American Cities In The 19th Century

The typical American city has gone through quite a few changes in its short history. These changes range from aesthetics to planning to size. Many of these changes then have occurred within the past hundred years. In Joel Garreau’s Edge City, though, he asserts that today’s image of cities is essentially still a nineteenth-century one. For while American cities have come a long way since their founding and first construction in the 1600’s, much of their layout, organization, divisions, and building types remain somewhat similar to the time of their largest transformations in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. These cities’ forms then were shaped not only by economic and transportation factors, but also by social and aesthetic considerations.
In 1850, 85 percent of the U.S. population was rural. Cities were fairly small and the economy revolved around trading. By the turn of the century though, with the help of the Industrial Revolution, cities such as Pittsburgh, New York, and Chicago became powerful and technologically advanced. As a result, Pittsburgh, for example, grew immensely because of its iron ore and steel factories. This industrial and economic advance then created wealth and many jobs for local populations. Thus, these cities started to grow both in size and population, highlighting the first major shift towards the true image of the nineteenth-century city
First, it cultivated economic and population growth in certain cities such as Detroit. With jobs paying quite well on the assembly line, Detroit saw migrations come from as far as Eastern Europe, Palestine, and the American Deep South. As a result, production grew and the Motor City quadrupled its population in only twenty years, from 285,000 at the turn of the century to well over a million by 1921. Next, unrelated to the economy or society, the automobile also increased overall congestion in city centers. For, many cities were not originally planned with the automobile in mind, and therefore many could not handle them. While somewhat disruptive to the overall city fabric though, in time, the automobile added to the validity of the city. It provided Americans with a free moving vehicle to and from any desired destination. Working with public transportation and the railroad then, the automobile fostered a form of decentralization within the city. Thus, as people began moving into the suburbs, the automobile still allowed businessmen to commute and work in the core of the