hist102—-essay1—-at least 2 page

Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870 –1900 By Sam B Warner, Jr. Harvard University Press and The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1962 Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 THE CITY of Boston is old and full of monuments to the past. To visitors it often appears a dowdy repository for some of the nation’s early memories. But to those who know it better the city’s life has always been one of ceaseless change. The visitor who stops at Paul Revere’s house seldom realizes that within thirty years the society that had produced so many revolutionaries was dead. And the local resident who stands before William Lloyd Garrison’s well-known statue seldom recognizes that the generation of Bostonians who erected this statue could not bring forth such an uncompromising radical. Boston, like the various societies that made it, has been ever changing, ever in transition. The differences that mark the successive eras have come from the shifting of emphasis from one set of problems to another from politics to business, from foreign trade to manufacture, from prosperity to depression.

No period in Boston’s history was more dynamic than the prosperous years of the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the most enduring of the many transformations of this era was the rearrangement of the physical form of the city itself. In fifty years it changed from a merchant city of two hundred thousand inhabitants to an industrial metropolis of over a million. In 1850 Boston was a tightly packed seaport; by 1900 it sprawled over a ten-mile radius and contained thirty-one cities and towns. The growth of the city brought other major changes. The old settlement of 1850 became by 1900 the principal zone of work-the industrial, commercial, and communications center of the metropolitan region. At the same time the tenements and old dwellings of the area came to house the lower-income half of the population. Beyond the inner concentrated section there grew an equally novel environment, the enormous outer ring of new commuters’ houses.

Boston in 1900 was very much a city divided. With the exception of the expensive houses of the Back Bay, it was an inner city of work and low income housing, and an outer city of middle- and upper-income residences. The wide extent of settlement in the outer residential zone was made possible by the elaboration of the new street railway transportation system, and a parallel extension of city services. Here the course of building reflected the movement of successive waves of people out from the center of the city. Here the new houses and neighborhoods demonstrated the economic progress of half of Boston’s families and their aspirations for a satisfactory home environment.

With these changes in scale and plan many of the familiar modem problems of city life began to emerge: the bedroom town; the inundation of country villages by commuters; the sudden withdrawal of whole segments of an old neighborhood’s population; the rapid building and rapid decay of entire

MAP 1. The pedestrian city of 1850 and the suburban metropolis of 1900. The metropolis of 1900 is that described by Sylvester Baxter, Greater Boston; A Study for a Federated Metropolis (Boston, 1891). See Table 1 for population distribution. THE PEDESTRIAN CITY OF 1850 (2 mile radius) Boston Proper East Boston South Boston Cambridge Charlestown Roxbury

THE PERIPHERAL TOWNS IN 1850 (3 mile radius) Brookline Chelsea Dorchester Somerville D THE NEW SUBURBS IN 1900 (10 mile radius) sections of a city; the spread of the metropolis beyond any encompassing political boundaries; the growth of non-elective agencies of government to meet metropolitan transportation, sanitary, and recreation demands; and, above all, the discipline of the lives of city dwellers into specialized transportation paths, specialized occupations, specialized home environments, and specialized community relationships. With the new metropolis and all its changes the ancient problems of large cities once more came to life: the individual members of urban society became isolated within a physical and social network which had passed their comprehension and control.

In 1850 Boston was something familiar to Western history and manageable by its traditions. The attitudes and institutions that governed its daily life had been developed slowly over at least 500

years. By 1900 it had become, along with many European and American cities, something entirely new, an industrial and suburban metropolis. Most of this metropolis of 1900 still survives. Even today it is the home of the bulk of Greater Boston’s industry and commerce, and probably half its population. Decisions made by city officials, corporation managers, and homebuilders, decisions now sixty to one hundred years old, still rule much of today’s social, economic, and political life. Perhaps most important, many of the traditions of thought and behavior first elaborated during the last half of the nineteenth century still dominate present action. WHO BUILT THE METROPOLIS?

The Boston metropolis is the product of hundreds of thousands of separate decisions. Looking back on the period for which detailed information is available, the years 1870-1900, one can make out a kind of partnership which constructed the new industrial and suburban metropolis. It was a partnership between large institutions and individual investors and homeowners.

No organization, however, tied together the two groups. Boston’s water commissioners and the president of the West End Street Railway Company, for example, were guided by their own day-to- day needs. And the homeowner who sought a lot and decided to build a house was unable to change city policy or affect the transportation service currently offered. Although throughout the last half of the nineteenth century one third to one half of the City of Boston’s budget was annually committed to projects and services directly affecting real estate, most of the political campaigns turned on other conflicts: Republicans versus Democrats; native Americans versus immigrants; more city jobs versus economy; corruption versus honesty. In addition, no zoning laws and few of the direct regulations now current in American cities then controlled the behavior of builders.

Common ideas and attitudes created the partnership of the large institutions and the individual homeowners and investors. Both groups shared an enthusiasm for a two-part city-a city of work sep- arated from a city of homes. This enthusiasm colored every decision, whether it was a decision made by the director of a large corporation or by a mortgage-pressed carpenter. Both groups were also subject to common disciplines: the disciplines of the contemporary money market, the disciplines of the current engineering and architecture, the disciplines of Boston’s geography, and the disciplines of the matrix of prior decisions which set the environment in which men worked.

