Exam #2 Flashcards
The Iron Horse, Early Industrialization and the Transformation of Urban Space
Otis Opened Elevator Factory September 20, 1853
By 1896, Ford had constructed his first horseless carriage
New York Stock Market Opened on Wall Street January 4, 1865
The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
The telegraph (invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844), and the railroad, knit together the regions
From 1850 to 1890 the total population in the United States increases from 23 million to 63 million
The urban population increases 18% (from 14% to 32%) or 16.6 million people
Many of the new industrial technologies had specific locational requirements we get:
- Power sites:
-Falling water (before the widespread use of coal-fired steam technology and electricity) was important
-Towns along the Fall Line (especially in New England and the eastern margins of the Appalachians)
Examples: Allentown, Harrisburg, Lowell - Mining towns:
- coal and ore towns to supply the industrial economy
- particularly Appalachian coalfield towns like Norton, Virginia - Transportation centers:
- Strategic locations accessible by rail and canal - Heavy manufacturing towns:
- Dependence on large volumes of raw materials
- Steel making and heavy engineering
- Pittsburgh takes on a new role – from being a important river port and wholesaling center to being the steeltown
What was Grand Rapids, Michigan nicknamed and what was it?
“The Furniture City.”
It was the first center of mass-produced furniture in North America
What contributed to the makings of a continental urban system?
- Steam powered riverboats
- Canals
- Growth of the rail network
Why was the growth of the rail network important?
- The railroad “allowed a loose-knit collection of regional economies to develop into a national economy within which American enterprise could fully exploit the commercial advantages and economies of scale of a huge market and an apparently unlimited resource base.”
- The railroad also realigned the spatial organization of the urban system
- -You could ship directly east
- -Inland cities such as Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago become critical juncture points
What were some effects of the continental urban system?
- Smaller port towns on the Mississippi (or nearby) could quickly lose their prominence
some places experience slow rates of growth
An increasing reliance on regional trade and service functions - Creation of the Manufacturing Belt
New York-Buffalo-Detroit-Chicago-Milwaukee
Philadelphia-Pittsburgh-Cincinnati-Louisville - Urban elites competed in a rivalry over the status of their cities
Where did most early industrial growth (and consequently urban growth) occur during the early phases of industrialization occur?
The largest existing towns and cities.
By 1875 the urban system had 15 cities that had more than 100,000 people. Why?
- Initial advantage:
- The owners of craft/wholesaling/transportation activities reinvested in factories and machinery
- Skills in entrepreneurship, investment and lending histories, etc.
- Largest pools of labor
- Largest and most affluent markets - External economies: benefits that translate into cost savings that accrue to producers from associating with similar producers in places that offer the services they need, such as specialist suppliers (location based clustering, agglomeration economies, urbanization economies)
- Skilled labor
- Good specialized business services
- Quality of the infrastructure (roads, harbors, utilities) - Locational economies: where external economies are limited to companies involved in a particular industry
- Pittsburgh’s attractiveness to the iron and steel industry
- Akron’s attractiveness to manufacturers of rubber products
- Dayton’s attractiveness to manufacturers of fabricated metal and machinery
Explain on the urban hierarchy the forces of diversification vs forces of unification.
As population/complexity increases, the probability of finding all the stuff available in one location decreases
What is the Rank-Size Rule?
Pi = P1÷ Ri
Pi = population of city i Ri = rank of city i P1 = population of the largest city in the urban system
For example:
- If the largest city in a particular system has a population of 1 million then
- Then the fifth largest city should have a population of 200,000
- Then the 100th ranked city should have a population of 10,000 and so on.
How did rank sizes change and grow prior to industrialization, during the industrial era, and then after?
Prior to industrialization we saw that it was possible to have a number of urban gateways of similar size
During the industrial era we find that the rank size distribution is more likely to converge on a straight line
- Result of the hierarchical organization of capital flows
- Result of the agglomerative effect of the concentration of financial, manufacturing, and business activities in a few major national and regional centers
By 1870 the spatial pattern of urban places becomes more predictable in the United States
Why did Continental Urbanism succeed and what were some of its effects?
- Increasing integration of North America due to the standardization of rail gauge and increased continental lines
- The constant supply of immigrants (provided low cost labor)
- Introduction of assembly line factory system
- The surpluses of mechanized agriculture
- The entrepreneurial activity of family owned corporations (i.e. Carnegie Iron and Steel)
How does the urban system develop (what are the 5 phases)?
A “Stage Model”
Phase 1: Exploration
Phase 2: Harvesting of Natural Resources
Phase 3: Farm-based Staple Production
Phase 4: Establishment of Interior Depot Centers
Phase 5: Economic maturity, central place infill.
Describe phase 1 of the stage model
- Search for economic information by a prospective colonizing power
- Reconnaissance missions
- What’s out there? Fish, fur, gold, etc.
Describe phase 2 of the stage model
- Periodic harvesting
- Little permanent settlement
- Exploitation of natural resources
Describe phase 3 of the stage model
- Increased permanency of settlement
- Exchange between colonial agricultural commodities and mother country manufactured goods
- Seaports/Gateway cities act as “points of attachment”
Describe phase 4 of the stage model
-Penetration of the interior (usually along routes that facilitate movement of staple products)
-Development of long distance routes and the emergence of towns serving as depots of staple collection at strategic locations
-Towns are established at strategic locations to function as “depots of staple collection” (spearheads of the frontier)
Urban industrial growth in the mother country – supplies both home and colonial markets
Describe phase 5 of the stage model
- Economic maturity in the colonies
- Depots begin to take on service functions and develop as regional centers
- Development of a domestic market large enough and affluent enough to sustain the growth of a domestic manufacturing industry
- Development of a colonial urban network
Vance’s staple trade interpretation is useful for long-run urban development in colonial American, but it is not entirely satisfactory in explaining the initial colonization of English towns. What came first in most English colonial settlements in the new world?
- In most English colonial settlements in the new world, the town came first (Boston, Philly, New York, Charles Town, Newport)
- the staple crop was not necessarily the the most important reason or purpose for the town’s existence
For English colonial settlements, if the staple trade didn’t solely determine urban locations – what did? Why build a town first?
- Obvious answers
- Englishmen regarded towns as nodes of commerce, administration, and defense - A more perceptive answer:
- The role of the colonial town was rooted in pessimism of Elizabethan and Stuart world views
- Elizabethan culture must be preserved and the New World was filled with “licentious natives” and “beguiling wilderness.”
- Wayward colonists (rural wanderers) might pose a threat to the colonial enterprise and the fabric of English culture (i.e. rumors that lost Roanoke colonists were living like “White Indians’, examples of barbarism, the English experience in Ireland)
- The town was a preventative measure, it was deemed the most basic and necessary of frontier institutions
We also cannot ignore the influence of mercantilism on the development of the urban system. How do you define mercantilism?
Basis principles of Mercantilism:
- a nation’s strength depends on its wealth as measured in gold and silver
- only a fixed amount of wealth exists in the world, and nations have to compete for their share of that wealth
- a favorable balance of trade is an important step in gaining wealth
- countries should seek to limit imports and maximize exports
- A country should have its own source for raw materials and precious metals to avoid dependence on others
- colonies exist only as a way for the mother country to make profit
- a county’s colonies should not trade with other countries
What did mercantlism have a hand in?
- british/french rivalry
- african slave trade
- american war for independence
- mid-eighteenth century wars
- spanish colonial system
What did the influence of colonial companies (monopolist authority) do to towns and their location?
- Limited the number of towns
- Administrative centrality (not a free-trade system like the Dutch or French)
- One chief port, centrally located that takes into account:
- Pre-settlement boundaries
- Measurement of coastal boundaries and the location of expected port sites
- Avoidance/Prohibition of ports on opposing shorelines (except in certain circumstances)
- Identification of harbor and navigational features conducive to port location
Why did Boston, Charles Town, Philadelphia succeed beyond expectations and Jameston, St. Mary’s and Burlington flounder?
Vance’s model would have us look at the economic base of a staple export commodity
But we might also consider immigration issues
1630s Puritans to Boston
1680s English Quakers to Pennsylvania
1680s Barbadian planters, French Huguenots, English nonconformists
These periods and places are characterized by family migration (middling socioeconomic status)
Population spikes often corresponded to mother country economic depression and religious persecution
- Ironically, the best colonial lands attracted few family migrants
- In the south, the individual, not the group or even the family became the primary unit of settlement
- These middle lands were reserved for Anglicans and Catholics and the marginal lands to the north were left for the Puritans, Quakers, Separatists, etc.
- Persecution of Anglican families in England wasn’t sufficient to push them to leave
- Those towns in the marginal lands had to find sustenance in stable crops/carrying trade
- Consequently, towns flourished in the colonies where they were least expected to by the Crown.
