1. The Challenge of the Cities
Chapter 8 section 3
The Challenge of the Cities

2. Cities Grow
Both immigration and urbanization caused U.S. cities to grow at the end of the 19th century.
Between 1880 and 1920, 11 million Americans left behind the hardships of their farms and moved to the cities.

3. Cities Grow continued
Increased acts of violence and segregation after the end of Reconstruction (1877) resulted in many blacks fleeing the South and some moving to the cities.
In the1910s, when the boll weevil destroyed the cotton crops and floods ruined Alabama and Mississippi farmlands, several hundred thousand African American fled the South mostly to northern cities.

4. Cities Change
Between 1865 and 1900 subways, skyscrapers, smog, and slums became new features of modern city life.
Suburbs grew in the later 1800s and early 1900s because motorized methods of transportation made commuting much easier.
As urban space became scarce buildings were built much taller.

5. Urban Living Conditions
Tenements were low-cost apartment buildings designed to house as many families as the owner could pack in.
A group of dirty, run-down tenements could transform an area into a slum.
Fires and diseases would spread quickly because tenement buildings were packed so close together in the slum areas of cities.

6. Dumbbell Tenement
A change in New York law in 1879 that required a window in every room resulted in the building of the dumbbell tenement.

7. Drinking Water
Diseases were spread by contaminated drinking water, which tenement residents drew from a common pipe or pump.
Legislators did make laws which demanded improvements and resulted in cleaner water.

8. Jacob Riis
Exposed many of the horrors of tenement life in his book How the other Half Lives.
As a result of his work New York State passed the first meaningful laws to improve tenements.

9. The Gap between the well-to-do and the poor widened as the middle and upper classes began to move to the suburbs.
Urban growth put pressure on city officials to improve police and fire protection, transportation systems, sewage disposal, electrical and water service, and health care.
To deliver these services cities were forced to raise taxes.

10. Political Machines
Increased revenues and responsibilities gave city governments more power.
Political machines were born out of the clashing interests in the cities between the middle and upper classes on one side and the new immigrants, migrants from the countryside and workers on the other.

11. Political machines were unofficial city organizations designed to keep a particular party or group in power.
They were usually headed by a single powerful “boss.”
They basically worked through the exchange of favors for votes.
Graft (the using of one’s job to gain a profit), was a major source of income for political machines.

12. Immigrants
Tended to support political machines because the machines helped poor people at a time when neither government nor private industry would.

13. “Boss” Tweed
Most notorious political boss who controlled Tammany Hall.
Tammany Hall was a political club that ran New York City’s Democratic Party.

14. Nast & Tweed
The Tweed ring amassed millions of dollars through fraud and graft.
Thomas Nast was a German immigrant cartoonist who helped bring down Tweed exposing his methods.