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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
While the scholarly literature largely ignores issues of suburban population size, density and heterogeneity, during the 1920s a number of large, densely-settled, heterogeneous suburbs emerged on the fringe of the largest US cities. The article identifies forty-one of these potential ‘city suburbs’ which are defined as communities having minimum thresholds of 25,000 population and residential densities of 6,000 per square mile. City suburbs may have claimed nearly 25 per cent of the suburban populations of the nation's ten largest metropolitan districts. Drawing largely on data for midwestern cities, city suburbs are further identified through their diverse populations by class, ethnicity and race; varied housing stocks and economic activities including retailing, professional services and manufacturing; and political independence from their central city. Nearly equally divided between residential and industrial suburbs, the former, including Oak Park, Illinois, ‘fit’ traditional middle-class suburban descriptions while neighbouring Cicero represented workingclass, industrial communities.
The author thanks Susan Borchert, Richard Harris, Robin Einhorn and Lizabeth Cohen for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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7 Similarly, Robert Fishman found that ‘Only when the London suburb was transported to Manchester and the other early industrial cities of northern England did suburbia demonstrate its revolutionary power to dominate middle-class residential patterns and to transform urban structure’: Bourgeois Utopias, 73.Google Scholar Jon Teaford noted the unity of these industrial cities: Cities in the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, 1993).Google Scholar
8 These were selected by identifying all suburban communities in the ten largest metropolitan districts with 1930 populations near or above 25,000 and densities over 6,000. This list was then divided into two groups, residential and employing/industrial, based on Chauncy Harris's analyses of the 1930 population census and the 1935 census of manufactures and trade: Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 11–13. Despite qualifying, satellite cities and independent urban centres were excluded whenever they could be identified. Other metropolitan areas may have had city suburbs; more research is necessary to determine their full extent.
9 Only Berkeley, with a 1930 population of 82,109 and density of 8,643 represented a significant exception to the dearth of western city suburbs. St Louis failed to produce either type while Los Angeles' only city suburb, Huntington Park, barely reached the population threshold. Washington, Pennsylvania (classified as diversified by Harris) is excluded here because its considerable distance from Pittsburgh and its broader economic base suggest an independent city; Aliquippa, an industrial city suburb at a considerable distance from Pittsburgh, is included. There is room for debate over which communities belong here. Other disqualified communities include: Hoboken, Elizabeth, Patterson, Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey. Closer analysis might alter the list but should not significantly change city suburbs' description or importance.
10 For a discussion of these forces, see Taylor, G.R., Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York, 1915)Google Scholar, chs I and IV.
11 Cramer, R. E., ‘Manufacturing structure of the Cicero District Metropolitan Chicago’ (unpublished University of Chicago thesis, 1952), 13–18Google Scholar; and Borchert, J., ‘Social landscapes of a streetcar suburb: 1889–1930’, in Groth, P. (ed.), Vision, Culture and Landscape (Berkeley, 1990), 41–62.Google Scholar
12 In contrast, other suburbs with large populations were also larger spatially: New Rochelle – 9.9 square miles; Newton –17.9; Dearborn – 25; and Long Beach – 29.6. Computed from ‘Government data on the 960 cities over 10,000 population’, in Ridley, C. and Nolting, O. (eds), The Municipal Year Book –1935 (Chicago, 1935), 164–87.Google Scholar
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17 In some cases state borders or significant water barriers made annexation efforts unlikely.
18 Teaford, J., City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970 (Baltimore, 1979), 95–6.Google Scholar City suburbs retained their political independence whether their governmental form took the shape of city, village, town or a borough. This sets city suburbs apart from inner-city suburban areas that accepted annexation.
19 Teaford, City and Suburb, 90, 85–6, 91–2Google Scholar; see also Gacy, Le, ‘Improvers and preservers’, 194–206Google Scholar; and Buchbinder-Green, B., Evanston (St Louis, 1989), 94.Google Scholar Some city suburbs apparently did not attract interest from their central city and remained independent by default, including Boston's Chelsea, Somerville and Revere and Detroit's Hamtramck and Highland Park. Teaford, City and Suburb, 60–1, 87Google Scholar; and Wood, A.E., Hamtramck A Sociological Study of a Polish-American Community (New Haven, 1955), 16–17.Google Scholar
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21 Theoretical and empirical work demonstrate the significance of density, although suburban scholars have been reluctant to apply it. Wirth, L., ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1938), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lampard, E.E., ‘American historians and the study of urbanization’, American Historical Review, 67 (1961), 49–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berry, B.J.L., Simmons, J.W. and Tennant, R.J., ‘Urban population densities: structure and change’, Geographical Review, 53 (1963), 389–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Douglass concluded that density and size could not be used ‘as a significant basis for the comparison of suburb with suburb’: Suburban Trend, 75.Google Scholar His 1925 book appeared, however, before the city suburb had fully emerged.
22 These figures are computed from population data in US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US; and spatial data in ‘Government data on 960 cities’, 164–87. Since much land in central cities was devoted to commerce, wholesaling, office space, manufacturing, parks and roads, the urban densities do not fully reflect the peak densities in residential neighbourhoods.
