Urbanization

Americans Migrate to the Cities Lacked money to buy farms Lacked education Remained in the cities with factory jobs Rural Americans also moved to the city

New Urban Environment Skyscrapers Louis Sullivan Mass Transit Horse car Cable car Electric trolley car

Separation by Class High Society Middle-Class Gentility Doctors, lawyers, managers, teachers “streetcar suburbs” Working Class Tenements – crowded multi-family apartments Industrial workers

The intersection of Orchard and Hester Streets on New York’s Lower East Side, photographed ca. 1905. Unlike the middle classes, who worked and played hidden away in offices and private homes, the Jewish lower-class immigrants who lived and worked in this neighborhood spent the greater part of their lives on the streets. SOURCE:Oil over a photograph.The Granger Collection (4E534.23).

This picture of Bohemian immigrant cigar makers at work in a New York City tenement first appeared in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), a pathbreaking work of “exposure journalism.” Apartments like these, owned and rented out by cigar manufacturers, served as both living quarters and workshops, leading to filthy and unhealthy conditions. Note how the entire family works together to roll as many cigars as possible. SOURCE:Bohemian Cigar Makers at Work in Their Tenement ,ca.1890. Museum of the City of New York,The Jacob A.Riis Collection, (#147.90.13.1.150).

A tenement room, 1900 By 1900, cities had begun early regulation of tenement housing. Here, two officials of the New York City Tenement House Department inspect a cluttered basement room that had been inhabited by shoemakers. (Note the "cobbler’s bench," the shoemaker’s tools, and materials such as leather for soles and uppers on the floor.)

Urban Problems Crimes, disease Jacob Riis “How the Other Half Lives”

Urban Politics Political Machine – informal political group Party bosses – ran the political machine George Plunkitt – Irish NYC most powerful Graft & Fraud Graft is getting money through dishonest means Tammany Hall New York political machine William M. “Boss” Tweed Thomas Nast