Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings. . . . Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before. —EDWARD BELLAMY, Looking Backward (1888) By the late nineteenth century, American cities were growing at a vertigo-inducing pace. In 1850, around 30,000 people lived in Chicago; by 1870, there were 300,000. New York’s 1875 population of just under 1 million made it the world’s third-largest city; over the next twenty-five years, that population would double.1 Civic activists grew concerned, not merely due to this population explosion but also because of the accompanying, very visible division of society into extremes of wealth and poverty. “The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer in the city than elsewhere,” wrote Reverend Josiah Strong in Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, an 1885 pamphlet that sold 130,000 copies among concerned churchgoers.
