Suburban Sprawl Was a Long Time in the Making.
I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology. Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a great deal from a close reading.
Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published. He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling. The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment." That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them. Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book." Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.
I intend to focus Book Review No. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title. First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from. My elaborations will come after the jump.
First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor? Do you look in Lionel catalogs? Do you read pulp magazines? Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.
Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor? Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"? Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful? Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare? Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery? Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings. Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it? Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs." Les deplorables, an echo in time.
Like Professor Stilgoe, I concur, to research the origin, growth, and place of the suburbs prior to the railways is to produce another book. Or perhaps one of my patented mini-dissertations. We have to begin with the origin of the cities themselves. By civilization, the Romans meant "people capable of living in a city." Cities might have emerged as fortified places for the farmers to repair to during times of war; they also included whatever temples, treasuries, and academies the rulers could cobble together. They were also places for people to meet and have sex. In the temples, treasuries, and academies their ideas could meet and have sex. Thus the cities, to use the regional economics locution, were places of agglomeration economies (an amalgam of information spillovers, thicker markets, scale economies in production and infrastructure, and unified governance). But with all that population came what an earlier generation of observers called the scurry; latterly we understand that as the rat race, or rush hour. And in those days a decree went out from Cæsar that neither chariots nor wagons shall enter the city walls after curfew. For all the influence that had, see page 23. "Continuous jams of drays, carriages, streetcars, and other vehicles slowed transport times, of course, but pedestrians persisted in dashing around such stoppages, and teamsters and coachmen 'made time' on back streets, down alleys, and wherever an open vista beckoned." Indeed, it was a coachman 'making time' and running down a Paris street urchin that set the story arc in Tale of Two Cities. And have I not mentioned how crowded conurbations are conducive to germs having sex. Do you ask, dear reader, why the suburban cul-de-sac might have its appeal?Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sheer prevalence of things like gated communities, cul-de-sacs, unnecessarily curvy roads, and other street grid features that force travelers to go way out of their way ended up ranking the U.S. among the least-connected nations in the global north, rivaled only by mountainous countries like Norway and relatively car-dominated nations like Ireland.
Places like Japan and Argentina, meanwhile, ranked among the most-connected countries on the planet, even if previous sprawl studies didn't recognize them as standouts. The researchers explained that while those nations' non-gridded street patterns don't closely resemble connected communities in North America, they still offer ample cut-throughs for people outside cars, and other innovative strategies to shorten traveling distances.
For perhaps a century, though, the railroads offered a way to scurry that was less unpleasant than braving the streets and dodging the wagons that no Cæsar would proscribe. The passenger train first made it possible for the person of means to get from his grange, hall, or manor to his office or counting-house (the people who lived in castles no doubt could get the railroad to run a special train); and the later streetcars and interurbans made the streetcar neighborhoods, streetcar suburbs, and the first exurban developments possible: thus the people could provide open space for their spawn, while the offices and academies continued to be where the ideas had sex.
So, too, with the factory floor, which is the second excursion into the prehistory of the metropolitan corridor. We begin with the manufactory and mechanization, in which machine tools make any sufficiently dextrous operative the equal of the skilled craftsman in the repetitive production of stuff. Ned Ludd, recall, was a skilled textile man rendered obsolete by the power loom, and I have to wonder whether North American gun-smiths of the early nineteenth century took at all kindly to Eli Whitney's interchangeable parts making assembly of a working rifle with a few hand tools practicable. What followed led Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, to pen a dyspeptic passage that undermined the entire labor theory of value: "In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage." But I digress.
As the metropolitan corridors emerged, factories came to have fewer stories, a larger footprint, and fire-resistant construction, which might have involved building each new one at a greater distance from its neighbors than was the case of the early, water-powered textile mills and metal works. That construction, Professor Stilgoe argues, reflected in part the imperatives of insurers, page 85. "Slow-burning construction techniques imperceptibly began the industrial flight from the city. Suburban land was abundant, cheap [meaning vacant and well away from the peak of the rent gradient -- Ed.] and lightly taxed; that insurance companies implicitly mandated it as the only safe manufacturing location made it even more attractive." As a side consequence, improvements in refrigeration and food-handling made possible the displacement of city milk, which tasted about as good as the scraps made available to city cows, with farm-fresh milk from cows fed a curated diet, and the disappearance of city cows might have spared city centers from the apocryphal consequences of an ill-timed lantern kicked over.
