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The following chapters are bookended by urban disorder: I begin in the riots and strikes of the Jacksonian era and conclude with labor conflict in the Gilded Age. Between these moments of crisis, though, a generation of consolidators linked the political organization of the city, the design of its built environment, and the shape of the nation as they struggled to reconstruct the metropolis.
The first five chapters, organized by theme, focus on the two decades before the Civil War. Chapters 1 and 2 explore how boosters and radicals tried to read the places and processes of the antebellum metropolis. Each fashioned distinct ideas about association and environment that shaped their urban vision. From there, I move in Chapter 3 to explore the making of growth politics, as citizens tried to put in place the building blocks to develop industry, railroads, and real estate: a project of urban empirebuilding that aimed to make the city the central place in an expanding United States. A new regime of urban capitalism left its mark on urban space, though not necessarily as boosters had envisaged. Chapter 4 therefore considers different plans for the built environment and the search for a method to set the metropolis’s imperial pretensions in stone. Frustration at the failure of the city to look and behave as consolidators expected led some from the 1840s to question the merits of a broad suffrage, but as Chapter 5 contends, democratic doubts found expression more often in designs to incorporate the suburban frontier, gentrify politics through environmental reform, and strengthen “family government” in Philadelphia’s homes.
The final two chapters look at the war years and after, as consolidation moved from a civic priority to a nation-building project. In alliance with the Republican Party, bourgeois citizens sought to harmonize sectional and social interests by reconstructing the center, expanding onto the rural frontier, and encouraging working-class property ownership. Philadelphia, they claimed, could be a city of boulevards and homes. Like the nation, boasted boosters, an imperial scale safeguarded republican government: the safety valve of suburbanization kept a permanent proletariat at bay. Philadelphia’s consolidators here had helped to put in place the institutional foundations of a powerful defense of capitalism. Indeed, the political economy of urban growth they pioneered anticipates on a municipal scale the federally sponsored reconstruction of post–World War II American cities. In both cases, private enterprise, public power, and an ideology of class consensus spurred suburbanization and urban renewal. But like post-1945 city-building too, Chapter 7 shows, mid-nineteenth-century growth politics could divide as well as unite. Urban expansion raised rents, blighted avenues, and raised fears of spiraling taxes to meet a ballooning debt. After the Panic of 1873, these tensions threatened to pull growth politics apart. But by then, Philadelphia boasted the world’s largest private corporation, the nation’s most territorially extensive city, its biggest municipal park, and in its new city hall, what would become its grandest (and to some critics, its most grotesque) civic building. That urban inheritance was the product of a longrunning struggle over the terms of a consolidation far less natural than Robert Ellis Thompson implied.
CHAPTER 1
“A Great City Is a Great Study”
In September 1854, just months after Philadelphia’s political consolidation had extended the urban boundaries to encompass almost 130 square miles, Morton McMichael’s North American and United States Gazette measured up the city and its people. The “vast multitudes” wandering the streets, the paper mused, embraced such a variety of “motives and men and actions” that the possibilities were “infinite.” All that was known was Philadelphia’s unknowability. “We who have lived from birth in the midst of this bustle know, comparatively, no more of the great city than the stranger who is within its gates,” the paper concluded.1
European and American commentators over the middle decades of the nineteenth century observed the same disorienting effects of urban growth. In Manchester, the “shock city” of the Industrial Revolution, the liberal Alexis de Tocqueville and radical Friedrich Engels described “the disintegrating of society into individuals.” Across the Atlantic in Philadelphia, an evangelical worried that the metropolitan masses lacked the mutual “sympathy” required for moral order. While their prescriptions ranged from reform to revolution to redemption from sin, each saw cities as solvents of community and tradition, as all that was solid melted into the air. Few captured this better than Edgar Allan Poe in his “Man of the Crowd.” Set in London, but penned during the writer’s sojourn in Philadelphia, Poe’s narrator sorts the nameless people passing him by, before fixating on an inscrutable soul whose resistance to categorization hints at the anomie of “great cities.”2
Poe’s friend Morton McMichael had reason to share such pessimism. In 1844, soon after starting a term as county sheriff, he failed to stop the growth of two riots, which metastasized into the largest urban disorders in the history of the Union. Blamed for allowing the metropolis to fall apart, he made it his mission to put it back together. Consolidating the city across its divisions preoccupied him from the 1840s to the 1870s. Over decades in which federated republics, multiethnic empires, and geographic expressions converged as national states, McMichael set about building a nation in miniature. Philadelphia, having grown too big to know informally, needed imagining as a whole.
McMichael joined others in a quest for legibility. As the North American hinted in 1854, the more complex a society became, the harder it was to see. Nineteenth-century state builders tried to overcome their “partial blindness” by bringing territory and population into focus. The maps and censuses they produced helped incorporate colonial frontiers into national domains.3
One of those frontiers was the city. On both sides of the Atlantic, reformers, journalists, and novelists tried to illuminate the shadowy spaces of their cities and incorporate the urban wilderness. Gridironed Philadelphia may have looked the model of a transparent, modern metropolis, but in the courts and alleys that ran off the main thoroughfares and the unknown suburbs in which riot and disease held sway, it—like Poe’s man of the crowd—defied the surveyor’s gaze. McMichael, who wanted to sort the discordant phenomena of urban life, made the “great city” a “great study” for his paper. Scattered in Philadelphia’s soil—his daily insisted—lay the seeds of metropolitan empire, but only knowledge could nourish their growth.4
The problems McMichael and his allies encountered in trying to make the city legible reveal the pitfalls of reducing the story to a linear tale of modernization. In contrast to most modernizing states, Philadelphia’s pre-Consolidation municipalities evinced little interest in knowing their territory and people. Their inaction frustrated the North American, but when Philadelphians associated voluntarily to measure their metropolis, they struggled to make sense of what they found. “However we may con it over, we shall never know it thoroughly,” McMichael’s paper wrote of Philadelphia, “for continually some new phase … starts up to astonish and bewilder us.” Rather than settle for still lifes of a place in perpetual motion, citizens searched for laws of cause and effect, asking not only what the metropolis was, but also what it might become. Their prophecies had the power to shape the city.5
In mapping Philadelphia’s present and future, citizens imagined the city as an interdependent whole, while exposing its divisions. Here, the project of collecting, interpreting, and sharing knowledge of the city helped to consolidate an economic elite. At McMichael’s urging, merchants, manufacturers, and professionals came together in counting the cost of riots and weighing up the productive power of the suburbs.