- Title
- Early twentieth century suburbs in North Carolina: essays on history, architecture and planning
-
-
- Date
- 1985
-
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
Early twentieth century suburbs in North Carolina: essays on history, architecture and planning
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North Carolina’s Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs
and the Urbanizing South
David R. Goldfield
Department of History
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
What a time to be living in an American city! In less than a
generation, late nineteenth- century Americans had witnessed a
remarkable transformation in their towns and cities. The tech¬
nological marvels of the age seemed to coalesce in urban areas to
provide daily sound, light, and visual spectacles that heralded
the dawn of a new millennium. Electricity rescued the city from
centuries of darkness. Pure water and indoor plumbing were no
mere conveniences, but indelible marks of advanced civilization
(though the ancient Romans possessed both) . Electrified vehi¬
cles whisked an upwardly mobile middle class out to new
suburban subdivisions, while millions of foreigners poured into
central cities to take their place.
It was also now possible to talk into a box and be heard in
another city. And, if these innovations were insufficient to jar
the most jaded senses, a visual survey of the urban landscape
would confirm that the dawn of the Age of Steel had indeed
wrought a magnificent new urban world. Graceful skyscrapers
ascended heavenward, and even more artful bridges rose in
Gothic splendor to span broad rivers.
Never before and never since have so many changes
occurred in the American urban environment in so short a time.
While these transformations might have been marvelous to
behold, individually or collectively, they were also frightening.
They had occurred in a nation still predominantly rural, imbued
with the strong Jeffersonian ideal of the virtuous farmer
contrasted with the pale and even unnatural city dweller. Never
mind that increasing numbers of these virtuous rural yeomen
were abandoning their country hearths for a place in the new,
The city center with its streetcars: Downtown Charlotte
during a May 20 celebration, ca. 1905. From Julia M.
Alexander, Charlotte in Picture and Prose, 1906.
uncertain city. Historian Robert Wiebe characterized the
collective American response to these vast and incomprehen¬
sible changes during the closing years of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the new century as a “search for order.”
And, indeed, it is not difficult to understand why the clang of the
trolley, the ring of the phone, the flash of the light, and the thrust
of the buildings and bridges drove Americans to seek some
refuge, some port before the waves of innovation drowned their
sensibilities and senses completely.
One of the most common responses to this new environment
was to organize. Whether you were a worker, entrepreneur, or
historian this was no place, no time to be alone. While pro¬
tection was an obvious motive for collective behavior, organiza¬
tion possessed more positive characteristics. The grouping or re¬
grouping of urban Americans was an attempt to take control of
this colossal new phenomenon and mold it into an acceptable
and livable image. The corporation was an entrepreneurial device
that efficiently channeled the vast capital and managerial
requirements of the new technological age; labor unions
evolved, in part, as means to secure some of the benefits and
avoid the costs inherent in the creation of a permanent industrial
working class; and professional associations emerged to share
information, certify practitioners, and cope with various aspects
of the new urban life.
Southern cities and towns, which had long languished in the
backwaters of American urban civilization, became drawn into
the whorl of innovation that characterized late- nineteenth-
century America. Technology diffusion was rapid as national
corporations such as General Electric formed to harness and
disseminate new technologies. Few southern cities had the
expertise required to implement the new range of urban services
made possible by technological breakthroughs, so they sought
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