Life in the Big City

1
Life in the Big City

• Industrialization, Urbanization, and Immigration

2
A few revealing stats

• Life expectancy
• 1900
• 46.3 yrs for men
• 48.3 yrs for women
• Family size
• 5.7 kids for laborers
• 5.2 children for skilled workers
• Top 12 of nation controlled 86 of wealth in
  1900 lowest 44 controlled 1.5

3
Urbanization

• Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis,
  Baltimore, etc.
• From 1860 to 1910, city population grew sevenfold
• By 1920, the majority of Americans lived in urban
  areas
• Urban growth came from southern and eastern
  European immigrants Southern African Americans
  who moved north
• New innovations in transportation cable cars,
  subways, trolley cars, Brooklyn Bridge, etc.

4
Immigration

• Push and pull factors
• 1860-1890 Irish and Germans
• After 1890 New immigrants Italians, Poles,
  Greeks, Russians, Slovaks, Croats Catholics and
  Jews many were very poor and illiterate
• 1892 Ellis Island constructed
• http//www.ellisisland.org/
• 1910 Angel Island (California) Asian immigrants
• Immigrants settle in ethnic neighborhoods, ghettos

5
Immigration (cont.)

• 15 of Americans in 1900 were immigrants
• 4 out of 5 New Yorkers were born abroad or were
  children of immigrants
• Assimilate or stay true to your roots?
• Discrimination by native-born Americans
• Nativism anti-Catholic organizations,
  immigration restriction groups like the
  Protective Association, Immigration Restriction
  League, etc.
• 1880s/90s more restrictive immigration laws
  limiting Chinese, undesirables, etc.

6
Working class family life

• Cooperative family effort women take in laundry,
  boarders
• Children went to work at age 10 and turned over
  earnings to parents
• Most children stopped education after elementary
  school Catholic immigrants founded their own
  schools separate from Protestant-controlled
  public schools

7
Urban Problem 1 Housing

• Shortage of quality, affordable housing
• Tenements
• 4-5 story buildings on 25x100 foot lots (500-800
  people?)
• 4,000 people per block/700 per acre
• Bordered industrial districts noise, odor,
  smoke, coal dust
• 1879 NYC law each bedroom must have a window
  dumbbell tenements with an air shaft in the
  middle
• http//www.tenement.org/
• Lively ethnic neighborhoods

8
Tenements
9
Urban Problem 2 Water

• Skyrocketing population not enough clean
  drinking water
• Poor (or no) indoor plumbing
• Disease (cholera, smallpox, diphtheria,
  tuberculosis, typhoid fever, whooping cough,
  measles, scarlet fever)
• 20 infant mortality rate in Chicago in 1900
• Filtration and chlorination introduced in late
  19th and early 20th century

10
Urban Problem 3 Sanitation

• Sewage flowed through open gutters, horse manure
  piled up on the streets, factories spewed foul
  smoke into the air outhouses
• In Chicago, only 25 had access to a bathroom
  with running water
• No dependable trash collection
• Early 1900s many cities developed sewer lines
  and created sanitation departments

11
Urban Problem 4 Political corruption

• Political machines fill the power vacuum
• Precinct captains
• Ward bosses
• City boss
• Tammany Hall, NYC Boss Tweed (in the 1860s, 65
  of public building funds went directly in his
  pocket)
• New immigrantsnew voters!
• Bosses provide food, favors, and JOBS to
  immigrants
• Graft and corruption

12
Urban Problem 5 Crime

• Pickpockets and thieves, murder
• Ethnic street gangs
• NYC first police department, 1853
• Widespread corruption and cooperation between
  criminals and police
• Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt cleans NYC
  up 1895-97

13
Urban Problem 6 Fire

• Caused by limited water supply, wooden houses,
  use of candles
• Absence of organized municipal fire departments
• The Great Chicago Fire (1871)
• The San Francisco Earthquake (1906)

14
Final question

• Whose responsibility is it to deal with these
  problems?