Savannah, and Mobile. Charleston had been the South’s second-largest city
(after New Orleans) in . It had fallen to third by and to thirteenth
by . Savannah, number six in , fell to twelfth by . Mobile, fourth
in , ranked fifteenth in .^11 New Orleans remained throughout the
half-century first among southern cities because it was the principal outlet
for much of the midwestern grain belt as well as for the largest lower South
and trans-Mississippi cotton growers. New Orleans had also become a rail-
road city, too, of course.
By , however, Atlanta had already emerged as a serious contender
for preeminence in the urban South. A young railroad city when Sherman’s
men burned it down in , Atlanta had recovered and grown to the fifth-
ranking urban place in the South by . It was second in and al-
ready a marvel of civic ambition and technology. Atlanta had an all-electric
lighting system by late , and its electric street rail system, introduced
in , was well worth bragging about. Passenger cars were furnished
with oak and plate-glass windows; their steel rails, bulkier than those of
the Georgia Railroad, rested on stone foundation piers. There was a new
waterworks and sewer system and then the South’s first skyscraper, which
opened in ; another one rose five years later. Both were equipped with
elevators, naturally. In all these urban boasts Atlanta was merely bigger,
never alone, and not always first. An electric trolley system opened in Mont-
gomery, Alabama, before Atlanta’s, Richmond’s, and Nashville’s, although
not by much. By , in fact, southern cities were ahead of other American
urban regions in electric streetcar companies, electric lights, telephones,
and other modern infrastructures.
On the other hand, southern cities resembled American cities generally
in that modern transportation, communication, and sanitation were for
central business districts and nearby well-off residential neighborhoods.
Poor areas, whether outlying or close to urban centers—especially if they
were predominantly black—contained steets that were never paved, irregu-
lar or nonexistent garbage collection, air fouled by smoke from trains and
factories, latrines unconnected to sewers, and suspect water from private
wells. Until gasoline-powered trucks finally displaced dray animals, city
streets everywhere were covered with the urine and feces of horses and
mules. Dead animals—usually equine but many other species, too—lying
in streets and sometimes festering for days before city scavengers dragged
them away, were common. Disposal of such poor creatures seems to have
been various. A freshly dead horse could be economically recycled into
meat, leather, insulation, glue, and many other products of value. The prac-