The Divided City

Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America

Alan Mallach

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781610917827
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Who really benefits fromurban revival? Cities, from trendy coastal areas to the nation's heartland, are seeing levels of growth beyond the wildest visions of only a few decades ago. But vast areas in the same cities house thousands of people living in poverty who see little or no new hope or opportunity. Even as cities revive, they are becoming more unequal and more segregated. What does this mean for these cities—and the people who live in them?In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach shows us what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He draws from his decades of experience working in America's cities, and pulls in insightful research and data, to spotlight these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social, and political context. Mallach explores the pervasive significance of race in American citiesand looks closely atthe successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change. The Divided City offers strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity. Mallach makes a compelling case thatthese strategies must be local in addition to being concrete and focusing on people's needs—education, jobs, housing and quality of life. Change, he argues, will come city by city, not through national plans or utopian schemes.This is the first book to provide a comprehensive, grounded picture of the transformation of America's older industrial cities. It is neither a dystopian narrative nor a one-sided "the cities are back"story, but a balanced picture rooted in the nitty-gritty reality of these cities. The Divided City is imperative for anyone who cares about cities and who wants to understand how to make today'surban revival work for everyone.

Chapter 1

The Rise and Fall of the American Industrial City

The Founding Fathers’ United States was a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic Ocean, an agrarian country whose cities were centers of trade, not industry. While that began to change soon after the end of the Revolution, as the Northwest Ordinance opened up vast tracts of the Midwest to settlement, for years western places like Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Cincinnati were small villages, barely more than fortified outposts, situated along rivers and surrounded by forests still largely populated by long-established Native American peoples. As late as 1820, more people lived on the island of Nantucket than in the city of Pittsburgh.

These Midwestern towns were small, but not sleepy. They bustled with an entrepreneurial energy that in some ways was greater, and certainly more single-minded, than in cities back East; Frances Trollope, visiting Cincinnati in 1828, noted with disdain that “every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey … vulgarly called money.”¹ At the time, Cincinnati was by far the largest town west of the Alleghenies, a status it retained until the Civil War. Over the next few decades, as millions of migrants moved westward, one city after another emerged along the region’s rivers and lakes, linked first by canals and then by railroads. In 1837, a different, more generous English visitor could describe Detroit “with its towers and spires and animated population, with villas and handsome houses stretching along the shore, and a hundred vessels or more, gigantic steamers, brigs, schooners, crowding the port, loading and unloading; all the bustle, in short, of prosperity and commerce.”² By the eve of the Civil War, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Buffalo were all among the ten largest cities in the United States.

Most manufacturing in the early years of the nineteenth century was still taking place on the East Coast, in large cities like New York and Philadelphia as well as in dozens of smaller cities around them. Lowell, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, were founded as mill towns and grew into cities; the first potteries making tableware were founded in Trenton early in the nineteenth century, while Peter Cooper and Abram Hewitt opened their first iron mill in that city in 1845.³ By the middle of the century, Philadelphia was calling itself the “workshop of the world.”⁴ These East Coast cities were soon rivaled, though, and in many industries overtaken by the growing cities of the Midwest.

Midwestern cities were hives of industrial activity from the beginning; an 1819 directory of Cincinnati listed two foundries, six tinsmiths, four coppersmiths, and nine silversmiths; a nail factory, a fire engine maker, fifteen cabinet shops, sixteen coopers (barrel makers), and many more.⁵ Detroit’s shipyards started out as repair yards, soon branched into manufacturing marine engines, and by the 1840s were making steamships for the growing Great Lakes trade. All this activity was fueled by a growing regional market as the population of Northwest Territories exploded. From an 1810 population of 12,282, Illinois’s population reached 1.7 million by 1860, second in the Midwest to Ohio, which by then had over 2.3 million residents. This population explosion was driven not only by continued migration from the East, but also by the arrival of the nation’s first mass immigration, from Germany and Ireland, just before mid-century.

While long-settled cities like Boston and Philadelphia had dignity if not grandeur, Midwestern cities, for all their ambition, were still modest affairs. A late-nineteenth-century description of 1860 Detroit noted that “only a few leading thoroughfares were paved. There were neither street railways nor omnibus lines. Old-fashioned drays did the hauling. There were no public street lamps except in the central part of the city. […] There were but three stone business fronts.”⁶ Still, there were intimations of greater things to come; pictures of Cleveland from the 1850s, when it was still a small city of only 17,000, show an impressive row of four-story masonry buildings along Superior Avenue leading to the lavishly landscaped Public Square, then and now the heart of the city (fig. 1-1).

