City life in America changed dramatically after the Civil War as urban centers swelled with men and women leaving the nation’s farms and millions of immigrants from Europe sought labor and an escape from political and social ills. Burgeoning cities caused the creation of innovative technologies, opened doors to powerful political city bosses and corruption, fostered diseases due to poor sanitation, and hybridized ethnic cultures with American values. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas and America came to be seen as an “urban nation.”
Gilded Age Immigration
During the 1880s and 1890s, cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago were inundated with the “new” immigrants, families from Italy escaping war, pestilence, unemployment; Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe fleeing the Russian pogroms; Southern Europeans from the Mediterranean, seeking new lives free of the constant political turmoil and economic declines.
Cities like Chicago and New York grew rapidly as immigrants defined specific ethnic neighborhoods still evident today. Boston and New York have thriving Italian sections (the “Old North End” and “Little Italy”) as well as colorful China Towns. Chicago, in a rebuilding mode after the calamitous 1871 fire, was home to the first skyscrapers, a new architectural marvel, begun by Louis Sullivan, and destined to change forever city sky lines.
Most of the new immigrants were unskilled and found employment in the growing factories. Living in inner city tenements, whole families occupied the smallest of quarters often serviced by only one bath. By 1890, over half of all New York buildings where tenements. For the most part, immigrants like the Italians remained in their ethnic neighborhoods, creating fraternal organizations and support groups.
Changing Nature of City Life
As immigrants expanded their urban presence, the middle class moved beyond the city centers into outlying, “suburban” sections easily accessed by new transportation modes such as the tram or trolley. This was the beginning of mass transit. Middle class workers used these early transit systems to “commute” to the inner city business districts. In New York, competing railroad companies established “elevated” lines connecting the city, suburbs such as in Brooklyn, and the beaches at Coney Island.
Politically, the influx of immigrants represented an opportunity for local political bosses. In New York, for examples, “bosses” like William Tweed, connected with Tammany Hall, courted immigrant votes for service while establishing networks of patronage that often siphoned off the public till. While the infamous construction of the New York County Courthouse, budgeted at $250,000, cost taxpayers 13 million, other public projects completed with local political assistance such as the Brooklyn Bridge (built by a German immigrant) served a tremendous public good.
Poor sanitation, non-existent water treatment or filtering, and cramped living quarters added to the outbreaks of disease such as cholera. In 1890, Jacob Riis documented urban problems in his book, How the Other Half Lives. Other writers like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane fictionalized Gilded Age problems through powerful characters like Sister Carrie.
Ethnic Neighborhoods Still Retain their Character
Pizza, an American staple, was only universalized in the late 1940s and 1950s after American GIs returned from Europe where they had been introduced to pizza during the war. Yet pizza had existed for decades in the Italian ethnic neighbors. Because these neighborhoods retained their inclusive nature, initially, few Italians ventured beyond them or married outside of their ethnic groups. In contrast, New York’s German section, “Yorkville,” comprised only a few blocks. Today, New York’s E. 86th Street barely provides evidence of a German past.
Changes in Gilded Age American cities, notably the largest growing cities, affected the character of a nation. Helping to transition America from a rural to an urban society, the journey involved significant hardships.
Sources:
Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life 2nd ed. (Harper Perennial, 2002)
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the American People (Little, Brown, and Company, 1973)
George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation (Hill and Wang, 1965)
Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America: A People’s History of the Post-ReconstructionEra Vol. VI (Penguin Books, 1984)
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (on-line edition)
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