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The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth
This award-winning book charts the unfolding, from the Revolutionary War to the Great Depression, of the American tradition of city building and city living, using Philadelphia as a resonant example.
288 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 1987
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About the author
Sam Bass Warner, Jr.
16 books3 followersSam Bass Warner, Jr., is Visiting Professor of Urban History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 13, 2017
Read this a while ago, but reread it for comps.
Warner argued that failure of American cities is that they are ruled by privatism, where the goal of the city is to be a community of money makers, and that private decisions have dominated urban development, as opposed to democratic consensus. Warner believes the failure of cities to provide a hospitable atmosphere for the majority of its inhabitants, with racial integration, access to medical care, full employment, and quality education, is due to this privatism.
He uses Philadelphia as his case study, looking at three different periods of Philadelphia’s development: 1) 1770-80, as Colonial Town, where committees of merchants ran the city very loosely and the city was an open society of commerce, though often failed to respond to crisises like food shortages during the war; 2) 1830-60, the Big City, which saw the old ruling structure as inadequate, as the townships of the county were not connected to Philadelphia’s waterworks projects, as well as increasingly violent riots between different ethnicities of the townships, especially in South Philadelphia, cholera outbreaks at the time, and poor education. This caused consolidation and building of municipal city government, but industrialization was at the foreground of the building of Philadelphia as it was swept up with immigrants rapidly. Just after the Civil War, the Republican Party machine came to power, which ruled Philadelphia for 90 years and largely kept the city unambitious and tampered to privatism; 1920-30, or industrial metropolis, in which the city settled into patterns of familiarity, with working class white and black ghettos in South Philadelphia, working to middle class neighborhoods in the North and Northwest, the “Commuter Suburb” of West Philadelphia, and the wealth in suburbs just beyond the city. Suburbanization was beginning to set it, slowly, as the city reached nearly 3 million residents. The book is dated, coming out in the early 1960s, during the height of change of Philadelphia and white flight, as the middle class and some of the white working class followed the upper class to the suburbs, but is still useful for understanding the history of a large old American city. Philadelphia’s real power seems to remain with the Chamber of Commerce and its privatism rather than City Hall.
Key Themes and Concepts
-4 Processes of urbanization: 1) growth of population 2) structure of occupations resulting from the course of industrialization 3) social geography of the city in shifting residentialization 4) group organization work. These interaction produced different social and physical structures in each Philadelphia, colonial, big city, and industrial metropolis.
-Core of Warner’s work is in studies of ethnic, occupational, residential clustering of Philadelphia.
-Progressive history, in that Warner sees the city as stalling in what they should be.
Warner argued that failure of American cities is that they are ruled by privatism, where the goal of the city is to be a community of money makers, and that private decisions have dominated urban development, as opposed to democratic consensus. Warner believes the failure of cities to provide a hospitable atmosphere for the majority of its inhabitants, with racial integration, access to medical care, full employment, and quality education, is due to this privatism.
He uses Philadelphia as his case study, looking at three different periods of Philadelphia’s development: 1) 1770-80, as Colonial Town, where committees of merchants ran the city very loosely and the city was an open society of commerce, though often failed to respond to crisises like food shortages during the war; 2) 1830-60, the Big City, which saw the old ruling structure as inadequate, as the townships of the county were not connected to Philadelphia’s waterworks projects, as well as increasingly violent riots between different ethnicities of the townships, especially in South Philadelphia, cholera outbreaks at the time, and poor education. This caused consolidation and building of municipal city government, but industrialization was at the foreground of the building of Philadelphia as it was swept up with immigrants rapidly. Just after the Civil War, the Republican Party machine came to power, which ruled Philadelphia for 90 years and largely kept the city unambitious and tampered to privatism; 1920-30, or industrial metropolis, in which the city settled into patterns of familiarity, with working class white and black ghettos in South Philadelphia, working to middle class neighborhoods in the North and Northwest, the “Commuter Suburb” of West Philadelphia, and the wealth in suburbs just beyond the city. Suburbanization was beginning to set it, slowly, as the city reached nearly 3 million residents. The book is dated, coming out in the early 1960s, during the height of change of Philadelphia and white flight, as the middle class and some of the white working class followed the upper class to the suburbs, but is still useful for understanding the history of a large old American city. Philadelphia’s real power seems to remain with the Chamber of Commerce and its privatism rather than City Hall.
Key Themes and Concepts
-4 Processes of urbanization: 1) growth of population 2) structure of occupations resulting from the course of industrialization 3) social geography of the city in shifting residentialization 4) group organization work. These interaction produced different social and physical structures in each Philadelphia, colonial, big city, and industrial metropolis.
-Core of Warner’s work is in studies of ethnic, occupational, residential clustering of Philadelphia.
-Progressive history, in that Warner sees the city as stalling in what they should be.
July 13, 2017
While this book is dated ( published 1987), it provides an in-depth look at three periods in the history of Philadelphia: 1770-1780; 1840-1850, and 1920-1930. The book's overall purpose is to illustrate how "privatism ( defined as a focus on individual advancement and gaining of wealth over against or more community-minded focus) undermined the health development of cities like Philadelphia. While he provides many interesting insights into the life of city during these periods, his larger purpose is to use Philly as a prototype of how most American cities developed. However, what I enjoyed was his use of original sources to tell the story of these three periods. One can see the issues in these periods re-emergent today in different forms
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews