CHAPTER 5
Whether celebrated by artists as some sort of precious flower or cursed by social critics as a kind of cancer, the American city stood at the center of civilization in the Gilded Age. It, and not man, was the glass of fashion and the mold of form. As sociologist Philip Slater explained a century later, “‘Civilized’ means, literally, ‘citified’, and the state of the city is an accurate index of the condition of the culture as a whole.”
In the late nineteenth century, American cities were unsurpassed for the scope of their activities, the scale of their skyscrapers, and their general spectacle and sound. Their rate of growth was astonishing. Whereas in 1860 only one American in six lived in a community of at least 8,000 people, by 1900, one in three did so. Between 1860 and 1900 the urban population rose four times, whereas the rural population only doubled. For every town dweller who went to live on the farm, there were twenty countryfolk who moved to the city. The new urban civilization was not spread evenly among the states. In the South, the mountain states, and the plains cities were few and far between. The huge developing cities flourished with industry mainly in the Northeast, by the Great Lakes, and along the Pacific Coast.
During the Gilded Age the railroad revolution in transportation and the telegraph revolution in communication both served to bring widely distant cities into the same commercial basin. Breweries, refineries, steel mills, and meatpacking plants, previously dispersed, were brought around the major rail terminals. Railroads attracted transcontinental trade to Chicago and St. Louis in the Midwest, and to Denver, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles in the Far West. Some cities manufactured regional farm products and prospered in the process: Minneapolis made flour from wheat, Milwaukee made beer from cereals, and Memphis made oil from cottonseed. They attained metropolitan status because of their manufacturing services. Others developed because they used local labor to make or sell goods not produced nearby. This was the job of mill towns in the Northeast and the Midwest. While Albany made shirts, Troy, nearby, made collars. New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts, produced cotton textiles. Elizabeth, New Jersey, made electrical machinery, and Dayton made machine tools and cash registers. Bridgeport, Connecticut, combined the worlds of metal and cloth by producing brass, corsets, and machine tools. Such towns were able to benefit from mechanical and industrial technology because it was based on the traditional processes of iron and steam on which they themselves were built.
Cities not only provided markets for agriculture and labor for industry but also stimulated economic growth in their own right. Just as postwar railroad expansion was coming to an end, developing cities provided necessary, new opportunities for industry with their insatiable needs for private housing and public buildings, street construction and lighting, transportation and other services. As architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson (1979) puts it: “Upward and outward moved the city. New or vastly enlarged communities came into being: the ghetto for the immigrant, the suburb for the middle and upper classes, and the resort or spa for those who could afford to escape.” Thus, city dwellers were diverse in ethnic origins, education, occupation, style, and standard of living.
Given the amazing changes taking place in the United States during the Gilded Age, it is not surprising that after the Civil War the American city was transformed from big city to industrial metropolis by the turn of the century. The paradigm of each was New York circa 1870 and Chicago circa 1890. Other cities came to resemble them in their particular heyday more than they did their former selves. These two cities also provide an architectural prototype and a social archetype of each period:
“Not since Nineveh/Not since Sidon/Not since Jericho started sliding”—these lyrics celebrating city grandeur and variety in Kismet might have been written about the great American industrial metropolises toward the close of the nineteenth century, with their profusion of soaring, sepia-colored skyscrapers—giant buildings made possible by such new advances in construction, communication, and transportation as steel frames and piping, elevators, telephones, and electric light. This photograph of Randolph Street east from LaSalle Street, Chicago, was taken in 1900 by the Detroit Publishing Company. (Library of Congress.)
in New York in 1870, the so-called dumbbell tenement and the city boss, William Marcy Tweed; in Chicago in 1890, the skyscraper and the urban reformer, Jane Addams.
The Big City and the Industrial Metropolis
In 1870 New York City comprised Manhattan and the small islands in the East River. Its population was 942,292. Brooklyn was a separate town. Its population of 419,921 made it the third largest in the country. Until the Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1883 Brooklyn (and Long Island) were linked to Manhattan only by ferry. In 1868, nine boats carried more than 48 million passengers across the East River. In turn, Manhattan was also linked to the mainland by ferry and by the lines of one railroad, the New York Central.
In 1870 big cities might have looked a muddle to casual visitors. But they all had a clearly defined internal structure obvious to the discerning eye. Because intracity transport was expensive, businesses with a large volume of goods huddled by the shipping wharves or railroad stations. Commerce was conducted in St. Louis by the banks of the Mississippi, in Philadelphia by the Delaware, and in New York by the East and Hudson rivers. Service areas and housing radiated outward from these centers in a large fan. Those who wanted the convenience of a central address paid dearly to live on Beacon Hill in Boston, Nob Hill in San Francisco, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and Washington Square in New York, from which they set the standards of fashion. Between fashionable blocks and shantytown slums were mixed commercial, industrial, and residential neighborhoods offering a genuine association of classes and ethnic groups.
In 1867 the Evening Post described New York as the “most inconveniently arranged commercial city in the world.” The major indictment was the inadequacy and inconvenience of public transportation. A wit once defined martyrdom as a journey through New York on an omnibus or streetcar. Twelve separate companies ran twenty-one routes through New York at average speeds of four to six miles an hour. Like railroads across the country, they clung to profitable routes and ignored certain districts, which were left isolated.
Because public transportation was so limited, city limits were restricted to manageable walking distances. Eighty-five percent of the population lived within two miles of the city center, Union Square at Fourteenth Street. The major downtown institutions were places for businessmen to meet and make transactions, such as the Stock Exchange and Merchants’ Exchange. The tallest buildings were still churches with spires. Even a great daily newspaper like the New York Tribune could contain office and plant in one modest five-story building. City factories were two-story buildings, something like backyard barns. City lots for commercial and domestic building were rectangular plots of 25 by 100 feet. Such was the value of land and the pressure for accommodation that space was at a premium. Architects had a solution for compressing the maximum number of people into the minimum amount of space, the dumbbell tenement.
In December 1878 Henry C. Meyer, proprietor of the Sanitary Engineer, offered prizes of $500 in a competition for the best tenement designs. The first prize was awarded to James E. Ware for his double-decker dumbbell tenement, so called because the middle part of the ground plan tapered in. The idea was to allow light and air to the central portions of the building without reducing the width of front and back. The dumbbell tenement usually had four apartments to each of its six or seven floors, two on either side of the separating corridor. Only one of the three or four rooms received light and air from the street at the front or from the yard at the back. The air shaft separating the tenements at the sides was no more than 5 feet wide along its 50- or 60-foot length.
Although Ware’s design became the prototype for tenement buildings until the end of the century, it was widely criticized. The New York Times in its editorial of March 16, 1879, took account of the restrictions placed on the competing architects by considerations of size and cost but condemned the whole experiment. The most common criticism was of lack of light and air and of inadequate sanitary facilities.
City streets also had their share of problems. They were littered with merchants’ wares; peddlers’ carts blocked access to roads and houses. Street and market were one and the same. Neither was cleaned except by private contract. In the area south of Fourteenth Street ancient sewers got clogged with accumulated filth; sometimes they burst open, and their contents rose to suffuse the streets with refuse and slime. Their narrow pipes could not even contain rainwater, and after a shower a major avenue like Broadway was awash with mud.
Lower Manhattan was notorious for crime. According to one joke, some of the neighborhoods were so rough that if you saw a dog with a tail it was a visitor from out of town. Maintenance of law and order was the task of the city police. In 1844 the state legislature had created a professional city police force of 800 men. It was the first organized police force in the United States. The chief of police was appointed by the mayor, the others by ward councilmen. Thus, the police force was subject to political control.
The common complaint was that it was the best police force money could buy. An investigation in 1894 disclosed that jobs were sold to the highest bidder and those who bought their way into the force made money out of it by bribery and the blackmail of prostitutes and of gambling and liquor interests. There were at least 12,000 prostitutes working in New York in the late 1860s. During an investigation of 1875 one police captain, Alexander (“Clubber”) Williams, was asked why he did not close down the brothels in his precinct. He answered, “Because they were kind of fashionable at the time.” In 1868, 5,423 crimes were reported but never came to court. The same year 10,000 indictments were dropped. The captains’ unofficial slogan was “Hear, see, and say nothin’. Eat, drink, and pay nothin’.”
In time, the industrial metropolis superseded the big city as the typical American city of the Gilded Age. Urban historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., describes the industrial metropolis as “the city of the mechanized factory, the business corporation, the downtown office, and the segregated neighborhood.” The special industrial structure of New York, based as it was on small shops and subject to constant social upheaval caused by the continuous influx of immigrants, precluded the kind of industrial concentration that gave rise to the industrial metropolis. It was Chicago rather than New York that was the model of this new form of city in 1890. It then had a population of 1,099,850 people.
Chicago, like New York and other major cities, owed its importance to its situation. After the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 and of ten trunk-line railroads by 1856, Chicago was ready for its role as a major regional center. It rose to service the Midwest when railroad construction made western expansion profitable as well as possible. It developed first as a market for livestock and grain; an industrial base for railroad and town, home and farm; and a bank for all these. Its future destiny as a metropolis was assured by its part in the most rapidly rising sectors of the national economy—mechanized manufacturing, transportation, and commerce.
The Brooklyn Bridge, a steel suspension bridge of 1,595 feet across the East River, linking Manhattan and Brooklyn, was a feat of daring engineering. Such engineering led to the technology for skyscrapers—tall buildings constructed on steel frames. Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge (1869-1883) was accomplished despite adverse circumstances: the accidental death of civil engineer John August Roebling (1806-1869) at the outset; the invalidism, through caisson disease (decompression sickness), of his son and successor, Washington Roebling (1837–1926), who had to transmit his building instructions through his wife, Emily; a series of physical disasters; and contractual fraud by a steel-wire supplier. (Library of Congress.)
Then the city encountered a major disaster. The Chicago fire of October 8, 1871, swept across 1,688 acres in the city center and consumed buildings valued at $192 million. Most buildings were made of wood and burned easily. The heat was such that in those few structures that incorporated metal beams the iron and steel became a molten river spreading the fire ever farther. However, Chicago was too important commercially for business and industry to allow this disaster to impede, let alone halt, the city’s inevitable growth. Within eighteen months the city had risen like a phoenix from the ashes.
The rapid growth of all its component parts—factories, machine shops, railroad yards, warehouses, offices, stores, and banks—had, by 1890, produced a clearly discernible and closely defined spatial structure that was entirely new. This was the radial city with a single center. It was based on the so-called sector-and-ring pattern, in which a ground plan of the city resembled a wagon wheel. The pivot of this wheel was the meeting of land and lake traffic at the mouth of the Chicago River. The first spokes of the wheel were the north and south tributaries of the river. In between were the first sectors. The chief difference between the traditional big city and the new industrial metropolis was this: no longer did any one neighborhood accommodate industry, commerce, and the homes of all classes as it had in New York about 1870; industrial, commercial, and residential land was segregated. Radiating outward from the center, specific economic activities were concentrated in central wedges, narrow slices of commercial and industrial property—the spokes of the wheel.
Between these commercial and industrial corridors lay unoccupied land. Into its empty tracts came the new population. It settled in three segregated rings. The truly poor lived in an inner ring of shanties and old apartments. The working class inhabited a second ring of cottages, tenements, and decaying houses. The middle class dwelt in an outer ring of new and better apartments and houses. Thus, an inner core of poverty was surrounded by outer rings of rising affluence. In addition, the truly rich occupied yet another corridor, the attractive and affluent north shore of Lake Michigan and Michigan Avenue. Its fashionable blocks of shops and hotels, mansions and apartments cut across all the other city sectors.
Railroads from the South and the West attracted new industries. Most successful were the stockyards and meatpacking plants to the south at the junction of Thirty-ninth and Halsted streets. First opened in 1865, they were developed to comprise 100 acres of cattle pens and 275 of slaughterhouses and packinghouses. This mammoth enterprise depended on a ready supply of cattle and refrigerator cars and relied on regular railroad services for its survival. There followed steel mills and plants making electrical machinery and an entire industrial complex by the Calumet River. These were, in effect, industrial satellites, mill towns within a metropolis, linked to the core city by centripetal rail lines and to one another by new centrifugal belt lines.
The middle class, inspired by Central Park in New York (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1857) and by Georges Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris, aspired to an exclusive life-style. They had parks and avenues laid in imitation. In doing so they helped to determine the rings of class settlement. By 1894 the mold was set.
The street railway carried millions of people in and out of the city center to work, shop, and play. The cult of conspicuous consumption in city center stores was a focal point in the lives of women of all classes. Thus, as Warner suggests, downtown Chicago, the Loop, was “the place of work for tens of thousands, a market for hundreds of thousands, a theater for thousands more.” Yet the population remained fragmented along economic lines. In the residential districts they were further divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. Only at work, whether mill or sweatshop, store or clerical pool, did they have a common identity.
The symbol of this new urban civilization was the skyscraper, a tall structure built of metal as well as stone that consumed less ground space and yet accommodated more people on its several floors than the largest stone buildings of the mid-nineteenth century. In New York, St. Louis, and Chicago progressive architects, enthusiastic about the invention of a safe passenger elevator, began experimenting with iron-and-steel frame construction beyond ten stories. They were devising skyscrapers in New York and Chicago by the end of the 1870s that would come to depend on telephone, typewriter, and electric light.
