Cities, Tenements, and Streetcars

American cities had nowhere left to spread, so they went vertical and dense. Steel-frame construction let buildings climb higher than brick and timber ever allowed, and architects answered the need to house huge numbers of poor and working people cheaply with the dumbbell tenement. Picture a narrow building, 25 feet wide, pinched in the middle so that from above it looks like a dumbbell. That pinch created a narrow airshaft between buildings, the only source of light and air for interior rooms. The front and back rooms got windows facing the street or yard; the middle rooms got a few feet of airshaft, often filled with garbage and stale air. Families crowded in by the dozens per building.

Streetcars, first horse-drawn, then electric by the 1890s, solved a different problem: how to get people out of that crowding. A streetcar could move someone five or six miles from downtown in under an hour, so land at the edge of the city, cheap and open, suddenly became reachable for a daily commute. Middle-class families who could afford the fare and wanted space bought homes along these new streetcar lines, creating the first residential suburbs tied to a city by transit rather than farmland. Working-class and poor residents, tied to factory and stockyard jobs downtown and unable to spare the fare or the time, stayed packed into the tenement districts near their work.

This split, money and mobility moving out, poverty staying concentrated in the core, became the basic shape of American urban geography for the next century. Twentieth-century suburbs, first streetcar suburbs, then automobile suburbs after World War Two, simply extended a pattern streetcars had already drawn: those with resources choose distance from the city center, and the city center absorbs those without.