The building of the new divided metropolis was a popular movement, a movement executed by hundreds of thousands of middle class citizens. This book is a search for the historical background of the ” multitudes of decisions which together created the new urban environment of 1900. Three questions will guide the search. Who made the decisions to build what? What patterns were created by the repetition of individual decisions? What were the consequences of these patterns? The old records of the building of Boston do not yield information to which a modern sociological class analysis can be applied. Little but the census and legal records survive as the literature of this mass movement. Therefore, the story must be told largely by the patterns made by the end products of the decisions themselves: the parks, the streets, the pipes, the tracks, the houses. The method of this book will be to look first at the largest patterns and then with ever narrowing focus to descend to the smallest patterns. The book will proceed from common nineteenth century ideas and experiences, to the metropolitan transportation and utility network, to the towns, to the neighbor- hoods, to single streets, and finally to individual houses and their builders. In the range of narrow focus Boston’s old suburbs, the formerly independent towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dor- chester, will provide the detail of the story.

COMMON IDEAS AND EXPERIENCES

In the late nineteenth century most Bostonians, indeed most Americans, held in common a certain way of looking at the world. Their outlook was a product of the conditions of the times. Three sets of experiences and three associated ideas informed men’s life in the city: ‘the increasing industrialization of work was accompanied by the idea of romantic capitalism; The experience of immigration gave rise to nostalgic nationalism; The impact of ever more intensive urbanization called forth the emotional reaction of the rural ideal. Old residents and newcomers alike interpreted the changing possibilities and disciplines of their lives in terms of a mixture of these experiences and ideas. .

Industrialization and immigration together fired the economy of nineteenth century Boston. The port of Boston, one of the most active ports in the United States, served as the place of entry for thousands of European immigrants. Prior to the 1840’s farmers, artisans, and mill workers from the British Isles, men squeezed by the shifting rewards and penalties of English industrialization, made up the bulk of the new arrivals. Joining them were sizeable numbers of Germans seeking an escape from the poverty of Central Europe. Also, as the trading center for New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada, Boston attracted a steady flow of men from this back country.

These three main groups of newcomers, though they included small numbers of German Jews and Irish, German, and French-Canadian Catholics, were much the same in background, habits, and religion as the resident population of the city. Indeed, with some variations in proportions, these areas had supplied New England with its immigrants for the past two hundred years. The strong tide of democratic tolerance that had been growing since the eighteenth century easily buried such religious and ethnic tensions as existed among these groups, the old residents, and the other small immigrant colonies. Men from the British Isles, from the Maritimes, and from rural New England continued to come to Boston in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century, and with the repeated experience of easy assimilation this immigration came to be fused in people’s minds with the old stock.

The great decline of Irish agriculture, beginning with the terrible potato famines of the 1840’s, brought a radical change in Boston’s population. Catholic Irish peasants, for the most part unskilled and penniless, arrived by the shipload. By 1875, sixty thousand foreign born Irish were living in Boston. During the balance of the century immigration from that poverty stricken island continued so rapidly that despite the growth of the city the Irish newcomers and their children made up from 30 to 40 percent of Boston’s total population. Then, in the last decade of the century, as Irish immigration began to slacken, their place was taken by new waves of people from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Beginning around 1890, Jews and Italians became an important element in the population of the city.

This enormous and continuous influx of people made Boston a great labor pool. Early industrialists had set up their factories in the small towns of New England not only for water power but also to tap the surplus labor resources of the farm-young women and children. .

Now next to a fully developed seaport there existed a whole army of men and women desperately in need of work. The industrial prosperity of the Boston region dates from the 1840’s when improvements in steam engines provided the power, and the flood of cheap labor provided the hands to tend factories and machines. Ironworks, textile and shoe factories, and almost every kind of manufacture came to be carried on in the area. In some cases businessmen adapted old trades to the unskilled peasants. For example, by the Civil War Boston led the nation in the production of inexpensive ready-made garments. Ready-made clothes was a new industry developed by the novel breakdown of tailoring into its simplest operations. With this reorganization unskilled women and children could work this formerly complicated trade in sweatshop factories or tenement homes.

With its old merchant capital and new abundance of workers, the city grew, and grew wealthy, as

never before. The money of this period paid for the expensive homes of the South End and Back Bay, the estates of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Milton, and Dedham. Municipal enterprise went forward on an unprecedented scale. The streets were widened, marshes filled and hills leveled, parks laid out, and miles of waterworks constructed. Year after year the City of Boston’s expenditures exceeded those of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And the ample stone churches which still stand in every section of the city bear testimony to the wealth of private subscription.

This whole fifty-year era brought with it a special kind of life. Its dynamism and prosperity not only made its economic system of capitalism popular but also generated a kind of enthusiasm for wealth and productivity which gave contemporary enterprise a romantic quality. For the majority of men prosperity and happiness in this capitalist era required the acceptance of its three disciplines: hard work, thrift, and education. Each one of these disciplines was at once a description of rational behavior necessary for the success of the economic system and a prescription of an ideal in its own right.

Hard work and devotion to the task brought advancement in the job and security against being laid off. By long hours, too, ambitious men working on borrowed capital pitted their time against the risks of speculation. Beyond such rational guides to behavior emphasis also fell on hard work because the job lay at the core of romantic capitalism. In this society work was a source of joy as well as a virtue. The society had a great appreciation for productivity in any form. The man whose dozen garish barn signs brought orders for a carload of patent medicines, the inventor of an automatic oven that sent forth an unceasing parade of soda crackers, or the traditional artisan whose high skill and patience could make a violin-all were heroes. However, since the production of personal wealth brought the greatest power in the society, this kind of productivity brought with it the greatest popular standing.

Thrift was likewise a rational economic necessity and a generalized virtue. By putting aside earnings a man could protect himself against hard times, and by thrift he could put himself into a position to buy a business or make some investment. By practicing thrift, just as by working hard, a man also demonstrated virtue and gained respect. In this way he at once realized the benefits of social approval and acquired the standing necessary to borrow money from banks and private investors.