Taking advantage of the elevator, architect Richard Morris Hunt designed the ten-story New York Tribune Building in 1874. Such height, however, required massive walls that covered more ground area than smaller, more conventional buildings. It was only after 1884 when William LeBaron Jenney experimented with a steel skeleton for the construction of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago that structures of more than ten stories became practical for conventional commercial use.
The Home Life Building had an internal skeleton of wrought- and cast-iron for the first six stories and Bessemer steel beams for the next four. Although this building was accredited the first skyscraper, it did not look like one. Jenney disguised the frame to make it look like a conventional building. However, two of his junior staff, William Hola-bird and Martin Roche, went on to design the Tacoma Building in 1886 —the first skyscraper that looked the part. It stood twelve stories high, and there was no attempt to make the light brick and terra-cotta walls seem anything more than a mere facade or sheath for the metal frame behind. They were without ornament and carried an almost continuous range of bay windows. Here was the forerunner of the curtain wall in American city architecture. The honeycomb interior spread the maximum possible amount of light and air.
More than anyone else, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan gave form and substance to the modern skyscraper. “It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line,” he said. His early inspiration came from various suspension bridges. His partnership with engineer Dankmar Adler was a perfect complement of mind and method. The most famous of their early commissions was the Auditorium Building (1886–89), which comprised an opera house, a hotel, and offices designed in Romanesque style within a structure at first no higher than ten stories and no wider than half a block.
Sullivan exploited steel-frame construction to the fullest. With his Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis he set the style of American skyscrapers for half a century. The structure was entirely of steel encased in fireproof tiles and carried the walls on shelves at each of its ten stories. What was remarkable was Sullivan’s determination to make no concessions to fashion by minimizing its height. Instead of disguising the long upward flow of the building with some kind of ornate embellishments around the windows, he broke with convention and emphasized its height and essential lines. His governing principle was that the form of a building should demonstrate its function. The basic tenet of the Chicago school of architecture was that a building should express a total cultural purpose. Besides Sullivan, leading exponents included John Wellborn Root and Dankmar Adler. Skyscrapers suggested American obsession with individual achievement. The man-made vertical canyons they made of city streets in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere complemented the natural horizontal canyons of the American West. As they reached ever higher into the heavens skyscrapers separated even further the nouveaux riches above from the huddled masses below.
The Monadnock block (1891), West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, by Burnham and Root, an early skyscraper with a basement and seventeen stories conceived by John Wellborn Root (1850-1891) along the spare, tapering lines of an Egyptian pylon to please the client, Owen F. Aldis, who persuaded him to “throw the thing up without a single ornament.” (Photograph by Cervin Robinson for the Historic American Buildings Survey in August 1963; Library of Congress.)
Social Problems
The most distinctive feature of American cities in the Gilded Age was their cultural composition of widely different ethnic groups. In 1890 the number of immigrant adults exceeded the number of native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population of more than 100,000. In two cities, New York and San Francisco, as much as 42.2 percent of the population were first-generation immigrants. Danish immigrant and reporter Jacob Riis provides a most picturesque analysis of the geographic distribution of immigrant ghettos in New York about 1890:
A map of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would show more stripes than the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow. The city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the East Side. But intermingled with these ground colors would be an odd variety of tints that would give the whole the appearance of an extraordinary crazy-quilt.
Almost as obvious as the cultural nature of cities was their social character. They were overcrowded. In 1890, 1 million people, two-thirds of the population, were packed like sardines in 32,000 dumbbell tenement buildings in New York. Conditions were particularly bad in the Lower East Side, that section of Manhattan east of Third Avenue and south of Fourteenth Street. In blocks like Poverty Gap, Misery Row, Penitentiary Row, and Murderers’ Alley the rooms were pokey and airless, the halls dark and dank, the toilets primitive. Charles Loring Brace, in The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), reports the comments of a visitor from the Children’s Aid Society:
In a dark cellar filled with smoke, there sleep, all in one room, with no kind of partition dividing them, two men with their wives, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, two men and a large boy of about seventeen years of age, a mother with two more boys, one about ten years old and one large boy of fifteen; another woman with two boys, nine and eleven years of age—in all, fourteen persons.
Danish immigrant, police reporter, photographer, and reformer Jacob August Riis (1849-1914) scandalized the political conscience of middle-class society with How the Other Half Lives (1890), a searing, documented exposure of evil conditions in tenement slums, thereby stimulating significant social legislation in New York and arousing humanitarian reform impulses among progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt. (Library of Congress.)
When Jacob Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune in 1877 he learned all about the Lower East Side from the Mulberry Street precinct at ‘The Bend,” “the foul core of New York’s slums.” Riis’s exposure of slum conditions pointed to the venality of unscrupulous landlords. It led to the appointment of the tenement house commission, which, at the insistence of members Felix Adler and Alfred T. White, recommended the abolition of rear tenements and the opening of playgrounds. When Riis published the first of his series of books about the tenements, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890, he offered various suggestions for easing the poverty and degradation of slum dwellers. He had begun to document his study with photographs at a time when news photography was in its infancy. Here was irrefutable proof of the plight of the poor—factual, graphic, stark. Riis’s pictures were among the first to demonstrate the power of photography in journalism. Unfortunately the half-tone technique of photo reproduction was still imperfect. Thus the first edition of the book carried only line sketches of thirty-eight of his original pictures. The drawings minimized the squalor of the Lower East Side and softened the pain of his subjects. Nevertheless, when Riis referred to the “sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters” heaving “uneasily in the tenements,” the middle class took it as a portent of incipient class war. One he influenced was a young police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, who abolished the police lodging houses Riis had exposed as breeders of vice and crime. Moreover, in 1901 New York passed a law whereby all tenement buildings had to have indoor staircases and windows at least twelve feet away from the building opposite, as well as running water and toilets in each apartment.
The problem, however, was not confined to New York. Some parts of Chicago had three times as many people as the most crowded parts of Tokyo and Calcutta. In one Polish ghetto there was an average of 340 people to every acre in 1901. In one sector of only three blocks there lived 7,300 children. This Polish district was described as “nothing more than an infested wall-to-wall carpet of rotted wood and crumbling concrete.” Whole neighborhoods were congested, filthy, and foul. Offal and manure littered the street along with trash and garbage. It was hardly surprising that, in the large cities, consumption, pneumonia, bronchitis, and diarrhea were endemic. Immigrant communities were prone to outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and typhoid. Indeed, Pittsburgh had the highest mortality rate for typhoid in the world, 1.3 per 1,000.
