Everyday Life: Suburbs

Everyday Life: Suburbs

Sources

Growth of Suburbs. During the first part of the nineteenth century Americans thought of a suburban home as an isolated country house to which a wealthy family retired. As railroads began to extend farther from cities, as the cable car was put into use in the 1870s, and as the electric streetcar was developed in the 1880s, however, more and more city dwellers were able to move outside the city limits to more rural areas. Such changes permanently refashioned the image of suburbia in the United States as more and more suburbs grew up along rail lines. These “streetcar” or “railroad suburbs” placed suburban living within the reach of middle-class Americans. Suburbs fulfilled the desire of many late-nineteenth-century Americans for the beauty and serenity of the country without the isolation of truly rural areas. Convenient and affordable, suburbs offered many a compelling reason to commute.

City Services for the Suburbs. Throughout the 1880s many early suburbs tried to provide residents urban-style amenities—including parks, schools, and cultural associations—and services such as running water and sewer connections. These additions took time and money. Community associations and real-estate developers met some of these needs, but residents also turned to local governments. By the 1890s the best suburban communities advertised their paved streets, schools, good transportation, and other services formerly available only in cities. As suburbs grew, rural life also changed. In many regions agricultural villages became suburbs.

Industrial Suburbs. By the turn of the century factory owners took advantage of the services suburban homeowners had obtained from their local governments.

Drawn away from urban areas by less expensive lands, industrialists build large suburban factories supported by good roads, mass transportation, sewerage, and water services. The first to take advantage of business opportunities in the suburbs was George Pullman, who built his Pullman car works and the model town Pullman in a southern suburb of Chicago in 1882. Such an arrangement, where workers lived in a single-industry suburb, provided them access to good services but left them vulnerable to the dictates of their employer and landlord.

Sources

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973);

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).