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Urban Problems: Fire, Water, Epidemics, and Open Spaces
Contributing teacher: Andrew Meyers
Time period: 1830s–80s
Point
Kenneth T. Jackson represents the story of urban reform in the nineteenth century as one of problem solving. He calls this the "liberal response," stating: "One response, which is the one I will tend to espouse, is the liberal response. By creating institutions, we figure out ways to respond to problems that develop: epidemics, crime, fire. So in a sense it's a happy story. We identify the problem and we solve it, and we move on." Thus, he argues, the problems of urbanization, fire, disease, poverty, and crime present themselves in nineteenth-century New York City, and the city responds by expanding the role of city and state government in building infrastructure and providing public services. This is an essentially altruistic, or at least pragmatic, view of the relationships involving urban problems, governing elites, and social reform.
In the "liberal" view, while many recognized the economic need for reform, enlightened city leaders, such as the merchant, senator, mayor, and governor DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828), spoke of reform and philanthropy as responsibilities required of his class, and he called for the creation of the Croton Aqueduct System (1837–42 and after), construction of hospitals for the poor, and relief for debtors. The poet and editor William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) would call for a "great park" to create "lungs" for the city and relief for the worker from the deleterious effects of factory labor. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), the principal creator of Central Park, saw parks as a means of elevating the consciousness of the public, of spiritual "recreation" by means of experiencing transcendental nature. The practical and the paternalistic converged to support many private and public improvements in the infrastructure and services of New York during this period.
Counterpoint
As Jackson points out, there is a less "happy" interpretation:
According to the Marxist interpretation, if there's a problem with fire and we develop a professional fire department to deal with it, it's not because the powers that be really care about your home burning up. It's because they're trying to protect the places of production, the places of important investment. If we create a police department to solve the problem of felonious activity, it will be all well and good if the policeman happens to protect you from getting hit on the head by a mugger, but the purpose of the police is to protect the property and lifestyles of the rich and, in fact, to keep you down. If the issue is public health or epidemic disease, government acts not to prevent you from getting sick but because it wants a healthy and active workforce.
There are many Marxist urban historians, and even more who look for the role of class interest in urban-reform efforts. A clear expression of skepticism about the altruistic intentions of urban reformers can be found in a work about Chicago: M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). In this book, Boyer uses the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago to reveal the ways in which urban planning and reform can be seen as efforts to control and manage the working population. A more nuanced exploration of the tensions between elites and other classes in urban reform is Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig, The Park and the People (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), which explores the creation of Central Park, investigating the motivations of the park boosters and planners, as well as examining the experiences of those displaced from their homes to make way for the park.
The prevailing view today is that urban reform served many interests and arose out of a variety of motives—practical, patrician, paternalistic, and profit-centered. For an overview of the many interests served by such reforms, the historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace show, in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), how the Croton Aqueduct System, the Metropolitan Police, housing reform, and Central Park were multi-determined but drew upon a consensus over the need for public intervention to solve the problems of urbanization and industrialization (perhaps returning to Jackson's "happy" liberal view, but with a materialist spin).
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