The disposal of human sewage and industrial waste was a most pressing problem. The easy solution was to use local rivers and bays, and despite the hazard to health, this was where garbage, sewage, and waste were commonly deposited. The census of 1880 reported how the soil of New Orleans was saturated “very largely with the oozings of foul privy vaults.” Baltimore had very porous soil; its 80,000 cesspools were a menace to wells for drinking water. A large proportion of the population of Philadelphia drank water from the Delaware River, into which 13 million gallons of sewage were emptied every day.
In 1866 New York established the metropolitan board of health, which took prompt action against a cholera epidemic, inspiring other cities to strengthen their boards and to staff them with doctors rather than politicians. The duties of these boards included inspecting meat, milk, and sanitation facilities, and recording births and deaths.
The risk of fire was as great as the risk of fever. Successive fires in the 1870s took enormous tolls of life and property in New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh, as well as Chicago. After the Chicago fire sixty-four insurance companies could not meet the claims for damages and went bankrupt. Popular jokes of the period are full of insinuations about the incendiary motives of men who profited from fire insurance. It was commonly said that the cause of a fire was the insurance. The favorite poet of a beneficiary of arson was Burns. A fortune teller at Coney Island was called a fake when she told a client he would suffer a loss by fire. A collector who asked a passerby to contribute something to the disabled firemen’s fund was advised, “With pleasure. But how are you going to disable them?” The most popular tableau at the Burnupsky Social Club was “Nero Fiddling While Rome Burns.”
After a serious fire in Portland, Maine, in 1866 the New York City board of fire underwriters led the movement to organize the national board of fire underwriters. Its policy of reviewing local regulations, inspecting local fire-fighting equipment, and examining fire hazards before determining appropriate rates of insurance provided a powerful incentive for local authorities to insist on improved standards from business and industry. City councils began to insist that construction companies use masonry or brickwork instead of wood for new buildings.
By 1876 most large cities had adopted the Cincinnati plan of a municipal fire department in preference to the discredited volunteer system of private companies each competing for business and quarreling openly with their rivals—sometimes while fires were actually raging. Moreover, the new steam fire engines with their automatic water pumpers, such as those produced by the Silsby Manufacturing Company of Seneca Falls, New York, were more efficient than the traditional manual pumper. The steam engine never tired while the fuel held out. It could also throw a longer stream of water: Clapp and Jones of Hudson, New York, claimed that one of their engines could pump a horizontal stream a distance of 215 feet. Such technological advances allowed firemen to keep a safer distance from a blaze and to fight fires in ever taller buildings.
In the 1870s cities began to provide secondary education for the masses for the first time. By 1891 the typical elementary school year in cities lasted between 180 and 200 days compared with anything from 70 to 150 days in the countryside. Progressive educators, however, realized that it was not enough to teach children the three Rs. Edward A. Sheldon in Oswego, William T. Harris in St. Louis, and Francis W. Parker in Chicago were convinced that immigrant children needed courses in elementary science, handicrafts, and mechanics as well and devised new techniques of object teaching. Boston and St. Louis were the first cities to open kindergartens.
The Tweed Ring
The sheer momentum of economic, industrial, social, and political change generated municipal problems of housing and welfare, sanitation and health, employment, transportation, and law enforcement that overwhelmed obsolete city governments and set the stage for the rise of the boss and the city machine. As Alexander B. Callow explains in The City Boss in America (1976), ‘The boss exploited the inability of government to supply the demands of the emerging city. He created a mechanism–the machine—for coping with the complex political, economic, and social adaptations entailed in the transformation of American society.”
The city machine was an alternative to formal government. It responded to the needs of three groups. To immigrants and the urban poor it offered patronage and a chance of economic improvement and social opportunity. To legitimate business it offered contracts for industry, construction, and commerce. To illegitimate business, syndicated crime, and commercial vice, it offered profitable order instead of the unlicensed chaos of internecine competition. Despite their corruption and profligacy, city bosses and their organizations performed crucial social and economic functions. The secret of the bosses’ success was their sure personal touch. Martin Lomansey, a ward leader in Boston, told reformer Lincoln Steffens, “There’s got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to—no matter what he’s done—and get help. Help, you understand; none of your law and justice, but help.” Patronage included favor as well as labor—such things as welfare and relief, legal aid and bail. Ward bosses were pivotal figures in local clubs and might well own a saloon. A story of the period tells how a wit hired a newsboy to run into a council meeting crying, “Mister, your liquor store is on fire!” All the aldermen jumped to their feet and rushed out of the door in disorder.
The neighborhood, with its wards, districts, and precincts, provided the city boss with political power. Control of municipal services provided him with sources of patronage and profit. The stakes soared as the cities grew.
The model of the city machine in the Gilded Age was the Tweed Ring. Between 1866 and 1871 it dominated politics in the city and state of New York. Although later rings were more ruthless and rapacious, the Tweed Ring retained the reputation of being the most notorious and audacious of them all. It comprised only four men—Chamberlain Peter Barr Sweeny, City Controller Richard Connolly, Mayor Abraham Oakey Hall, and the ringleader, William Marcy Tweed. Not for nothing were they known, respectively, as “the Brains,” “Slippery Dick,” “the Elegant,” and “the Boss.”
William Marcy Tweed came from a middle-class, Protestant family of Scots-Americans. In 1851, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected alderman for the Seventh Ward. The post carried considerable responsibilities in the matter of making appointments and granting franchises; and along with other corrupt aldermen, known as the Forty Thieves, he used his largess to build up a personal following. He was a jovial, bulky man whose boisterous manner made him popular in barrooms and back streets across the length and breadth of the city. Tweed also had boundless energy and enterprise, and his executive ability was extraordinary.
In 1857 Tweed became a member of the board of supervisors, hitherto a minor forum, but transformed that year by the state legislature into a bipartisan council of twelve with increased powers. He remained in office until 1870 and used his authority to form a supervisors’ ring, a profitable operation specializing in election fraud, as well as in raising money and spending it on city improvements.
As controller, Richard Connolly raised revenue from taxes and rents and the sale of stocks and bonds. He spent some of it legitimately but siphoned much more into the coffers of the ring. The money was embezzled by means of fraudulent contracts, padded payrolls, excessive rents, and fictitious accounts. In turn, Connolly was served well by the county auditor, former convict James Watson, who “cooked” the books and covered the tracks. The ring’s principal accomplices were the governor, John Hoffman, and three corrupt judges, John McCunn, George Barnard, and Albert Cardozo. Cardozo, a Portuguese-American Jew, had a deserved reputation as an oily master of intrigue. It was said he had the eyes of a serpent in the face of a corpse. The judges’ task was to find sophisticated arguments to excuse criminal acts. Truly it was better to know the judge than to know the law.
