Just beyond Montmartre, the Paris suburbs began. They had nothing in common with the modern American image of a suburb. For one thing, they were more densely populated than the city itself, and possessed little in the way of sanitation, because they were outside the geographical boundaries of Parisian sanitary requirements. In a sense, they were Haussmann’s creation. He had no interest in these suburbs, but they provided a place to live for the thousands of immigrants who flocked to Paris to realize his plans: construction workers, ironworkers, stonemasons, all able to make the journey from rural France because of the train lines that reached out to the hinterlands to pick them up. Eventually they became home base for the children and grandchildren of the Haussmann brigade, most of them still working at jobs of hard physical labor, though in plastics and rubber factories rather than building boulevards. Grimy suburbs like Belleville and Ménilmontant became the ancestors of the squalid suburban housing projects north of Paris that house the North African immigrant underclass today—even though, somewhat ironically, these suburbs right on the urban border are growing more gentrified every year.
Even with eyesore suburbs on its northern fringe, Paris was a city that seemed to enchant practically every visitor who showed up. It is still enchanting them. Just a few years ago, the urbanist James Howard Kunstler exulted of Haussmann’s Paris that “the great ordering system of the street walls, the balconies, the mansard roofs, the ubiquitous white limestone facades of the buildings … all induce a tremendous sense of satisfaction that you are finally in a human habitat that completely makes sense.” A couple of decades earlier, François Loyer put it more concisely: “Second Empire Paris became one of the most coherent cities imaginable.”
ONE OF THE MOST. Some might award the prize for urban coherence to turn-of-the century Vienna, the capital dominated by one big circular boulevard, around which the social and cultural life of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire seemed to revolve.
Vienna’s Ringstrasse was a boulevard of Haussmannesque grandeur, but it was not created by anything resembling Haussmann’s methods. In the 1850s, the medieval wall that had enclosed the Hapsburg palace and the cathedral was declared obsolete and torn down, leaving an empty circle more than four miles in circumference and 160 feet wide. Emperor Franz Josef seized on the opportunity to create a unique urban street, and he fixed its dimensions and height limits, but he didn’t make rules for every window and cornice the way Haussmann did. The actual character of the Ringstrasse was determined by thousands of individual decisions, the product of the wealthy bourgeois families and minor nobility who developed it, owned it, and lived on it.
The apartment buildings that lined the street were magnificent to look at—they still are—but the boulevard itself was the magnet. It was a promenade at all hours, a place where Vienna’s industrial and commercial elite spent much of its time seeing and being seen. One impoverished young painter living in Vienna in 1910 found himself utterly transfixed by the entire scene. “For hours I could stand in front of the Opera,” he wrote, “for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of ‘The Thousand-and-One-Nights.’ ” Such was the spell that Vienna’s showplace boulevard cast over Adolf Hitler.
When the Ringstrasse opened in 1865, the imperial government and the city offered thirty-year property tax abatements to encourage the elite to live there. Probably they were unnecessary: In the Vienna of those days and in the generation to come, it simply made sense for the city’s elite to live on the Ringstrasse, or on the smaller avenues that ran alongside it. It was said that a third of the residents were aristocrats, and that the other two-thirds were the commercial rich: industrialists, bankers, rentiers of various sorts. To a certain extent, they grouped themselves by occupation: There was a “textile quarter” right off the Ringstrasse where the Jewish clothing magnates who had made late-nineteenth-century fortunes installed their modestly scaled businesses on the ground floor and their apartments above, mostly in buildings four to six stories tall, sixteen apartments to a building. Vienna was about 10 percent Jewish in 1900, but Jews made up most of the commercial elite and a majority of the city’s doctors, lawyers, and journalists. Nearly all of them lived on or near the Ringstrasse and took part in its cultural temptations.
The wide Ringstrasse that made a circle through the Vienna of a century ago was an outdoor playground and showcase for the wealthy bourgeoisie and members of the nobility. (photo credit 1.2)
Apartment life on the Ringstrasse was, by today’s standards, an unusual form of urban life. Most of the private living areas were relatively small, even in the most expensive buildings. It was the more public spaces that were large, the front rooms overlooking the street where dinners and parties could be held. And even more money was lavished on the common areas, the entrance halls with grand marble staircases and the front entrances with columns, sculptures, pediments, and friezes. Unlike in Haussmann’s Paris, the buildings had their own individuality, or perhaps quirkiness is a better word. There were Gothic apartment buildings with classical ornaments; there were Renaissance-style palazzos with Gothic ornamentation. More than a dozen families would use the same front door and stairway, and take a common pride in the decoration that surrounded them.
The residents shared one crucial value: their belief in culture and entertainment as the core of life in their community. Children grew up with an intimate knowledge of museums, theaters, and concert halls. The novelist Stefan Zweig was to write in his memoirs many years later that “the Minister-President or the richest magnate could walk the streets without anyone’s turning around, but a court actor or an opera singer was recognized by every salesgirl and every cabdriver.”
As Zweig recalled, “The first glance of the average Viennese into his morning paper was not at the events in parliament, or world affairs, but at the repertoire of the theater, which assumed so important a role in public life as hardly was possible in any other city.” Taking the whole family to a play early in the evening and then out for a late supper on the Ringstrasse was not a special treat; it was a routine part of urban living.
The Ringstrasse had a wide selection of formal restaurants for aftertheater dining, but for casual dining and sociability at all hours there was the café, an institution that turn-of-the-century Vienna developed to a level of sophistication unmatched anywhere, before or since.
The café was a place to drink strong coffee and choose from an enormous variety of pastries—apfeltorte, Sacher torte, cinnamon streusel, cremeschnitte; the Viennese had as many names for pastry as the Eskimos did for snow—but for many, it was also a place to spend much of one’s day, conversing on subjects that ranged from the upcoming weather to the state of Western civilization. Every café had its regulars, who spent three or four hours a day there, but also a steady supply of smart and talkative strangers. “It is a sort of democratic club,” Zweig wrote, “to which admission costs the small price of a cup of coffee. Upon payment of this mite every guest can sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and above all go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines.”
Not everyone in Vienna frequented the cafés, of course, or strolled down the Ringstrasse on sunny afternoons, or enjoyed the city’s embarrassment of cultural riches. As diverse as the mixture of people was at Vienna’s center, a huge proletariat resided far beyond it, across the Danube, in hastily built suburbs where the heavy industry was concentrated—the chemical factories, most especially—and immigrants, from Bohemia, Hungary, and a profusion of other places far to the east. This suburban working class was a quarter of the population of metropolitan Vienna by 1900; its members no longer worked seventy-hour weeks, as they had until the 1880s, but they worked longer and harder and in less sanitary conditions than anyone in a developed country could imagine today. In the suburb of Ottakring alone, there were thirty thousand apartments, most of them two rooms, with as many as ten adults and children sleeping inside every night. Ottakring,
Frederic Morton wrote, was a “dismal tenement landscape … barracks hidden under laundry lines and the crumbling of pseudo-classic stucco.” To the inhabitants of Ottakring, the Ringstrasse must have seemed thousands of miles away.
• • •
WHEN WE SHIFT our focus to London, the third of the great European cities of the early twentieth century, we are looking at an altogether different sort of place from Paris or Vienna. There were no great boulevards for the affluent to use as promenades; there was no Haussmann or Emperor Franz Josef to impose any plan for urban greatness. “If the British empire was the most powerful the world had ever known,” the historian Jonathan Schneer wrote, “it yet lacked an emperor whose every vision of London could become an architect’s command.”
London, like Vienna and Paris, was an enormous magnet. It brought millions of people together for reasons of economics, government, and culture. But it didn’t have a center in the way Paris or Vienna did. Until the very end of the nineteenth century it had few large apartment buildings, and no grand streets to place them on. Instead of a center, it had centers; instead of concentrating, it sprawled—as much as fifteen miles in some directions, a sea of small-scale tenements, townhouses for the wealthy, and small suburban cottages for the emerging middle class.
The closest thing to a center was an entirely commercial place, the “City of London,” barely one square mile, a short walk up from the Thames River docks, a chaotic place in which the fundamental business decisions of a global empire were made. The City was, one might say, a downtown to end all downtowns. The daytime population was close to half a million. They were mostly subway commuters: Every morning, tens of thousands of men emerged from the Bank Street Underground station, men in white shirts, white collars, and top hats. They were importers and exporters, bankers and brokers, lawyers and insurance agents. They traded Caribbean sugar, South African gold, East Asian rubber, tea from China and India. They created a pedestrian traffic jam on the narrow City lanes three times a day: at the morning and evening rush hours, and at lunchtime, when the City restaurants were so crowded that customers queued up in long lines behind those seated at the counters, waiting patiently for their turn to eat.
If the City of London lacked the iconic architectural masterpieces of Paris or Vienna, it did have its landmarks: the Stock Exchange; Lloyd’s of London; the “Mansion House,” where the lord mayor lived and presided benignly over the commercial transactions of the globe; and, a little incongruously for a money-obsessed downtown, St. Paul’s Cathedral, built by Sir Christopher Wren in the decades following the Great Fire of 1666.
The City of London was not a place for people to live in—the residential population in 1900 was tiny—but it was a place that Londoners of every class felt proud of. The Underground itself, noisy, dirty, and plastered with advertisements on every inch of available space, was a source of civic pride. The novelist Ford Madox Ford wrote of “a true Londoner, wishing on his death-bed once more to see and savour the smoke of the Underground.”
