Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T20:47:50.543Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Suburbs in the City

Reassessing the Location of Nineteenth-Century American Working-Class Suburbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Jason Jindrich
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Political boundaries are the criterion scholars use most often to define American suburbs; a problematic approach when applied to the late nineteenth century. Annexation distended the boundaries of nineteenth-century cities so far as to obscure broad swaths of suburban and rural districts within their limits. The absence of a literature about these “suburbs in the city” is problematic, because it encourages historical researchers to consider newly annexed territory as urban equivalents of older city districts. This article argues that under the generally accepted definition of suburb, the condition of nineteenth-century urban overbounding obstructs a full appreciation of the historical breadth, ubiquity, and composition of working-class residence outside the urban core. Analysis of the socioeconomic characteristics of regions with suburban population densities within the 1880 city limits of Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark, New Jersey; and St. Louis, Missouri, indicate that researchers have underestimated the degree and diversity of blue-collar suburbanization during this period.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Summer 2012 , pp. 147 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Binford, H. C. (1985) The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Campanella, R. (2002) Time and Place in New Orleans: Past Geographies in the Present Day. Gretna, LA: Pelican.Google Scholar
Cleveland Directory Company (1880) The Cleveland Directory, for the Year Ending June, 1880. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Directory.Google Scholar
Cowan, R. (1997) A Social History of American Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dilworth, R. (2005) The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dilworth, R.Trevenen, K. (2004) “When cities get married: Constructing urban space through gender, sexuality, and municipal consolidation.” Urban Affairs Review 40 (2): 183–209.Google Scholar
Douglass, H. P. (1925) The Suburban Trend. New York: Century.Google Scholar
Fishman, R. (1987) Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gardner, T. K. (1998) “The metropolitan fringe: Suburbanization in the United States before World War II.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.Google Scholar
Gardner, T. K. (2001) “The slow wave: The changing residential status of cities and suburbs in the United States, 1850–1940.” Journal of Urban History 27 (3): 293–312.Google Scholar
Harris, R. (1994) “Chicago’s other suburbs.” Geographical Review 84 (4): 394–410.Google Scholar
Harris, R. (1996) Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900–1950. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
IPUMS-USA (1950) usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/OCC1950#description_tab (accessed December 21, 2011).Google Scholar
Jackson, K. T. (1985) Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobson, C. D. (2000) Ties That Bind: Economic and Political Dilemmas of Urban Utility Networks, 1800–1990. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Jindrich, J. B. (2010) “When the urban fringe is not suburban.” Geographical Review 100 (1): 35–55.Google Scholar
Keating, A. N. (1988) Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Keating, A. N. (2004) “Chicagoland: More than the sum of its parts.” Journal of Urban History 30 (2): 213–30.Google Scholar
Kennedy, A.Woods, R. (1969) The Zone of Emergence: Observations of the Lower Middle and Upper Working Class Communities of Boston, 1905–1914. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, J. H. (1896) A History of the City of Cleveland. Cleveland, OH: Imperial.Google Scholar
Lewis, R. (2001) “A city transformed: Manufacturing districts and suburban growth in Montreal, 1850–1929.” Journal of Historical Geography 27 (1): 20–35.Google Scholar
Lewis, R., ed. (2004) Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and Home on the Metropolitan Fringe. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Nicolaides, B. M. (2002) My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sauers, B. J. (1974) “A political process of urban growth: Consolidation of the south side with the city of Pittsburgh, 1872.” Pennsylvania History 41 (3): 265–87.Google Scholar
Schnore, L. F. (1962) “Municipal annexations and the growth of metropolitan suburbs, 1950–60.” American Journal of Sociology 67 (4): 406–17.Google Scholar
Sobek, M. (1996) “Work, status, and income: Men in the American occupational structure since the late nineteenth century.” Social Science History 20 (2): 169–207.Google Scholar
Teaford, J. C. (1975) The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650–1825. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Teaford, J. C. (1979) City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Teaford, J. C. (1984) The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Teaford, J. C. (2008) The American Suburb: The Basics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1964) Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Urquhart, F. (1913) A History of the City of Newark, New Jersey, Embracing Practically Two and a Half Centuries, 1666–1913. New York: Lewis.Google Scholar
US Census Bureau (1880) Bureau of the Census. 10th Census. NARA Publication T9.Google Scholar
Warner, S. B. (1962) Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wiese, A. (1999) “Black housing, white finance: African-American housing and home ownership in Evanston, Illinois, before 1940.” Journal of Social History 33 (2): 429–60.Google Scholar
Wiese, A. (2004) Places of Their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar