The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

227

The Journey to Work,

Philadelphia, 1850

During the next two decades, the expanding scale of manu-
facturing operations made the craft-dominated workshop
nearly an anachronism. Larger operations required more
work space, and the need to locate near suppliers, customers,
or a source of waterpower meant that the owner’s home
could no longer serve as a workplace. By about 1850, Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and other cities had sorted them-
selves into commercial and residential districts; the residen-
tial districts further separated into working-class and
employer-class neighborhoods.
Nowadays the term inner cityoften connotes poverty,
andsuburbs, prosperity. But the relationship was reversed in
the mid-nineteenth-century city, as historian Sam Bass
Warner has shown in his study of Philadelphia. In 1850 afflu-
ent Philadelphians resided in the core of the city while factory

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In-migration wards

Out-migration wards

No net migration

In-migration trend

Railroads

KENSINGTON

NORTHERN

LIBERTIES

PASSAYUNK TOWNSHIP

WEST PHILADELPHIA

PENN TOWNSHIP

SPRING

GARDEN

MOYAMENSING

Market Street

Broad Street

Philadelphia, 1850:

workers’ daily journey

to factories

workers lived in shanties and boardinghouses along its out-

skirts. The accompanying map, based on census data for 1850,

shows that fewer factory workers lived in downtown

Philadelphia than were employed by the factories there. Each

day, thousands of factory workers from Penn Township and

the eastern section of Passyunk Township walked into town

to work in downtown factories.

Question for Discussion

■As the maps of Rochester in both 1827 and 1834 show,

journeymen and master shoemakers lived downtown,

on Buffalo-Main Streets; in Philadelphia, a much larger

city, the workers lived in the “out-migration wards” on

the edge of town. What likely explains the difference

between the residence patterns of artisans in Rochester

and Philadelphia?