American Cities, Suburbs, and the Dual Metropolis

Written for H-Urban by Michael Ebner, Lake Forest College

The following essay revises "Re-Reading Suburban America: Population Deconcentration, 1810-1980," American Quarterly, 37:3 (1985), 366-81, incorporating much of the new scholarship that has appeared. An expanded version of this essay appears in Neil Larry Shumsky, Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs, 1998.

From the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, the basic vocabulary employed to define the American metropolis is changing. This rhetorical alteration corresponds to the shifting residential and employment circumstances of the nation's population. As a result, such key words as "city" and "suburb" are rendered inadequate. Kenneth T. Jackson, pre-eminent among students of the suburban experience, offers an important addition--"urban population deconcentration"--to historians' language of metropolitan development. This demographic process constitutes a causal explanation encompassing the vast sweep of American urban history since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Antecedents

The suburban tradition is most often attributed to the surging and inventive forces of the nineteenth century. But to appreciate what happened in the United States, we must step back at least to the late Middle Ages and examine suburbia's antecedents in England as well as on the Continent.

The earliest image conveyed by the word "suburb" was a setting described by H. J. Dyos, an English historian, as "extramural settlements." "In the suburbes of toun," wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales were places of "fereful residence" frequented by "thise robbours and thise thives." A peripheral zone to the south of London, circa 1580, has been termed as on the fringe of urban society. The modern-day word "slum" has been invoked to characterize suburbs as they existed in the eighteenth century. In Central and Eastern Europe, the poor inhabited the outlying regions of principal cities, including Gdansk, Prague, Poznan, Lublin, Warsaw, and Riga.

The embryo of modern suburbs, it is generally agreed, was set in the seventeenth century and evolved over the next four hundred years. A key date for London was 1735, when a network of new bridges and turnpikes began transform the economy of the rural landscape; to this would be added, starting in 1774, the rudiments of a public transportation system. By 1800, several English communities had been launched. Although the size of their populations was minuscule, they established noteworthy precedents. Residents of London considered Clapham, five miles to the southeast, a "serious paradise." Its middle- and upper-class inhabitants physically and morally had separated themselves from the perils of the urban core. Commissioned in 1811, Regents Park and Park Village, both five miles northwest of London, were designed to emphasize the rural landscape as an alternative to city life. The former was envisioned as a haven for the upper classes, the latter as a model suburb for the middle classes, though only Park Village would reach fulfillment.

Origins of American Suburbs

To comprehend the origins of the movement to the suburbs, we must return to the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Spurred by the Industrial Revolution, the pace of urban growth exceeded almost every expectation. Congestion, filth, and disease exerted a significant force in prompting urban residents to consider alternatives. We learn from Margaret Marsh, moreover, that the impulses underlying the earliest American ideology of suburbanism took root in male--not female--concerns equating democracy with rural life; the dominant concern of women, by contrast, entailed fostering domesticity. The impulse to flee the cities was given form between 1815 and 1830 by the perfection of three transportation systems: steam-powered ferry boats; various horse-drawn conveyances; and steam railways. Ultimately, the steam railway proved dominant: in Chicago alone, 3,600 miles of new track were laid within the city between 1848 and 1856.

Commuter railways enabled people who worked in the city to live in newly-established suburbs, and swiftly became the most influential agent of change. Here were the origins of the phenomenon that John R. Stilgoe terms "metropolitan corridors," which recast physical landscapes and cultural patterns. It first took hold in Boston. As early as 1838 overcrowding and a scarcity of real estate helped create rudimentary commuting services to outlying areas. By late 1849, daily passenger trains entering or departing its seven depots number 208, 118 of them moving in a fifteen-mile radius. In New York, a railway was constructed north of Manhattan into Westchester County in the 1840s; seven weekday trains visited Croton Falls, six more stopped at White Plains, and fifteen at Williamsbridge. A combination of steam railways and ferry boats brought residents of several counties in northeastern New Jersey into Manhattan via Jersey City. In Chicago and its environs, only ten miles of track entered the city in 1848 but within eight years the figure exceeded 3,600 miles as eleven new lines were constructed.