In that dynamic, though, we see the undoing of the metropolitan corridor. Because it emerged along the railroads, it shared with its riverine forebears a relatively rigid structure. By 1983, Metropolitan Corridor could observe, page 333, "After 1910, and certainly after 1920, the nation learned that prosperity might come to a region lacking in widespread rail service, dependent on the automobile. No longer did a scenic postcard emphasize a railroad line or depot; by 1930, at least east of the Mississippi River, it emphasized a well-graded, often paved road. No longer did an absence of rails indicate poverty." So it often is with creative destruction: the timberlands of New England, farmland less productive than the forests and fields of the Upper Lakes and the Northern Plains, lost population as the farmers and loggers pursued those opportunities, and the railroads built elsewhere, and yet, when your property is vacant and well away from the peak of the rent gradient, the entrepreneurs will show up. "The wildered and rediscovered rural Northeast, once beyond the trains and trolleys of the metropolitan corridor and isolated from "live-wire" life, became the proving ground of the automobile, the testing place of a sprawling, irregular pattern of real estate development, the automobile exurb." I'll save for another day how the attempt of zoning boards to regularize the pattern went, to borrow from the humanities, from the classical to the baroque to full-on Dadaism, within a generation.
Regional economics is always about balancing centrifugal and centripetal forces, isn't it? So it was with the river towns bypassed by the railroads, so it was with the frontier towns that the railroads didn't build to, so it was with much of the railroad-based metropolitan corridor by the early 1980s, so it might be with the shopping malls that were still all the rage in the early 1980s, and it remains to be seen what will come of the edge cities (does anybody even write about edge cities any more?) and in the ongoing tussles over gentrification and congestion pricing in densely populated cities we see precisely the tensions Romans dealt with two millennia ago.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published. He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling. The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment." That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them. Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book." Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.
I intend to focus Book Review No. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title. First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from. My elaborations will come after the jump.
First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor? Do you look in Lionel catalogs? Do you read pulp magazines? Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.
Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor? Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"? Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful? Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare? Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery? Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings. Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it? Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs." Les deplorables, an echo in time.
Like Professor Stilgoe, I concur, to research the origin, growth, and place of the suburbs prior to the railways is to produce another book. Or perhaps one of my patented mini-dissertations. We have to begin with the origin of the cities themselves. By civilization, the Romans meant "people capable of living in a city." Cities might have emerged as fortified places for the farmers to repair to during times of war; they also included whatever temples, treasuries, and academies the rulers could cobble together. They were also places for people to meet and have sex. In the temples, treasuries, and academies their ideas could meet and have sex. Thus the cities, to use the regional economics locution, were places of agglomeration economies (an amalgam of information spillovers, thicker markets, scale economies in production and infrastructure, and unified governance). But with all that population came what an earlier generation of observers called the scurry; latterly we understand that as the rat race, or rush hour. And in those days a decree went out from Cæsar that neither chariots nor wagons shall enter the city walls after curfew. For all the influence that had, see page 23. "Continuous jams of drays, carriages, streetcars, and other vehicles slowed transport times, of course, but pedestrians persisted in dashing around such stoppages, and teamsters and coachmen 'made time' on back streets, down alleys, and wherever an open vista beckoned." Indeed, it was a coachman 'making time' and running down a Paris street urchin that set the story arc in Tale of Two Cities. And have I not mentioned how crowded conurbations are conducive to germs having sex. Do you ask, dear reader, why the suburban cul-de-sac might have its appeal?Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sheer prevalence of things like gated communities, cul-de-sacs, unnecessarily curvy roads, and other street grid features that force travelers to go way out of their way ended up ranking the U.S. among the least-connected nations in the global north, rivaled only by mountainous countries like Norway and relatively car-dominated nations like Ireland.
