Public Works

The density and scale of urban life brings with it unique needs for sanitation, fire protection, transportation, and public safety, which governments have met by building comprehensive water, sewage, street lighting, and street transportation systems. These physical systems constitute the core of urban public works, though the term public works could also include canals, port development, airports, mass transit, communications systems, and even public buildings, all of which are “public” in the sense that (1) it is usually only a government that can raise the capital sufficient to build them, (2) governments hold responsibility for building these systems because private firms often see no profit in providing such things as public health or brightly lit streets, and (3) even when provided through private firms, economies of scale in public works make these industries monopolistic and thus subject to higher levels of government regulation.

Urban public works as we understand them today were first financed by city governments in the early 19th century, with private engineering and construction firms doing most of the actual work. City charters even early in the century provided the authority to lay streets and sewers and build waterworks, yet the size and scope of the projects usually required cities to seek specific state authorization to issue municipal bonds, raise the local government's debt limit, or grant new municipal powers.

Municipal governments assumed responsibility for urban public works as cities gradually shifted from their traditional role as commercial associations to geographically defined public services providers. At the turn of the 19th century, only Philadelphia had a municipal water supply system, built in 1801, and followed by waterworks in Columbia, South Carolina (1823), Pittsburgh (1826), Wilmington, Delaware (1827), and Richmond, Virginia (1830). In other cities [Page 629]residents relied on wells, cisterns, or private companies that provided customers with water through distributing systems often made of bored wooden logs, connected to a nearby reservoir. Fires and disease epidemics highlighted the inadequacies of private water companies that had neither the capacity nor interest in providing water for street cleaning or fire hydrants. The Philadelphia waterworks, for instance, was in large part inspired by a devastating outbreak of yellow fever in the city in 1793. The initial demand for a municipal water system in Boston has been dated to a large fire in that city in 1825, which ultimately resulted in the construction of the Cochituate Aqueduct some 20 years later. Authorization and construction of the largest and most comprehensive of the 19th-century water systems, New York's Croton Aqueduct, resulted from the public outcry for water after an outbreak of cholera in 1832. By 1907, of the 158 American cities with populations over 30,000, 74 percent had municipal water supply systems. The average year that those cities either built or otherwise acquired their water systems is 1871.

A few cities, such as Brooklyn and Jersey City, had enough foresight to build combined water and sewage systems. For most cities, the demand for better sewerage came after the introduction of a waterworks and the resultant increase in wastewater overwhelmed the traditional system of cesspools and privy vaults. In the 17th and 18th centuries, city sewers were mostly disconnected drains, often privately financed, that led off in different directions. Piecemeal construction meant a lack of coordination and uneven quality. Large sewers emptied into smaller ones and sometimes ran uphill. After the Civil War, cities increasingly took control over sewers to create uniform systems of lateral, sub-main, and trunk sewers that emptied out at one or a few spots. By 1907, sewers lay under approximately half the streets of the country's 158 largest cities.

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