15.2 The Problems of Urbanization

OBJECTIVES:1. Describe the movement of immigrants to cities and the

opportunities they found there

2. Explain how cities dealt with problems related to housing, transportation, water supply, and fire and police protection.

3. Describe some of the organization and people who offered help to urban immigrants

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• By the early 1900s immigrant populations were overwhelming American cities

• More Poles in Chicago than in Warsaw!• More Irish in New York than in Dublin, Ireland!

• Many immigrants often lived in neighborhoods with others who shared their background

• This helped them adapt to the new culture

• Many African Americans moved North to cities like Detroit and Chicago

3

Immigration Problems• Row houses became very

popular

• Working class families were moving out of the city

• Dumbbell tenements were oddly shaped in include an air shaft

• Unfortunately people began to use them as a garbage disposal

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Dumbbell Tenement

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More Urban Problem

TRANSPORTATION

• PROBLEM: People can’t get to work

• Streetcars• Cable cars• Subways

WATER/SANITATION• Many tenements did

not have fresh water• Diseases were spread

• Horse manure in the streets

• sewage in the gutters• foul smoke from

factories

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Urban Problems• Lack of water

• Wooden dwellings

• 1853 – first paid fire dept.

• 1874 – first auto fire sprinkler

• 1844 – first organized police force

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Chicago Fire 1871

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Poor neighborhood, Philadelphia, 1915

Poor neighborhood, Philadelphia, 1915Scenes like this in the immigrant wards of America's great cities stirred middle-class reformers to action at the turn of the century. (Philadelphia City Archives)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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Library of CongressFamily in an attic home with drying laundry]. CREATED/PUBLISHED [between 1900 and 1910] NOTES title devised by cataloger. Photograph of a photographic print. Possibly immigrants. Detroit Publishing Co. no. P 512. Gift; State Historical Society of Colorado; 1949

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The Tenement Question--Inside and Out!

The Tenement Question--Inside and Out!

Many city dwellers, especially immigrants, typically lived in tenements that were crowded and unsanitary. (Library of Congress)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

14

REFORM • Most mainstream or old

line Protestant churches struggle to address plight of urban poor

• Catholicism thrives, founds schools and parishes

• SOCIAL GOSPEL is preached (vs. SOCIAL DARWINISM)

• Salvation Army, YMCA and Christian Scientists are formed in this milieu

• Jane Addams: Reformer, studies social ills, founds Hull House in Chicago in 1889

• Settlement Houses are founded to provide assistance to poor and new immigrants

• Run largely by middle-class women reformers

• Provided aid and education15

TERMS• Urbanization

• Row houses

• Dumbbell tenement

• Social Gospel movement

• Settlement house

• Jane Addams

• OBJECTIVES:1. Describe the movement of

immigrants to cities and the opportunities they found there

2. Explain how cities dealt with problems related to housing, transportation, water supply, and fire and police protection.

3. Describe some of the organization and people who offered help to urban immigrants

16