3 THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN URBAN NEIGHBORHOOD, 1860–1950

Cities before Neighborhoods: The Early Market City

Neighborhoods did not play a large role in colonial and early post-Revolutionary American cities. Colonial cities, like most of their European counterparts, resembled more the cities of the Middle Ages or antiquity than what they would become over the next two centuries. Although some neighborhoods undoubtedly existed in colonial cities, those cities were compact places in which land uses and building types were far more mixed together than was true later. They were also small. As late as 1820, among all American cities only New York City had a population over one hundred thousand, although Philadelphia, together with the adjacent smaller cities of Southwark and Northern Liberties, both of which it absorbed some years later, came close.

Preindustrial cities in the United States were largely ports and trading centers dotted with small workshops; a directory of 1819 Cincinnati, a city of fewer than ten thousand at the time, listed two foundries, six tinsmiths, four coppersmiths, and nine silversmiths along with sixteen coopers (barrel makers) and fifteen cabinetmakers. These workshops were run by their owners, master craftsmen, with rarely more than one or two apprentices or journeyman helpers. The cities’ populations were concentrated in tightly clustered blocks around their harbors, with residences, workshops, stores, warehouses, taverns, and coffeehouses mixed together in a jumble of land uses and building types. In Philadelphia, the largest American city in 1776, barely twelve of the nearly two hundred city blocks laid out in William Penn’s plan for the city were largely developed. Those blocks formed a triangle, with its base defined by the bustling wharves and piers along the Delaware River (figure 3.1). The State House, now known as Independence Hall, where the signers of the Declaration of Independence gathered, was near the edge of the city, with open fields only a block away.

To be sure, the colonial city was spatially differentiated by economic class. The most prosperous families typically lived nearest the center and those with less farther away, while the poorest families often lived in shanty settlements outside the urban core. Distinct neighborhoods, though, were atypical. As urban historian Patricia Mooney-Melvin writes, “neighborhoods, as identifiable units in the American cityscape, emerged as major urban centers underwent the transition from the pedestrian city of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the expanded and differentiated urban structure of the early twentieth century.”³

Colonial cities were haphazard affairs where builders for the most part, in architectural historian Charlie Duff’s words, “viewed their buildings and streets as tools, made for use rather than for elegance, and they were quite ready to discard them when better came along.”⁴ A handful of remnants of the colonial city, modeled after the row houses of London and other British cities, still stand today, such as Elfreth’s Alley in Philadelphia, with houses dating back to the 1720s, but most of what we think of as colonial dates from the early nineteenth century, such as Mount Vernon Square in Baltimore and Acorn Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood (figure 3.2). Acorn Street was initially built for artisans, not poor but not gentry, many of whom conducted their businesses from the premises. Houses on Acorn Street that come on the market today sell for upwards of $3 million.

The Rise of the Industrial City and the Immigrant Neighborhood

The urban neighborhood as a pervasive presence and defining feature of the American urban fabric was the product of post–Civil War urban expansion. That expansion was unique in world history up to that point, making the earlier growth of European industrial cities such as Manchester pale by comparison. Chicago added nearly 20,000 people per year to its population between 1860 and 1880 and 60,000 per year from 1880 to 1900, a growth rate that continued until World War 1.⁵ From a village of fewer than 5,000 people in 1840, it had become a metropolis of 2.7 million in 1920. Chicago was far from alone. In 1820, places such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh were modest settlements, barely even villages. One hundred years later each was a major city of over half a million people, with Detroit close to a million. The Philadelphia of 1776 had become little more than a tiny corner of little importance in the vastly larger 1876 city, while the centers of commerce and government had moved westward away from the increasingly industrial Delaware River waterfront (figure 3.3). At the same time, along with the handful of behemoths such as Chicago and Detroit, urban expansion turned hundreds of other towns—such as Trenton, New Jersey; Lima, Ohio; and Reading, Pennsylvania—into smaller cities, each replicating the features of the larger industrial cities in miniature. All of this was part and parcel of the process by which the United States became the world’s dominant industrial nation.

