Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
But I don't think 1900 is a good proxy for urbanity. Cars didn't dominate the scene until after WW2. The greatest binge of urban development in North America occurred in the half century preceding WW2.
In 1900, the Bronx, now the second most urban place in North America, consisted of farms and woods, for the most part. There's very little intact pre-1900 urbanity in North America.
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I dunno. I tend to divide urban development into three semi-distinct eras.
Prior to 1890 - The "old urban" or finely-graded urban era.
Urban neighborhoods were pretty much exclusively built to interact with on foot. Thus most neighborhoods had a mixture of residential, commercial, and industrial. Neighborhoods tended to have class diversity as well, as the business owners in the poor neighborhoods, and the "help" in rich neighborhoods needed to be able to walk to their jobs. Larger cities during this age were, to a great degree, a whole lot of smaller cities smashed together, although proto-commuting (omnibus, cable car, ferry, horsecar, railroad commute, etc) did start to be used later in the period - particularly by the wealthy.
As an aside, surviving Old Urban neighborhoods are my favorite to walk through today, because they are such a chaotic jumble of smaller-scale buildings of different eras you never know what you'll find when you turn around the next corner. You could find a random restaurant in the middle of a residential block, or an old mini-mill which has been converted into live-work space.
1890 to 1919 - The (electric) streetcar era.
This era opened up vast new tracks of land which could be developed cheaply and quickly away from the urban core. Separation of uses began, because the new streetcar suburbs contained no employment anchors, and often only a smattering of shops. Blocks became longer, with the new neighborhood (in lower-density cities) dominated by block after block of closely spaced mass-produced single-family detached housing. The new neighborhoods themselves were often not particularly walkable, with the expectation that one would take the streetcar to their place of work or the nearest retail center.
At the same time, the development of the new residential nodes and the establishment of the streetcar system allowed the remaining "old urban" neighborhoods to specialize in many cases on non-residential uses, allowing for higher employment densities. Formerly mixed-use areas tended to become centers of office employment (the CBD), retail, or manufacturing. These new densities required much of the more small-scale, old-urban city to be demolished as the first office towers and factories spanning multiple blocks with thousands of workers took form. This era also saw the rise of dedicated apartment buildings for the first time in the U.S. - which were previously mostly limited to NYC, Boston, and Cincinnati, partially supplanting older forms of high-density living (rooming houses, boarding, hot bunks, long-term hotel residence, etc).
1920-1949 - The proto-suburban era.
For the most part this era is really just the 1920s, because very little got built during the latter period between the Great Depression and World War 2. Regardless, new neighborhoods in most cities built during this period are effectively suburban, because even though car ownership levels were relatively low, they were high among those with access to enough capital to buy homes. Neighborhoods of this vintage are dominated by single-family homes with driveways and garages (albeit detached garages). The exceptions were in dense cities like NYC and Philly, where the transit system was robust and car ownership levels stayed relatively low, but even the neighborhoods built during this era in the higher-density cities feel a bit more spread out than the streetcar suburbs which preceded them.
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