Fringe and Suburb: Where to look for the nineteenth century working class.
Paper to the Diverse Suburb Conference. Hofsta University, Hempstead, NY.
Jason Bryan Jindrich, S4 Initiative, Brown University.
Session VII-E, 9AM Saturday, October 24, 2009.
Abstract: This paper addresses two shortcomings of research discussing the presence of working-class residents at the nineteenth century urban fringe. First is the dominance in the literature of industrial work over other forms of blue collar employment; particularly in the nineteenth century when the presence of a factory is often the only indication of an area of working class residents. In many cities, and most areas at the urban fringe, factories were not significant sources of employment, limiting the generalizablity of the conclusions of this literature. The second shortcoming is where suburban-like development is assumed to be taking place in nineteenth century metropolitan region. Through frequent and aggressive annexations many nineteenth-century cities included large areas of undeveloped land and settlements that were suburban up to the point of annexation. This suggests that the urban fringe was in these circumstances located far within the city limits. These issues are addressed through the use of an HGIS of four cities built around the 1880 U.S. Census. It is suggested that these shortcomings have led researchers continue to understate the degree of blue collar residence at the fringe during this period.
Introduction
The city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was thirty-six years old in 1880 and like other cities of that era was growing rapidly in both population and territory. Although the city regularly annexed new land these were attachments made in the expectation of future development and far exceeded the immediate spatial needs of the residents, and the city’s ability to provide services. This widespread condition of nineteenth-century urban overbounding directly conflicts with the common definition of suburb used in American research.
As Jon Teaford noted in a recent book;
“For Americans the notion of city limits has been vital to the concept of suburbia. Unlike Britain, where the term suburb refers to a peripheral area whether inside or beyond a major city’s boundaries…” (The American Suburb: The Basics. 2008. p. ix)
This condition of the “suburb in the city” is a familiar theme that been noted and commented upon before, most notably by Sam Warner (Street Car Suburbs), and Richard Harris (Unplanned Suburbs), and allusions to the same can be found in virtually any publication that mentions nineteenth century suburbs. The most concise description of the problem was made in 1925 by Harlan Douglass in his book, The Suburban Trend. When trying to estimate the suburban population of the United States he discovered that,
“[l]acking a complete study of the density of population and character of community life in the outlying portions of political cities, one can only resort to a very rough estimate as to the number of suburbanites which they contain. General knowledge of cities, however, suggests these “suburbs within the city” are fairly extensive….([footnote] As for example in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Rochester to say nothing of Queens and Richmond Boroughs of New York City.) (p. 57)
This paper directly addresses two specific shortcomings of the current discussion of nineteenth-century urbanism, both generated from the American preference for political boundaries to define the location and character of suburban settlements. The Urban Transition GIS at the S4 initiative of Brown University enables the analysis that Douglass mentions as a barrier to investigating these periurban regions separately from the rest of the city.
The first part of this paper will establish the location of suburban-like regions in the areas of overbounding in four major American cities. This is done using census data from the 1880 US Census. Individual records are geocoded to the household to generate a density profile for the city which is then used to define regions within the city limits.
I open with Milwaukee because that city offers the most straightforward example of a population gradient between the dense urban center, the fringe area of development, and the rural densities at the edge between the fringe and city boundary. From that example I then demonstrate that similar patterns of overbounding existed within the boundaries of the cities of Saint Louis, Cleveland, and Newark.
The second part of the paper is a more detailed comparison of the populations inhabiting this three-part division of the city into center, fringe, and edge. As observed by many, the organization of status in the walking city was the reverse of what we have come to expect in the industrial age. High status residents once lived in the densest areas of the core surrounded by amenities while the less affluent were relegated to the ugly, chaotic, and underserved periphery. (Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 1985) Some research has suggested that this general pattern persisted up to the Second World War (Gardner 1998, 2001), although the rise of the affluent commuter suburb was well in motion in the early decades of the twentieth century. (Douglass, The Suburban Trend 1925)
Using the divisions described in the first part as a framework, I confirm that the core remained more affluent than the periphery in the early industrial era, even in cities with a well-developed transit system. Annexation has completely obscured this low-class periphery surrounding most major cities in this era, and it deserves to be brought forward as an important phase of urbanization.
The third section suggests that the factory employees that are used to signal the presence of working-class residents in many recent suburban histories are not representative of the core of the working-class at the urban periphery. For this reason it is likely that the real extent and varieties of blue-collar suburban residence remain unexplored. But first, it is necessary to establish that the urbanizing edge fell within city limits.