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the North American pattern of spatial change--"peripheral affluence and central despair" are the words invoked by Kenneth T. Jackson--was evident in the nation's largest metropolises. For instance, as of 1830 Brooklyn was growing more quickly than Manhattan; by mid-century a journalist rued the population exodus across the East River, claiming it resulted in "the desertion of the city by its men of wealth." As of the 1850s, Boston boasted of its Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia its Germantown, San Francisco its Nob and Russian Hills, and Chicago its North Shore. Increasingly apparent was the romantic suburb--Newark's Llewellyn Park, Cincinnati's Glendale, Chicago's Lake Forest--whose artful designers preserved pastoral landscapes for their upper-class clients. Gunther Barth, in studying the cultural transformation of cities, cites these amenities as fostering "the isolationist features of modern city life," whereby people's place of residence was determined by their class status.

In post-Civil War America the configuration of the metropolis underwent dramatic reordering. Several factors contributed to this transformation: heightened industrialization; massive new waves of immigration, increasingly from southern and eastern Europe after 1880; significant innovations in sanitary engineering during the early 1880s; and further technological advances, none more important than the telephone (1876) and the gasoline-combustion automobile (1893). While promoters sought to convey romantic suburban idioms, what architectural historians regard as Victorian suburbs were actually being democratized, with large tracts of land divided into small, affordable plots. Brightwood, east of Indianapolis on the Bee Line Railroad, was a speculative venture launched in the early 1870s on a conventional gridiron plat; absentee land owners allowed residential property owners to construct homes as they wished without stipulations as to land use or design. In West Philadelphia, once "genteel estates" of considerable size and architectural distinction gave way after 1880 to a pattern of land development premised on the insistence of prospective residents to achieve a "uniformity of appearance, of price, and of situation."

Urban Imperialism

During the second half of the nineteenth century, suburban residents found their communities coveted by metropolitan imperialists. Leaders of several major cities sought to centralize administrative control over adjacent territories. Jon C. Teaford explains that annexation campaigns constituted an impulse by urban leaders to add adjacent suburbs to their cities. The first effort occurred in Philadelphia, which in one swoop in 1854 expanded its municipal boundaries from 2 square miles to 129 square miles. The hitherto independent suburb of Spring Garden had ranked as the nation's ninth largest city in the preceding decennial census. Chicago added 133 square miles to its existing 43 square miles in 1889 (including the thriving municipalities of Lakeview and Hyde Park), constituting the largest single addition of outlying land in Chicago's history. Most significant of all was the formation in 1898 of Greater New York City, wherein its square mileage went from 40 to 300, and its population grew instantaneously by 2 million. Included in the consolidation was Brooklyn, heretofore the nation's fourth largest city. Similar accessions occurred in St. Louis, Boston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.

Urban imperialism did not proceed unimpeded. In some long-established suburbs on the borders of major cities, people prized their local autonomy and distinctive identities. Citizens of Brookline, Massachusetts thwarted plans for annexation with Boston as early as 1873, a decision now regarded by urban historians as the first significant setback to the consolidation mania sweeping the nation. When other suburban communities-Cambridge (1892) and Somerville (1893) north of Boston as well as Evanston (1894) north of Chicago-faced similar questions, their citizens voted down annexation. These residents, and their counterparts elsewhere, demonstrated a dogged determination (very much evident today) to differentiate their communities, politically and culturally, from the central city.

The firm opposition to imperialist designs within well-established suburbs is evidence that what Peter O. Muller regards as "closed social cells"--a hallmark of the North American pattern of metropolitan life as we know it today--were being set into place during the 1890s. When annexations occurred thereafter, they tended to be in southern, southwestern, or western cities. Los Angeles grew from 108 to 440 square miles between 1915 and 1930 by annexing the San Fernando Valley; Dallas expanded in physical size, from 1940 to 1960, from 45 to 350 square miles. For the most part, however, each suburban community would view itself as separated physically and culturally from the central city as well as distinguish itself from its neighboring suburbs.