Give a brief profile of urban expansion in the New Nation (1776-1860)
- 1 in 20 were town or cities dwellers in the infant nation
- By the American Revolution (1775-1783) the colonial population was approx. 2.5 million
- Even by 1830, only 9% of the population lived in places of 5,000 or more
- Coastal cities were the largest but they were all competing for new hinterlands west of the Appalachians
- By 1840 the American urban system had become independent
- By 1860 there were 100 cities with an urban population of 6 million, making the percent of urban people 19.8%
Between 1776-1860, it is intriguing to note that although a very small proportion of the population of the colonies lived in cities, the Constitution was predominately written by whom?
City dwellers and supported city growth
While only 5% of all Americans lived in cities:
20 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were city dwellers
And 20 more had extensive urban contacts (i.e. they were lawyers or merchants)
When it came to supporting the Constitution at state ratifying conventions – city interests lined up on the side of adoption while areas dominated by small farms chose delegates who opposed it
What followed American Independence?
- It was both practical and necessary for economic links to be forged between towns/cities
- A greater proportion of investment was financed by American capital – less money leaked back to the European system
- A proliferation of government functions (county courthouses to town halls to state capitals to a new seat for the federal government [Washington, D.C. ])
- Westward expansion also stimulated Eastern cities to attempt to consolidate their control (creation of corridors of trade)
- Westward/Southward expansion required frontier towns
“At the time of the first census in 1790, the top-twenty cities in the United States all had ____________. These cities served as ___________________.
“Forty years later, in 1830, the locus of growth had shifted ___________________, including Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. These cities joined several coastal cities as the leading centers of their time.
- coastal locations, primarily in the northeast
- ports and entrepot cities that nurtured important trade functions such as wholesaling and finance.”
- inland to a series of river cities
What did the Canal do for New York? Why is Schenectady’s rank clock surprising?
Nearly every major city in New York can be found along the trade route established by the Erie Canal: it links Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, and Albany with New York City.
Schenectady had prospered as a principal port of the lower Mohawk River but the completion of the Erie Canal meant that boats could go all the way.
What are some important facts about the Erie Canal?
Of the American canals preceding it only three were more than two miles long and the longest of these, the Middlesex, was hardly 28 miles in length
Question: How long is the Erie Canal
Answer: 363 miles
Construction began in 1817 and was completed in 1825
Built largely through unsettled territory
Its justification lay not in current traffic but in the expected development [an act of faith, “if you build it they will come”]
Why was the Erie Canal important and what was its’ effect?
IT WAS A BOLD BID FOR WESTERN TRADE
Inevitably, the Erie Canal sparked a national canal craze
The Canal’s success vitally affected the rivalry of the major eastern seaboard cities
- It reduced shipping costs for a ton of goods from $100 to $10
- It dramatically shifted the rural to urban ratio in New York State
When was the Ohio-Erie Canal and the Miami-Erie Canal completed?
Ohio-Erie Canal (completed 1833) and Miami-Erie (completed early 1840s)
What did the Ohio Canal system do to turnpikes?
The canal challenged the supremacy of the turnpikes
- Up to the 1820’s, New York’s competitors to the south relied on turnpikes to control western trade.
- The shortest route to the west led across Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and the two principal east-west roads favored Philadelphia and Baltimore.
- The Pittsburgh Pike and the National Road made Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Wheeling important commercial centers at a time when Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit were mere frontier settlements.
- In this respect, New York City was at a disadvantage during the turn-pike era.
What are some facts about turnpikes?
The first private turnpike in the United States was chartered by Pennsylvania in 1792 and opened two years later.
- Spanning 62 miles between Philadelphia and Lancaster, it quickly attracted the attention of merchants in other states, who recognized its potential to direct commerce away from their regions.
- Soon lawmakers from those states began chartering turnpikes.
- By 1800, 69 turnpike companies had been chartered throughout the country, especially in Connecticut (23) and New York (13). -Over the next decade nearly six times as many turnpikes were incorporated (398).
- Turnpikes promised little in the way of direct dividends and profits, but they offered potentially large indirect benefits (aka: you were not going to earn money by buying stock in a particular turnpike company). Because turnpikes facilitated movement and trade, nearby merchants, farmers, land owners, and ordinary residents would benefit from a turnpike: Improved value of lands, Serving the community (a public service ethos), and Turnpikes became symbols of civic pride
For example, the Pittsburgh Pike (completed in 1820) greatly improved freighting over the rugged Allegheny Mountains. Freight rates between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were cut in half because wagons increased their capacity, speed, and certainty (Reiser 1951, 76-77).
What were some disadvantages of turnpikes and what was the effect?
The turnpikes’ were severely limited though.