In the Tweed years covert crime (theft, burglary, and confidence tricks) increased greatly while crimes of violence did not. As contemporary observer Edward Crapsey explains in The Nether Side of New York (1872), ‘The thugs of the city found employment in politics equally congenial and more remunerative.” Sometimes Tweed’s men went too far and were arrested. They were rescued from the toils of the law by crooked lawyers named “Tombs Shysters” or “Tombs Harpies,” after the city prison, or “Tombs.” Most prominent was the firm of Howe and Hummel. William Howe’s prose was as purple as his clothes. He once convinced a jury that defendant Ella Nelson had accidentally pulled the trigger not once but half a dozen times.
At no time did the Tweed Ring command a true majority of voters. Its power base was control of the New York quadrilateral—City Hall, the Hall of Justice, the State Capitol at Albany, and Tammany Hall, headquarters of the Democratic party. The original Tammany Society had been founded as a charitable organization by Irish-American William Mooney in 1789 and took its name from an Indian chief, Tamma-nend. Governed by thirteen senior executives or sachems, it was heterogeneous in character but came to be dominated by an Irish oligarchy after the Civil War. The first Tammany dynasty was the Tweed Ring. Tweed consolidated the Hall’s hold on New York politics. Through various forms of patronage, he claimed that at least 12,000 electors in the twenty-one wards were obligated to him. These spoilsmen were known as the Shiny Hat Brigade. In 1868 he had the number of qualified voters increased when his pliant justices naturalized about 60,000 recent immigrants, administering the oath to groups of 144, or one gross, at a time.
The primitive but comparatively comfortable home of an English coal miner and his family on New York’s Lower East Side as captured in this stark photograph by Jacob Riis, who discovered and analyzed much of the squalor from the vantage point of the police precinct at “The Bend,” Mulberry Street, where many immigrants lived in crowded, unsanitary conditions and which Riis described as “the foul core of New York’s slums.” (Library of Congress.)
The techniques used to cheat at the polls were numerous. They included padding the registration lists with phony names and addresses. In Philadelphia the list of voters once included a boy of four and his dog. One politician there boasted that the men who had first signed the Declaration of Independence back in 1776 still voted in Philadelphia. Machines employed gangs of men whose motto was “Vote early and often,” with repeaters voting in place of the fraudulent names several times over. In some precincts there were more votes cast than there were residents. One repeater who claimed to be an Episcopal bishop, William Croswell Doane, had an argument at the polls. “Come off,” said the official. “You’re not Bishop Doane.” “The hell I ain’t, you bastard!” was the retort.
It is hardly surprising that, instead of appreciating the creative potential of New York City, the state legislature at Albany, dominated by rural interests, preferred to picture it as a cesspool of vice and crime, fit only for the feeble, the foreign, and the fraudulent. The city’s undoubted problems were treated as proof of its ills rather than as symptoms of a disease that could be cured. In popular parlance, New York was “an underground rapid transit railroad to hell.” The reputation of other large cities was just as bad. Pittsburgh was “hell with the lid off” and Philadelphia was “the city of brotherly loot.”
In 1868 Tweed was at the height of his power. Elected state senator from the Fourth District, he also held the following public offices: school commissioner, deputy street commissioner, president of the board of supervisors, chairman of the Democratic central committee of New York County, and grand sachem of Tammany Hall. He was also a director of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk’s bank, the Tenth National, and of their railroad, the New York Central. In addition, he was president of the Guardian Savings Bank and was a director of the Harlem Gas Light Company, the Brooklyn Bridge Company, and the Third Avenue Railway Company. Moreover, he was the third largest owner of real estate in New York and occupied a splendid mansion on Fifth Avenue at Forty-third Street. He was rarely with his family, however, preferring the company of a charmed circle of cronies at the Americus Club where they wore tigers’ heads set with ruby eyes.
Because he wanted to be well liked Tweed also gave freely to charities, churches, hospitals, schools. Only the Tweed Ring, it seemed, cared for the needs of the underprivileged. In the seventeen years between 1852 and 1869, the state distributed $2 million to private charities. But in the three years from 1869 to 1871, the Tweed Ring used its influence with the state legislature to increase the appropriations to $2.22 million. There was method in this magnanimity. State aid to hospitals, orphanages, and Catholic parochial schools ensured support from immigrants and the poor at the polls. It was especially galling to reformers to see Tweed gain in public esteem from charity that was paltry compared with the plunder he kept for himself. Moreover, he did nothing to ameliorate the conditions that contributed to disease, poverty, and crime.
The most notorious single act of the Tweed Ring was its embezzlement of public funds that were already appropriated fraudulently for a new city courthouse. The design by architect John Kellum was completed in 1858, but not until Tweed became president of the board of supervisors in 1862 did the work of construction commence in earnest. Arguing that the original appropriation of $250,000 was unworthy of New York, Tweed secured additional monies: $1 million in 1862, $800,000 in 1864, $300,000 in 1865, and $800,000 in 1866. By 1871 he had spent $13 million altogether on a building that, after thirteen years, was still incomplete.
Where had the money gone? James Watson, county auditor and bookkeeper of the ring, divided the money raised with 35 percent going to the various contractors and a cool 65 percent going in commission to the ring. The abuse was so flagrant that in 1870 reformers had a board of courthouse commissioners appointed to oversee warrants and contracts. Tweed and the mayor, Oakey Hall, packed the board with Tammany hacks, and Watson produced fraudulent vouchers to demonstrate that current expenses were genuine. The ring relished its work. It made out checks to “T. C. Cash,” signed them “Philip F. Dummey,” and even charged contractors for printing their own bills at Tweed’s printing company.
Robert Roosevelt, one of the reformers, said that the bills were “not merely monstrous, they are manifestly fabulous.” For instance, for three tables and forty chairs, the city paid out $179,729.60. Carpets, shades, and furniture supplied by the James Ingersoll Company cost the somewhat startling sum of $5.69 million. In short, the courthouse cost four times as much as the Houses of Parliament and twice as much as Alaska.
In the fall of 1870 the ring’s control apparently was as assured as ever. It seemed they could survive indefinitely as a self-perpetuating oligarchy once Hall had succeeded Hoffman as governor. But it had antagonized the middle classes, who dreaded displacement among the mounting tides of immigrants. And it had made deadly enemies of its political rivals. James O’Brien, whom Tweed had once made sheriff, joined forces with state senator Henry (“Prince Hal”) Genet and Congressman John Morrisey to lead opposition to the ring within the Democratic party. This faction, usually called the Young Democracy, was directed from the sidelines by Samuel Tilden, chairman of the Democratic state committee of New York. Tilden wanted to become president and had to overthrow Tweed and his supposed candidate, Hoffman, to do so. By the spring of 1870, more than half the general committee of Tammany Hall was taking part with the Young Democracy.