Finally, education was both a tool and a source of status and pleasure. At the lowest level the new industrial society created jobs that needed workers who could read, write, and do arithmetic. The well paid and rewarding jobs in law, engineering, finance, and business increasingly required educated men who could handle words, numbers, and ideas. With the elaboration of the society and its tools, high school, technical school, and even college and professional education became every year more necessary job criteria. In addition education brought social standing, for people tended to associate class with different levels of training and rising scales of financial reward. Finally, education offered the pleasures inherent in being in touch with the world, both past and present. These pleasures were open alike to the dirt farmer who first learned to read the newspapers, and the college graduate who could follow world literature and technology.

For the average Boston family the formula of hard work, thrift, and education meant a 48- to 55- hour work week for the father, little vacation for the family, and emphasis on the education of the children and financial gain. The ultimate test of the family’s success and the key to its social standing rested within the capitalist framework-how much money did the family have, how much property did it control? To have such goals, and to live such a life, was, in the nineteenth century, to be a middle class American.

Such goals were generally shared in the society, as can be seen by the rapid multiplication of stores and businesses; the increase in homeownership; the frequent use of the words “middle class” as a term of wide inclusiveness; the constant repetition of capitalist goals in popular literature; and,

in family histories and reminiscences, the almost universal description of success by thrift, hard work, and education. Perhaps 60 percent of Boston’s population was middle class by living habits and aspirations. The exceptions to the dominant code of behavior were some of the rich for whom money making no longer appeared a satisfying way of life, and a large proportion of the lower – income groups for whom wealth was an impossibility.2

Another test of the extent to which a society is middle class is to examine the distribution of income. As one might expect, more people held middle class aspirations than enjoyed the income necessary to live out these ideals. A reasonable guess would be that 40 to 50 percent of the families of Boston were middle class by income. Such people were sufficiently well off to live by the income of one member of the family. This income was secure enough not to be drastically curtailed in times of panic; it provided the family with a safe, sanitary environment; and it allowed the family to dispense with children’s work at least long enough for them to finish grammar school. Although but one quarter of Boston’s families owned houses in 1900, and for a number of reasons many preferred homes in multiple dwellings, it seems also a fair presumption to say that this 40 to 50 percent of the society accumulated enough capital in its lifetime to be able to choose homeownership instead of tenancy. Since most men’s income and capital rose slowly, at any given moment probably not more than half of Boston’s middle class earned enough or had saved enough to be able to purchase a home. Thus, any year’s potential housing market could not have exceeded one fifth of the total families in the city.3

Many aspiring to middle class life lacked the income. These families resorted to multiple employment to achieve their goal. If, when the children were young, husband and wife were lucky and neither fell sick or were unemployed for long, in time the earnings of the children would push the family income into the middle range. For the immigrant family who arrived in Boston without skill or capital this advancement to middle class standing usually took two or three generations. The immigrant’s children, educated in the public schools and armed with the skills and goals of the American middle class, were frequently the first to benefit from the chance for advancement offered by the industrial prosperity of the age. The constant rise of great numbers of immigrant families to middle-income jobs and their movement into middle class neighborhoods was taken by contemporaries as testimony to the success of the capitalism of the day and a reassurance of its harmony with the general goals of American democracy.

Although the aspirations and disciplines of romantic capitalism dominated the majority of men’s minds there were many Bostonians who lacked this conviction. Perhaps 40 percent of the city’s population did not have middle class aspirations. Laborers, factory workers, and new immigrants made up most of this group, but to it must be added artisans, clerks, and skilled mechanics who, though they possessed a fair income, resented the discipline of the industrial world and neither understood nor enjoyed the pleasures of a life devoted to the current definition of “getting ahead.” Most of those without middle class aspirations, however, took their opposition not so much as a matter of independent belief, but as a consequence of the unequal distribution of income.

For thousands, perhaps one third of Boston, natives and immigrants alike, life brought only the tensions of too few jobs at too little pay, inhuman work conditions, wage cuts and seasonal layoffs, accidents and disease, and, at times, terrible depressions whose effects public authorities relieved only by the inadequate and inhospitable charity of the city’s soup kitchens. These economic tensions and hardships led many lower class Bostonians to attack not the methods of industrialism that caused their suffering, but each other.

Quite different from the case of European cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, the suffering of Boston’s poor produced no strong movement for corrective alternatives to the dominant capitalism. Instead, men whose fate rested upon the successful reshaping of society in one country and in one era turned their thoughts back to visions of other places and former times. Large numbers of peasants had been driven by famine and hard times from a society of enduring tradition to the

hazards of a new land, new work, and a new society that was itself ever changing. Such men sought an anchor against uncertainty and confusion, they sought a device to lessen the scope of the world and thereby render it more manageable.

Old nationalisms and the maintenance of old ethnic ways offered such a device. Nationalism created in large American cities a temporary refuge in which die world could be thought of as containing only one’s own group and “the others” -others of whom one need have no knowledge, for whom one need take no responsibility. Nor was the escape into nationalism limited to immigrants. The native poor of Boston, in competition with immigrants for jobs and sharing with them the penalties of the mal distribution of income, often matched the newcomers in clannishness and frequently confronted them with raw hostility. Their nationalism produced the special political movement known as nativism. From 1854 to 1857, nativists were in control of the state government, and anti-foreign, anti-Catholic sentiment remained an active ingredient in state and city politics for the rest of the century.

In 1834 a Charlestown convent was burned; in the 1850’s there was a church bombing and anti- Catholic riots; Protestant street gangs, militia, and fire companies fought their Irish Catholic counterparts; and later in the century Jewish families became the objects of Irish attacks. More important than these sporadic outbursts of local violence, the nationalist response to the social stress of immigration and industrial change infected all levels of the society with job discrimination, ethnic politics, and racist stereotypes. The whole spectrum of behavior from the aristocrat’s snobbery to the barroom brawl distracted men’s attention from the problems of poverty, housing, education, and welfare which severely limited the promise of American democracy.