- Issue of free-ridership
- Some manufactured goods were shipped westward, but bulky agricultural produce of the west continued to use the Mississippi route to New Orleans.
- The increased use of the steamboat for up-river carriage on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers threatened to deprive the turnpikes of even their westward trade.
- Basically New Orleans was a rival to East Coast dominance (and remember New Orleans was not an American city until 1803)
This situation was transformed by the construction of the Erie Canal.
-The Canal created a direct two-way trade
New York’s site and situation placed her major rivals-Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore –in an extremely difficult position. What was that position? What question did that raise?
-A failure to achieve a line to the west, therefore, meant stagnation, even decline; this was the view of the advocates of internal improvement in all the rival cities.
HOW DO YOU
COMPETE IF YOU ARE BOSTON, BALTIMORE OR PHILLY? The question was do you IMITATE OR INNOVATE?
In other words: Should New York’s rivals use the tried and tested method of canals in a geographical situation that was unsuited to that method or should they choose an untried method? Or should they postpone and risk obsolescence?
How did Pennsylvania answer the imitate or innovate question?
- Chose to build a canal to Pittsburgh
- The height/grade of the mountains forced them into the construction of a ‘mongrel line’ (a road and rail mix) with three transshipment points
- A series of depots and agents, located at Philadelphia, Columbia, Hollidaysburg, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh
What were some problems Pennsylvania ran in to?
- Transshipments caused delays, damaged and lost goods
- Delays and high tolls convinced shippers and millers in western Pennsylvania that it was cheaper to send flour down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then by ship to Philadelphia
- The turnpikes remained central for more valuable goods
- Good for west bound traffic but the Ohio and Mississippi rivers remained central for bulk commodities
- “… .the chain that was to bind Philadelphia with the west was . . . severed, disjointed, fragmentary. It was an amphibious connection of land and water, consisting of two railways separated by a canal, and of two canals separated by a railway, happily elucidating the defects peculiar to both methods of transit, with the advantages of neither.”
But it is not simply about through-traffic:
- The mainline received large quantities of coal and raw iron from the Union Canal, from the canals along the north and west branches of the Susquehanna, from the valley of the Juniata, and from the huge bituminous coal fields west of Hollidaysburg.
- To the Pittsburgh iron interests, the mainline was a lifesaver.
- Money spent on the mainline however delayed construction of a full railway across Pennsylvania
Overall Pennsylvania made a poor choice:
- Couldn’t compete with the Erie
- Loss of merchants to New York
- Delayed the construction of rail lines
- -The Pennsylvania Railroad was completed in 1852 (too late to divert a good portion of the trade that had centered on New York for a quarter of a century)
- -Also the Erie Railroad (New York Central), and the Hudson River Railroad were all in operation
How did Baltimore answer the imitate or innovate question?
- Experiencing “gradual deterioration” - this was their term for a slowing down of the rate of growth
- Private construction of a trans-Appalachian line, the Baltimoreans decided to risk their own capital in a private venture.
- Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company
How did Boston answer the imitate or innovate question?
- Was in a very difficult position
- While the city could hope to participate in the trade of the west – it couldn’t possibly hope to replace New York
- If it built a canal it would have to cross the Berkshires and even then it would simply be linking itself to the Hudson
- So it delayed.
What happened before 1890 to make L.A. rise?
Between 1820 and 1870:
- Success of the Mexican war of Independence (1821)
- Gold Rush (1840) – a motivating force for the American conquest of California
- California becomes a state in 1850
- Continental rail links to San Francisco by 1870 and to Los Angeles by 1876
- Northern California’s population and economy virtually exploded during the Gold Rush, but Southern California remained relatively unpopulated and undeveloped until much later in the century
-“By effectively exploiting their physical isolation, the Californians had created a sufficient if not affluent economy. The ranchos were nevertheless grossly inefficient. Compared with farms in the United States, they produced extremely little per acre and per person. That they survived anyway was due to the sparse population, mild environment, and proliferating stock. That they also prospered was due to the absence of taxes on land and the availability of involuntary labor.”
What happened when the US took control of California and Los Angeles?
- When the US took control, a new system was implemented (property taxes, proof of land ownership, litigation fees, natives became ‘free’ = salaries
- the result was a shift from self-sufficient agriculture to market agriculture (from immediate consumption to specialized production for distant consumers)
- 1848 = gold boom in Northern California but there was also a shift in Southern California as well. The rancheros got rich feeding the miners but they also became infatuated with luxury and the pursuit of please distracted them from the fact that their monopoly of the beef trade was temporary.