Transportation

A technological innovation in transportation--the electrified street railway-added to the complexity of metropolitan life in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Known as the trolley, it radically transformed mass transit. Adna Ferrin Weber, deservedly acknowledged as the pioneer scholar of American cities, wrote in 1898 that the key to his faith in suburbanization as a democratizing force was the electrified trolley. First launched experimentally by a disciple of Thomas A. Edison in Richmond, Virginia in 1887, it ran immediately thereafter in the western suburbs of Boston. It caused a revolution in mass transportation that soon attained international proportions. Its instant success has been attributed to its economy, cleanliness, speed, and geographic radius. By 1895, 85 percent of all street railways in the U.S. had been electrified; in 1902, the figure was 97 percent. Although suburban preserves of the elite--Lake Forest and New York City's Tuxedo Park among them--would continue to rely primarily on steam railroads for commuting, electrified trollies proved a boon to the middle class. Stimulating the home construction industry, they created what Sam Bass Warner, Jr., labels as "streetcar suburbs." Builders of the new transit lines, faced with their own economic imperatives, laid down track on whatever suburban property became available rather than along well-designed coordinates. Instead of new communities or neighborhoods, and the public life associated with them, by 1900 there evolved a fragmented pattern of civic life best defined as centerless.

Not that electric street railways won universal approbation. In Newark's affluent suburbs, a protracted campaign encouraged by local politicians temporarily prevented trollies from penetrating the long-established communities of Orange, East Orange, and Montclair. These suburban residents, already fearful about influxes of new-stock ethnic inhabitants, created legal obstacles to franchise petitions. Along the North Shore of Chicago, substantial opposition prevent the completion of a new line for nine years until 1899. Contributing to such delays--which also occurred simultaneously in Toronto (1893) and Paris (1902)--was concern over preserving local autonomy, fear of encroachment by people and corporations deemed foreign because of their urban addresses as well as corporate ties, and uncertainty as to how this advance would affect the urban landscape.

The 1890s saw the emergence of another revolutionary innovation, the gasoline combustion automobile. Initially a technological novelty enjoyed by the rich, the possibilities offered by the automobile dramatically affected trolleys after 1900. A variety of factors figured in the trolley's decline: diminishing profits for transit companies; political criticism over fare structures; overcrowding; and deteriorating rolling stock.

The marriage between suburb and automobile was consummated during the 1920s. Vehicle registration reached 8 million in 1920; in 1927, one car existed for every 5 persons; and by 1929, 26 million vehicles were on the nation's roadways. Highway and road construction mounted, stimulated in part by federal legislation dating to 1916; in 1925, total highway construction nationally surpassed $1 billion annually. Key linkages were also erected: the Benjamin Franklin Bridge tied Philadelphia to Camden (1926); the Holland tunnel joined lower Manhattan to Jersey City (1927); and the George Washington Bridge did the same for upper Manhattan and Bergen County, New Jersey (1931).

Stimulated in large part by these transportation developments, by the first third of the twentieth century the suburban experience encompassed a broad range of Americans, not just residents of long-established upper-class enclaves. At the same time, masculine influence was waning. Women colored communal sensibilities of organizing child-centered as well as family-oriented pursuits, often attended by dutiful fathers, in affluent suburbs such as Palos Verdes, CA, Scarsdale, NY, and Winnetka, IL. Meanwhile, the nation's forty largest industrial counties suffered a net loss of 617,965 jobs at the expense of peripheral locales over a seven year period beginning in 1919. In retailing, highway clutter was becoming common along material arteries leading into cities; strips of businesses catered to retail customers, advertising their wares using neon-illuminated signs and billboards.

But the effect of automobiles on suburbanization during the 1920s should not be overestimated. What was happening reflected a process whose social and demographic origins extended into the nineteenth century. Suburban-situated industrial plants took hold as management sought to avoid costly land acquisitions and high tax rates; correspondingly, workers found it more convenient to relocate in close proximity to their employment. Retailers also found it essential to decentralize. Between 1910 and 1920, Chicago department stores such as Wiebolts, Sears Roebuck, and Marshall Fields as well as Filene's in Boston established suburban branches. Further contributing to the exodus from the core was the modernization of select commuter transit lines. As early as 1911, more than 50 percent of all the practicing lawyers in Boston lived beyond its corporate limits; the figure reached 40 percent for Newark, New Jersey, by 1925.