The first conflict between Tweed and his enemies was over a new city charter. It had to pass the state assembly at Albany, and so gross were the bribes offered senators and assemblymen—perhaps over $1 million altogether—that it did so despite bitter controversy. In some important respects, the Tweed charter was a reform measure. It tended to give the city control of its own affairs, to simplify its complex administration, and to place administrative business in only a few hands. Unfortunately, as English political scientist James Bryce observed, “These hands were at the moment unclean and grasping hands.” Real power was vested in a new board of audit composed of Hall, Sweeny, and Tweed.
The new publisher of the New York Times, George Jones, and his managing editor, the Englishman Louis John Jennings, set out to expose to the people the theft of their city. On September 20, 1870, the Times began with innuendo and for a year continued its attacks with smear and sarcasm. Fate unexpectedly took a hand and dealt the reformers the ace of spades. The ring’s trusty auditor, James Watson, was killed in a sleighing accident on January 21, 1871. There was no one to prevent new appointees to the auditor’s offices from getting at the true facts. Two of them, William Copeland and Matthew O’Rourke, uncovered evidence of gross fraud. Previously, Jennings and Jones had not a scintilla of proof for their accusations. But now Copeland and O’Rourke had saved the situation by feeding them precise facts and figures. The Times opened its series of explicit attacks on July 8, 1871. It began with accounts of armory frauds and then exposed the extravagance of the new courthouse. On July 22 it carried the sensational headline, “The Secret Accounts: Proofs of Undoubted Frauds Brought to Light.”
The ring realized that it was trapped. It offered Jones and Times cartoonist Thomas Nast bribes of $500,000 in useless attempts to buy their silence. Tweed himself recognized the mastery of Nast’s caricatures. “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures,” he exclaimed. Tweed was depicted as gross, vicious, and lowborn. Sweeny was the evil genius. Connolly was the oily intriguer. Oakey Hall was the buffoon.
The public was outraged. At a meeting held in Cooper Union on September 4, 1871, former mayor William F. Havemeyer reported Controller Connolly’s confession. During the thirty-month period when the revenue of city and county was $72.54 million, the ring had paid out $139 million and stolen at least $45 million. The audience called for the appointment of an executive committee of seventy to recover the lost money and reform the city government. Tilden persuaded Connolly to yield his place as controller to Andrew Green of the committee of seventy. Judge George Barnard was obliged to grant an injunction barring the ring from raising or paying money. All government was brought to a stop. There was no money with which to pay city employees their wages.
The Tammany Hall machine was defeated in the city and state elections on November 7, 1871. The new assemblymen included Samuel Tilden. In all, the reformers took 75,000 regular Democratic votes away from the ring. They owed their success to the defection of the ring’s repeater gangs and to the despised immigrants and native poor. However, Tweed survived the November elections and was reelected to the state senate. His defiance of his critics passed into a proverb, “What are you going to do about it?” He soon discovered. A grand jury indicted Tweed in December, and he was arrested. Released on bail of $2 million put up by Jay Gould, he was a broken man already; he looked closer to sixty than his true age of forty-eight. He was not tried until January 7, 1873, when he appeared before Judge Noah Davis. The jury could not agree on a verdict, and Tweed was tried again on November 5, 1873. During his lawyer’s final summary he hid his face in his hands and wept convulsively. This time he was convicted on 204 of 220 counts in the indictment. He was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment and fined $12,750.
The court of appeals had ruled that, although an indictment might contain any number of counts, a convicted defendant’s actual punishment could not exceed that prescribed for one offense even if he were found guilty for all of them. Tweed was, therefore, released on January 15, 1875. However, public opinion was not stilled. The former boss was arrested again on a civil action for recovery of $6 million in loot. He was committed to Ludlow Street Jail. But, on December 4, 1875, he escaped. In August 1876 he was recaptured in Vigo, Spain, after someone recognized him there from the Nast cartoons. After his enforced return to Ludlow Street he offered to turn state informant. Tilden, the new governor, would not let him, wanting punishment to be restricted to the scapegoat. Tweed died of pneumonia on April 12, 1878, and was buried in Brooklyn.
Extreme poverty was the fate of Tweed’s nemesis Thomas Nast. The German-American cartoonist was the consummate artist of political caricatures in his day and the bane of the most elevated politicians, especially President Andrew Johnson and the politicos of Tammany Hall. A regular cartoonist to Harper’s from 1862, Nast’s policy disagreements with the management became so acrimonious that in 1885 he ceased to work for the magazine. His contributions elsewhere became less frequent, and, because he had lost his savings in the failure of a brokerage company, he became destitute. In 1902, the year of his death, he became consul general in Ecuador.
Reform in the Cities
The resounding moral victory of reformers against the Tweed Ring was, as Alexander Callow explains, actually an ironic political defeat. Reformers, blinded by their commitment to expose and rout the ring, were oblivious both to the limitations of civic institutions and to the kinds of changing urban conditions in which corrupt political machines could thrive with new people. Members of this middle-class group with patrician ideals were obsessed with the idea of “honest, efficient, and economical government.” In 1872 they succeeded in electing a reform candidate as mayor of New York.
The new mayor, William F. Havemeyer, having retired from the sugar-refining business at the age of forty to devote himself to public service, was now a sixty-eight-year-old reformer who championed clean government and economy to the interests of business. He proposed structural reform without social improvement. He cut wages on public works, insisted on elaborate scrutiny of public expenditures, and sacrificed public services. In 1874 he vetoed more than 250 bills relating to the maintenance and extension of streets, schools, and charities. In doing so he retarded downtown development and damaged relations between immigrants and natives. Despite his stringent economies, his fiscal policy as a whole was a failure. In 1871 the civic debt had been $88 million. At the end of 1874 it stood at $115 million. Havemeyer’s death that year was a merciful relief to the city as a whole. Nevertheless, he was the prototype of other structural reformers such as Grover Cleveland in Buffalo, Seth Low in Brooklyn, and James D. Phelan in San Francisco, all of whom were committed to low taxes and rigid economies.
While photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston’s (1864-1952) choice of subjects was conventional enough, including several evocative stills of the interiors of grand houses, she liked to provoke her viewers by adopting slightly outre attitudes, as in this self-portrait of 1896, complete with lighted cigarette, full tankard of ale, and upturned frilly petticoat. (Library of Congress.)
Across the country what reformers really wanted was a better and more impartial administration of essential urban services. In time they became convinced that only the public ownership of utilities could free American cities from a major source of corruption. Public opinion was hostile both to the power of utility monopolies and to any “socialistic” attempts at their public ownership.
Reformers in Philadelphia, disappointed at their inability to drive a wedge between Boss James B. McManes and the local gas and transit monopolies, decided to call a national conference of other aggrieved civic reformers in 1893. It was attended by delegates from 29 organizations in 21 cities who founded the National Municipal League, which soon included 180 affiliated societies. At its Columbus conference in 1900 it adopted a model program of advice and directives for reform groups across the country.
