American cities grew very rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th century, concentrating and intensifying industrial life. At the start of this era, there were only a dozen cities in America with a population of 100,000 people. But by 1920, there were over two dozen cities with more than 100,000 people.
In the largest metropolises, the scale of growth was... much faster. New York City grew from a population of 1.4 million in 1870 to over 3.8 million in 1900, and Philadelphia grew from 674,000 people in 1870 to over 1.2 million in 1900. And as railroads snaked across the west and settlement followed, cities sprouted up across the region.
Western cities, founded in the 1860s or 1870s, tended to be based around a major railroad line. Such was the case with Wichita, Kansas. As the region developed, businesses in many western cities focused on a single industry. So, Los Angeles began its explosive growth based initially on tourism to California.
Then, a generation later, Oil was found near Los Angeles, driving its growth in the early 20th century. In the late 19th century, the largest city in the West became Chicago, a city whose initial growth owed in large part to the industry of animal slaughtering. It grew faster than any other city in America during this time.
Chicago went from just 299,000 residents in 1870 to a population of more than 1.7 million in 1900. A gold rush in the late 1850s in Colorado led to the emergence of Denver. The gold rush, though, faded, leading to an exodus of residents. But then another gold strike revived the city's prospects.
By the late 1800s, Denver had begun to grow rapidly. Workers in cities needed to live close to the factories. Cities began their rapid expansion two generations before the mass production of cars, or the advent of urban trolleys.
So long-distance commutes were impossible. You had to live near to where you worked, which meant people were crammed together in tight spaces. Cities were... often badly planned or not planned at all, and they became overcrowded as immigrants and rural migrants poured in to work in the factories and the dockyards and the slaughterhouses.
There was little or really no zoning. Housing was crammed into small spaces to maximize landlords'incomes. Land values and rents were high in city districts.
Jacob Reese, an immigrant, documented the deplorable conditions in the slums of New York and other cities, both through his photos and in a book that he wrote titled How the Other Half Lives. Cities depended on coal fires, both for cooking and to power engines. Nearly all houses had an open fire for cooking and for heating the stove.
Fires doubled as a source of heating. as well. Also, before the spread of electricity in the 1920s and 1930s, houses had kerosene lamps, and this was in fact the primary use of petroleum before the advent of cars. Hence, the fire risk was very high in cities. Many people regarded it as an amusement to be able to go for an evening stroll and spot the raging fires around town.
That, of course, meant someone's house was burning down. Only later did firefighting become a part of the municipal services provided by cities. So for most of this era, it was really just gangs of boys running around with buckets of water.
Indeed, sometimes the boys would fight one another for the right, and they hoped the tip, to extinguish the fire, rather than cooperating to put the fire out. The number of children who died from horrifying burns in the 1870s and 1880s in 1890s was shockingly high. But even when houses weren't ablaze, the reliance on open flames, both for cooking and for heating homes, along with the use of gas or kerosene flames for lights, meant that smoke and smog billowed through the air, with the result that cities were terribly polluted. Clouds of Smog hung over cities, large grayish-brown clouds enveloped towns.
In Pittsburgh, on Sundays, women would take two pairs of gloves to church. One pair to wear on the way, but a second pair to wear on the way back. And that's because soot settled on everything, making everything outside, every surface, grimy.
And... Adequate water supplies and sanitation were rare. In 1885, such cities as Baltimore and New Orleans and Mobile, well, they still had open sewers.
Raw sewage ran through the streets. Philadelphia was hardly better. It had an estimated 80,000 cesspools, where people went to defecate and urinate.
In Boston, the harbor was still used as a sewer, with the result that as the tide went out, it would carry away the waste to everyone's relief. But then, the incoming tide would wash the waste back in again in only slightly diluted form. Given this stew of germs, epidemic disease and outbreaks were common throughout many cities.
New Orleans suffered from periodic outbreaks of yellow fever. The city also suffered from an outbreak of cholera that, as it spread in the 1870s, killed more than 50,000 people. Typhus outbreaks afflicted thousands in Baltimore, in Washington, D.C., and in Philadelphia. Boston had an outbreak of scarlet fever from 1895 to 1905, and that was a disease which had all but disappeared from North America. for almost two centuries, and then there was New York.
New York City hosted all these diseases at various times in the late 19th century. Large numbers of animals in cities, especially horses, worsened the risk of disease and impacted everyone's daily life. Horses were the main means of transport and cargo transit. There were an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 horses in New York City by the 1880s, and tens of thousands of horses in other American cities.
Horses were so prevalent that urban planners in the 1870s speculated that really large cities like New York simply could not grow much larger because the number of horses needed for transit around town meant that the amount of manure on the city streets would rise knee-deep. The average horse produced over 25 pounds of manure each day, and it piled up. On empty lots in New York City, piles of manure, in some cases, reached over 50 feet high.
This was not just an American problem. In 1894, the London Times predicted that, quote, in 50 years, every street in London... will be buried under nine feet of manure. This triggered what came to be known as the Great Manure Crisis that led London's planners to try and figure out how to mitigate the amount of horse manure in the city. Sometimes, horses died in the streets.
Jacob Rees took pictures of children playing in street gutters alongside the bloated carcass of dead horses. It was a real problem because basically someone had to have a team of horses to carry off the dead horse. Horses are very heavy. In 1872, there was an epidemic among horses in Philadelphia, which killed almost 2,500 horses in just three weeks.
And other animals, of course, also died in cities. Here's a passage from Jacob Rees'book. in 1872. Quote, a few days ago, a dead goat was reported lying in Pell Street.
But it was mysteriously missing by the time the awful cart had come to take it away. It turned out an Italian had carried it off in his sack to a wake or a feast or some sort in one of the back alleys.