Establishing the Periphery
Like most cities in this expansive era, Milwaukee’ appetite for territory is astonishing when compared with the slow or no-growth regime in place today. (Figure 1)
Figure 1: Annexations to Milwaukee from
original charter to 1880.
In the three decades before 1880 the city annexed land as many times, and continued adding territory into the early twentieth century, a circumstance that, in 1880 at least, meant that generous amount of undeveloped and thinly populated land within the city limits greatly exceeded the immediate needs of the population. Figure 2 illustrates the amount of surplus land within the city limits of Milwaukee, the red denoting the city core and fifty percent of the city population, the green denoting areas at or below rural population densities.
Figure 2: Density grid of the population of 1880 Milwaukee. (Source US Census)
Whatever motives lay behind this constant expansion of boundaries, the rapid changes in political jurisdictions argues strongly that city limits are a poor guide to finding periurban development during this era. It also suggests that periurban development will be found deep within the city limits. For this paper I use the differences in population density to divide the area inside the city limits into regions, density being the essential characteristic dividing urban and suburban land uses. Density is also one of the surest guides to infrastructure and services in this era when paving and sewers were limited to truly urbanized areas, providing an important motive for annexation.
Figure three illustrates how population density is used as a guide to dividing the city of Milwaukee into three primary regions. Each of the four cities in this paper is divided similarly, using local population density as a guide.
Figure 3: Regions created in Milwaukee from the population profile.
The Central Region encompasses the densest areas of the city. It includes fifty percent of the total city population in less than a sixth of the city area. This is the truly urbanized area and reliably falls in areas recognized as being downtown.
The Fringe Region is the area of transition between the dense areas of the Central core of the city and the near-rural densities of the Edge region, encompassing twenty-five percent of the population and a fifth of the area.
The Edge Region encompassing the remaining twenty-five percent of the city population and nearly two-thirds of the area within city limits, by far the largest of the three regions in area.
This ratio of 50:25:25 is used to define the regions in the other cities as well, and the proportions of the resulting regions are roughly the same as those in Milwaukee. (Figures 4 and 5)
Figure 4: Regions created in Newark from the population profile.
Figure 5: Regions created in Saint Louis from the population profile.
I occasionally adapted the density-defined boundaries slightly following some intuitive criteria, such as including areas between the densest areas of a city and a waterfront to the central region and the creation of a fourth region in Cleveland designated “Newburg” that represents a well-established industrial area separate from the main urbanized area. (Figure 6)
Figure 6: Regions created in Cleveland from the population profile.
The Edge region of each city was consistently found to have population densities either at or only slightly higher than those of the rural districts surrounding the city, and many areas are empty of any population at all.
This is borne out by a quote taken from an 1896 history of Cleveland
The annexation of East Cleveland and Newburg brought into the city limits many farm lots, which added to the acres and acres held vacant right in the best part of the city, by the Payne and Case estates, gave to Cleveland, even of 1876 or later, the appearance of a series of detached villages, where much growth would be necessary before it could justify its widely-extended boundary lines. — A History of Cleveland. James H. Kennedy, p.460
Even overlooking the occasional baronial estate, the characterization of the Edge region exclusively as farmland is an error. The number of farmers and farm workers anywhere in the city limits stands at less than two hundred, and only fifty nine live in the Edge region.[1] The next section addresses the question of who did live at the urban periphery in the absence of farmers.
The Persistence of the Ragged Edge
The analysis itself is a modification of the example set by Todd Gardner in his analysis of metropolitan regions across nine decades (The Slow Wave, etc). The key variable is the Duncan SEI, which is a 100 point scale of prestige. At the top of the scale are doctors and lawyers with other occupations scoring lower according to their relative socioeconomic standing. The value of the SEI should not be interpreted as an absolute measure of prestige or wealth (a store clerk with an SEI of half that of a judge does not have half the socioeconomic status or earnings). Instead the SEI is a useful and robust index that simplifies comparisons of the relative prestige of different occupations.
The analysis is restricted to those with a valid SEI greater than one, removing the records of unemployed children, retirees, and women employed with housework.[2]A Location Quotient is calculated for each of the regions for the low status workers with an SEI of less than 17 and for those high status workers with SEI greater than 23. These scores consistently represent the cut points dividing the workforce into approximate thirds; on average thirty-five percent of every city workforce scored 17 or less on the SEI while roughly the same number scored 23 or higher. In the discussion that follows these groupings will be referred to as the lowest third and the highest third respectively.