Historians and economists have identified so many different reasons for the simultaneous explosion of industrialization and urbanism in late nineteenth-century America that the outcome seems to have been all but inevitable. America had everything needed for industrial supremacy: vast natural resources of coal and iron, ample and inexpensive sources of energy, an extensive and efficient transportation infrastructure built first around navigable rivers and then around the spread of the railroads, a growing and increasingly affluent domestic market, technological innovations such as the Kelly-Bessemer steelmaking process, a flourishing entrepreneurial culture subject to few legal or customary restraints, seemingly inexhaustible sources of inexpensive immigrant labor, and finally, the creative energy of the both acclaimed and reviled band of inventors, financiers, and industrial barons, among them Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John Pierpont Morgan Sr., John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Unlike earlier workshops, the new factories were vast establishments, running on the labor of hundreds and often thousands of workers. While the workforce for America’s first factories, New England’s early nineteenth-century textile mills, was drawn from the region’s rural population surplus, that surplus had disappeared by midcentury as Americans headed to western lands that were opened up for settlement early in the nineteenth century after the Native Americans who had inhabited them had been brutally dispossessed.⁶ The post–Civil War industrial explosion was fueled by millions of men and women from almost every European nation fleeing poverty, hunger, exploitation, political unrest, and oppression or simply looking for a better life.

From a trickle in the 1820s and 1830s, immigration increased steadily through the nineteenth century and up to World War I, exceeding 1.2 million in 1907 and again in 1914 (figure 3.4). The initial waves were from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Germany, triggered by hunger, poverty, and the failed German revolutions of 1848. Eastern and Southern Europe contributed ever-larger shares of immigrants in later decades, most prominently Italians largely from southern Italy and Sicily; Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and other Slavic peoples; and the persecuted, impoverished Jewish residents of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The color bar in effect throughout this period meant that the great majority of immigrants were European, and if not fully accepted as “white,” they were neither Asian nor Black. Few Asian, African, or Afro-Caribbean immigrants made it to the United States; although Chicago sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh refers to a “Persian” community in that city early in the twentieth century, it was probably either an Arab or Armenian rather than Iranian community.⁷ Despite the porous Mexican border of the time, few Latinx immigrants arrived in northern cities.

As the cities grew, their character changed. While the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century city was one in which different land uses and building types were mingled widely with few distinct residential neighborhoods as such, land uses and activities gradually became more sharply defined and separated. Downtowns became districts for the conduct of commerce, with large office buildings and stores including the grand department stores that emerged late in the century. Except for the occasional Skid Row, downtowns had largely lost what residential populations they once had by the end of the nineteenth century.⁸ Surrounding residential quarters grew, increasingly differentiated by income, social status, and place of origin. The elites built neighborhoods of fine houses sometimes close to downtown, such as Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, but sometimes in landscaped settings such as Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, laid out in 1853 as “a suburban community of country estates … [with] finely crafted homes stand[ing] amid majestic trees and running streams.”⁹

In-town elite neighborhoods increasingly became islands in a working-class sea. By the end of the nineteenth century, immigrants and their native-born children vastly outnumbered the population of “native” stock in America’s cities. When Jacob Riis asked an old-timer in New York City in the 1880s where the “Americans” lived, he answered “I don’t know.… I wish I did. Some went to California in ’49, some to the war and never came back. The rest, I expect, have gone to heaven, or somewhere. I don’t see them ’round here.”¹⁰ In 1910, over three-quarters of the populations in Chicago, 74 percent in Detroit, and fully 85 percent in the small New Jersey industrial city of Passaic were made up of immigrants and their native-born children. What Oliver Zunz has written about Detroit can stand for almost any American city: “a description of the ethnic neighborhoods in this large industrial city in the late nineteenth century is in many respects a description of the entire population.”¹¹

The greater part of each city was taken up by factories and housing for immigrant workers. While immigrant quarters contained stores to serve their residents’ needs along with small workshops or sweatshops, their principal function was to house the families of the workers in nearby factories. The factories themselves, often vast complexes covering hundreds of acres, were part of the urban fabric, not set apart in industrial parks. Tenements and row houses often faced hulking factory buildings across a city street, an alley, or a postage stamp backyard.