- Soon the supply of cattle far exceeded the demand and few Californians survived this crisis with their ranchos intact. Trained as soldiers and dedicated to the ideal of the Spanish grande, they did not understand the complexities of the market economy. Instead of fortifying their position during the boom of the early 1850s, the expanded their holdings and squandered their profits.
- Possession of Southern California’s ranches passed to a few prominent Los Angeles and San Francisco capitalists who experimented with crops/ products. (The shift from ranchos to ranches was complete and the selling of land was the result
- The repercussions profoundly affected Los Angeles. So long as self-sufficient ranchos covered the country side, it remained an agricultural village with no unique function in the region’s economy or society. The failure of the ranchos, however, generated opportunities for urban enterprises and associations which transformed the Mexican pueblo into an American town.
When California joined the Union in 1850, nothing about Los Angeles foreshadowed its emergence as one of America’s foremost metropolises. Why?
- a nondescript agricultural village with 1,610 people
- no railroads, few streets or other public improvements.
- It was isolated, geographically and economically, from the large population centers of the United States and western Europe.
- lacked the natural harbor and surface resources that attracted commerce and generated industry elsewhere in the country.
In the 80 years after 1850, Los Angeles witnessed an amazing expansion. Why?
- It grew into a city of 1.2 million and a metropolitan district of 2.3 million persons
- It built a vast network of railways and highways
- It tapped northern Sierra sources for its water supply, and subdivided the vast southern California countryside.
- It developed into a flourishing commercial entrepôt, an impressive industrial producer, and the economic center of the great Southwest.
- By 1930, it stood fifth in population, second in territory, and ninth in manufacturing among American metropolises
Why did San Diego initially appear to be the powerhouse of the west?
- Prior to the 1880s it was believed that San Diego was the only southern Californian settlement that could compete with San Francisco
- Los Angeles was “too far inland and had no reliable harbor. We must be content to be the political and social capital of south California; we must be satisfied with out genial climate, our fruitful soul, our generous wines, our golden fruit, our productive mines, out cattle upon a thousand hills”
Until the 1870s “all eyes were riveted on San Diego”
- San Francisco’s Southern Pacific created a stranglehold
- San Diego’s supreme asset, the bay, was also its fatal liability
- In 1885, the first transcontinental train arrived in San Diego, years after Los Angles was connected to San Francisco by the Southern Pacific
In the east settlement promoted _________. In the west, railroads promoted.
railroad construction
settlement
What happened to the Texas and Pacific company’s railroad?
The Texas and Pacific company, with San Diego designated as the western terminus of a railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific was held back near El Paso, Texas, while the Southern Pacific (controlled by the Central Pacific) built eastward from the California border to control the southeast entrance at Yuma.
A new challenger appears (the Santa Fe). The route designed for the Atlantic and Pacific was from Springfield, Missouri to Albuquerque, and thence “along the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude as near as may be found most suitable for a railroad route, to the Colorado river, at such a point as may be selected by said company for crossing; thence by the most practicable and eligible route to the Pacific.
Who were the “big four” and what was their victory?
Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins.
“These four men controlled a far-flung network of railroad enterprises which gave them enormous wealth and political power. Admired and detested as the West’s first “railroad kings” they left a legacy of railroad development which still influences transportation and politics in California.”
What was Los Angeles goal in their war with San Diego?
For Los Angeles
It wasn’t enough to cut San Diego off from trade
The goal was to become the population center of note in Southern California
But they couldn’t simply rely on natural increase or farm to city movement (there were simply too few people)
It was reasoned that immigration was “the one great desideratum” and that “every practicable means should be used to secure it as rapidly as possible.”
But how do you convince an immigrant population to choose southern California?
Keep in mind that there were lots of options:
- Central California’s San Joaquin, northern California’s Sacramento, and western Oregon’s Willamette valleys contained fine farmland.
- Fine farmland also dotted western Canada’s Red River Valley, now penetrated by the Canadian Pacific, and eastern Washington’s inland empire, just opened up by the Great Northern.
- And American immigrants—be they New York farmers who chose the forested Ohio Valley over the treeless Dakota Territory or Piedmont planters who preferred the Tennessee hills to the Louisiana lowlands—traditionally favored a countryside with a familiar climate, topography, vegetation, and agriculture.
For immigrants, who were unaccustomed to a warm, arid climate and uneasy amid a timberless, mountainous landscape and who had never irrigated a field, pruned a vine, or grafted a citrus tree, southern California had little appeal.
What aided the movement?