In Milwaukee this analysis results in a simple pattern of core to periphery diffusion. The trend is for the highest third to live in the central area, while the lowest third is stronger the farther from the core. (Table 1)
Table 1: Location Quotient of Milwaukee workers classed by SEI.
|
|
Lowest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
7808 |
51.8 |
0.89 |
|
Fringe |
5669 |
37.6 |
1.12 |
|
Edge |
1588 |
10.5 |
1.30 |
|
Total |
15065 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Highest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
9694 |
67.1 |
1.15 |
|
Edge |
713 |
4.9 |
0.60 |
|
Fringe |
4043 |
28 |
0.83 |
|
Total |
14450 |
100 |
|
The socio-economic stratification in Newark is flatter than that found in Milwaukee, but the trend is the same with the higher status residents living in the Central region. (Table 2) This pattern persists despite a well-established horse-car service throughout the city that was the envy of the nation.
Table 2: Location Quotient of Newark workers classed by SEI.
|
|
Lowest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
5429 |
49.9 |
0.93 |
|
Fringe |
3609 |
33.2 |
1.10 |
|
Edge |
1840 |
16.9 |
1.02 |
|
Total |
10878 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Highest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
11489 |
54.7 |
1.02 |
|
Fringe |
6252 |
29.8 |
0.99 |
|
Edge |
3270 |
15.6 |
0.95 |
|
Total |
21011 |
100 |
|
Cleveland also had a highly-developed public transit system reaching into every neighborhood of the city, yet again there is a strong centralizing trend among the highest third. (Table 3) Instead it is the lowest third that disperses throughout the city evenly, the location quotients in the sparsely populated Edge region being nearly equal as that in the Newburg industrial satellite and the highest in the city.
Table 3: Location Quotient of Cleveland workers classed by SEI.
|
|
Lowest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
10476 |
53.3 |
1.01 |
|
Fringe |
6534 |
33.3 |
0.95 |
|
Edge |
1566 |
8 |
1.11 |
|
Newburg |
1065 |
5.4 |
1.10 |
|
Total |
19641 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Highest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
14692 |
58.1 |
1.10 |
|
Fringe |
8448 |
33.4 |
0.95 |
|
Edge |
1493 |
5.9 |
0.82 |
|
Newburg |
647 |
2.6 |
0.53 |
|
Total |
25280 |
100 |
|
In Saint Louis the trend is again clear, with a higher proportion of lowest third workers in the Edge region and higher status workers occupying the Fringe and Central regions. (Table 4) This trend is also strongly present among the black workers of Saint Louis, although they are much less likely than whites to reside out of the Central region overall. (Table 5)
Table 4: Location Quotient of Saint Louis workers classed by SEI.
|
|
Lowest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
27568 |
62.8 |
0.98 |
|
Fringe |
7211 |
16.4 |
0.97 |
|
Edge |
9094 |
20.7 |
1.10 |
|
Total |
43873 |
100.0 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Highest Third |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
31484 |
64.8 |
1.01 |
|
Fringe |
9310 |
19.2 |
1.13 |
|
Edge |
7817 |
16.1 |
0.86 |
|
Total |
48611 |
100.0 |
|
Table 5: Location Quotient of Saint Louis workers classed by SEI and race.
|
|
White Lowest Third |
|
|
Black Lowest Third |
|
||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
22461 |
61.6 |
0.96 |
Central |
5107 |
68.8 |
1.07 |
|
Fringe |
6410 |
17.6 |
1.04 |
Fringe |
801 |
10.8 |
0.64 |
|
Edge |
7577 |
20.8 |
1.11 |
Edge |
1517 |
20.4 |
1.09 |
|
Total |
36448 |
100 |
|
Total |
7425 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
White Highest Third |
|
|
Black Highest Third |
|
||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
26903 |
63.1 |
0.98 |
Central |
4581 |
76.4 |
1.19 |
|
Fringe |
8568 |
20.1 |
1.19 |
Fringe |
742 |
12.4 |
0.73 |
|
Edge |
7147 |
16.8 |
0.89 |
Edge |
670 |
11.2 |
0.60 |
|
Total |
42618 |
100 |
|
Total |
5993 |
100 |
|
This outward filtering of low-status workers is consistent with the high-status urban core found by Gardner in his investigation of politically-delimited suburbs and cities. The replication of that pattern across four diverse metropolitan areas indicates a general process that appears to operate independent of location relative to the city limits or region of the country. The next section will examine the degree that filtering influenced the residences of blue-collar workers of different socio-economic status.
