LITMIR.BIZ

Figure 4. The intersection of Broad Street with Germantown and Erie Avenues in 1883. Courtesy of the Print and Picture Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.

      Because these corridors were a part of the bourgeois city, middle-class women could use them on largely equal terms with their male counterparts to exploit the many resources of the metropolis. Bourgeois women traveled alone by day and night, no longer needing male escorts. The same cars that carried John L. Smith also took Eliza N. Smith of West Philadelphia (no relation) and her daughters throughout the region. Whether to Wanamaker’s for shopping, various schools for work, the Witherspoon Building for charity board meetings, or Delaware County for flowers, the female Smiths were frequent users of the bourgeois corridors. Without the freedom of movement brought about by the trains and the streetcars, many largely female spaces in the city—like the large department stores—could not have developed as they did.³

      What set the bourgeois tone of these steel corridors in the late nineteenth century was unregulated capitalism. Throughout most of the Victorian period, the steam and street railways in Philadelphia (and the rest of the United States) were free to operate their services and to set their fares largely as they chose. Unlike in Britain, where the state-mandated parliamentary and workmen’s trains meant members of the working classes had some access to the rail facilities, the high charges of most American companies essentially limited everyday ridership on the trains and streetcars to the bourgeoisie and above.⁴

      After the Centennial year, this growing array of transportation options helped middle-class Philadelphians remake their mental maps of the city and its region. How individuals chose to use those options—separate home from work, shop at a big dry goods store downtown rather than a smaller one closer to home—is what shaped Philadelphia’s new spatial order. Trains and streetcars did not dictate the rationalization of Victorian Philadelphia; their middle-class riders did. They used the transport facilities to develop distinctly middle-class locations in and around the metropolis, and these places reflected bourgeois culture. Urban geography, as represented by both city blocks and larger tracts, increasingly became specialized in use because bourgeois women and men slowly (and largely unconsciously) created a taxonomy of space for their city. Because this new Philadelphia of specialized spaces was created by hundreds of thousands of individual decisions, tracing its roots can be difficult. But what is so striking about the Victorian bourgeoisie’s world is that in so short a time it became so rationally classified largely without coercive governmental action. This suggests that there was shared belief behind all these individual decisions. This faith in rational classification became commonplace throughout middle-class society, and by the new century bourgeois Philadelphians had both mentally and physically transformed the texture of their city’s landscape and the rhythms of their lives through their use of money and technology in accordance with this sentiment.⁵

      This comprehensive reconstruction along rational lines of “their” Philadelphia by the late nineteenth-century middle class represented an unprecedented intellectual victory over the physical world. Although there had been previous attempts at imposing order on smaller parts of the urban fabric, from like-minded firms clustering together to noxious producers moving away from those likely to complain, none were as impressive as that undertaken by the women and men of the middle class in the late nineteenth century. Not only did bourgeois Philadelphia encompass a vast region but it happened so subtly, or perhaps so “naturally” to the Victorians, that most contemporaries failed to connect the changes. Journalists, guidebook authors, and diarists all noted the individual transformations in the city—the tall buildings, the trolleys, the residential neighborhoods, and the like—but failed to see the underlying relationships. By the start of the twentieth century, the collective efforts of the Victorian middle class had created a detailed classification of space in the metropolis that would rival any present-day land use plan. To find this map, however, a scholar cannot go to City Hall, for formal zoning regulation would not come to Philadelphia until the 1930s, but must instead turn to the written words left behind in numerous diaries and letters. By following these bourgeois men and women as they went about their metropolis, the contour of the bourgeois city—where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place—slowly begins to appear through the rituals of everyday life.

      Before we can understand the transportation dynamics of Victorian Philadelphia, we must consider a bit of its history. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia (along with the other major cities of the Westernized world) had been a “walking city” for all but the elite. Only a very small percentage of the population could afford the horse and carriage that allowed for a significant separation of home from work. In 1850 the average worker lived within six-tenths of a mile of his or her workplace. The only modes of urban transport then available were omnibuses and a small number of steam railroad local trains. Both were relatively expensive and neither offered extensive service.⁶

      In 1854, the Pennsylvania legislature took the first step toward creating the modern metropolis when it merged Philadelphia county (and its many political subdivisions) into the city. Although governmental fiat could create a unified political entity, it could not alter social reality. For years Philadelphia would continue to function as a series of large and small towns rather than as a single community because there was no form of reliable, inexpensive transport available. Two transportation changes occurred following the creation of the expanded city in 1854 that allowed for its effective consolidation by 1876: increased local train service and the development of the horse-drawn streetcar. Neither was a great technological leap forward, but both helped to transform the geography of the city for those who could afford their fares: the middle class and above.⁷

      Since the opening in 1832 of the city’s first steam passenger railway company, technological change had been evolutionary—rather than revolutionary—in the railroad industry. Steam locomotives became bigger and more powerful, passenger coaches longer and more comfortable, and track heavier and more durable, but the basic technology remained largely unchanged. The importance of the steam passenger railway to intracity transportation grew slowly (and unevenly) during the Victorian age, but by the 1880s Philadelphia had a large network of lines that both served the city and connected the metropolis with its hinterland in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.⁸

      Far more important for the city was the introduction of horse-drawn streetcars in 1858. Entrepreneurs combined two existing technologies—the body and motive power of the omnibuses and the track of the railroads—to create a new form of transport. The rails gave a smoother ride for passengers than the rough, stone-paved streets and the combination of metal wheels on metal rails made for less friction so the horses could both haul greater loads and accelerate faster. These two advantages helped to ensure the rapid decline of omnibus usage on any route with enough patronage to justify the higher capital investment of laying the rails for the streetcars. By 1880, horse-drawn street railways served almost all populated areas within the city limits and carried 99 million passengers annually.⁹

      By the 1880s, middle-class Philadelphians had a more than adequate system of horse-drawn streetcars and steam-hauled commuter trains to serve their transportation needs in both the booming metropolis and its expanding hinterland in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The lines of the various privately owned streetcar companies occupied every major street (and many minor ones) in Center City and extended southward, westward, and northward from the original urban core along the Delaware River into the adjoining

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