The process by which distinctive immigrant neighborhoods emerged paralleled the growth and industrialization of cities. It was not an orderly process, nor was there a single model of an “immigrant neighborhood.” A neighborhood might be settled by one immigrant group, only to give way to another and then another over time. As Zorbaugh describes one Chicago neighborhood, “wave after wave of immigrants has swept over the area—Irish, Swedish, German, Italian, Greek, Persian and Negro—forming colonies, staying a while, then giving way to others.”¹² Alternatively, an immigrant group might settle in one area, as in Trenton’s Chambersburg, which became a distinct Italian neighborhood late in the nineteenth century and stayed that way until the 1990s, when a shrinking Italian community gradually gave way to today’s mixed Latinx population. St. Louis’s Hill neighborhood, childhood home of baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, was settled by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century and remains an Italian neighborhood to this day.

While some neighborhoods were dominated by a single immigrant community, others were a jumble of different nationalities and religions, sometimes coexisting peacefully but often living in a state of conflict that could range from occasional slurs and gestures to outright warfare. As Zorbaugh writes about the same neighborhood, “while the Irish and Swedish had gotten on well as neighbors, neither could or would live peaceably with the Sicilian[s].”¹³ In an 1895 survey of its environs, Chicago’s Hull House found eighteen different distinct nationalities living in an area of less than a third of a square mile within which were smaller and more homogenous pockets with clusters of Italian, Czech, Jewish, and Irish immigrants.

Living conditions in these neighborhoods were often crowded, unsafe, and unhealthy. Riis describes one tenement apartment he visited in lower Manhattan:

Look into any of these houses, everywhere the same piles of rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper, all of which the sanitary police flatter themselves they have banished to the dumps and the warehouses. Here is a “flat” of “parlor” and two pitch-dark coops called bedrooms. Truly, the bed is all there is room for. The family teakettle is on the stove, doing duty for the time being as a wash-boiler.… One, two, three beds are there, if the old boxes and heaps of foul straw can be called by that name; a broken stove with crazy pipe from which the smoke leaks at every joint, a table of rough boards propped up on boxes, piles of rubbish in the corner. The closeness and smell are appalling.¹⁴

The sheer density of New York may have made it extreme but not unique. A Chicago social worker described her city’s immigrant quarters in similar language. “Little idea can be given of the filthy and rotten tenements, the dingy courts and tumble-down sheds, the foul stables and dilapidated outhouses, the broken sewer-pipes, the piles of garbage fairly alive with diseased odors, and of the numbers of children filling every nook, working and playing in every room, eating and sleeping in every window-sill, pouring in and out of every door, and seeming literally to pave every scrap of ‘yard.’ ”¹⁵

The 1910 census laconically reports that the city of Boston contained 74,000 dwellings but 140,000 families. Riis describes one dwelling in New York’s Lower East Side, where “two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a ‘family’ of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders.”¹⁶ Conditions were typically somewhat better in the newer, less densely built cities of the Midwest such as Detroit and Cleveland, where an immigrant family had a better chance of having a house or apartment to themselves.

Exploitation and poverty were the rule. Factory jobs were long and dangerous and paid little. In Andrew Carnegie’s mills in Pittsburgh, workers worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week with only the Fourth of July off, while fatal accidents in the city’s mills accounted for 20 percent of the city’s male deaths in the 1880s.¹⁷ Yet, contemporary writers often compare the factories favorably to what was known as the “sweating system” under which “sweaters,” or middlemen, bought fabric or unfinished clothes from manufacturers and in turn farmed the work out to men, women, and children working long hours for pennies in their apartments or rooms, using their feet to power their machines, among damp, fumes, and sick or screaming children. Riis describes such a scene:

Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, … on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man.… Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines sewing knickerbockers, “knee-pants” in the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of “pants” ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep.¹⁸

Reformer Florence Kelley estimated that twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand Chicagoans, almost all Jewish and Italian immigrants, were employed in similar conditions.¹⁹ In the 1890s, the sweating system was a pervasive reality wherever garments were manufactured in American cities.