Workers Vs Factories
The two largest census classes of blue-class labor in 1880 are Operatives and Laborers. Operatives are the factory workers at the heart of research into blue-collar suburbs. (R. Lewis ed. Manufacturing Suburbs 2004) Laborers are a less easily defined group. They are of much lower socio-economic standing than the factory operatives, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century are much more likely to be freed slaves and immigrants. Laborers often worked on daily projects earning minimal wages, or they might also be contracted to long-term projects with the city laying sewer pipe or paving. The distinction between the two classes of blue collar-worker is sufficient that in the classification of socio-economic status used in the previous section, these two large classes of workers fall into different groups; Laborers falling in the lowest third and Operatives in the highest third.
The proportions of these Operatives and Laborers to their corresponding lowest or highest thirds varies widely between cities with no clear pattern. Despite this variation in the composition of the workforce between cities, the pattern of residence within cities is consistent and indicates that factory workers lived separately from laborers.
Milwaukee illustrates this trend clearly, with an increasing trend of laborer residence farther out from the core while factory workers live closer in. (Table 6) This pattern is consistent among laborers in the other cities studied even though the proportion of labors is the lowest of any of the four cities studied, being only 9 percent of the population of the lowest third in Milwaukee.
Table 6: Location Quotients of laborers and operatives in Milwaukee
|
|
Laborers |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
2533 |
39.7 |
0.68 |
|
Fringe |
2934 |
45.9 |
1.37 |
|
Edge |
920 |
14.4 |
1.78 |
|
Total |
6387 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Operatives |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
3324 |
58.5 |
1.00 |
|
Fringe |
2023 |
35.6 |
1.06 |
|
Edge |
335 |
5.9 |
0.73 |
|
Total |
5682 |
100 |
|
At another extreme, Newark has the highest proportion of Operatives of the four cities studied. Despite this difference the pattern found in Milwaukee remains and Laborers are more likely to live out from the dense regions of the city and Operatives the reverse. (Table 7)
Table 7: Location Quotients of Laborers and Operatives in Newark.
|
|
Laborer |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
1335 |
47.6 |
0.89 |
|
Fringe |
932 |
33.2 |
1.10 |
|
Edge |
540 |
19.2 |
1.16 |
|
Total |
2807 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Operatives |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
9156 |
55.1 |
1.03 |
|
Fringe |
4763 |
28.7 |
0.95 |
|
Edge |
2686 |
16.2 |
0.98 |
|
Total |
16605 |
100 |
|
The Newburg region of Cleveland confirms the magnetic effect of a well-developed industrial satellite upon blue-collar workers that is suggested in the literature. (Table 8) Both Laborers and Operatives are disproportionately represented in the outlying industrial Newburg satellite and to a lesser degree in the Edge region. This trend, however, is consistent enough with the residence pattern of laborers in other cities that it should only be considered a notable difference from the norm when considering Operatives. The importance of Newburg is that it in some ways represents the wave of the future. In the decades following 1880 new zoning regimes and the need for large industrial complexes drove industry from the city center and into the urban periphery. Although the factory worker is the archetypical resident of these satellites, it is crucial to also note the presence of other blue-collar workers in these company towns and that these communities were neither large, nor typical of the periurban zone.
Table 8: Location Quotients of Laborers and Operatives in Cleveland.
|
|
Laborer |
|
|
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
3071 |
42.3 |
0.80 |
|
Fringe |
2927 |
40.4 |
1.15 |
|
Edge |
542 |
7.5 |
1.04 |
|
Newburg |
712 |
9.8 |
2.00 |
|
Total |
7252 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Operative |
||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
3071 |
38 |
0.72 |
|
Fringe |
3434 |
42.4 |
1.20 |
|
Edge |
671 |
8.3 |
1.15 |
|
Newburg |
915 |
11.3 |
2.31 |
|
Total |
8091 |
100 |
|
In Saint Louis there is again an inversion of Laborers and Operatives trends with Laborers living farther out. (Table 9) This pattern holds true among laborers of both races and white Operatives. (Table 10) The exception is the strong presence of black Operatives in the Edge region. The number of black Operatives is small enough to discourage the kinds of generalizations about trends in worker residence possible when describing workers in general, and the majority of black Operatives do live in the Central region. Yet the surprising spike out in the Edge does not result from a concentration of Operatives at a single location, as is the case in the Central region, where a few blocks are home to the majority of black factory workers.
