502 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
Insurance Building (completed in 1885) was the first
metal-frame edifice. Height alone, however, did not
satisfy these innovators; they sought a form that would
reflect the structure and purpose of their buildings.
Their leader was Louis Sullivan. Architects must
discard “books, rules, precedents, or any such educa-
tional impediments” and design functional buildings,
he argued. A tall building “must be every inch a proud
and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation...from
bottom to top...aunitwithout a single dissenting
line.” Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in St. Louis and
his Prudential Building in Buffalo, both completed in
the early 1890s, combined spare beauty, modest con-
struction costs, and efficient use of space in path-
breaking ways. Soon a “race to the skies” was on in the
great cities of America, and the wordsskyscraperand
skyline entered the language. Daniel Burnham,
another of the Chicago-school architects, designed the
twenty-two-story Flatiron Building in New York
which, when completed in 1902, was one of the tallest
in the city.
Leisure Activities: More Fun and Games
By bringing together large numbers of people, cities
made possible many kinds of social activity difficult or
impossible to maintain in rural areas. Cities remained
unsurpassed as centers of artistic and intellectual life.
New York was the outstanding example, as seen in its
many theaters and in the founding of the American
Museum of Natural History (1870), the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (1870), and the Metropolitan Opera
(1883), but other cities were equally hospitable to
such endeavors. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, for
example, was founded in 1870 and the Boston
Symphony in 1881.
Of course less sophisticated forms of recreation
also flourished in the urban environment. From 1865
to 1885 the number of breweries in Massachusetts
quadrupled. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that
in crowded urban centers there was a saloon on every
corner; during the last third of the century the number
of saloons in the country tripled. Saloons were strictly
male working-class institutions, usually decorated with
pictures and other mementos of sports heroes, the bar
perhaps under the charge of a retired pugilist.
For workingmen the saloon was a kind of club, a
place to meet friends; exchange news; and gossip,
gamble, eat, and drink beer and whiskey. Saloons
also flourished because factory owners and other
employers of large numbers of workers tended to
forbid the consumption of alcohol on their premises.
In addition, the gradual reduction of the workday
left men with more free time, which may explain
why vaudeville and burlesques, the latter described
by one straightlaced critic as a “disgraceful spectacle
of padded legs juggling and tight-laced wriggling,”
also proliferated.
Calvinist-inspired opposition to sports as a frivo-
lous waste of valuable time was steadily evaporating,
replaced among the upper and middle classes by the
realization that games like golf and tennis were
“healthy occupation[s] for mind and body.” Bicycling
became a fad, both as a means of getting from place
to place in the ever-expanding cities and as a form of
exercise and recreation.
Many of the new streetcar companies built picnic
grounds and amusement parks at their outer limits. In
good weather thousands seeking to relax after a hard
day’s work flocked to these “trolley parks” to enjoy a
fresh-air meal or patronize the shooting galleries,
merry-go-rounds, and “freak shows.”
The postwar era also saw the first important devel-
opment of spectator sports, again because cities pro-
vided the concentrations of population necessary to
support them. Curious relationships developed between
upper- and working-class interests and between compet-
itive sports as pure enjoyment for players and spectators
and sports as something to bet on. Horse racing had
strictly upper-class origins, but racetracks attracted huge
crowds of ordinary people more intent on picking a win-
ner than on improving the breed.
Professional boxing offers an even better example.
It was in a sense a hobby of the rich, who sponsored
favorite gladiators, offered prizes, and often wagered
large sums on the matches. But the audiences were
made up overwhelmingly of young working-class
males, from whose ranks most of the fighters emerged.
The gambling and also the brutality of the bloody,
bare-knuckle character of the fights caused many com-
munities to outlaw boxing, a fact that added to the
appeal of the sport for some.
The first widely popular pugilist was the legendary
“Boston Strong Boy,” John L. Sullivan, who became
heavyweight champion in 1882 by disposing of one
Paddy Ryan in nine rounds. Sullivan was an immensely
powerful man whose idea of fighting, according to his
biographer, “was simply to hammer his opponent into
unconsciousness,” something he did repeatedly dur-
ing his ten-year reign. Sullivan became an interna-
tional celebrity and made and lost large sums during
this period. He was also the beneficiary of patronage
in such forms as a diamond belt worth $10,000 pre-
sented to him by some of his admirers. Yet boxing
remained a raffish, clandestine occupation. One of
Sullivan’s important fights took place in France, on
the estate of Baron Rothschild, yet when it ended
both he and his opponent were arrested.
Three major team games—baseball, football, and
basketball—developed in something approaching