New candidates, more representative of the common people than either spoilsmen or reformers, came to the fore of politics in the 1890s. Samuel M. Jones became the “Golden Rule” mayor of Toledo, and Tom Johnson became mayor of Cleveland. In Detroit Hazen S. Pingree was the Republican nominee of business leaders who wanted an independent mayor to fight against a corrupt Irish ring.
Reformers’ well-intentioned attempts to improve the lot of the urban poor were deeply resented by immigrants because they were condescending and high-handed. Yet each side needed the other’s support. The link between the two was forged by Jane Addams. Her solution, the settlement house, was also intended to sublimate the private distress of educated women who felt unfulfilled in urban society.
Jane Addams, daughter of an Illinois state senator who was a mill owner and banker by profession, was born in Cedarville in 1860. Her mother died two years later, and in 1867 her father married a widow, Anne Haldeman, who had two sons. From 1877 to 1881 Jane attended Rockford Female Seminary, and during her last year there her father died. The 1880s were years of personal frustration. She spent them partly in visits to Europe in 1883 and 1887, partly in an abortive attempt at medical study, and partly in an equally useless effort to please her stepmother and become part of society. But she also worked for charities. Moreover, these were years of painful physical illness. As a child she had suffered from spinal tuberculosis, and it had left her spine slightly curved. In 1882 her stepbrother Harry Haldeman performed an operation on her back that left her unable to bear children. She was confined to bed for a year, and this precipitated gnawing feelings of social and sexual insecurity. Living in mental isolation, she was unsure of her future role, torn by a desire to escape from her family and from society and to plunge into some vocation. She was trying to escape from the confinements of society.
During her stay in England in 1887 Addams visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house organized by Samuel A. Barnett. With her was her closest friend from Rockford, Ellen Gates Starr. Together they decided to devote themselves to social work. On their return to Chicago they produced a carefully considered proposal for a settlement house, part residence, part club, part school. They persuaded churchmen, charity workers, and women’s groups to join them. The settlement could thus offer the urban ghetto the sort of essential social services that the city council was unwilling to provide—entertainment, welfare, and relief.
The idea was not new to America. New York already had a Neighborhood Guild, and a group of Smith College graduates were planning to open a college settlement on the Lower East Side. What Addams wanted, however, was an informal organization, something different in kind from the relief agencies of religious or temperance societies. Her family opposed the plan. Without Ellen Starr she would not have had the courage to break with them. “Let’s love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation,” she wrote to Starr on January 24, 1889.
For the center of their proposed settlement Addams and Starr chose Hull House, the dilapidated mansion of Charles J. Hull on the corner of Halsted and Polk streets. A Victorian suburban house that had survived the fire of 1871 and subsequently been surrounded by tenements of the growing metropolis, it was situated between a saloon on one side and a funeral parlor on the other. After delicate negotiations with the present owner, Helen Culver, they leased part of the building. Preceded by a barrage of favorable press publicity, they moved in on September 18, 1889. The Chicago Tribune of March 8 described it as “a Project to Bring the Rich and Poor Together.”
Even before Hull House was opened the press was imposing on Jane Addams the image with which she was to become identified: Saint Jane. It was easier for reporters to explain that two young women who went to live in the slums and care for the needy were motivated by spirituality and self-sacrifice than to ascribe their move to the sort of determined break with convention that Jane Addams and Ellen Starr were actually making. The press might suggest that Jane Addams was a genius in the day and Ellen Starr a beauty by night, but there was no hint that this Adam and Eve were able to raise Cain in the community.
Jane Addams’s life’s work against the concentrated power of capital would not have been possible without the values of hard work, ambition, and thrift upon which the wealth of her father and other entrepreneurs were based. Her unyielding confidence in the virtues of self-help could be both callous and condescending. She once told a shipping clerk who came to Hull House asking for relief that he should work outdoors on a construction gang cutting a local canal. Although he was used to working indoors, he did so. After two days he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. Addams cared for his two orphaned children but could not quiet her conscience.
Addams did not just want to help the poor, she wanted to find a new role for educated women in society. At Hull House many talented women gained experience and confidence as administrators. It provided a practical training ground for the first generation of professional women such as Florence Kelley, who became head of the National Consumers’ League, and Alice Hamilton, an industrial chemist, who became the first woman professor at Harvard Medical School.
Within a year of the opening of Hull House Helen Culver waived the initial rent of $60 a month. By 1895 she had turned over the adjacent property to Hull House, and that year gave both land and buildings to the University of Chicago. Hull House was made a corporation with a board of trustees, of which Addams was president. She expanded the original activities, adapting and extending the various houses. The complex was completed in 1907 and comprised thirteen buildings including lodgings, kindergarten, childrens’ clubs, gymnasium, art gallery, coffee house, and theater.
Hull House also contributed to the growing academic discipline of sociology. The Illinois Factory Act of 1893, passed in part because of the Hull House lobby, did not meet the expectations of Florence Kelley. She turned her attention to a project to study the neighborhood block by block. The resulting publication, Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), described ethnic groups, wages, sweatshops, child labor, and union activity. It was favorably reviewed by a few critics, sold poorly, and soon went out of print. But it stimulated similar research in other cities and convinced Addams that the future of Hull House lay in providing a special arena for social work and social research. It was not coincidence that Hull House figured prominently in the essays of the first volume of the new American Journal of Sociology, launched in 1895.
Nothing concerned residents of the Nineteenth Ward more than the stench and filth of their streets, which were littered with refuse. In 1895, tired of submitting pleas to the city council that fell on deaf ears, Jane Addams put in a bid for a franchise of garbage removal in the ward. It was refused. But the publicity she earned was worth a fortune. The story of an upper-class lady who wanted to become a scavenger was sensational copy across the country, and this more than any other action turned her into a national celebrity.
Critic Frederika Randall has observed, “Garbage has always been with us, but it took the zealous generation of turn-of-the-century progressives to define it as a menace to civic harmony and social order.” In New York, Civil War veteran Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., used his knowledge of military strategy to devise means of collecting and disposing of garbage when he became commissioner of street cleaning. His enthusiasm and ingenuity almost succeeded in giving the grammar of garbage collection an unexpected glamor of its own.