Figure 1-1 A city in the making: downtown Cleveland in the 1850s. (Source: Western Reserve Historical Society)

For all the bustle and activity of its cities, though, the United States on the eve of the Civil War was still an agrarian nation. Only one out of six Americans lived in towns of more than 2,500 population. Fewer than 19,000 of Indiana’s 1.3 million people lived in Indianapolis, the state’s largest town; of Illinois’s 1.7 million people, only 112,000 lived in Chicago, the state’s only city of any size, whose economy was still heavily based on meatpacking and other agricultural products, which were shipped back East. Except for a handful of Northeastern mill towns, no American city could be characterized as an “industrial city”; most factories other than textile mills were small in scale, more like workshops than the vast factories that emerged after the Civil War.

That changed quickly. By the late 1880s, the United States had become the world’s leading industrial nation, while in the thirty years following the Civil War, places like Cleveland and Detroit had gone from overgrown towns to become major urban centers. Historians and economists have singled out many different reasons for the simultaneous explosion of industrialization and urbanism in late-nineteenth-century America—so many that one is led to believe that America’s industrial supremacy was meant to be. America had everything: rich lodes of natural resources such as coal and iron; ample and inexpensive energy sources; a far-flung, efficient transportation infrastructure; a growing and increasingly affluent domestic market; transformative technological innovations, such as the Kelly-Bessemer process that turned steelmaking from an artisanal to an industrial process; a flourishing entrepreneurial culture operating with few restraints curbing its activities; seemingly inexhaustible sources of inexpensive immigrant labor; and, of course, the leadership of a powerful band of inventors, financiers, and industrial barons, whose names, whether acclaimed or reviled, still resonate as giants in the American saga: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt or Edison.

It wasn’t pretty. Workers worked long hours, under grueling and often dangerous conditions; “you don’t notice any old men here,” said a laborer in Carnegie’s Homestead Mill in 1894. “The long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up.”⁷ In contrast to the small workshops of the past, the new steel mills were vast, impersonal places employing thousands of people. In Carnegie’s mills workers worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, with only the Fourth of July off. Death and dismemberment were routine daily events. Safety regulations and limits on working hours or child labor were all still in the future.

Living conditions outside the factories were often not much better. With the social safety net also still in the future, poverty and destitution were widespread. Thousands of immigrant families were crammed into tiny houses, often sharing them with one or more other families. While tenements were rare outside New York City, conditions in Baltimore’s alley houses or Newark’s triple-deckers were often only marginally better. In 1900, two or more families doubled up in over half of all the houses and apartments in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey.

Yet that was not the entire story. As the century neared its end, remarkable transformations took place in city after city, particularly in the great Midwestern cities that were at the heart of the nation’s industrial expansion. As these cities’ prosperity grew along with their middle-class populations, they became true cities, not merely in the sense of large agglomerations of people and business activity but, following as best they could the models of ancient Athens or renaissance Florence, as centers of civic, cultural, and intellectual life. While their achievements may have fallen short of those ideals, they were nonetheless notable.

Much of the cities’ efforts were devoted to beautification, often emulating the boulevards and palaces of the great cities of Europe. After Frederick Law Olmsted completed Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the next city to commission work from him was Buffalo, followed by Chicago and Detroit. Buffalo, indeed, hired Olmsted to design not only a park, but an entire network of parks and landscaped parkways forming a green ring around this gritty industrial city. Following on the heels of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Daniel Burnham and his colleagues created an elaborate Beaux Arts plan for downtown Cleveland featuring a three-block landscaped mall 400 feet wide, flanked by the city’s principal civic buildings, including the county courthouse, city hall, public library, and public auditorium. During the same years, the great downtown department stores came into being, as did the first wave of skyscrapers, led by the “father of skyscrapers,” Chicago’s Louis Sullivan.

Physical embellishment was matched by cultural embellishment, taking the form of universities, symphony orchestras, and museums, but even more by civic improvement. Reform movements sought to clean up hitherto corrupt municipal governments, ameliorate the living conditions of the poor, introduce proper sanitation, electrify the streets, modernize public transportation, and provide universal public education, introducing all of these features into what had become increasingly polluted and crowded utilitarian places. Lincoln Steffens hailed Cleveland’s Mayor Tom Johnson in 1905 as “the best mayor of the best-governed city in the United States.”⁸ There was no doubt that the civic leaders of these cities saw them as great cities; as the governor of Illinois said at the 1889 dedication of Chicago’s Auditorium Building, it was “proof that the diamond of Chicago’s civilization has not been lost in the dust of the warehouse, or trampled beneath the mire of the slaughter pen.”⁹

Beaux Arts schemes like the Cleveland mall may have existed at least in part to burnish the self-image of the cities’ leadership, but the transformation of the industrial city was not merely for the benefit of the elite. Despite—or perhaps because of—sustained labor and civic unrest, the nature of the urban working class was changing. Trade unions were organized, while immigrants became Americanized and their children steadily moved into the middle class. And move they did; as research studies have shown, intergenerational mobility in the United States was at its height from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s, and far greater than in Western Europe at the same time.¹⁰ Although it may have become rare for skilled workingmen to open small factories and modestly prosper, the transformation of the American economy had opened up millions of new middle-class jobs for armies of industrial and retail clerks, salesmen and saleswomen, government officials, and the growing ranks of professionals, while factory jobs themselves were increasingly propelling people into the middle class. By 1900, nearly two out of every five families in Cleveland, Detroit, and Toledo owned their own homes, and in contrast to crowded New York City, only one out of eight Detroit families, and one out of fourteen in Toledo, shared their home with another family.

