C The City As Private Enterprise 1 example essay topic

I. Urbanization A. Industrial Sources of City Growth 1. Until the Civil War, cities were centers of commerce not industry. 2. Cities were places where merchants bought and sold there goods. 3. After mid-century, industry began to abandon the countryside.

4. NY, Phil., Brooklyn, St, Louis were among the largest cities. 5. Many smaller cities became one-industry towns.

6. As factories became bigger, their size cont. to urban growth. B. City Building 1. The commercial cities of the early nineteenth century had been compact places. 2. The first innovation, dating back to the 1820^aEURTMs had been omnibus, and elongated version of the horse-drawn coach.

3. Then came the electric trolley car. 4. In 1890 the number of passengers carried on American Streets railways was more than 2 billion per year, twice the rest of the world combined. 5. If urban transit evolved in response to the geographic expansion of the American city, the need for more space in downtown business districts drove advances in building constructions.

6. Chicago pioneered skyscraper construction, but the island of Manhattan. 7. For ordinary citizens the electric lights that dispelled the gloom of the city at night probably offered the most dramatic evidence that times had changed. C. The City as Private Enterprise 1. City building was very much an exercise in private enterprise. The lure profit spurred the great innovations- the trolley car, electric lighting, the skyscraper, the elevator, the telephone- and drove urban reale sate development.

2. American Cities actually compiled an impressive record in the late nineteenth century. 3. Even with planning the city^aEURTMs dynamism often confounded efforts to meet the needs of the people. 4.

Hardest hit by urban growth were the poor. 5. Chicago and Berlin had virtually equal populations in 1900.6. Yet as a functioning city Chicago was in many ways superior to Berlin. 7. Giant sanitation projects were one thing.

II. City People A. Newcomers 1. With the opportunity and boundless variety came disorder and uncertainty. 2. At the turn of the century, upward of 30% of the residents of New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and San Francisco were foreign born. 3.

W / in ethic groups, one could also spot clusters of people from the same province or even village. 4. Capitalizing on the fellow-feeling that drew ethic groups together. 5.

The vast majority of Blacks- 85% in 1880- lived in the rural South. 6. In the face of pervasive discrimination, urban blacks built their own communities. B. Ward Politics 1. Race ethnicity tended to divide newcomers to the city and turn them in on themselves.

2. The machine similarly served the business community. 3. For ambitious young immigrants and backs, this was reason enough to favor the machine system. C. Religion in the City 1.

For African Americans the church was a central institution of urban life. 2. About 250,000 Jews, mostly of German origin, were living in American when the eastern European Jews began to arrive in the 1800's. 3. The church managed to satisfy the immigrant faithful. 4.

The social meaning that urban Protestants sought in religion the enormous popularity of a book called In His Steps. D. Leisure in the City 1. City people compartmentalized life^aEURTMs activities, setting workplace apart from home and working time apart from free time. 2. For young unmarried workers the leisure activities of the city created a new social space.

3. Of all forms of male diversion none was more specific to the city or so spectacularly successful as professional baseball. 4. Most efficient at this task, however, was the newspaper.. The World of the Urban Elite A. Creating High Culture 1. The nations first major art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, opened in Washington D.C. in 1869.2.

A deeply conservative idea of culture sustained this generous patronage. 3. The treatment of life, the eminent editor and novelist William Dean Howells wrote. B. The New Millionaires 1. In the compact city if the early nineteenth century, class distinctions had been expressed by the way men and women dressed, how they behaved and the deference they demanded from or granted to others.

2. New York became the home of a national elite as the most ambitious people gravitated to this preeminent center of American economic and cultural life. 3. Americans were adept at making money, noted the journalist Edwin L. Godkin in 1896, but they lacked the European traditions of spending it. IV.

The Urban Middle Class A. Expanding Suburbs 1. The American middle class, particularly its salaried ranks, was an urban population. 2. The geography of the American suburbs was truly a map of class structure. 3. The small town of the rural past had fostered community life. B. Middle- Class Families 1.

In the re industrialize economy framers, merchants, and artisans counted as members not only blood relatives but others living and working in the house hold. 2. The burdens of this domesticity fell heavily on the wife. 3. The strains of marriage were manifest in the number of middle-class families that brook up. 4.

In the earlier times sexuality and reproduction had been more or less in harmony. 5.1830's condoms were invited.