Reformers such as Kelley, Riis, and their counterparts provided a valuable service in bringing the exploitation of immigrants to wider attention, yet they often failed to see beyond the poverty and disease that initially overwhelmed them. Their writings often betray a sense that these immigrants and their families were inferior to people of solid “American” stock, something that also reverberated in much of the writings of the Chicago School as well as in popular discourse until the end of World War II.

However deplorable the housing conditions of the late nineteenth-century immigrant neighborhoods were, middle-class reformers such as Riis and Kelley erred badly in assuming that their physical conditions were signs of pervasive social depravity and economic despair. On the contrary, as Hymowitz writes, “some of the enclaves became reeking, overcrowded slums that would catalyze progressive reformers.… But they also hummed with Tocquevillian energy. Immigrant civic groups sprang up to meet every sort of need from the medical to the recreational to the spiritual. The social benefits of the immigrant enclave were immense.”²⁰ Immigrants did not let the squalor of the moment dim their aspirations for the future. They were adapting to a new country, building institutions, and in large numbers slowly but steadily moving up economically. Ironically, for all its abuses, the sweating system was a vehicle for upward mobility. A pieceworker might more easily make the transition to becoming a sweater than find comparable opportunities elsewhere, earn a little more, and eventually perhaps move into a better neighborhood and into the middle class.

As immigrants from different nations, speaking little or no English and adrift in the new country, each reached critical mass, and the institutions they created both sustained their ties to now faraway Europe and helped support their adjustment to a new life in the United States. The process of immigrant neighborhood formation was very much an informal and iterative one in which the first group of immigrants would arrive in a city and found a church, synagogue, or other center that would become a focal point around which more people of their nationality or religion congregated. The first wave of settlers did not typically form themselves into a cohesive ethnic neighborhood. It was the process of institution building over time that led to the formation of cohesive ethnic neighborhoods.

By the eve of World War I, American cities were almost all “cities of neighborhoods,” mostly distinguished by ethnic or religious identities. While small cities might have a single distinct “Italian neighborhood” or “Polish neighborhood,” larger cities tended to have something more like an archipelago of ethnic neighborhoods with multiple ethnic clusters, some large distinct neighborhoods with others no more than a block or two. Few ethnic neighborhoods, though, were ever entirely the terrain of a single group. Except for the Black ghettos that emerged in the 1920s, which formed a special case and which we discuss below, neighborhoods were mixed to varying degrees, but usually one national, ethnic, or religious group dominated the mix. Immigrants created institutions such as the Dom Polski (Polish House), built in 1889 in the Buffalo neighborhood known as Out Broadway, or Polonia. The Dom Polski was the home of Polish cultural and fraternal groups and became the de facto clubhouse for thousands of neighborhood residents. Shown in figure 3.5, it stood at the intersection of Broadway and Fillmore, known as “the Polish Main Street.” That business district was equivalent to the main street of a midsize Northeast city, reputedly boasting 2,930 Polish-owned businesses and 14 community banks.²¹

Early twentieth-century neighborhoods such as Polonia were all but self-contained, self-sufficient entities. Residents could spend their entire lives there without ever stepping outside its boundaries. Many of the men worked in nearby factories, while the neighborhood shopping street provided everything people needed for their day-to-day lives, from the taverns where the men went to unwind after their shifts to the grocery stores and bakeries from which their wives and children brought food home for dinner. The children went to the neighborhood public or parochial school, the family went to the picture show in the neighborhood movie theater on Saturday, and on Sunday they worshipped in a neighborhood church. Excursions to downtown department stores or to the country were special events, for which one dressed as if for church or a family wedding. For some, their first trip outside the neighborhood may have been the ride in the hearse—owned by a neighborhood funeral parlor—that took them to the cemetery.