The great industrial cities of the Midwest were only the most visible parts of the nation’s industrial archipelago. During the latter part of the century, manufacturing grew by leaps and bounds, with 2.5 million factory jobs added between 1880 and 1900. In cities as varied as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Newark, two out of every five workers worked in factories. By 1900, manufacturing had come to dominate the economies of one-time merchant cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, while hundreds of smaller cities like Trenton, New Jersey, Reading, Pennsylvania, or Lima, Ohio, each had its factories, its immigrant neighborhoods, and its trappings of prosperity in the form of parks, concert halls, and pillared city halls.

Trenton is an archetypal small industrial city. Famous for its role in the American Revolution, its industrial history began in the 1840s with small pottery manufactories, as they were called, and an early iron mill that made rails for the region’s growing number of railroads. As the century progressed, both industries grew. The presence of Peter Cooper’s ironworks brought a German immigrant named John Roebling to Trenton, where he established his own factory for the construction of steel cables; by late in the nineteenth century, over seventy ceramics factories and workshops had been established, from Lenox, makers of fine china, to the predecessors of the Crane and American Standard makers of sanitary porcelain. Other industrial products of the city included rubber tires, canned foods, and one of the sportiest of the early automobiles, the Mercer Runabout. The city’s population grew from 6,000 in 1850 to 73,000 by the turn of the century and nearly 120,000 by 1920, including thousands of immigrants, mostly from Italy and Poland.

As was true of far larger cities, as Trenton grew, it took on the trappings of prosperity. In 1891, Frederick Olmsted’s Cadwalader Park opened to the public, while in 1907, a new Beaux Arts city hall with an imposing marble-pillared façade was dedicated. The city’s sense of itself as first and foremost an industrial city was reflected in the decoration of the new council chambers, which featured a large mural by Everett Shinn, a prominent member of the Ashcan School of American artists. In two vivid panels, it depicts the fiery interiors of the city’s iconic industries, the Maddock ceramics factory on the right, and the Roebling steel cable plant on the left, both all but dripping with the sweat and the exertion of Shinn’s muscular workingmen. About the same time, the local Chamber of Commerce held a competition to coin a new slogan to epitomize the city; the winning entry, “Trenton Makes—the World Takes,” was mounted in 1911 on a bridge across the Delaware River. The same sign, albeit in a new digital version, still heralds one’s arrival in Trenton by train from Philadelphia and Washington.

As Robert Beauregard writes, “the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the latter decades of the nineteenth occupy a privileged position in American urban history.”¹¹ It was not to last. Although it is customary to think of the decline of American cities as beginning after the end of World War II, the first signs of decline were visible as early as the 1920s. One intimation was the growth of the suburbs, as the nation’s transportation systems began to shift from rails and water to a new system based on the car and the truck, the road and the highway. The number of private cars in the United States more than doubled between 1920 and 1925; by 1925, there were over 17 million cars and 2.5 million trucks on the country’s increasingly congested roads, and half of all American households owned a car.

With little fanfare, suburbs began to grow. Earlier streetcar suburbs had remained small, limited to chains of villages along the spokes established by commuter railroads and streetcar lines; now, suburbs could be built anywhere, and they began to fill in the spaces between the spokes, ringing the now largely built-up city with what gradually became a wall of separate towns, villages, and cities locking central cities into their pre-1920s boundaries. While most cities continued to grow during the 1920s, their growth rates were slowing, especially after the drastic restrictions on immigration that went into effect after 1924.

Industry was beginning to disperse as well. St. Louis was the nation’s leading shoe manufacturer, but during the course of the 1920s, as Teaford explains, “St. Louis shoe moguls were shifting much of their production to plants in impoverished small towns scattered through southern Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. […] Corporate headquarters would remain in St. Louis and the other heartland hubs, but the corporations’ factories would depart.”¹² With water power no longer needed to fuel industry, many of Lowell’s famous textile mills decamped to the South during the 1920s. The city saw its population shrink by over 10 percent during the decade. Although Lowell has been growing again since the 1980s, it has yet to completely regain the population it had in 1920.

The increasingly footloose nature of American industry reflected changes in the structure of the urban economy in ways that marked the beginning of the end for what historian John Cumbler has called “civic capitalism,” or the interconnected network of loc...