Lewis Mumford's Alternative Vision

Lewis Mumford advocated an alternative vision of suburban America during the 1920s rooted in the ideal of planning rather than entrepreneurship. Although not fully realized, his ideas merit attention. Influenced by decentralist thinkers of the late nineteenth century, Mumford's goal was to create tightly-organized planned communities within the metropolis ("fully equipped for work, play, and living"). This aspiration was partially realized in 1928 in the establishment of a 1,350-acre planned community with a projected population of 25,000 known as Radburn designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, twelve miles west of the George Washington Bridge (then under construction) in Bergen County, although ultimately its completion was sidetracked by the Great Depression. During the 1930s the concept of planned communities was briefly revived by the federal government, but met opposition from virulent anti-statist critics. If Mumford's idea was never fully achieved, its influence on American suburban tradition has endured among intellectuals as well as progressive planners. Alexander Garvin claims that the cul-de-sac is the most enduring design element of Radburn. Other evidence of its persistence also is found in Palos Verdes Estates, CA (which in fact predates Radburn) as well as the rise of a handful of experimental new towns (e.g., Reston, VA, Columbia, MD, and Irvine, CA) during the1960s. Nonetheless, deeply-embedded opposition to large-scale planned community developments persists as a veritable hallmark of American political and economic systems.

The New Deal

The 1930s exacerbated the complex and uneasy relationship between suburb and city. The Great Depression affected the core with enormous severity. Unemployment soared in major cities: 1,000,000 in New York City, and 600,000 in Chicago, and 298,000 in Philadelphia. Yet the gross effects do not tell all. Puzzling as it initially appears, suburbs prospered at the expense of cities because of New Deal policies! This effect is curious in that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is widely regarded as a politician with an urban electoral base.

Two pieces of New Deal housing legislation explain this circumstance. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), created in 1933, sought to curtail the enormous number of foreclosures on private home mortgages, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1934, boosted the home construction industry by subsidizing the upgrade of existing dwellings and the initiation of new starts. If conventional wisdom once instructed us that such laws restored faith and prosperity, Kenneth Jackson offers a revised interpretation: the policies of these agencies undermined the well-being of housing stock in the urban core while enhancing circumstances in the suburbs. Real estate appraisers developed the nefarious practice we now know as "red lining," wherein loans are not granted in portions of the city classified as physically or economically deteriorated or in neighborhoods populated by African-Americans and working-class ethnics. The FHA favored low-risk loans: new units rather than existing dwellings, open spaces rather than built-up locales, white collar rather than working class, whites rather than blacks, and native-born rather than immigrant stock. Of course neither housing agency possessed a legislative mandate to defend or revive central cities. Rather, their housing programs fit a classic New Deal mold: utilizing public funds to induce a return to economic health in the private sector. Whatever the motives of those who designed HOLC and FHA, they best served suburban, middle-class home ownership.

Postwar Trends

After 1945 the suburban trend seemed inevitable, as if it amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy abetted by the federal government. Housing starts between 1946 and 1955 doubled over the preceding 15 years. Many new homes were situated on the metropolitan periphery, constructed inexpensively, and subsidized by federal loan programs. Best known were the Levittowns (first on Long Island at Strathmore-on-Manhasset, then in suburban Philadelphia in Bristol, and later in central New Jersey in Willingboro). These communities featured mass produced, low-cost detached single-family 750-square foot Cape Cod-style homes on 60 x 100 lots constructed on slabs in park-like subdivisions. Highway construction also flourished, reaching $2 billion in 1949 and $4 billion by 1955.

A suburban life inspired two-car families as well as rising numbers of women remaining in the labor force; Glamour (1953) linked home ownership to the two-income households. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 projected a transcontinental network of superhighways stretching 42,500 miles and costing $60 billion. By the end of 1958, for instance, retail sales in the declining industrial city of Paterson, New Jersey (four miles west of Paramus) decreased by half of what they had been four years earlier. The proliferation of suburban malls affirmed a fundamental fact: the American people live and shop in the suburbs.

