The Cities Modernize 501passengers a year over the East River
between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Even the high cost of urban real estate,
which spawned the tenement, produced
some beneficial results in the long run.
Instead of crowding squat structures cheek
by jowl on twenty-five-foot lots, architects
began to build upward. Stone and brick
apartment houses, sometimes elegantly
known as “French flats,” replaced many
dumbbell tenements. The introduction of
the iron-skeleton type of construction,
which freed the walls from bearing the
immense weight of a tall building, was the
work of a group of Chicago architects who
had been attracted to the metropolis of the
Midwest by opportunities to be found
amid the ashes of the great fire of 1871.
The group included William Le Baron Jenney,
John A. Holabird, Martin Roche, John W. Root,
Louis H. Sullivan, and Daniel Burnham. Jenney’sHomea few big operators controlled the trolleys of more
than 100 eastern cities and towns.
Streetcars changed the character of big-city life.
Before their introduction urban communities were
limited by the distances people could conveniently
walk to work. The “walking city” could not easily
extend more than twenty-one-and-a-half miles from
its center. Streetcars increased this radius to six miles
or more, which meant that the area of the city
expanded enormously. Dramatic population shifts
resulted as the better-off moved away from the center
in search of air and space, abandoning the crumbling,
jam-packed older neighborhoods to the poor. Thus
economic segregation speeded the growth of ghettos.
Older peripheral towns that had maintained some of
the self-contained qualities of village life were swal-
lowed up, becoming metropolitan centers.
As time passed, each new area, originally peopled
by rising economic groups, tended to become
crowded and then deteriorated. By extending their
tracks beyond the developed areas, the streetcar com-
panies further speeded suburban growth because they
assured developers, bankers, builders, and middle-
class home buyers of efficient transport to the center
of town. By keeping fares low (five cents a ride was
standard) the lines enabled poor people to “escape”
to the countryside on holidays.
Advances in bridge design, notably the perfection of
the steel-cable suspension bridge by John A. Roebling,
aided the ebb and flow of metropolitan populations.
The Brooklyn Bridge described by a poet as “a weird
metallic Apparition... the cables, like divine messages
from above... cutting and dividing into innumerable
musical spaces the nude immensity of the sky,” was
Roebling’s triumph. Completed in 1883 at a cost of
$15 million, it was soon carrying more than 33 million
The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 was a community spectacle.
Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron Building (1902) was one of the first to
use steel girders to hold up the building; this allowed the outside
masonry to be decorative stone. In mid-century, architects
eliminated the outside wall entirely, encasing steel-framed
buildings in walls of glass.