Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
Chapter 1
The Most Traversed City by Railways inThis Country, If Not the World
Philadelphia, containing one hundred and twenty-nine square miles, is, doubtless, the most traversed city by railways in this country, if not the world. It has more than 600 miles of track on its streets, upon which are carried over 100,000,000 passengers annually. These figures do not include the steam roads, with over one hundred regular stations, and an ever-increasing business. All of these lines of travel form a network of thoroughfares through the limits of the city, and extend to its furthest outskirts.1
As this excerpt from an 1887 guidebook to Philadelphia makes clear, the horse-drawn streetcars that John L. Smith road to the Centennial were just a small part of a complex urban transportation system that developed in the city during the second half of the nineteenth century (see figure 4 for a contemporary streetcar). Although the exact mix of steam trains, streetcars, and subways varied from city to city, the rapid expansion of transport facilities that happened in Victorian Philadelphia took place throughout the major cities of the Europeanized world at approximately the same time. The steel rails of these transit lines became “bourgeois corridors” that knit together the various strands of the emerging middle-class metropolis during the late nineteenth century. The vehicles were safe, usually comfortable, bourgeois spaces in the city, as were the homes, the department stores, the amusement parks, and the offices that these rail lines connected with each other.
These bourgeois corridors are what made both the reality and the perception of Philadelphia as a massive middle-class metropolis possible. For many modern students of Victorian Philadelphia, it is this interplay between reality and perception that makes the late nineteenth-century city so fascinating. The middle-class city was in part reality because there were simply so many areas spread throughout the region that were used largely (but never exclusively) by the bourgeoisie. But it was also a perception, an image held by many members of the middle class of an exclusively bourgeois city, their city. One native-born playwright recalled that “most of the people in Philadelphia are in one class. One great big stretch of middle class.” He and so many other members of the bourgeoisie missed the complex and heterogeneous nature of the city because of the seamlessness of the flow from one largely middle-class location to another along these corridors. This tension between the reality of bourgeois space in the multi-classed metropolis and the perception of the middle-class city is behind all the journeys that follow. This tension is also our key to understanding why the Victorian metropolis was so fragile: it was as much a product of the mind as it was of bricks and mortar.2
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,
