Streetcar Suburbs

Horse-drawn streetcars were put in service in 1832 between Prince and 14th Streets in lower Manhattan, but they did not revolutionize urban transportation until a couple of decades later. By the middle of the century, grooved rails laid flush with the street surface enabled streets to accommodate public transit as well as continued vehicular and pedestrian use. Rails made the ride on horse-drawn omnibuses smoother and enabled a speed increase of up to 8 miles per hour. From pedestrian cities with a 4-mile diameter, the radius expanded to 7 miles by 1870, when most cities were outfitted with a grid of horsecar lines. Between initial experiments in 1887 and 1907 improvements in electric power distribution, electric street railways gradually supplanted horses. By 1903, most of the 30,000 miles of American streetcar routes had been electrified. Increased speed and flat fares, which subsidized long-distance ridership, had a substantial impact on urban configuration and development.

A pattern of elite residences at the center of cities and peripheral occupancy by the lower classes was gradually reversed by the advent of convenient and affordable transportation. The well-to-do were followed by the middle class, attracted by development within proximity of the new transportation routes. Suburban developments of single, twin or row houses, and apartment buildings within short walking distance of streetcar transit to the city became a desirable wholesome alternative to the dirty, crowded, noisy, [Page 771]and disease-ridden city. The noisy streetcars and their unsightly overhead wires encouraged small commercial and service establishments and residences of lesser status along the streets where lines ran.

The streetcar provided access to work, shopping, recreation, and social activities for the land that would be developed under unified ownership or by smallscale developers, usually according to a predefined grid pattern. In the pre-automobile years, lots remained small by comparison to those in post–World War II developments. With the advent of the automobile, the Garden Court development model initiated in about 1925 in West Philadelphia incorporated a garage into the basement level of the residential building. Accessible from the back alley, where service functions were relegated, the built-in garage did not require a larger lot size and did not alter the street configuration of the residences, where front porches remained prevalent. The need to provide access to the streetcar line within walking distance (no further than two blocks away, in West Philadelphia streetcar suburbs) encouraged keeping the lots deep and narrow and the sidewalks paved. Street trees, reminiscent of the recently converted farmland, provided a common street landscape and shade for pedestrians and houses in the decades before air conditioning. Dedicated residential land use, social stratification, and racial separation also resulted from the configuration of these developments.

The 1962 landmark publication by Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900, focuses on the middle-class suburbs of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester, which would eventually be annexed to Boston. West Philadelphia, which became part of Philadelphia in 1854, exhibits a similar pattern. Warner's analysis of building permits for 23,000 new residences built in the three towns during the last three decades of the 19th century provides insight into the motivation of the people who built those houses. The decisions of individuals operating without zoning and land use restrictions yielded a regular grid of streets with uniform architecture types. The consensus in development decision making failed to provide a community for residents and the housing stock did not adapt readily to socioeconomic change. As the automobile allowed migration further from the city and the rise in value of central urban real estate pushed lower-class urban residents toward the outskirts, streetcar suburbs were recycled into lower-class and minority neighborhoods. As Warner indicates in his introduction to the 1977 edition of Streetcar Suburbs, the Registry of Deeds would yield more pertinent information than the Building Department for the examination of subsequent developments where land use and zoning became primary factors.

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