A Streetcar Suburb Named Desire

How Transit Shaped the Early Suburbs

Long before the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, the first Brooklyn-bound ferry landed on the banks opposite Manhattan in 1814. There, as the Brooklyn Star predicted, “gentlemen of taste and fortune” would build the first middle-class suburb for commuters on subdivided farmland. New ferry lines emerged to meet burgeoning demand for “country living,” and so Brownstone Brooklyn sprouted on fields where Washington and the Continental Army had once retreated from the British.

The suburban revolution had begun.

The idea of the suburb as both a morally and physically superior option to the city surfaced around the same time that the first ferries sailed across New York Harbor. “The Suburban Lifestyle Dream” became an American cultural value inextricably linked to the national character. As Kenneth T. Jackson chronicles in Crabgrass Frontier, both the moral ideal and the suburbs that embodied it would flourish with new transportation technology in a rapidly industrializing country.

Industrialization fueled explosive population growth in American cities, creating huge demand for housing. In the pre-skyscraper era, the working poor crowded into tenement buildings while the wealthy began looking beyond the proverbial city walls. At a time when only 1 in 50 individuals traveled a single mile to work, ferries and horse-drawn omnibuses enabled workers to live beyond walking distance of their workplace and normalized commuting on transit. After the omnibus was put on rails, the new “horsecar” system grew to serve nearly 100,000 passengers a day in New York City, giving commuters a relatively smooth, 45-minute journey from Central Park to Downtown.

While the horsecar enabled cities to expand, it left behind a daily mountain of manure.

Jackson cites a particularly ripe statistic from Rochester, New York: in one year, the city’s 15,000 horses produced enough manure to create a one-acre,175-foot-tall pile that “would breed sixteen billion flies.” New York City had 128,000 horses in 1910, which by the same math would produce enough manure to breed 137 billion flies. It was “[l]ittle wonder that the electrified streetcar, and later the automobile, were looked upon as the salvation of the city.”

For sixty-five years, the omnibus powered the linear growth of cities, but the arrival of the electric streetcar in the 1880s would usher in a new era of suburban expansion. The trolley—a corruption of “troller,” for the carriages that were trolled along the overhead wires”—could travel at speeds of up to 20 mph, four times faster than the omnibus. And it was cheap: with larger carriages than the horsecar and fewer capital expenses, fares fell to only 5 cents.

The streetcars were immediately popular, and the lure of immense profits attracted significant investment, leading to the construction of 30,000 miles of electrified street railway nationwide by 1903 and the near disappearance of the horsecar. Americans took more than 2 billion streetcar rides in 1890, “more than twice that of the rest of the world combined.” The trolley even spurred local tourism, allowing residents of cities to explore other neighborhoods that were previously out of reach. Many of the trolley companies built beer gardens and amusement parks like Coney Island at the end of the line to encourage pleasure-riding.

Meanwhile, as steam locomotives allowed polluting industries to relocate away from city centers, the streetcars brought new commercial activity in. The invention of the steel-frame skyscraper, the telephone, the elevator, and the electric light bulb, combined with the streetcar, led to the flourishing of downtowns between 1890 and 1950. Radiating outward from the city center to its new suburbs, the streetcar carried office workers to new towers and shoppers to new department stores. Downtown thrived. The streetcar

represented progress and technological achievement; no community that thought well of its future could afford to be thought backward and unpromising. The electric streetcar was a source of pride; the very symbol of a city.

Its inventor, Frank Sprague, called it the “most potent factor in our modern life.”

The streetcar was successful not only because of its technological advances but also because it represented a literal pathway to the fulfillment of the suburban ideal for the middle-class. In particular, it was viewed by many observers as a cure-all to urban overcrowding and its attendant moral ills. 

Abundant, cheap land allowed the streetcar to troll away from city centers, creating new communities in its wake in Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, Chicago. But there were constraints on the pattern of suburban growth: homes had to be within walking distance of the streetcar stops—no more than a “mile from the station or a half mile from the trolley tracks were the immutable limits.” Only the wealthy, who had their own horse-drawn carriages, could afford to live farther away—and they “chose well-kept lawns and an opulent overall ambience rather than the twenty-four-hour polyglot atmosphere of the great city.” 

These immutable limits kept the new streetcar suburbs relatively compact, on lots that were narrow and rectilinear, conforming to street grids, and between 3,000 and 6,000 square feet. As early as the 1880s, some suburbs began to implement minimum lot sizes and mandatory setbacks for homes, codifying the suburban ideal into law. Even then, the suburbs that implemented such restrictions ensured that only the middle class and wealthy could afford the suburban ideal.

Though not quite the rural idyll anticipated by the suburb’s early boosters, the compactness of the streetcar suburbs was both practical and necessary. The streetcar:

required a certain volume of traffic for profitable operation, and because the very availability of a transit line tended to raise the price of land. Thus the trolley, which was supposed to provide space for the middle class, was not feasible unless the residential neighborhoods were closely packed.

Along with the inexpensive “balloon frame” house, built from two-by-fours hewn from America’s vast forests and held together with machine-made nails, the streetcar brought homeownership to the masses, an achievement unparalleled in Europe. But it also emptied the city centers of middle-class residents, creating new downtown, business-only districts surrounded by “inner city” slums. Still, in this pre-automobile age, the streetcar suburbs resembled something of the urban form. 

As Lewis Mumford wrote, “As long as the railroad stop and walking distances controlled suburban growth, the suburb had form.”

When the first Model T rolled out of the factory in 1908, it wasn’t obvious that the form of the suburb—and the city itself—was going to be radically reshaped by the automobile. But after World War I, the motor vehicle “created a booming optimism” that would come to represent a “national faith in technological progress” and a “necessity of the American middle class.” Along the way, streets that used to serve a social and recreational function in communities would be given over entirely to the car. Entranced by the “beauty of speed,” Americans would refashion the city around it:

In their headlong search for modernity through mobility, American urbanites made a decision to destroy the living environments of nineteenth-century neighborhoods by converting their gathering places into traffic jams, their playgrounds into motorways, and their shopping places into elongated parking lots. These paving decisions effectively made obsolete many of urban America’s older neighborhoods.

The streetcar had become, according to New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, “an old fashioned obstacle to progress,” and the streetcar suburb it had spawned would never be built again. By the 1920s, Henry Ford would declare that “The city is doomed. We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.” And he would provide the means for Americans to do so.

It’s the summer of the Wet Hot American Suburb here at City of Yes! Last week, we explored The Suburban Lifestyle Dream; next week, we’ll look at how the automobile and other innovations permanently changed the way we built our cities and their suburbs.