Rate wars between rail companies and help to populate California with boosters/boomers
How did heavy boosterism contribute to immigration out west to Los Angeles? What did California sell the idea of?
- On the whole, American was being sold as a nation of farmers
- And yet, by 1900 the nations countrymen were profoundly dissatisfied with their lot. They were tired, and many of them have been born tired, or tired, toil-broken parents. They yearned to escape the toil, drudgery and drabness of their farms and shops, to free themselves from the bonds of their narrow spheres; and most important of all, to spare their children their own fate. Desiring life’s amenities no less than its decencies and less arduous but more rewarding livelihoods, they were strongly attracted by the far greater comforts and better opportunities in American cities.
California sold the idea that the difference between this and many parts of our land is that here nature seems to work with man and not against him and tends to soften the asperities and abate the restless rush and haste of usual life.
Instead of promising prospective immigrants material prosperity, southern California’s promoters offered them an easier, more varied, less complicated, and well-rounded life.
Ultimately, the cityscape of Los Angeles was created by:
- Suburbanization
- The growth of satellite cities
- The decentralization of manufacturing activities
- There was no urban-industrial fabric to negotiate (a blank canvas)
- A landscape ripe for polycentric sprawl
What fueled Los Angeles’ burst of growth? What was the biggest reason?
- Agricultural development (vineyards, beef ranches, vegetables, citrus groves)
- Climate and amenities
- A tourist paradise
- Oil
…But really it was BOOSTERISM!
BOOSTERISM driven by land speculators, real estate players, developers and media
What image were they selling?
- A new Eden for middle-class, white and Protestant American home seekers locating to escape the racially mix east coast
- The American Dream (property and prosperity)
What are some examples of Los Angeles boosterism?
What was being sold/packaged?
Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel, Ramona
written to expose the mistreatment of the Mission Indians by Angelo-Americans, the book did much to encourage interest in Spanish/Mexican California
She had wanted to write something akin to Uncle Tom’s Cabin but instead stimulated Spanish Revival
Europeans were viewed to be benevolent and Mexican California was considered evil
She romanticized the history of race relations in California
She linked Southern California to Mediterraneanism – a second Italy, Greece or Spain
A full blown tourist industry was built around the novel
Colonel Otis (and Harry Chandler)
He took control of the city’s business organizations and prevented unionization and harassed picketers
He sold the open shop mentality
Los Angeles Times
“Los Angeles is in a transition state,” he wrote in an early editorial. “She has finally waked up from the dull lethargy of those old days when she was one great sheep-walk and cattle range. All she needs now is men of brawn and brains to grow up with her.”
Charles Fletcher Lummis
Walked from Ohio to Southern California
Helped create the boom of the 1880s by marketing Southern California as a place to escape the ravages of eastern cities (health, tourism, a winter sojourn, even a permanent move)
A place to amalgamate the genteel tradition and the strenuous life
Los Angeles became the sunny refuge of White Protestant America in the age of labor upheaval and the mass immigration of the Catholic and the Jewish poor from Eastern and Southern Europe
The interplay of metaphors allowed Southern California to be constructed akin to a stage set (Mediterranean motifs, architecture and places names helped complete the image)
In people’s eyes, Los Angeles transcended being a mere city? Why?
“Los Angeles it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.” (Morrow Mayo)
“Unlike other American cites that maximized their comparative advantages as crossroads, capitals, seaports, or manufacturing centers, Los Angeles was first and above all the creature of real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation, in fact, of the generations of boosters and promoters who had subdivided and sold the west from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific.”(Mike Davis, 1992)
What did the first surge of growth in Los Angeles do?
Sold an idyllic Los Angeles to Protestant America
Rooted the regional economy in agriculture, land speculation, boosterism, tourism and the specialized health and leisure services required by wealthy white (often retirees)
The economy base of Los Angeles was initially unsustainable, so what did Los Angeles do?
This economic base was clearly not sustainable
- -From 1900-1920 L.A. begins to shift towards industrial development
- A Western Outlier to the American -Manufacturing Belt
- Petroleum
- Aircraft Industry
- The Movie Industry
- An expanded port complex (1906) – L.A. annexed San Pedro
- The Completion of the California Aqueduct
- Significant migration streams (European, Japan, Mexico)
- Automobile
Forty widely scattered suburbs were created during this period (‘black gold suburbs’)
What does “shoestring” annexation mean?