23 Computed from data in US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US, 35, 57, 166Google Scholar; and ‘Government data on 960 cities’, 164–87.
24 Green, H.W., Population Characteristics by Census Tracts – Cleveland, Ohio – 1930 (Cleveland, 1932), 54.Google Scholar
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31 Le Gacy concludes that ‘Oak Park people were solid, middle-class, white-collar wage earners’: ‘Improvers and preservers’, 182.
32 Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 6, and n. 7. Berkeley, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland, East Orange, Evanston, Lakewood, Montclair, Oak Park and Wilkinsburg each had ‘more than 14 per cent of gainfully occupied … in professional occupations in 1930’.
33 Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 6–7, n. 8. These included: Berwyn, East Cleveland, East Orange, Irvington, Lakewood, Maywood, Medford, Oak Park, Somerville and Wilkinsburg.
34 Cramer, ‘Manufacturing structure of the Cicero District’, 18. Other industrial city suburbs emerged largely as the result of single major factories: Hamtramck around a Dodge Motor Company plant. Highland Park around a Ford Motor Company plant, Garfield around the Forstmann and Huffmann mill and Passaic adjacent to the Botany mills. Zunz, , Changing Face of Inequality, 291Google Scholar; and Goldberg, D.J., A Tale of Three Cities: Labor Organizations and Protest in Patterson, Passaic, and Lawrence, 1916–1921 (New Brunswick, 1989), 55, 46.Google Scholar
35 Cramer, ‘Manufacturing structure of the Cicero District’, 49–50. A problematic aspect of joining industrial and residential city suburbs is their respective differences in ‘Out-’ or ‘in-commuting’ to work. As significant employment centres, industrial city suburbs appear more like satellite cities than suburbs (see Schnore, L.F., ‘Satellites and suburbs’, Social Forces, 36 (1957), 121–7).CrossRefGoogle Scholar None of the industrial city suburbs cited here, however, are identified in Taylor's Satellite Cities; the effort has been to exclude those so identified. More importantly, many residential city suburbs also served as employment centres both for white- and blue-collar workers; while they seldom employed as many workers as industrial city suburbs, the difference, again, is more one of degree than kind. See the following discussion and notes 39–42. Blue- and white-collar workers commuted to central cities from industrial city suburbs such as Cicero as much as they did from residential ones.
36 Harris,‘Suburbs’, 12–13.
37 Wood, , Hamtramck, 23–4Google Scholar; and Goldberg, , A Tale of Three Cities, 55.Google Scholar Zunz reported differences between Hamtramck (85 per cent of the employed were factory workers in 1920) and Highland Park (60 per cent); the former had just over 8 per cent of its population in professional, white-collar or proprietorial occupations while Highland Park had nearly 40 per cent so employed. The Changing Face of Inequality, 354, 356Google Scholar, Table 13.4 and 358, Table 13.5. Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 6–7, n. 8.
38 Ibid., 13.
39 Ibid.
40 Suggesting the complexity of city suburbs, Berkeley's next largest groupings of employed residents were professionals (19 per cent), and clerical workers (16 per cent). Federal Writers' Project, Berkeley: The First Seventy-Five Years (Berkeley, 1941), 116–18.Google Scholar
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42 Green, H.W., Planes of Living in Cuyahoga County As Depicted by the Real Property Survey, part I (Cleveland, 1940), 76.Google Scholar This makes the neighbourhood more like that of an industrial city suburb where residents often lived and worked in the same community. The extent of industrial and other employment in many city suburbs, residential and industrial, helps bridge the gap between city suburbs while other factors set both types apart from satellite cities.
43 Le Gacy, ‘Improvers and preservers’, 179–80. By 1940, Oak Park had 630 stores with an annual business of $36 million dollars.
44 Guarino, J., Oak Park (St Louis, 1988), 100–1Google Scholar; Buchbinder-Green, , Evanston, 85, 124, 155, 160, 161, 167Google Scholar; Borchert, , Lakewood, 162–3.Google Scholar Well-to-do suburbanites in each of these city suburbs also established exclusive social clubs along the lines of those founded earlier by central city elites. Families, however, were more welcome in these private community clubs, as they were in nearby suburban country clubs.
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51 Contrast this with Margaret Marsh's descriptions in Suburban Lives, 90Google Scholar: communities that were ‘safe, homogeneous, and purged of the poor… and the ethnically suspect’. Other scholars suggest greater diversity in period suburbs; in a review of suburban literature, Carol O'Connor found ‘it… possible that individual suburbs… used to be more heterogeneous than they are today’, but provided little explanatory framework. O'Connor, ‘The suburban mosaic: patterns of land use, class, and culture’, in Gillette, H. Jr and Miller, Z. (eds), American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (New York, 1987), 253.Google Scholar Ken Jackson also found diversity in late nineteenth-century railroad suburbs where ‘about 30 to 50 per cent of the heads of households… were affluent businessmen’ but ‘towns had a larger, poorer group of citizens whose function was to provide gardening, domestic and other services for the wealthier class’: Crabgrass Frontier, 99.Google Scholar
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