For most Bostonians nationalism was a passive secondary attitude; the business of making a living and mastering wealth and production occupied their major efforts. For lower class families the retreat into sentimental nationalism provided some temporary relief from the pains of life. For the middle class, both families who had achieved the promise of a competence and those still aspiring to it, sentimental nationalism was a second thought, a set of ideas that filled the vacuum left by their dominant code of capitalist striving. It provided a vehicle for thoughts of love and security which capitalist competition ignored, and it occasionally guided action in areas in which there were no capitalist imperatives.

Much of the nationalism of the nineteenth century was a reaction to the stresses of the present, a longing of both native and immigrant for some “old country” or “old days.” The immigrant tended to blur the memory of the clay on his boots with a vision of the rolling green hills of Ireland, or obscure the memory of a broken-down farm with the vision of the forests and shores of Maine or Nova Scotia. Russian Jews, Italians, Germans, Scots, Canadians, Englishmen, and Americans all shared a knowledge of a past era prior to industrialization. As every year went by the reality of the past grew dimmer, and the “old country” or “old days” took on the very qualities that were missing in the modern world. In this blend of fact and fancy, life was less disciplined and more leisurely, and men lived in simple communities where all spoke the same language, went to the same church, and shared a common life. Friends were true and wealth unimportant, the girls prettier and the cooking better, honest craftsmen labored for love to make things of beauty, not cheap machine shoddy, and when a man came home at night it was to a neat cottage and a family of healthy happy children.

The sentimental, backward-looking, quality of the urban nationalisms of the late nineteenth century formed part of a general contemporary reaction to the growing industrial metropolis. In abetting this popular movement nationalism joined a strong and old American tradition-the rural ideal. The rural ideal was an attitude which had always contained the notion of escape from city restraints, organizations, and objects. The city’s ways and forms were conceived of as too artificial and of the wrong quality to support a moral life. In opposition to the oppressive modes of social behavior in the city, in the country the church, the village, and the home were to provide the setting for simple gatherings of families and friends on a basis of fellowship and common interest.

The very fact of light settlement assisted in the creation of a moral dichotomy between the city as artificial, incomplete, and temporal. and the country as simple, full, and timeless. The wild surroundings of forest, rivers, and hills, like the landscape of farms where men’s lives depended directly upon plants and animals, provided some of the key weapons of the rural ideology. Here, the physical setting encouraged the family to live by some concept of harmony with the unending cycles and seasons of nature.

The city, on the other hand, was thought to be the home of feasts and orgies, of clothes cut to fashion alone, of men and women devoting their lives to the pursuit of money, power, and happiness in a setting not made in the image of nature but by the goals of the city itself Whereas in the country simple village institutions would suffice to police the actions of the villagers, the city often appeared out of control. The city accumulated great wealth, but it seemed lacking in devices to harness that wealth to moral ends.

FIG. 1. A romantic cottage, West Roxbury, 1856-1857

FIG. 2. The suburban achievement, 1903

The prevalence of this contrast between city and country goes far hack in the Western world, at

least to Roman times. It was, however, the model of the country gentleman of seventeenth and eighteenth century England that transmitted the rural philosophy to the United States. By his service to the state and frequent trips to London the model country gentleman kept his contact with the largest world of Ills day while at the same time living a well-rounded life on his estate. The lives of the Virginia presidents of the United States were but domestic copies of this image. Men like Harrison Gray Otis and John Hancock, with their town houses and country estates, served as models

for middle class Bostonians. Numerous wealthy families during the first half of the nineteenth century copied this form of

life. In Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester rich men, following the Roman and English traditions of an interest in farming, carried on important experiments in scientific agriculture. Today the remainder of their tradition still survives in the Institutions they founded: the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Prior to the steam railroad and street railway two houses, not one, were generally required. Just outside Boston, country villages like Watertown, Jamaica Plain, and Brookline provided the sites for the rural ideal, but most early estate owners needed, also, a town house for their business life and social contacts. The streetcar suburb brought with it a whole set of new problems. Much of its success or failure centered around the attempt by a mass of people, each with but one small house and lot, to achieve what previously had been the pattern of life of a few rich families with two large houses and ample land.

For the middle class of the late nineteenth century the rural ideal was one positive element in a complex of conditions which shifted people’s attitude from being favorable to being hostile to city life. The physical deterioration of old neighborhoods, the crowding of factory, shop, and tenement in the old central city, the unceasing flow of foreigners with ever new languages and habits-these negative pressures tended to drive the middle class from the city. The new technology of the street railway and the contemporary sanitary engineering enabled these families to move out from the old city boundaries into an expanded area of vacant and lightly settled land. In this new land the rural ideal, by its emphasis on the pleasures of private family life, on the security of a small community setting, and on the enjoyment of natural surroundings, encouraged the middle class to build a wholly new residential environment: the modern suburb.

CHAPTER TWO THE LARGE INSTITUTIONS

AT ANY given time the arrangement of streets and buildings in a _ large city represents a temporary compromise among such diverse and often conflicting elements as aspirations for business and home life, the conditions of trade, the supply of labor, and the ability to remake what came before.

The physical plan of metropolitan Boston in 1850 rested upon a primitive technology of urban transport: Boston was a city of pedestrians. Its form reflected a compromise among convenience and privacy, the aspirations of homeownership, and the high price of land. The arrival of the street railway freed the elements of the compromise from their former discipline of pedestrian movement and bound them together again by its own new discipline. By 1900 the transformation of Boston had been completed. The patterns made by this new compromise are what today is recognized as the suburban form of the metropolitan city.