Cities as Hollow Centers

Whether the vantage point is social or economic, the postwar suburban trend damaged the nation's older cities. A key aspect of this was an inter-regional shift away from the northeast and upper middle west. Among the 29 fastest growing cities in the nation (with populations of at least 100,000) between 1980 and 1990, 22 were in fact suburbs in the shadows of larger central cities; 16 were in California, four in Texas, and three in Arizona; only one was east of the Mississippi River (Virginia Beach, VA). Abetting this demographic movement, beginning in the 1950s, was the ubiquity of air conditioned residences as well as workplaces, ease of airplane travel, advances in communications technologies, and federally-supported highway improvements. The transfer of the hitherto hapless California Angels from Los Angeles to Anaheim in 1966 merits notice as the first suburb boasting its own major league baseball franchise.

Meanwhile, Sharon Zukin metaphorically has identified the nation's oldest urban places as "the hollow center." Between 1950 and 1960, cities grew 11 percent as contrasted with suburban growth of 46 percent. Similar shifts occurred in employment patterns: between 1948 and 1963, industrial jobs declined 7 percent in the nation's 25 largest cities at the same time that suburban jobs rose 61 percent. From 1970 to 1977, suburban-situated jobs increased 48 percent in Washington, D.C., 41% in Baltimore, 31% in St. Louis, and 22% in Philadelphia. The United States Conference of Mayors balefully itemized the problems afflicting cities in 1986: population loss, impoverishment, racial concentration, deindustrialization, unemployment, homelessness, crime, schooling, and high taxes. William Julius Wilson has said as much in explaining how the underclass or poorest residents of inner cities suffer disproportionately from the compounded effects of their environs as one affliction builds upon another.

Edge Cities

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, a new suburbanization phenomenon is emerging: "edge cities." Among their ingredients: locations along highway corridors far from their central cities; reliance on automobiles; population homogeneity; and swift economic development led by technology-related industries, computer-linked enterprises, and shopping mall retail businesses. Revolutionary advances in information technology early in the 1980s resulted in the proliferation of the so-called "wired office" reliant upon networked computers, enabling corporate centers relocated to suburban locations to receive, analyze, and transmit data essential to the daily transactions of far-flung, large-scale corporate and research enterprises. People work, live, and pursue many of their leisure activities in these settings. Edge cities are situated along interstate highways as much as 40 miles from the urban core on the peripheries of large-scale metropolitan systems. In 1991, Joel Garreau of The Washington Post calculated some 200 edge cities. Examples include: Bellevue, Washington; Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta; Naperville, Illinois; Overland Park, Kansas; Princeton, New Jersey; and Tyson's Corner, Virginia.

Robert Fishman, a rare historian willing to cast an eye toward the future, forecasts how such edge cities might differ "radically" in form and function from their traditional precursors: ". . . too congested to be efficient, too chaotic to be beautiful, and too dispersed to possess the diversity and vitality of a great city." Edge cities, contrary to what some optimistic observers would have us believe, do not represent the nation's urban future. Rather, they constitute the most recent chapter, avowedly anti-urban, in the evolution of our suburbs. And there is even the prospect, raised by Professor Fishman, whereby the edge cities of America will eradicate the traditional suburban culture and replace it with mindless metropolitan sprawl.

Dual Metropolis

The dual metropolis, encompassing our decaying inner cities and our glittering suburbs within a single geographic system, is a useful contemporary depiction of the relationship between city and suburbs. It is premised on the notion of unbalanced development (e.g., technologically oriented job opportunities requiring high skill levels in suburbs and poorly educated, underemployed labor pools in cities). Replete with the starkest of contrasts, such instances are symptomatic of national political structures and economic systems that too often have proven themselves disdainful of the inner city, its depleted resources, and its beleaguered inhabitants. To cite a single benchmark, federal spending on cities diminished from 15 percent to 6 percent between 1980 and 1990; a direct result of the "new federalism" associated with the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-89). As early as 1982 Richard C. Wade foresaw that the outcome would benefit the American suburban majority. Indeed when urban experts from Europe recently visited American cities, Derek Bok reports in The State of the Nation (1996), they expressed their wonder upon encountering circumstances akin to a nation in the Third World. Central cities accounted for 43 percent of Americans below the poverty line in 1991 as contrasted with 27 percent in 1959.

