1. Section 6-2
Urbanization

2. Urban Opportunities
Urbanization- growth of cities, mostly in the regions of the Northeast and Midwest.
Americanization Movement- designed to assimilate people of wide-ranging cultures into the dominant culture.

3. Americans Migrate to the Cities
Skyscrapers- Tall steel framed buildings. The Home Insurance Building in Chicago was built in 1885 (ten stories). First Skyscraper in America.
Louis Sullivan- No one contributed more to the design of skyscrapers. (Chicago)

4. Six Major Urban Problems
Housing
Transportation
Water
Sanitation
Crime
Fire

5. Urban Problems Housing:
-row houses- single family dwellings that shared side walls with other similar houses.
-Tenements- multi-family urban dwellings.

6. City Life
Poor families struggled to survive in crowded slums living in tenements.
Tenements were overcrowded, dirty and oftentimes had no windows, heat, or indoor bathrooms.
Hine, Lewis W. NYC tenement 1910

7. Jacob Riis, 1889 “Lodgers in a Bayard Street Tenement, Five Cents a Spot"

8. Urban Problems Transportation:
-Mass Transit- Transportation systems designed to move large numbers of people along fixed routes.
-Streetcars-San Francisco (1873)
-Subway-Boston (1897)

9. Urban Problem
Water:
-As late as the 1860’s many cities had grossly inadequate piped water.
-Disease- Typhoid Fever, Cholera
-Filtration (1870’s)
-Chlorination (1908)

10. Urban Problems Sanitation: -Manure piled up on the streets
-Sewage flowed through open gutters
-Factories polluted the air and water
-Scavengers- private contractors hired to sweep the streets.
-Sewer lines and sanitation departments (By 1900)

11. Urban Problems Crime: -First full-time police force- NYC (1844)
-To small to impact crime.
Fire:
-First paid fire department- Cincinnati (1853).
-Automatic sprinkler (1874).

12. Machine Politics
Political Machine- an informal political group designed to gain and keep power in the cities. Came about partly because cities had grown much faster than their governments.
Party bosses- (City Boss) Those in charge of their respected political machine.

13. Machine Politics
Graft- getting money through dishonest or questionable means.
George Plunkitt- One of NYC’s most powerful party bosses; defended honest graft.
William “Boss” Tweed- Leader of Tammany Hall, the NYC Democratic political machine. Very corrupt!