THE WALKING CITY

In 1850 the area of dense settlement hardly exceeded a two-mile radius from City Hall. It included only portions of the towns and cities of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Charlestown, Chelsea, Dor- chester, Roxbury, and Somerville. Before the invention of the telephone in 1876 and the introduction of street railways in the 1850’s, face-to-face communication and movement on foot were essential in- gredients of city life.

One can only guess just how large metropolitan Boston would have grown had there been no invention of new communication devices. If the spread of the city had begun to exceed the distance a man might walk in about an hour, say a three-mile radius, the shops and offices of the metropolis would have fallen out of easy daily communication with each other. The result would have been the destruction of a single unified communication network and the development of semi-autonomous sub-cities which would have had to duplicate many of the services and facilities offered in other parts of the city. One of the principal contributions of nineteenth century transportation and communication technology was to preserve the J centralized communication of the walking city on a vastly enlarged scale.

In 1850 carriages were a prominent sight on Boston’s downtown streets. They moved only a small proportion of the city’s population, however, because few people could afford to maintain a private horse and carriage. The omnibus and the steam railroad were likewise supplements to walking. The omnibus, an urban version of the stagecoach, was first introduced in 1826. It moved slowly, held relatively few passengers, and cost a lot. The steam railroad, in operation since 1835, was also expensive and accomplished, during its first fifteen

FIG. 3. An antique omnibus years, little to change the old pattern of the city. At best it was a limited method of mass transportation. The railroad was fast but its infrequent stops and its single terminal, often located at some distance from passengers’ ultimate destinations, prevented it from offering the great variety of choices of entrance and exit that streetcar systems ultimately provided. Prior to the Civil War the principal contribution of the’ railroad lay in its joining of the port of Boston, with its wharves and warehouses, to the manufacturing and farming towns of New England. The result was to accelerate the industrialization of both the trading center and its hinterland. For residents of the Boston region the railroad simplified business transactions with outlying industrial cities like Lynn and Waltham. The railroad also enabled some men of wealth and leisure to settle permanently at their summer estates which lay in scattered clusters about the hills beyond Boston.

Before 1850 Boston’s geography had inhibited easy expansion. Marshes, rivers, and the ocean restricted the paths of pedestrian communication. Boston itself was a rough, hilly peninsula set on the end of a narrow strip of land that connected it to the mainland at Roxbury. In the general area where the wharves now stand, against the eastern and northern part of the peninsula, lay the deep- water harbor. The rest of the peninsula was surrounded by tidal basins and enormous marshes. So confined by the harbor, Boston land had always been expensive, and almost from the beginning of its settlement men cramped for space began damming and filling the marshes and flats, first for commercial, and later for residential, purposes. As the city prospered and housing standards rose, more extensive works became profitable. Hills were leveled and sea walls built. By the 1850’s developers had reclaimed the area around Charles street, parts of the North End, and much of the South End, (See Map 3 for sections of Boston) and had cut down a good deal of Beacon and other hills.

In the succeeding twenty years Boston’s two most ambitious land filling schemes were executed: the South End and the Back Bay. The South End was almost completely taken up with houses by 1880; the Back Bay, by 1900. Only the rich and the prosperous segment of the middle class could afford most of the new houses in these sections even though the common design of narrow row houses, three and one half to four and one-half stories high, required but small parcels of land.2

Under such circumstances speculators turned their attention to land just beyond the main peninsula. What they wanted was property that could be more easily developed and therefore sold at

lower prices. The search for cheap land began long before central Boston was filled. In 1804 South Boston was opened as a housing speculation. Its progress remained slow, however, until the 1830’s when the growth of Boston created a shortage of land sufficient to persuade people to move beyond the old peninsula and walk the added distance.3 Similarly, Charlestown, parts of Cambridge, East Boston, and the nearby sections of Roxbury filled up rapidly in the period from 1830 to 1850 when Boston’s industrial prosperity and expansion began to make headway.

These peripheral communities were not simple bedroom towns for commuters, not exact early models of the modern middle class residential suburb; rather they were mixed settlements of Boston commuters and local workers. All these communities lay at the edge of the harbor and possessed considerable industrial and mercantile

FIG. 4. Middle class single-family houses of the peripheral towns, c. 1830-1870

FIG. 5. Mid-nineteenth century working class alley housing located to the rear of houses in Figure 4 potential. Charlestown and East and South Boston developed large shipbuilding and wharf facilities, while Cambridge and Roxbury became manufacturing centers.4 Promoters of these areas, used to the tight scale of the walking city, saw no incompatibility between residences and factories; they wished to recreate the conditions of Boston.

Throughout the tiny metropolitan region of 1850, streets of the well to do lay hard by workers’ barracks and tenements of the poor; many artisans kept shop and home in the same building or suite; and factories, wharves, and offices were but a few blocks from middle class homes. The wide physical separation between those who could afford new houses and those who could not awaited the expansion of the city that accompanied the introduction of the street railway. .

Despite the peripheral towns’ imitation of the central city some architectural differences marked the two areas. On the filled land of the main peninsula close copies of the brick London town row house predominated. In the peripheral areas, detached houses, continuations of eighteenth century American wooden construction, were the rule.

These latter structures were often smaller and generally cheaper than their in town opposites. Today, after detached wooden styles have dominated residential fashions for over eighty years, the little wooden houses of South and East Boston appear to be significant alternatives to the brick row house. In the early nineteenth century, however, these houses were but a continuation of old habits. They were the products of a class of people who had yet to earn the wealth, had yet to learn the modes, of city life.

