattan contained the world's highest concen York. has ernphJucally disagreed. His prize-winning arion of off;ce space and bw;iness activity. in 1970, book. The Cuv in Hiswry, was a celebration of the -'VUc 78 Dercem of r.he residenrs in the Nt:w York medieval community and an excoriation of "the ; ~; u rb ::; d.;o ·Norked in the suburbs. Many outlying formless urban exudation· that he saw Amencan ' ~'1ffi\J5'ities thus achieved a kind of Jutonomy fro m ci ties becoming He noted that the automobile rnega ''elder •iowntown areas . lopoiis wa s not a fi nal st age in ci ty development bur an KEN NETH T 1AC KSON •\ ;e c~n 1 :. 11:lc'1:::. :, . · 1.. h; .: 11.:d •.'l''i\'11•1u11·> .. 1f : \: (' ·,1;",u -.:. :.:: ..1:1 ; 'l it: hund•1.' d :nuu<.. .1n , \ ,;::;;1)\in,: ..; : ,;'!'.''!.:·; '·'r :. :'1J ' ''-'1 -.-.:' up .1n hi'--.!•:1r\1. \:1rn l: n:1rk . ;i :·:•. :1 t' 11u1 •ht: qu;.i1tc1 -c1'i:l"ry uf •h1:1: ,:1«:<:i1 \w\\·;;L"t l:cl. rhc :; !i11pp11"'~ c:c nt 1: !· •.:;h:•J\ :1 ' \· o\uti tir:11.cd 1.J. tn ~, C I . 1nv1