Table 9: Location Quotients of Laborers and Operatives in Saint Louis.
|
|
Laborer |
||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
9725 |
61.5 |
0.96 |
|
Fringe |
1972 |
12.5 |
0.74 |
|
Edge |
4115 |
26.0 |
1.39 |
|
Total |
15812 |
100.0 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Operative |
||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
9505 |
70.5 |
1.10 |
|
Fringe |
1802 |
13.4 |
0.79 |
|
Edge |
2179 |
16.2 |
0.86 |
|
Total |
13486 |
100.0 |
|
Table 10: Location Quotients of Laborers and Operatives in Saint Louis classed by race.
|
|
White Laborer |
|
Black Laborer |
||||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
8291 |
61.3 |
0.95 |
Central |
1434 |
62.5 |
0.97 |
|
Fringe |
1835 |
13.6 |
0.80 |
Fringe |
137 |
6.0 |
0.35 |
|
Edge |
3390 |
25.1 |
1.34 |
Edge |
725 |
31.6 |
1.68 |
|
Total |
13516 |
100 |
|
Total |
2296 |
100 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
White Operative |
|
Black Operative |
||||
|
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Frequency |
Percent |
Location Quotient |
|
Central |
9214 |
70.3 |
1.09 |
Central |
291 |
75.0 |
1.17 |
|
Fringe |
1777 |
13.6 |
0.80 |
Fringe |
25 |
6.4 |
0.38 |
|
Edge |
2107 |
16.1 |
0.86 |
Edge |
72 |
18.6 |
0.99 |
|
Total |
13098 |
100 |
|
Total |
388 |
100 |
|
With the general exception of Cleveland and the specific exception of blacks in Saint Louis, the general trend is for Operatives to live in the higher status regions while the low status Laborers trend to the Edge region. The connection of working-class, as well as black and immigrant suburbs, is at least as old as Harlan Douglass’s work early in the twentieth century.
"The Relation between industry and the presence of these alien groups of population is well understood. It is in the industrial suburb, therefore, that we must look for these extreme concentrations of alien populations." (1925, p.97)
As neat as that description is, it is as oversimplifying and potentially misleading as reliance upon political boundaries to locate periurban regions, and is a connection I fear born of a connection between the perceived moral shortcomings of blacks and immigrants, and the corruption and pollution of industry.
The example of Cleveland indicates that a well-defined industrial satellite such as Newburg does concentrate factory workers away from the center of the city, but these industrial satellites should not be allowed to define the limits of the working-class periurban experience. Not when the majority of residents in these satellites are not connected directly to factory work and at the cost of overlooking the blue-collar residents outside these satellites.
Discussion
Because population density is crucial to nearly every aspect of how suburbs are defined, it is the criteria used in this paper to define the urban regions. There is an array of other criteria, and I am exploring a few of those in other work. For the purposes of establishing that there was a meaningful stratification of socio-economic classes within the city limits, a stratification reflecting conditions similar to the distinctions made between city and suburb, this paper demonstrates that density is a criteria that works admirably as a guide to dividing the city into meaningful regions, regions to which socio-economic classes respond in a consistent manner.
Such consistent stratification of socio-economic status by density across four cities widely disparate in location, age, and industrial maturity indicates an unexpected tenacity of the Walking City urban form that is apparently unaffected by the availability of public transit. The finding that high-status residents avoided low-density areas within the city, when viewed in the light of other research indicating that high-status residents avoided the politically defined suburbs, appears to remove inner-city density and a desire for elbow room out of the list of motives driving high status residents out of the urban core during the late-nineteenth century at least. Possibly this was a reaction to the same frenetic annexation history that has obscured this pattern. If one could afford to live in the city center, it would be more reasonable to live in the most comfortable parts of the city than to try to keep ahead of the ever-expanding urban juggernaut.
Annexation was so ubiquitous in this period that many, if not most American cities were significantly overbounded throughout the nineteenth century. The sharp decline in density and the consistent socio-economic filtering described in this paper indicates that processes that we commonly attribute to the presence of the city boundary are in operation well within the city limits, and the degree of overbounding is sufficient to encourage us to reassess using political boundaries to locate periurban development. Doing so has obscured generations of growth that occurred within the city limits, growth that if it were identified outside the city boundary would be readily accepted as suburban. Similarly obscured is the evidence that industrial satellites and workers are an important, but non-representative variety of the working-class periurban experience. As more historical demographic data becomes available that improves our ability to look beyond political boundaries, it is probable that a great deal of what we know about cities and suburbs will also prove to be artifacts of jurisdiction.
[1] Despite their small numbers farm workers are excluded from the analysis to avoid artificially depressing the relative status of any region by the inclusion of low-status farm workers.
[2] This, and the exclusion of farmers, is why the
percentages in each of the zones differ from the 50:25:25 proportions described
above.