Compared to the enlarged lots, the picturesque houses, and the planted streets of the streetcar suburbs of the last third of the nineteenth century, the architecture of Boston in 1850 was strongly urban. The houses of the central city and the peripheral towns, set as they were on small narrow lots and generally placed against the street, created a town environment of dense settlement. Building in both

FIG. 6. Medium-priced two-family house, c. 1850

FIG. 7. Roxbury Village, Dudley and Warren streets, c. 1860 areas was eminently suited to a city short of land, a city which depended on people’s walking for its means of transportation, a city which depended upon face-to-face relationships as its means of communication.5 THE STREET RAILWAYS

The history of Boston’s street railways in the nineteenth century is the story of fifty years of aggressive expansion. During both the early years of the horse car and the later years of the electric, lines were rapidly lengthened and service frequently increased. This continuous expansion of surface transportation had a cumulative effect upon the city. The pace of suburbanization, at first slow, went forward with in

MAP 2. Railroad trackage, 1870-1900

MAP 3. Street railway tracks, 1872 creasing acceleration, until by the 1890’s it attained the proportions of a mass movement.

From 1852 until 1873 the horse railroads of Boston merely stretched out the existing city along already established paths. The outer boundary of dense settlement moved perhaps half a mile, so that at the time of the great Depression of 1873 it stood two and a half miles from Boston’s City Hall. During the next fourteen years, from 1873 to 1887, horse car service reached out about a mile and a half farther, bringing the outer edge of good transportation to four miles from City Hall. Lines of suburban settlement began to appear in what were formerly distant places. In the late 1880’s and 1890’s the electrification of street railways brought convenient transportation to at least the range of six miles from City Hall. The rate of building and settlement in this period became so rapid that the whole scale and plan of Greater Boston was entirely made over.

Boston’s first street railway had but one car which in 1852 began service between Harvard Square, Cambridge, and Union Square,

MAP 4. Street railway tracks, 1886 Somerville. The success of this experiment and the example of profitable lines in other American cities brought on a wave of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. To the local investment public, used to the relatively long periods necessary to realize profits on large-scale land speculations, the rapid construction of horse railroads seemed to promise a generous and immediate harvest. To real estate

men the simple procedure of placing a coach on iron rails seemed a miraculous device for the. promotion of out-of-town property.

The experience of the three towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester was typical. The first line in this section of the metropolis commenced running in 1856. It followed the seventeenth century path which ran from downtown Boston along Washington street in the South End to Roxbury Crossing. In effect, the new service merely replaced the existing omnibus and supplemented the main traffic of pedestrians and carriages. In the short period from the first incorporation of 1852 to the Depression of 1873, seven companies were formed to serve the outlying towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester. Only four ever operated. By 1873 only two companies, the Metropolitan Street Railway, and the Highland Street Railway, survived.

Some of Boston’s street railways had been projected for routes with too light settlement and traffic, others were badly financed, and some were bogus companies put together to lure investors or to harass operating companies. The scramble for franchises, which were granted by the Boston Board of Aldermen, and for charters of incorporation, which were granted by the state legislature, further confused the ever shifting rivalries of the city’s street railway companies.

MAP 5. Street railway tracks, 1901

FIG. 8. Horsecar in front of the Metropolitan Street Railway car barn, South and Jamaica streets, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, c. 1880

These early difficulties of franchise and capitalization were soon superseded by the problems of the downtown. Boston’s streets were just too narrow to carryall the needed cars. The downtown squeeze made necessary complicated lease arrangements for competitors’ use

FIG. 9. Open horsecar on Centre street, Jamaica Plain Village, 1883 of each other’s tracks. The tempers of street railway employees were not always equal to this requirement of cooperation in a field of intense competition. All too often rival drivers raced for switches, stalled, and in general interfered with each other’s progress. Nevertheless, despite early confusion, chicane, and false starts, by 1873 the main streets of the old city had become the new horsecar thoroughfares. During the years from 1852 to 1873 the periphery of dense settlement moved from 2 to 2.5 miles from City Hal1.6

For the next fourteen years service in Greater Boston expanded steadily outward. Then, in 1887, Henry M. Whitney, a steamship operator and speculator in Brookline real estate, formed a syndicate out of his small West End Street Railway and began to purchase stock in the other five operating companies of Boston. After he had bought up large amounts of stock, especially in the biggest line, the Metropolitan, he offered by an exchange of stock and bonds to combine all the companies into one. Minority stockholders, probably helpless, and at any rate anticipating great profits from the rationalization of Boston service under one giant company, agreed to the merger. At the same time, the promise of rapid expansion of service and relief to downtown traffic jams persuaded the public and the legislature to

FIG. 10. Downtown traffic, Post Office Square, May 23, 1904

allow the creation of the traction monopoly. Consolidation did in fact accelerate the rate of improvements in transportation.

Whitney continued two historic policies of street railway management. First, he was more interested in increasing the total number of fares on his system than in watching the relationship of distance, cost, and fare per ride. He, like his fellow streetcar managers the state over,

was so convinced that the key to profit lay in the endless expansion of the numbers of passengers that, with little regard to costs, he constantly expanded the service area of the West End. As a result, by 1900 the outer limits of Boston’s electric railways lay at least six miles from the downtown.

Second, Whitney, like all horse car managers before him, was an ardent believer in the five-cent fare. Thus expansion of service took place without additional charge to the commuter. As cross town lines were built, free-transfer points were added, so that the nickel fare was almost universal in 1900. During the 1870’s and 1880’s eight cents had been required for many transfer rides; two full fares had been required where riders moved to the cars of different companies. 7

In his speeches before city clubs and regulatory agencies Whitney often pointed to these twin policies of rapid service expansion and the uniform five-cent fare as the proper basis for a public transportation system. He was an ardent champion of the suburban city. He frequently appealed to the popular belief that the rapid suburbanization of modern industrial cities was perhaps the most important single contribution of the street railway. Like his listeners, also, Whitney did not wish to control the form and direction of this suburban expansion, but rather to leave the development of suburbs to individual builders and homeowners. Though statistics of 1890 and 1900 showed that only one quarter of Boston’s suburbanites owned their houses,8 he, like his contemporaries, felt that the continued suburbanization of the city would bring a substantial increase in homeownership. He liked to use as a typical example of the coming benefits the rather untypical case of the workingman buying a lot of land in the suburbs upon which would be built his own home. Whitney’s speeches were also full of comparisons to conditions in Europe and references to the old pre-streetcar sections of Boston where multifamily tenements and crowded old wooden houses were the rule.