But it was the Strand, the commercial street just a short distance from the Thames, that best reflected what this part of London was all about. “The Strand of those days,” the architect H. B. Creswell wrote many years later, “was the throbbing heart of the people’s essential London. Hedged by a maze of continuous alleys and courts, the Strand was fronted by numbers of little restaurants whose windows vaunted exquisite feeding; taverns, dives, oyster and wine bars, ham and beef shops and small shops marketing a lively variety of … things all standing in rank, shoulder to shoulder, to fill the spaces between its many theaters.” Only three unpleasant qualities marred Creswell’s enjoyment of the Strand, but they were three fairly important ones: “The mud! And the noise! And the smell!”
The social geography of London in 1900 can be reported pretty accurately in one sentence: The rich lived in the west, the immigrants and the poor in the east, the growing middle class in the suburbs.
The affluent, ensconced in the West End townhouses of Mayfair and Belgravia, lived a much more private life than their counterparts in Paris or Vienna. There was no equivalent to the Ringstrasse cafés in which the bourgeoisie drank coffee and ate pastry among people they didn’t know. The City bankers and traders who lived in the West End had their own gathering places in the clubs near St. James’s Park and other fashionable parts of the city, but these were private places, closed not just to strangers and the less affluent, but to women of every social class. Even in the theaters of Covent Garden, where the classes actually did mix, there were separate entrances for the elite and the ordinary, unlike in Paris. As Donald Olsen wrote, “The leisure class in London spent more of its leisure out of public view.”
The West End encompassed diversity of a unique kind; an estimated 16 percent of its workforce consisted of servants, and they lived either in the basements of the grand townhouses or on side streets nearby. But the genuinely poor had a province of the city all to themselves, and it was a place their more fortunate fellow Londoners rarely even saw. It was the East End. In the words of the historian Tristram Hunt, “The East End became a terra incognita as unknown and as dangerous to the clubs of the West End as the Great Lakes of central Africa.”
There were nearly a million people living in London’s East End at the start of the twentieth century. It was a vast expanse of six-story tenements with as many as half a dozen people sleeping in rooms no larger than ten by twelve feet. One writer described it as a place “where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.” The journalist Will Crooks is said to have remarked that the sun that never sets on the British Empire never rises on the dark alleys of east London.
This was no welfare population; to all intents and purposes, there was no welfare. Most of these people worked. The main employers were sweatshop clothing makers, but many East End residents worked on the London docks, loading and unloading ships at the world’s greatest port, twenty-six square miles of territory along the Thames, lined with huge warehouses, some of them six stories tall and an acre across. Most of the dockworkers were casual laborers, showing up at hiring halls early each morning in hopes of finding temporary work.
When their work stints were finished, or when they weren’t fortunate enough to get any work, they returned to the East End streets, as crowded as the midcentury streets of Paris, but far more dispiriting. H. G. Wells walked the neighborhood often and described it as “a great mysterious movement of unaccountable beings.” D. H. Lawrence found it more ominous still: “some hoary massive underworld, a hoary ponderous inferno, where traffic flows through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of hell through their banks of dry rocky ash.”
Turn-of-the-century London was not unique in placing its affluent on one side of the divide and reserving another for immigrants and the working poor. What was unique about London was the rapid expansion of suburbs for the lower middle class, generated almost entirely by rail transportation.
The Cheap Trains Act of 1883 required the railroads to build “workmen’s trains.” Although it took a while, they built enormous numbers of them: More than six thousand of these trains were running by 1904. That was the year the Times of London wrote that “the habit of living at a distance from the scene of work has spread from the merchant and the clerk to the artisan. The suburb is now mainly the residence for the family of small means.”
In fact, the term “workmen’s train” was something of a misnomer. Dockworkers didn’t commute to the suburbs on them; neither did the enormous servant population that waited upon the West End elite. But the bank clerks and bookkeepers of the City found homes in the suburbs, semidetached stucco cottages with small gardens in the rear, each of them looking almost identical and the whole agglomeration stretching for miles into the countryside of Surrey, Essex, and Hertfordshire. They were commonly advertised as “villas,” even though they didn’t qualify for that status by
any definition familiar before or since.
The upper class almost universally derided these developments as sterile, if not hideous. Even those who believed in social reform saw nothing worthwhile there. H. G. Wells, who found the poverty of the East End fascinating, if sometimes grotesque, didn’t find the suburbs interesting in any way at all. He described “the little clump of shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch … and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch … a sort of fourth-estate of little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very brassy window blinds.”
Some of the critics found suburbia not only a dull place but an ominous portent of the metropolitan future. “The center of population is shifting,” Sidney Low wrote in the 1890s, “from the heart to the limbs. The life blood is pouring into the long arms of brick and mortar and cheap stucco that are feeling their way out to the Surrey moors.”
In many ways, these critics sound like their American counterparts in the 1950s, appalled by the monotony of the suburbs and oblivious to the fact that ordinary families were moving there because they considered a suburban cottage a symbol of comfort, and a step up in the world.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 4