Chicago offers a case in point. Between 1970 and 1990, the city was losing 17 percent of its population as its suburbs gained 24 percent. As of 1990, the city's share of metropolitan private-sector employment had fallen slightly below 40 percent for the first time; eighteen years earlier the city's proportion stood at 56 percent. The 1990 statistic also reflected a precipitous twelve-month decline for the city, a loss of more than 8,000 jobs occurring at the very time when the six-county suburban region had added almost 66,000 positions; ranking first in suburban job growth, no doubt spurred by Naperville's expansion, was DuPage County. The Economist has reported that within Chicago some 2,000 manufacturing sites were vacant in 1994. The decision by Sears, Roebuck to relocate its corporate headquarters from its downtown Sears Tower to the northwestern suburb of Hoffman Estates in 1992 affected 5,000 workers. Underlying these changes is the fact that as of 1990 Chicago ranked second nationally--exceeded only by Detroit--in an analysis of the 100 largest cities that measured concentrations of poverty and distressed neighborhoods.

If the dual metropolis represents the bleakest of contemporary realities, what better prospect exists for our metropolitan future at the close of the twentieth century? The most optimistic expression, rooted in an abiding faith in our capacity as a democratic nation to foster renewal and change, is that future suburban residents might yet find reason to recenter their sensibilities. This would require a series of political and economic imperatives fostered by our leaders--in the public and private sector, in the neighborhoods, in the giant corporations, in small enterprises, in labor unions--at the local, state, and national levels. David Rusk, himself a former mayor of Albuquerque, NM (1977-81), earned considerable attention in 1993 when he urged state governments to enact legislation which would ease prospects for realizing city-county consolidations.

Escaping the scourge of the dual metropolis is a goal worthy of our self-respect as a great and powerful nation; contemporary examples of what might be achieved by linking corporate interests to metropolitan initiatives for urban revitalization have been launched in Atlanta, Boston, and Pittsburgh. Writing in 1993 about the imperiled urban condition, Paul E. Peterson championed what amounts to a reversal of the new federalism: "a national political and policy commitment that see urban needs as an intimate part of the country's broader social agenda." Achieving this, of course, would require broad-based recognition of a new set of imperatives obliging Americans to redirect their metropolitan lives--geographically, economically, and culturally--away from the edge toward the core.

Zane L. Miller wisely has reminded us that key words such as "suburban" and "metropolitan" are themselves the products of their perpetual recasting reaching back to the very beginning of urban population deconcentration in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Each word, moreover, continues to inspire a range of sensibilities. Some of them are noble and others less so. A "suburb" can be construed as an interdependent element within a functional metropolitan system, inextricably linked culturally and economically to the central city as well as to adjacent places; alternately, viewed through another set of eyes a suburb is a place to which people furtively escape in their quest to avoid urban problems and dangers. "Metropolitan" has been used to depict a pluralistic agency for programmatic efforts designed to amend some of the perplexing issues encompassing cities and suburbs. But it is also may be cast pejoratively to peremptorily cast away blueprints drawn up to guide the construction of useful conjunctures between the core and the periphery.

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Michael Ebner is the A. B. Dick Professor of History at Lake Forest College, and has served as the executive secretary of the Urban History Association since its formation in 1988. His most recent book, Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History, has received numerous awards and critical praise. He is presently working on a new book entitled Changing Places: Rapid Suburban Growth on the Metropolitan Edge, 1945-1990, a comparison of Gwinnett County, GA, Irvine, CA, Naperville, IL, and Princeton, NJ. Readers may also recognize him as the series editor for the invaluable "Classics in Urban History" books produced by the U.C. Press.