Whitney made these appeals to what was then termed the “moral influence” of street railways both from personal conviction, and from

FIG. 11. Working class wooden houses and tenements in the West End, photograph c.1890

the need to answer the numerous critics of his monopoly. He was continually before state and city agencies defending the profits and schedules of the West End Street Railway. Most important for the growth of the suburban city, criticism always took for its point of departure the same view of public transportation that Whitney’s management undertook to carry out. For critics, the trouble with the West End Company was that its very vigorous performance was not vigorous enough: new service was not added fast enough, profits were too high, and fares not cheap enough.9

The demise of Whitney’s West End Street Railway as an operating company was due not to the shortcomings of its suburban service, but to continued strife over downtown traffic conditions. The details of the decade of controversy over the control and pricing of tunnels and elevateds are not relevant to this history. In the end, in 1897, a group of rival capitalists formed the Boston Elevated Street Railway Company,

FIG. 12. The moral influence of the street railway, outer edge of new construction, 1904 and, under the supervision of the state-created Boston Transit Authority, leased the West End system in its entirety. With this new operating company the great subway and elevated projects were under- taken in a belated effort to solve downtown traffic problems. The Boston Elevated’s suburban policy remained that of its predecessors: expand for more total passengers.

During the entire second half of the nineteenth century two things made possible this continuous expansion of service under all kinds of managements. The first was the declining costs of materials; the second was electrification. In 1888 the West End began experimenting with electric cars and in 1889 introduced its first trolley service. The electric car moved at least twice as fast as the horse drawn one and soon was perfected to carry three times the number of passengers. Of course offsetting these advantages, the new machines required a great deal more investment in heavy equipment than the horse and his car barn.

In the center of the system, where traffic was heavy, the electric car was cheaper to operate per passenger mile than the horse car. It seemed reasonable to run the electric car from the in-town segment of a line out to the suburban terminal, especially since in the outer areas of less frequent stops the electric could really show its speed. In this way the electric-powered streetcar beguiled traction men who were careless about costs into spinning out the web of their service even beyond profitable limits.10

OTHER SERVICES TO HOME BUILDERS

Good transportation was not the only requirement for the successful large-scale development of suburban land, nor was the street railway the only important invention which contributed to the changing pattern of Greater Boston. During the last third of the nineteenth century sanitation and power services became established as prerequisites’ for the standard home.

Until the 1870’s the cities and towns of the metropolitan region had relied upon a mixture of public and private agencies for water supply and waste disposal. Municipal and private scavengers carried off rubbish, garbage, and privy waste. Some crowded districts had cooperative underground sewer lines, others did not. Because the discharge points were unregulated by anything but the common law of nuisance many of the low lands and neighborhood swamps of the

FIG. 13. Typical electric streetcar, 1900

FIG. 14. Open electric car for summer service, about 1903 region were terminal sewage pools. In crowded town centers, where surface wells proved inadequate, public and private water companies had been formed to meet group needs. The City of Boston’s Cochituate Water Works of the 1840’S’ was the most famous and largest of the systems. All the municipal and private systems together, however, failed to give more than partial coverage to the metropolis.

Partial coverage was almost useless to a public health program. The periodic plagues and epidemics that had swept the city regularly since the seventeenth century gave frequent demonstration that no part of the metropolis was safe until all parts were clean. By 1870 Boston’s own efforts and other American and European sanitary projects showed that the incidence of disease could be effectively reduced by thoroughgoing sanitary engineering. Fear of disease gave the late nineteenth century public health movement its great popularity, while the concurrent benefits of water for industrial use and fire protection assisted reformers in arguments with cost-conscious taxpayers.

During the last third of the nineteenth century Boston’s sanitary projects, its waterworks, sewer lines, land filling, and re-grading took about one third of the total city budget. Homeowners installed their own plumbing, and water meters and special installation assessments paid for the operating costs. But the enormous initial expenditure demanded for water mains, reservoirs, pumping stations, and trunk sewers could only have been met by the pledge of municipal and state credit.

Historically public interest in the supply of water preceded interest in waste disposal. Consequently the water and sewer systems of the metropolis continued under separate institutional management throughout the century. The great popularity of the sanitary engineering program assured strong public support, first for town and city boards, and later for the integrating metropolitan boards. As a result of the public enthusiasm, expenditures were usually generous and the planning of the works aggressive. As fast as new street railway transportation brought new houses to outlying parts of the city the sanitary departments hastened to provide facilities.12 ,

The lesser utilities-gas, electricity, and telephones-were <1eveloped by private corporations. The convenience of gas and electric lights, and the efficiency of telephone communication gave private companies marketable products for which users would pay the whole cost. Also, because these minor utilities did not need to cover the whole city at once they could seek the highest paying users first, and then expand their systems on a profit making basis. The extension of gas service, which began in the 1840’s, and the extension of electric and telephone services, which began in the 1890’s, were clearly derivative. Once street railways and sanitary engineering opened an area to home building the other utilities sought customers there. Most of the utility conflicts of the day concerned consumer rates, not the slowness of new service offerings.13 COMMON PATTERNS OF DECISION

Because of the aggressive quality of the public health movement and the imitative nature of the lesser utilities and municipal services the narrative of the development of the Boston metropolis during the last third of the nineteenth century can be simplified. Had these utilities and municipal services lagged significantly behind transportation, or had they pursued a radically different timing and pattern of location they would require an extensive separate treatment. As it was, the role of the large public and private institutions in the building of the metropolis can be analyzed in terms of the street railway alone.

