Streetcar Suburbs: The Process Of Growth In Boston, 1870-1900
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the decades following the Civil War, Boston underwent a dramatic transformation — one powered not by industry alone, but by the iron rails and electric cables of the streetcar — and Sam B. Warner Jr.'s Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 meticulously chronicles how this technological revolution reshaped the spatial and social fabric of an American metropolis. Drawing on rich archival data, Warner details the rapid suburbanization of Boston's outer neighborhoods, illustrating how the expansion of transit lines enabled tens of thousands of middle- and working-class families to abandon the congested inner city for newly platted residential communities in Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester. Warner's work stands as a landmark contribution to American urban history, presenting a rigorous yet accessible argument that private enterprise — rather than municipal planning — dictated the chaotic, fragmented pattern of suburban growth that would come to define twentieth-century American cities. His analytical precision is matched by a vivid narrative style that brings to life the speculative builders, streetcar entrepreneurs, and ordinary homeowners who collectively authored this urban revolution. A foundational text in urban studies and social history, Streetcar Suburbs leaves the reader questioning whether the city we inherited was ever truly designed — or simply accumulated.
Author: Sam B. Warner, Jr.
Format: Paperback
Published: 1970, Atheneum (Originally published by Harvard University Press and the M.I.T. Press)
Genre: American history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the decades following the Civil War, Boston underwent a dramatic transformation — one powered not by industry alone, but by the iron rails and electric cables of the streetcar — and Sam B. Warner Jr.'s Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 meticulously chronicles how this technological revolution reshaped the spatial and social fabric of an American metropolis. Drawing on rich archival data, Warner details the rapid suburbanization of Boston's outer neighborhoods, illustrating how the expansion of transit lines enabled tens of thousands of middle- and working-class families to abandon the congested inner city for newly platted residential communities in Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester. Warner's work stands as a landmark contribution to American urban history, presenting a rigorous yet accessible argument that private enterprise — rather than municipal planning — dictated the chaotic, fragmented pattern of suburban growth that would come to define twentieth-century American cities. His analytical precision is matched by a vivid narrative style that brings to life the speculative builders, streetcar entrepreneurs, and ordinary homeowners who collectively authored this urban revolution. A foundational text in urban studies and social history, Streetcar Suburbs leaves the reader questioning whether the city we inherited was ever truly designed — or simply accumulated.