“”shoestring annexation” is a term used in the United States for an annexation by a city, town or other municipality in which it acquires new territory that is not contiguous to the existing territory but is connected to it by a thin strip of land. It is sometimes called a “flagpole annexation” because the territory resembles a flagpole, in which the connection is the “pole” and the annexed territory the “flag”.”
The Industrial boom in Los Angeles was driven by …
Oil Drilling takes off in the 1890s (pin cushion hill)
Owens Valley Aqueduct (commenced in 1905 and completed in 1913)
Between 1920 to 1940 Los Angeles was roaring. Why?
1920-1940: A roaring Los Angeles
-A continuous boom in comparison to the rest of the country
-Two Great Migrations: Mexicans fleeing the Revolution, African Americans fleeing the South
-Annexations - during the 1920s L.A. annexed 45 adjacent communities
-A collection of suburbs in search of a city
Formation of a vast urban industrial zone
-The rise of a vast science complex (Caltech) and other state-of-the-art research facilities that attracted top scientists interested in technologically-oriented research
high-tension electrical transmission hydraulics, electronics
-Support for and then the construction of passenger aircrafts
-The Aero Club of Southern California
-A commercial market for aircraft
What did Los Angeles do to beat its competitors in industrialization?
Ironically, the image of the industrial might of America forced everyone to look at the Manufacturing Belt
Meanwhile L.A. continued to diversify its industrial base
- It led the country in movie production (90% of all films in the United States), oil refining, airplane manufacturing, and secondary automobile manufacturing
- It was second in tire production
- It was fourth in furniture production and women’s apparel
In short, L.A. had developed all the ingredients for its post war triumph as a “military-industrial complex”
What was Los Angeles appeal?
“Los Angeles emerged as America’s first essentially middle-class metropolis … Los Angeles’ appeal lay in its being the first major city that was not quite a city, that is, not a crowded industrial metropolis. It was a garden city of backyards and quiet streets, a sprawling small town magnified a thousandfold and set among palms and orange trees under a sunny sky” (David Brodsly)
“Precisely because Los Angeles lacked natural advantages and a dominant industry, its leaders realized that they would have to create these attributes themselves. Where other municipalities provided facilities in response to population growth and industrial expansion, the Los Angeles elite very early realized that their real business was growth itself. That is, they must invest to provide the essential infrastructure that the city lacked—water, power, a port, transportation—and then use this infrastructure to lure the new population and businesses which alone could justify the investments.”
Between 1875 to 1920, what happened to Los Angeles’ industry?
The organisation of industry:
-Industrial capitalism = more efficient transport and communication networks
-More pronounced patterns of economic specialization/greater integration
-Steel rails = heavier loads, greater speeds, concentration of industry in larger cities
-Expansion of railroad system
–allowed Birmingham, Jacksonville, Memphis and Houston to emerge as central places with regional status
–Infilling of settled areas
–Colonization of frontier areas
Copper in Montana
Lead and zinc in Missouri
Iron ore around Lake Superior
-Tourism in Florida
-The demand for coal produced numerous new sites
What was the urban hierarchy in 1920 and what contributed to it?
Urban Hierarchy (around 1920)
More than 4 million
New York
1.5 million
Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
150000-750000
several cities of the West (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle), Southwest (Dallas), Midwest (Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis), Northeast (Baltimore, Cincinnati, Providence)
Continued Growth of Cities
Falling Death Rates = greater natural increase
Large scale immigration
-The territorial expansion of the manufacturing belt (National economic heartland)
-Cities were closely integrated
-The result of initial advantage at a regional scale (core-periphery pattern)
-Scale and intensity differed in the manufacturing belt
-The production of goods for a national market
-Specialization provided the basis for increased commodity flows between towns and cities
-Local Specialization:
Brewers = Milwaukee, St. Louis
Men’s clothing, fruit and vegetable canning = Baltimore
Musical instruments and men’s clothing = Boston
Meat packing, furniture, printing, publishing = Chicago
Coach building, furniture = Cincinnati
Glass, iron, steel = Pittsburgh
Textiles = Philadelphia
How did the percentage of urban populations change from 1900 to 1990?
Essentially all 20th century US population growth has been in cities increasing the urban population fraction from 40 percent in 1900 to more than 75 percent in 1990. This move to the cities is projected to continue
What transformed the 20th century from the Century of Work to the Century of Play?
- The closing of the frontier
- the growth of large cities
- european immigration
- an expanding immigrant working population
- the end of slavery
- industrial expansion
- rise of new affluence/expansion of the middle class
- influence of health and moral reformers (settlement of house workers, YMCA, Playground Association of America
- acceptance of sport as a significant social and economic institution of American life.
