Shaping of the Metropolis

...But at least one shortcoming is apparent: It pays inadequate attention to exactly how large cities became large in the first place...

...By making only casual distinctions among cities in all except the chapter on housing, he has written less a history than a sociology of urban life...

...If the women thus received an education in urban commerce, the men absorbed lessons applicable to business and industrial life at the ball park...

...they BOARD...

...Everything from the editorials to the advertising copy served as a guide to housing, eating, dressing, leisure, and public behavior...

...This intercity commercial-industrial complex expanded according to local variations in resources, transportation, capital availability, and cultural attitudes toward risk-taking and change...

...The state of knowledge concerning...

...From the onset of industrialization, "dominant units of regional sets of cities have been characterized by very long-term rank stability...

...28.00...

...For instance, mercantile profits from Boston were invested in manufacturing in Worcester, which depended on labor from Hartford, raw materials and fuel from Philadelphia, foodstuffs from Baltimore, and financial transactions in New York...

...Much of his necessarily impressionistic analysis is over-generalized as well...

...As early as the 1830s, newspapers had started moving beyond mainly business and political news, adding material of wider appeal: "human interest" stories, sports pages, women's sections, elaborate Sunday editions...

...After the Civil War apartment buildings (a Parisian import) helped to end the residential hodgepodge, and streetcar networks permitted many of the new structures to be built outside the crowded business districts...

...Especially significant was their accommodation of women shoppers...

...He also rejects recent views of urban progress as being too myopically focused on the commercial interdependence of cities, on central-place or "trickle-down" theories, and scanting the importance of information flow and direct interaction among major urban areas...

...Most questionable, though, is his premise that the institutions he describes played a larger role in shaping urban life than the churches, schools, factories and political machines...

...In baseball," wrote Mark Twain, "you've got to do everything just right, or you don't get there...

...urban growth (and decline) is still much too rudimentary for scholars to accept unquestioningly either my model formulations of those of anyone else," Pred says...

...Constructed on a system of rectangular blocks, most American cities encouraged a haphazard development that left building design and land use at the mercy of real estate speculators...

...There fierce competition was channeled into a game of skill and chance played according to a set of rules that were constantly being altered and refined to make the game as exciting as possible...

...town-houses were converted into boarding homes, or tenements where whole families occupied one or two small rooms and shared eating and sanitary facilities with other families...

...And despite his numerous references to heterogeneity, Barth never adequately demonstrates that the urban culture he delineates is anything other than Protestant and middle class...

...That will not be a chore, for this book is happily free of arcana and highly technical jargon, making it accessible to nonspecialists and historians...

...Not until the turn of the century did the gruesome excesses of "yellow journalism" initiate the decline of the press asa force for social cohesion...

...Advertising and promotional campaigns opened the world of fashion to women of all social classes, and restaurants, hairdressers, special shows, female sales clerks, plus other amenities made the downtown stores a haven for day-long shopping sprees...

...Tenements did not disappear as a major urban institution when apartments became popular, for example...

...The finesse and precision of the game mirrored city life...

...A conjecture about the growth of cities in antebellum America that incorporates many previously overlooked factors, this work challenges the textbook portrayal of an industrialized and urbanized Northeast waxing fat on the markets for its manufactured goods in the agricultural South and West...

...Bankers in San Francisco, therefore, knew more about business in Chicago than did bankers in Louisville or Albany...

...Barth's analysis of the role of each of these institutions is interesting, but ultimately his City People is less than the sum of its parts...

...Nevertheless, anyone with a serious interest in urban history will want to study Allan Pred's thesis...

...Reviewed by Ernest H. Schell Department of History, Temple University The freedom and "orderly anarchy" of 19th-century American metropolises, Gunther Barth contends, were shaped into our "modern city culture" by five highly organized and efficient institutions: the apartment building, the metropolitan newspaper, the department store, the ball park and t he vaudeville house...

...They enabled people to cope with the confusion of an industrialized urban setting, and to gain a measure of privacy, identity, dignity, even happiness...

...Department stores proved more enduring...

...In support of his argument, he examines the emergence and evolution of each phenomenon...

...Spoofs of urban existence helped people to laugh at their problems and appreciate the diversity of city ways...

...It was a relatively restrained medium, despite its pandering to the masses to beef up circulation...

...Growth was stimulated by a series of "multipliers" and "feedbacks,"according to Pred...

...Innovations contributed to growth everywhere, but they were unevenly distributed because the larger urban centers monopolized the press, telegraph lines and mail delivery...

...Urban Growth and City-Systems in the United States, 1840-1860 By Allan Pred Harvard...

...Barth's single prefatory assurance that this was so is hardly sufficient proof to sustain his claim...

...Surprisingly, since he is a historian, one reason for this is the author's occasionally distorted sense of time and change...

...By the 19th century, land in the majority of downtown areas had grown too valuable for single-unit dwellings...

...Developing simultaneously in Europe and in the United States, they offered a broad variety of goods on full display at fixed prices...

...The complex development of Midwestern cities alone, Pred points out, casts doubt on the usefulness of the traditional model...

...320 pp...

...Allen Pred, a geographer who has devoted himself to studying the historical development of urban systems, buttresses his case much more effectively in his latest monograph...

...Department store entrepreneurs did more than tender a cornucopia: They taught women how to shop and provided a hospitable atmosphere that stood in stark contrast to the exclusive-ness of traditional specialty shops, where inexperienced young ladies often felt embarrassed and out of place...

...Since his is more inclusive than rival theories, it is likely to win widespread acceptance...

...It also afforded many urban dwellers such conveniences as elevators and electric lights...

...Professionalization of baseball meant the application of national standards and the introduction of regular schedules...

...The vaudeville houses offered a more relaxed but no less instructive form of entertainment...

...The metropolitan press, meanwhile, provided an effective antidote to the in-creased insularity of urban apartment living...

...Emphasizing the vertical dimensions of the city, the apartment house brought the family together again in a self-contained housing unit ideally adapted to the density of family life...

...Pred argues that the big metropolises boosted each other's growth far more directly than they influenced that of smaller cities: The big cities got bigger while the small ones grew more slowly...

...In 1856, Walt Whitman estimated that three-quarters of middle-class and even upper-class New Yorkers "don't live...

...In other words, American cities maintained a remarkable consistency in their share of a region's population, and in the population of the country as a whole...