Section 6-2
Urbanization
Urban Opportunities
• Urbanization- growth of cities, mostly in
the regions of the Northeast and Midwest.
• Americanization Movement- designed to
assimilate people of wide-ranging cultures
into the dominant culture.
Americans Migrate to the Cities
• Skyscrapers- Tall steel framed buildings.
The Home Insurance Building in Chicago
was built in 1885 (ten stories). First
Skyscraper in America.
• Louis Sullivan- No one contributed more to
the design of skyscrapers. (Chicago)
Urban Problems
Six Major Urban Problems
• Housing
• Transportation
• Water
• Sanitation
• Crime
• Fire
Urban Problems
• Housing:
-row houses- single family dwellings
that shared side walls with other
similar houses.
-Tenements- multi-family urban
dwellings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu9A7zUE_fU
City Life
• Poor families struggled
to survive in crowded
slums living in
tenements.
• Tenements were
overcrowded, dirty
and oftentimes had no
windows, heat, or
indoor bathrooms.
Hine, Lewis W.
NYC tenement 1910
Jacob Riis, 1889
“Lodgers in a Bayard Street Tenement, Five Cents a Spot"
Urban Problems
• Transportation:
-Mass Transit- Transportation systems
designed to move large numbers of
people along fixed routes.
-Streetcars-San Francisco (1873)
-Subway-Boston (1897)
Urban Problem
• Water:
-As late as the 1860’s many cities had
grossly inadequate piped water.
-Disease- Typhoid Fever, Cholera
-Filtration (1870’s)
-Chlorination (1908)
Urban Problems
• Sanitation:
-Manure piled up on the streets
-Sewage flowed through open gutters
-Factories polluted the air and water
-Scavengers- private contractors hired
to sweep the streets.
-Sewer lines and sanitation
departments (By 1900)
Urban Problems
Crime:
-First full-time police force- NYC (1844)
-To small to impact crime.
Fire:
-First paid fire department- Cincinnati
(1853).
-Automatic sprinkler (1874).
Machine Politics
• Political Machine- an informal political
group designed to gain and keep power in
the cities. Came about partly because
cities had grown much faster than their
governments.
• Party bosses- (City Boss) Those in charge
of their respected political machine.
Machine Politics
• Graft- getting money through dishonest or
questionable means.
• George Plunkitt- One of NYC’s most
powerful party bosses; defended honest
graft.
• William “Boss” Tweed- Leader of
Tammany Hall, the NYC Democratic
political machine. Very corrupt!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnN9SZlLkg