Unburdened by the need to pay federal income tax, industrial titans from across the United States displayed their massive wealth by building lavish mansions along New York's Fifth Avenue during the 1890s. By the 1920s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second‐generation industrial families sold their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them. Blocks of what was known as “Vanderbilt Alley,” named after the children of the steamship and railroad pioneer who had built mansions in the same area, were replaced by skyscrapers and high‐end retail emporiums.
The same basic principles of skyscraper production – build it quick and large, and pack it with people – motivated the way that builders produced other kinds of urban domiciles. “Today, three‐fourths of [New York City's] people live in the tenements,” wrote the reformer Jacob Riis in his 1890 classic, How the Other Half Lives, “and the nineteenth‐century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever‐increasing multitudes to crowd them” (Riis 1914). The best‐known tenement house design of this period was the dumbbell tenement of about five or six stories tall. They came about as the result of a design contest but were generally so crowded that they did more harm than good to the people who lived in them. Four families might live on a single floor with only two bathrooms between them. Designed to let light and air into central courtyards (which explains why they were shaped like a dumbbell from above), stacked up back‐to‐back, one against the other they did neither. Widely copied, New York City actually outlawed this design for new buildings in 1901 – but the old structures remained.
Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live closer to where they worked. Wealthy people could buy space and separation from one's neighbors, while those middle‐class people who could not afford to live in suburbs lost the space they had before urbanization accelerated. To counter these unequal tendencies, New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single building and managed it themselves. Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes.
2.4.4 The Assembly Line
The farther away that people lived from central business districts, the more they needed efficient transportation. Streetcars helped, to an extent, but passenger lines that centered on downtown neighborhoods left large areas that could be occupied with housing for a growing working population, provided that these residents had their own way to get around. “I will build a car for the great multitude,” declared Henry Ford in 1908. “It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one” (Watts 2005). That car was the Model T, and it revolutionized both auto‐making and the American landscape. It also revolutionized the entire concept of American production. Ford did not worry about whether his cars would have a market. He would make a market for his cars by producing them so cheaply that nearly every American could afford one.
Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line. This particular conceptual breakthrough owed much to the “disassembly lines” that had been pioneered in the meatpacking industry during the previous century. In the same way that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before. The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work, thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of labor to its logical extreme so that workers would perform only one function in a much larger assembly process all day, every day. The applicability of these principles to the manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the history of industrialization. Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that had once seemed far removed from the automobile.
Ford built Model T's at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He improved his production methods over time (which included introducing and improving upon the assembly line) so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently. Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory where those machines were placed. Because Ford made only one car, he could employ single‐purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality. The company also used lots of other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized factories.
Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work, the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers, Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor – not by mechanizing jobs that had once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just to feed and tend to those machines. This was not fun work to do. “The chain system you have is a slave driver!” wrote an anonymous housewife based on her husband's experience working on the assembly line. “My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home and thrown himself down and won't eat his supper – so done out! Can't it be remedied”? Ford instituted an unprecedented wage of $5/day to keep workers on his assembly line, but this reward did not make the work any easier (Hounshell 1984).
Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line (actually a series of assembly lines for every part of the car), labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production became possible. Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption, since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that steadily improved the quality of the car. Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the same chassis, and owners retro‐fitted their Model T's for everything from camping to farming.
The increased number of automobiles on city streets further congested already congested downtown areas. Streetcars got blocked. Pedestrians died in gruesome traffic accidents. One of the basic requirements of having so many new cars on the roads was to improve the quality and quantity of roads. Local city planners tended to attack such problems on a case‐by‐case basis, laying pavement on well‐traveled roads and widening them when appropriate. New traffic rules, such as the first one‐way streets, appeared in an effort to alleviate these kinds of problems. Traffic control towers and traffic lights – the mechanical solution to a problem inspired by industrialization – also appeared for the first time during this era.
Cities grew when industries grew during this era. Since people had to live near where they worked (and few people lived in skyscrapers), many builders built out into undeveloped areas. If a city had annexed much of the land around it previous to these economic expansions (like Detroit), those areas became parts of a larger city. If they hadn't, much of this growth occurred in new suburbs (like Philadelphia). Chicago was so confident of further growth during this period that it built streetcar lines into vacant fields. To meet rising demand for housing, homebuilders applied industrial principles to building – using standardized parts that were themselves the result of mass production techniques. By the 1920s, buying precut mail order houses became big business.
2.4.5 The Origins of Mass Production
After 1880, mechanization made factories even more productive thanks to technological improvements. This can be traced back to Thomas Edison's labs in New Jersey, where he practiced systematic invention to exploit the great commercial opportunities that modern life created. The electrical and chemical industries formed the vanguard for the blending of science and the useful arts during this era. By the 1920s, engineers had been formally integrated into the management