First, within their financial means all institutions undertook to render equal service throughout their geographic jurisdiction. Second, none of the institutions built houses themselves and, as much as possible, they avoided interfering with private profit making. Indeed, all encouraged individual capitalist enterprise as much as they could. Third, all institutions were somewhat sympathetic to the goals of the rural ideal, and to the extent that their actions were relevant, encouraged the dispersal of the urban population.

Although Boston society suffered severe ethnic tensions during this period of large scale immigration, its public agencies pursued a policy of service without regard to ethnic background. Just as the streetcar companies undertook to serve all the villages and quarters of the metropolitan region, so the schools and libraries undertook to serve all, the children and adults within the

municipality. Sewer, water, gas, and electric utilities were available at uniform prices to users every- where.14 Water was as plentiful in the immigrant North End as in the native Back Bay.

If there were unsanitary conditions in the slums, such conditions were regarded as the responsibility of landlords and tenants. The evidence of disease-riddenl8lums in an era of great concern for public health illustrates the second policy of public agencies in the late nineteenth century. Effective devices were developed for bringing public services to the property owner. The supervision of property owners’ individual performances, however, was lightly touched upon, and no effective machinery was devised for public assumption of responsibility when the owners failed in their performance.15 The official policy was to interfere as little as possible with individuals, and, where possible, to assist individuals in their role as private capitalists.

The contrast between the achievements in the old slum neighborhoods and the new suburbs graphically demonstrates the results of this policy. In the slums agencies dealt with individuals whose means were inadequate to the task; in the suburbs the public effort met immediate and effective private response. In the suburbs water lines, sewers, and public utilities hurried along with new construction, while the public transportation was extended with uniform fares to ever greater distances from the city. Likewise, at enormous cost, schools, libraries, fire stations, indeed, all municipal services, hastened after the movement of people within the metropolis.16

The City of Boston, the Metropolitan Commissioners, the West End Street Railway, and the predecessors of the Boston Consolidated Gas and Boston Edison companies all extended their services at a very rapid rate. They were able to do so because their fees and taxes rested upon large and prosperous geographical bases. Where the geographical units were small and poor, as was the case in most of the towns beyond five miles from Boston, the rate of progress was slow. The water pipes rarely ran beyond Main Street, and community expansion consisted of the building of a graded primary school, or, perhaps, the addition of those two new municipal ornaments, the high school and the public library.

Today’s municipal planning policy rests on a conscious attempt to control the uses of land. One of the major goals of modern planning is to allocate the various uses of land with an end to minimizing public costs and maximizing public benefits. Though in today’s terms there was no planning in late nineteenth century Boston, the largely successful effort to give new services to the whole jurisdiction with its consequent aid to private development was a conscious policy designed to achieve the ends of society By providing equal service to all citizens, by extending service as rapidly as possible to the whole geographic jurisdiction Boston’s public agencies hoped to give the greatest scope to the workings of individual capitalists. Education, health, transportation, and plentiful land were tools to encourage individuals to work effectively as private profit makers. The works of the individual private profit makers were to be the return for the public costs and effort.17

The third policy of the public agencies was to encourage the dispersal of the urban population. Tenement slums were the scandal of the age. Street railway managers, real estate men, politicians, philanthropists, health officers, school teachers, and the middle class generally all shared the attitude that open country surroundings and the small community were beneficent settings for family life. This widespread sympathy for the rural ideal provided additional impetus for the expansion of public services over the entire metropolitan region.18

The most general result of the work of the large institutions of Greater Boston was to make possible the creation of a new environment in the suburban edge of the metropolis while, at the same time, leaving the in-town section largely undisturbed. Much of this one sided effect upon the physical plan of the metropolis must be attributed to the continued need of close proximity for daily work.

Though railroads and steamships brought goods and passengers from great distances with unprecedented speed, though the street rail way daily moved thousands of commuters, though telephones, telegraphs, and railway mail connected all sections of the metropolis to the nation, much

of the economic life of 1900 still depended upon physical proximity. As only some customers and suppliers had telephones, office boys bearing notes were still a major form of rapid communication; hand carts and wagons and teams were still the methods of moving small lots of goods from ship to warehouse, from freight car to factory and shop, from store to customer. Because of these limited means of communication the work and shopping center of Boston remained packed tight against the harbor. Larger wharves, warehouses, and railway yards were built at or near old locations; offices, stores, and factories replaced houses. And in the downtown core tall buildings with elevators replaced the former five-story walk-ups.

The novel contribution of the street railway came in the zone beyond the old central city where the new transportation allowed the wide diffusion of the residential area. Most of the extension of the metropolis that took place with the establishment of street railways benefited middle-income families. Though they still had to seek their livelihood in the central cit_ their homes spread over an unprecedented area of suburban land. During the last fifty years of the nineteenth century Greater Boston tripled its population, but the houses of the new suburbs generally had two and often three times the land of their predecessors, and such was the revolution in transportation that even after such rapid growth vast amounts of vacant land still remained for future building.19

To see the full effects of the policy and work of the large institutions upon the construction of the new suburbs one must look at the patterns of building in some detail. Since the final decision of whether or not to put up a house rested with thousands of individual landowners, one must look closely at a small area, an area which reflects the scale of their decisions. Three Boston streetcar suburbs, the former towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester, will serve as the area of detailed study. During the last third of the nineteenth century these towns experienced an enormous growth of population, and over much of their territory the pattern of streets and houses took on the new suburban form. Even today the achievements and shortcomings of this former era continue to dominate their life.

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