Not all neighborhoods in 1900 cities were ethnic, immigrant neighborhoods. Cities had elite neighborhoods as well as a few other neighborhoods where most of the residents were what the makers of an 1895 nationalities map of New York City referred to as “natives,” meaning white households of “native” as distinct from immigrant stock. Most cities also had small African American pockets, and some had so-called Chinatowns. But the European ethnic immigrant neighborhood was the dominant neighborhood type that gave early twentieth-century American cities their distinctive character.

The Rise of African American Neighborhoods

Although some southern cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans had substantial Black populations since the nineteenth century, most northern cities of that era had far fewer Black residents than would be the case in later years. In 1900, there were thirty thousand African Americans living in Chicago, thirty-six thousand in St. Louis, and sixty-three thousand in Philadelphia. With seventy-nine thousand Black residents, Baltimore was the nation’s largest urban Black community, reflecting that city’s mixture of southern and northern roots.

While distinct Black neighborhoods such as Sweet Auburn in Atlanta and Tremé in New Orleans go back to the late nineteenth century, northern cities, while far from integrated, had few distinct Black neighborhoods. Typically, Black families lived in small clusters or pockets—all-Black buildings or largely Black blocks or block faces—inside larger neighborhoods they shared with poor white families. Few Blacks owned their homes, and the buildings they lived in were often the most dilapidated ones in the vicinity, although their rents were no lower than in nearby buildings occupied by white families that were often in better condition.

While members of white ethnic communities who succeeded economically and assimilated culturally could—and often did—move into mixed or predominantly “native” neighborhoods, middle-class African Americans were no more welcome than poor ones in white neighborhoods even then. As an early sociologist noted in 1912, “the strong prejudice among the white people against having colored people living on white residence streets, colored children attending schools with white children, or entering into other semi-social relations with them, confines the opportunities for residence open to colored people of all positions in life to relatively small and well-defined areas.”²² When a respectable Black lawyer and his wife moved onto a white block in Baltimore in 1910, the uproar ultimately led to the city enacting the first racial zoning ordinance, barring Black families from moving onto any city block “wherein more than half the residents are white.”²³

That changed with the First Great Migration, as it is known, which took place from 1910 to 1940 and brought some 1.6 million southern Blacks to northern cities, many of whom filled labor gaps left by the drop in immigration following the immigrant exclusion acts of the 1920s.²⁴ Cleveland’s Black population went from 8,000 in 1910 to 72,000 by 1930; over the same period, Detroit’s Black population grew from 6,000 to over 120,000. The thousands of newly arrived African American migrants put severe pressures on existing Black enclaves, foreshadowing the far better-known story of racial pressures and white flight of the 1960s and 1970s, described in Horace Cayton’s and St. Clair Drake’s classic study of Chicago’s Black community, Black Metropolis. The “tremendous demand for houses resulted in an immediate skyrocketing of rents for all available accommodations and in the opening of new residential areas to Negroes. There were tremendous profits to be made by both colored and white realtors who could provide houses.… Artificial panics were sometimes created in white areas by enterprising realtors who raised the cry ‘the Negroes are coming’ and then proceeded to double the rents after the whites had fled.”²⁵

It was during the 1920s that Black neighborhoods, in both their scale and their largely self-contained network of social institutions and economic activity, took on a character similar to that of the immigrant neighborhoods but with one important difference, as Drake and Cayton point out. “Negroes are not finally absorbed in the general population. Black Metropolis remains athwart the least desirable residential zones. Its population grows larger and larger, unable either to expand freely or to scatter.”²⁶ It was thus that they came to be referred to as ghettos, reflecting the painful truth—as was true of the original Jewish ghettos of early modern Europe, from which the term came—that Black residency of those areas was imposed by legal and extralegal pressure from outside. Although in 1917 the US Supreme Court struck down the explicitly racial zoning that Baltimore had pioneered and other cities had copied—albeit on property rights rather than civil rights grounds—restrictive covenants, social pressures, and often outright violence kept most Black families pent up in racially defined ghettos until after World War II.²⁷