Places like Japan and Argentina, meanwhile, ranked among the most-connected countries on the planet, even if previous sprawl studies didn't recognize them as standouts. The researchers explained that while those nations' non-gridded street patterns don't closely resemble connected communities in North America, they still offer ample cut-throughs for people outside cars, and other innovative strategies to shorten traveling distances.
For perhaps a century, though, the railroads offered a way to scurry that was less unpleasant than braving the streets and dodging the wagons that no Cæsar would proscribe. The passenger train first made it possible for the person of means to get from his grange, hall, or manor to his office or counting-house (the people who lived in castles no doubt could get the railroad to run a special train); and the later streetcars and interurbans made the streetcar neighborhoods, streetcar suburbs, and the first exurban developments possible: thus the people could provide open space for their spawn, while the offices and academies continued to be where the ideas had sex.
So, too, with the factory floor, which is the second excursion into the prehistory of the metropolitan corridor. We begin with the manufactory and mechanization, in which machine tools make any sufficiently dextrous operative the equal of the skilled craftsman in the repetitive production of stuff. Ned Ludd, recall, was a skilled textile man rendered obsolete by the power loom, and I have to wonder whether North American gun-smiths of the early nineteenth century took at all kindly to Eli Whitney's interchangeable parts making assembly of a working rifle with a few hand tools practicable. What followed led Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, to pen a dyspeptic passage that undermined the entire labor theory of value: "In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage." But I digress.
As the metropolitan corridors emerged, factories came to have fewer stories, a larger footprint, and fire-resistant construction, which might have involved building each new one at a greater distance from its neighbors than was the case of the early, water-powered textile mills and metal works. That construction, Professor Stilgoe argues, reflected in part the imperatives of insurers, page 85. "Slow-burning construction techniques imperceptibly began the industrial flight from the city. Suburban land was abundant, cheap [meaning vacant and well away from the peak of the rent gradient -- Ed.] and lightly taxed; that insurance companies implicitly mandated it as the only safe manufacturing location made it even more attractive." As a side consequence, improvements in refrigeration and food-handling made possible the displacement of city milk, which tasted about as good as the scraps made available to city cows, with farm-fresh milk from cows fed a curated diet, and the disappearance of city cows might have spared city centers from the apocryphal consequences of an ill-timed lantern kicked over.
In that dynamic, though, we see the undoing of the metropolitan corridor. Because it emerged along the railroads, it shared with its riverine forebears a relatively rigid structure. By 1983, Metropolitan Corridor could observe, page 333, "After 1910, and certainly after 1920, the nation learned that prosperity might come to a region lacking in widespread rail service, dependent on the automobile. No longer did a scenic postcard emphasize a railroad line or depot; by 1930, at least east of the Mississippi River, it emphasized a well-graded, often paved road. No longer did an absence of rails indicate poverty." So it often is with creative destruction: the timberlands of New England, farmland less productive than the forests and fields of the Upper Lakes and the Northern Plains, lost population as the farmers and loggers pursued those opportunities, and the railroads built elsewhere, and yet, when your property is vacant and well away from the peak of the rent gradient, the entrepreneurs will show up. "The wildered and rediscovered rural Northeast, once beyond the trains and trolleys of the metropolitan corridor and isolated from "live-wire" life, became the proving ground of the automobile, the testing place of a sprawling, irregular pattern of real estate development, the automobile exurb." I'll save for another day how the attempt of zoning boards to regularize the pattern went, to borrow from the humanities, from the classical to the baroque to full-on Dadaism, within a generation.
Regional economics is always about balancing centrifugal and centripetal forces, isn't it? So it was with the river towns bypassed by the railroads, so it was with the frontier towns that the railroads didn't build to, so it was with much of the railroad-based metropolitan corridor by the early 1980s, so it might be with the shopping malls that were still all the rage in the early 1980s, and it remains to be seen what will come of the edge cities (does anybody even write about edge cities any more?) and in the ongoing tussles over gentrification and congestion pricing in densely populated cities we see precisely the tensions Romans dealt with two millennia ago.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)