What happened from 1876 to 1925 in terms of sports?
- Baseball becomes acknowledged as the national pastime
- basketball is invented
- boxing explodes in popularity
- the rise of college football
- expansion of the sporting goods industry
- a recreation/parks movement takes root in the nation
- sport becomes firmly added into the educational curriculum
- tennis,golf,bicycling sweeps through the middle class
What did cities offer people?
- Geographic mobility
- there were a means of escape
- if life is unsatisfactory in one place, you move on
- a nation not just of immigrants but migrants
- rural-to-urban migration reversed Turner’s theory that plentiful land in teh West calmed urban tensions. Instead cities attracted those disappointed with farm life and those fed up with life in another city
- it took thousands o dollars to start a farm but only a few dollars to buy a railroad ticket - social mobility
- upward mobility soothes our souls
- it is not equally of condition but equality of opportunity that Americans have celebrated
- perhaps rising to th top is a myth, but the middle is thought to be possible (a new job, some real estate, or other forms of satisfaction helped ease social unrest and represented an improvement over life i in the old country.)
What contributed to the the roots of modern planning (the search for order and beauty)
- a high degree of national slovenliness
- that cities were full of stench (poor sanitation, industrial fumes)
- that too many sacrifices had been made to the altar of industry
- that cities were visually cluttered and unpleasing (billboards, aesthetic nuisances)
- that too much attention had been placed on innovations and inventiveness related to territorial expansion and not enough attention had been placed on figuring out how to create and foster ideals for communal living.
What was the progressive era and what two critical questions stemmed from it?
Progressive Era 1890-1920
Progressivism is the term applied to a variety of responses to the economic and social problems rapid industrialization, immigration and urbanization introduced to America
Jane Adams, Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives) concerned over the ‘tumor of the tenement’, pathogens
Daniel Burnham, Olmstead (and others) were concerned over city aesthetics
Two critical questions:
How could the masses be disciplined and regulated?
How to control spatial growth but ensure productivity?
Who were the progressives?
- women
- evangelicals
- journalists
- social workers
- experts
- professionals
- politicians
- conservationists
- civil rights activists
What are some important quotations about class inequality?
“Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.” (Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
Slums were “nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half a million beggars to prey upon our charities . . . because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion.”
What were three reforms in response to the urban “environmental” crises?
- Sanitary reform (water supply, sewage)
- Parks/Playground movement
- City Beautiful
What was the parks reform? What is a park?
Parks Reform: Returning ‘Nature’ to the City
“As long as the rural order was considered to be the source of national vitality, spiritual renewal, and democratic control, the American city would appear morbid and artificial. Because of the belief that urban society had been abruptly cut off from the harmonies of a natural order, it was held that it could be rejuvenated only by inserting the values and ethos of the rural past into the fabric of the urban order” (Christine Boyer 1983, 9).
What is a park?
A rural landscape emptied of rural labor and laborers?
An enclosed tract of land held by royal grant or prescription for keeping beasts of the chase (i.e. deer)?
An artificially natural landscape?
Is it not interesting to note that parks are usually identified with cities?
Why did cities build parks?
Reformers were still committed to and nostalgic from the values instilled by America’s rural democratic past
Parks were part of the “back to nature movement”. They were restorative.
Idyllic counterpoint to the congestion of the city
Islands of nature in the artificial urban milieu
They were therapeutic.
a place to relieve the tension of urban living
“foul air prompts to vice, oxygen to virtue”
“curative natural environments”
physical relief/breathing spaces
Had a democratic force
-Create a fraternal spirit
Recreation opportunity for laboring masses
Pleasure grounds for the upper classes
Enhanced/increased the property values of neighboring properties
Prices was relatively modest (aka the time was ripe)
Why was Central Park created?
Central Park (initially opened in 1857)
Emerged out of a complex mix of motivations: Make money Display the city’s cultivation Lift up the poor Refine the rich To advance commercial interests To retard commercial development To improve public health To curry political favor To provide jobs
New York did have a number of private parks/gardens and public squares
But NYC didn’t have something to match expansive parks of European capitals where royal grounds had been converted to public use
Seeking “a public space worthy of our great metropolis”
By the late 1840s, NYC’s population had grown to half a million people
20,000 new immigrants arrived at the port each year
-Blocks of houses/stores stretched north of the Battery to 30th street and ferries linked the island to Brooklyn and New Jersey
-Increased size, density and social heterogeneity meant dramatic social changes and New Yorkers were keen to outline where improvements were needed.
-The idea of large public park competed for attention