Despite being penned in and partly for that same reason, Black neighborhoods were vital communities. Black-owned businesses lined the streets of Bronzeville, including Black-owned banks and insurance companies, while hundreds of social clubs, churches, nightclubs, and theaters provided solace, sociability, and entertainment. As Drake and Cayton note, “on eight square miles of land a Black Metropolis was growing in the womb of the white,” visible in a 1934 map of Chicago (figure 3.6).²⁸

Bronzeville had counterparts in almost every major American city from Harlem in New York to Black Bottom in Detroit, which had been the heart of Detroit’s Jewish community at the end of the nineteenth century and got its name from its rich alluvial soils long before it became an African American community. These neighborhoods shared rich community networks along with appalling housing conditions, which got worse as more and more people moved north and crowded into already-teeming areas. Between 1920 and 1950 Chicago’s Black population grew from one hundred thousand to nearly half a million and that of Detroit from forty thousand to three hundred thousand, while few opportunities existed to move beyond the borders of the ghetto.

Homeownership opportunities in neighborhoods such as Black Bottom and Bronzeville were few and far between, and living conditions for all but the well-to-do were often inadequate or worse. Conditions in Black Bottom, in a 1917 account, were “unspeakably vile,” as a reporter wrote, with “tumbledown shacks … [that] fairly bulge with their human population, herded into stuffy quarters without proper light or ventilation, eating, living and sleeping in a single room.”²⁹

The Beginnings of the Urban Neighborhood Transformation

The 1920s saw significant changes come to American cities. After the Immigration Act of 1924, mass immigration came to an end. From over eight million immigrants in the first decade of the twentieth century and over six million—despite World War I—in the 1910s, immigration to the United States dropped to four million in the 1920s (mostly arriving before 1925) and to fewer than seven hundred thousand in the 1930s. At the same time urban Black populations grew rapidly, and the first distinct Black neighborhoods emerged in most American cities.

The 1920s were also the years when the spatial transformation of American life that was to become a reality after World War II first became clearly visible. It was when the automobile became a product for the masses rather than a toy for the elite. By 1925, over seventeen million private cars were on the road, more than ten times the number in 1914, roughly one for every two American households. Almost every feature of America’s car-oriented society can be traced back to the 1920s, from the first motels and drive-in restaurants to the growth of the suburbs. Freed from their dependence on streetcar and commuter rail lines, suburbs could now be built anywhere that a car could reasonably reach. Although cities continued to grow during the 1920s and added more people than their suburbs, the 1920s was the first decade when suburbs grew at a faster percentage rate than central cities.

The 1920s also saw an unprecedented volume of homebuilding in urban America. With large tracts of vacant land remaining inside most central cities, much “suburban” construction took place within the cities as their boundaries were filled in with bungalows, row houses, and other housing types meeting the demands of a growing middle class. Relative to the size of the existing housing stock, that decade—particularly the years from 1923 to 1927—still stands as the greatest housing boom era in American history.³⁰ More 1920s buildings still stand in Chicago today than from any other decade before or since.³¹

Neighborhoods changed but less than might have been expected considering these dramatic social and economic changes. Scholars of the Chicago School argued that as immigrants moved upward socioeconomically they would slough off their parochial commitments, embrace a modern identity characterized by rational and instrumental relations, and move steadily into the so-called melting pot, but they were at least partly wrong. While immigrants shared the American aspiration for a house and yard of their own, as they began to prosper and realize that aspiration, their tendency was less to assimilate into ethnically neutral environments than to remain in familiar ethnic settings by either upgrading sections of existing neighborhoods into areas that often came to be known as “doctors’ row” or “lawyers’ row”, or forming new more comfortable but still largely ethnically defined neighborhoods within newly built parts of the same cities.³² Upwardly mobile New York Jewish families moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, while their Pittsburgh counterparts moved from Lower Hill to Squirrel Hill. The old ethnic neighborhoods, though, often remained the centers of ethnic social life and commercial activity. Residents of the newer ethnic neighborhoods continued for years to return to the old neighborhood to shop, worship, and participate in the distinctive culture fostered by the Dom Polskis, Turnvereins, and Sokols embedded in those neighborhoods.