Because of the publicity surrounding Addams, Mayor Carter Harrison appointed her garbage inspector at a salary of $1,000. She accomplished little. She realized that the real villain was the powerful and corrupt local boss, Johnny (“DePow”) Powers, chairman of the council’s finance committee, who had much to gain by keeping his electorate in conditions of squalor and ignorance. Addams determined to unseat him and launched two unsuccessful but widely publicized campaigns against him in 1896 and 1898. She discovered she could not compete with his reputation for generosity. He boasted that 2,600 ward residents owed their city jobs to him. He distributed railroad passes, Christmas dinners, and free coal. Ordinary people could appreciate such minuscule largess without realizing that they usually paid for it in the extortionate street railway fares Powers secured for his allies, the railway companies. Ironically, they preferred his top hat and opulent life-style to the cloth caps and austere behavior of Addams’s candidates. She conceded defeat, and she expressed her grudging admiration for someone who was at least “engaged in the great moral effort of getting the mass to express itself and of adding this mass energy and wisdom to the community as a whole.”
Hull House provided the model for other settlement houses, including South End House in Boston, Henry Street and University Settlement in New York, and Chicago Commons. From only six houses in 1891 the movement spread quickly. In 1897 there were seventy-four settlements and over 100 by 1900.
Progressive reformers made the middle classes well aware of urban problems. Whatever the positive contribution of individuals to social reform, the part played by the class as a whole was a negative one. It took flight to the suburbs. Between 1887 and 1894 a series of technological improvements in intracity transportation—cable lines, electric surface lines, and elevated transit—allowed the middle class its flight to the suburbs. Men of affairs and women of fashion could have the best of both worlds, the city by day, the suburbs by night.
Idealists wanted this for all classes. Commissioner of Labor Carol D. Wright, in an article for Popular Science Monthly in April 1892, reviewed the findings of the census of 1890 and concluded that adequate urban transportation was “something more than a question of economics or business convenience; it is a social and an ethical question as well.” For only suburbs could supply the “sanitary localities, [the] moral and well-regulated communities, where children can have all the advantages of church and school, of light and air,” which were necessary for “the improvement of the condition of the masses.” His views were echoed by other writers on urban affairs, including Adna Weber in his seminal work, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899). Progressive authorities in the larger cities understood these arguments and encouraged the development of efficient intracity transport. Moreover, the laying of additional railroad lines provided opportunities for lucrative construction contracts. On January 16, 1900, contractor John B. McDonald and banker August Belmont were awarded the contract for the first subway in New York, to be constructed at an estimated cost of $35 million.
The White City and the City Beautiful Movement
Rather than accept the drift to the suburbs as an inevitable fact of city life, town planners began to consider ways of improving urban conditions in order to retain their residents. In Looking Backward (1888) Edward Bellamy had offered a vision of “miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings. . . . large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed . . . [and] public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled.” It seemed that Bellamy’s vision had become a reality in 1893 when Chicago acted as host to the World’s Columbian Exposition on the shores of Lake Michigan. The impact of its landscape and architecture was considerable, mainly for its general ensemble. Frederic C. Howe wrote in The Modern City and Its Problems (1915):
Architects at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 based their buildings on research into classical and Renaissance models. The Administration Building by Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895), centerpiece of the Court of Honor, used a high attic story with an open Ionic colonnade inspired by the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus; a dome similar to Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral in Florence; and statues decorating the edifice by Karl Bitter (1867-1915) reminiscent of those by Francois Rude on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. To the left is Machinery Building by Peabody and Stearns; to the right, Electricity Building by Van Brunt and Howe. (Frances Benjamin Johnston; Library of Congress.)
The world’s fair in Chicago marks the beginning of city planning in America. People left it with the inquiry: “Why cannot cities be built like a world’s fair; why should we not employ architects and artists in their designing; why should we not live in cities as beautiful as this fugitive play city, that will disappear at the end of the summer?”
The overwhelming success of the Columbian Exposition encouraged the creation of later expositions in major cities across America in the remaining years before World War I: the Tennessee Centennial in Nashville (1897); the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at Omaha (1898); the Pan American Exposition at Buffalo (1901); the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis (1904); and subsequent expositions at San Francisco and Syracuse (both 1910) and San Diego (1915).
As to reordering city government, the devastation wrought in Galves-ton, Texas, by a cyclonic hurricane in September 1900 concentrated citizens’ minds remarkably. The flood deluged the streets with water seventeen feet deep. Six thousand people died and property worth $20 million was destroyed. The disaster prompted citizens to appoint a special commission with dictatorial powers to rebuild the city. The idea came from an emergency commission devised in Memphis after an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878. Within five weeks of the catastrophe the commission had protected the coast with a seawall of granite and concrete and raised the level of the city. The success of the commission was such that in 1901 the Texas legislature gave it permanent form in a new charter. This provided for a mayor-president and four commissioners, two elected by the people and (at first) two appointed by the governor. The system of city government by commission was so successful that by 1917 more than 500 cities across the nation had instituted government by commission.
The City Beautiful movement, largely inspired by the Columbian Exposition, flowered after the turn of the century. Its intentions were partly to redesign overcrowded cities and improve their living environment according to humanitarian principles, and partly to celebrate the pomp of civic and military achievement. Beginning with various local organizations, the movement gained publicity nationwide with the creation of the American Park and Outdoor Art Association (1897) in Louisville and the National League of Improvement Associations (1900) in Springfield, Ohio (renamed the American League for Civic Improvement in 1901). In 1904 these two organizations merged and became the American Civic Association.
The principal spokesman for the City Beautiful movement—and the one to whom is due most credit for popularizing it—was journalist Charles Mulford Robinson. Having graduated with a major in liberal arts from the University of Rochester, he first worked for a newspaper, became immersed in city problems, and then wrote three seminal articles for the Atlantic Monthly in 1899, entitled collectively, “Improvements in City Life.” Subsequently, he made the City Beautiful more widely known and understood in another hundred articles and in such books as The Improvement of Towns and Cities (1901) and Modern Civic Art; or, The City Made Beautiful (1903). Addressing the difficult problems of tenement living, hygiene, and social benefits in his articles, books, and municipality reports, he stressed the need for ideal spatial forms through squares, parks, even bridges—mainly according to European precedents. He was always at pains to emphasize the usefulness of reformed urban design.
Among landscape architects who effected such a transformation was Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his half-brother, John Charles Olmsted. Having advised the American Institute of Architects in an address in 1900 of the need for formal designs for public buildings and formal settings to enshrine them—especially in Washington, D.C., where he wanted to see the original 1791 plan of Charles Pierre L’Enfant revived—Frederick, Jr., was appointed to the McMillan Commission for Washington in 1901. Together with architects Daniel Burnham, Charles Follen McKim, and the commission secretary, Charles Moore, he visited European cities, including Paris and Rome, to make a study of what might be done. The McMillan Commission proposed a scheme for the reclamation of L’Enfant’s original plan of axes to crown diagonal intersections of streets and avenues. The result was a shaft of space that formed a central mall; plans for major memorials to national heroes such as Lincoln; the construction of Memorial Bridge and Union Square near the Capitol; and the creation of twin avenues lined with American elms four abreast. All of these were inspired by the commissioners’ visit to European cities.