The onset of the Great Depression tended if anything to reinforce the importance of the neighborhood, particularly in hard-hit ethnic, racial, and religious communities. With millions of families finding themselves in difficult circumstances and with public-sector social safety nets no more than embryonic, neighborhood institutions and solidarity became critical to both individual and group survival. As one historian writes, “New York’s Jewish neighborhoods eased both the generational transition and the economic hardships of the Depression years.… In working-class enclaves, where the Depression dealt its harshest blow, neighborhood support networks preserved Jewish morale and offered critical material aid. While middle- and upper-class Jews seldom required the financial supports of their neighborhoods, Jewish residential clustering encouraged ethnic persistence for Jews at all economic levels.”³³

What was true for New York’s Jewish communities was equally true for other racial and religious groups. But the Great Depression and World War II were also when, in the constant swing of the pendulum between community and individualism in American society, the idea of community was briefly in the ascendant. Within the framework of shared effort and sacrifice that characterized much thinking during the Depression and the war years, “the small-scale city neighborhood,” in Looker’s words, “sat close to the core of wartime understandings of American nationhood and purpose.”³⁴

In contrast to urban Black neighborhoods, which grew steadily from migration, becoming more and more crowded during the Depression and World War II, most white neighborhoods spent the Depression and war years in something of a time warp. While a steady trickle of people moved out and houses and other buildings became older, returning American troops after World War II found that their old neighborhoods had changed little from 1940 or, for that matter, from 1930. When those ex-soldiers started to establish their own households, though, they found that their neighborhoods had few vacant homes to offer them.

A decade of economic depression followed by wartime austerity had stifled housing production and discouraged more than routine maintenance and repairs in older housing. The 1950 census, which came after postwar production had already begun to ramp up significantly, found severe housing shortages in nearly every urban area in the United States. In cities such as Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee rental vacancy rates were barely 1 percent. In Cleveland, a city with over 110,000 homeowners, there were barely five hundred units listed for sale that year. Ads placed in the Los Angeles Times from people seeking housing captured the desperation of many families:

“No sympathy or charity. Wanted: Just a Home. Whatever you have to offer. We aren’t perfect, just normal people. Veteran, wife and child. Won’t you please call us?”

“Have bride but no threshold. Newlywed couple without home. Please rent us a bungalow, apartment or house, furnished or unfurnished. Up to $50.”

“Refined Christian couple. Ex-Army officer & wife. College grads. Want house or apt. Permanently employed. Best local references. No children or pets.”

“It’s the usual tale! But being a returned veteran I do want a home so my wife & I (no children or pets) can be together again. I’m sick of hotels & discouraged no end.”³⁵

As two historians have written, “Veterans returned to ‘no vacancy’ signs and high rents. As late as 1947, one-third were still living doubled up with relatives, friends, and strangers. American family life was on hold.”³⁶

The year 1950 was a pivotal moment in the history of the American urban ethnic neighborhood. For writer and broadcaster Ray Suarez, 1950 was the “last full cry of urban America”: “The teeming ethnic ghettos of the early century had given way to a more comfortable life,” he writes, “with religion and ethnicity, race and class still used as organizing principles for the neighborhood. The rough edges of the immigrant ‘greenhorns’ were worn smooth, and a confident younger generation now entered a fuller, richer American life.… [I]t was the ghetto, yes, but made benign by assimilation.”³⁷ Yet the signs of change were already visible, and by the end of the 1950s the process of change was already well under way. Within the next decade many neighborhoods that had flourished for generations disappeared, while others began an inexorable process of transformation. The reasons were complex, multifaceted, and impossible to pin on a single cause, as some people have tried to do, such as white flight, urban renewal, or the interstate system. In the next chapter, we will try to disentangle the threads.