Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

1

ENERGY

DAVID E. NYE

JUST FIVE MOMENTS provide a capsule history of the role of energy in American urban transportation. Imagine, first, an image of late nineteenth-century Broadway, in New York City, with parallel tracks, on one of which is an electric streetcar and on the other a horse-drawn car. The second moment is on a busy New York street corner, where cars, pedestrians, and horse-drawn vehicles again share the same space. The third moment leaps three generations forward, to an enormous freeway interchange in Los Angeles. The fourth instance suggests roads not taken: instead of highway systems, cities might have developed mass transit of various kinds, including aerial tramways such as one that operates in Portland, Oregon. Finally, the fifth instance is a high-speed rail station design for Anaheim, California, the station itself powered by solar energy.

These five moments together propose a narrative. They move from the densely populated urban city of the Progressive era to the urban sprawl of the present, from collective transport to the individualistic automobile to the current search for mass transit alternatives. In a very real sense, this narrative and these spaces are central to any analysis of the American city’s development since circa 1880. But the story is, of course, far richer than this initial sketch might suggest. I want to embroider on these examples, to write what Clifford Geertz would call a thick description of the energies and processes just described. This analysis relies on the study of American energy regimes laid out in my Consuming Power (1998), where I argued for the primacy of consumer demand rather than taking the usual focus on the industries of supply (coal, oil, gas, etc.) in understanding the path of U.S. development, an argument that rejects technological determinism. It may feel as though technical systems automatically drive events, but the histories of energy and of transportation are better understood as the technological momentum of systems put in place at an earlier time.¹ Thus the average American citizen may feel forced to own a car in order to live an ordinary life, but the car itself did not cause this state of affairs. Rather, the transportation choices made generations ago have been embedded in society and are difficult to change. The five historical examples discussed below are highly suggestive when seen in this light, and taken together, they raise two questions. Will the United States overcome the technological momentum of the automobile and redevelop its central cities? Will the United States recover the shared social spaces that once were so common in its urban life?

Returning to the opening example, you would see that even a street as important as Broadway was not paved with asphalt, but with wood, at the turn of the century. This was by no means unusual. New York streets first started to be macadamized and then asphalted in the 1870s. Yet it took decades for all the streets to be paved, even in New York. Portland cement roads were also being built after 1894. Sanitary reformers promoted these efforts in order to reduce the mud, dust, and dried horse manure. Pressure to pave the roads also came from bicycle enthusiasts, who numbered over one million by 1900. In 1905, when there were still few automobiles, 161,000 miles of road had been paved, largely inside cities and between the most important centers. During these years, as Clay McShane has shown,² the definition of what the street was to be used for remained an issue, and city residents struggled to retain the use of the street for activities other than transportation. In residential areas, homeowners regarded the street as an extension of shared community space, where children might play or activities be held. The street was less an artery of transportation than it was a space for the occasional commerce of peddlers and wagons that sold and delivered a wide range of goods, including ice, coal, fish, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables, and ice cream. In more commercial districts, the street was crowded with people, not vehicles. Stores expanded onto the sidewalks, and peddlers took up part of the street. The role of the street was not merely to move traffic. It had traditionally been part of the commons, and it was not given up to the dominance of vehicles without dissent. After recovering the nineteenth-century sense of the street, one can look at it with fresh eyes. By contrast, the point of view of many modern photographs is either looking down the street as though one were in a vehicle maneuvering through traffic or gazing out the car window at a passing scene. That point of view is ideological: it suggests the functionalist view of roads, the Robert Moses conception of the city. In contrast, of course, stands Jane Jacobs, with her demand that urban spaces be multifunctional, emphasizing the local community, not the passing motorists.

In 1900, the public had long been accustomed to going into the street in order to board horse cars and, later, streetcars. The horse car had been an urban institution for several generations. Introduced in 1832 in New York, by 1860, horse cars in New York alone carried 45 million passengers a year. They gave a smoother ride on the rails than the omnibus provided on cobblestones. They made possible the expansion of the walking city and roughly doubled the radius of the city’s functional size. Yet horses smelled, attracted flies, and produced tons of manure that were left on the streets.³ Horse cars also were too slow for the burgeoning cities of the late nineteenth century. Electric trolleys were faster and cleaner.⁴ They could have interior lights in the evenings and better heating systems in winter. During the 1880s, the advantages were so clear and the potential profits so palpable that many inventors worked on developing electric streetcars. The first to overcome the technical difficulties was Frank Sprague, in 1887. He developed a system that was reliable and that could handle steep grades. When he showed that it worked in practice in hilly Richmond, Virginia, the Sprague system spread rapidly to all parts of the United States. In just three years, two hundred cities had ordered electric railways, 90 percent of them based on Sprague’s patents. His system was the first with a multiple unit control system, in which every car had its own motor. A single car could run by itself or larger trains could be assembled of any length desired. Horse cars disappeared all over the United States, and one of the last lines to close, according to the New York Times, shut down in 1917.⁵

However, in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Street Railway still ran cable cars, which since 1893 had carried passengers up Broadway to 51st Street, eventually reaching 109th Street. Cable cars, as the name suggests, were pulled by cables buried in the street. A slit ran between the rails, and beneath it a wire cable was moving at all times. When the driver wanted to stop, he disengaged the gripper from the cable, and it halted abruptly. When he wanted to start, the gripper took hold of the cable again and the car jerked forward. The trench and cable system was expensive, costing typically $57,000 dollars a mile and double that for double track. A large stream-driven powerhouse also was required, because fully 80 percent of what it pulled was the weight of the steel cable, not the cars. The Metropolitan Street Railway powerhouse lay roughly in the middle of the line at 50th Street and 7th Avenue. The total cost of such a system was considerably higher than an electrical trolley system, and no street railway ever decided to abandon the electrics for a cable system. The substitution went the other way, and the cable systems only survived where the hills were too steep for a trolley car to climb, as in San Francisco.

Even though this cable car system was new in 1893, within a decade the technology was obviously expensive and outmoded. Yet for a brief time, four technologies of urban transportation (driven by muscle, steam [the cable], electric motors, and gasoline engines) overlapped in turn-of-the-century America. This can be vividly seen in the 1897 photograph of a street scene in Philadelphia that precedes this chapter. Pedestrians, horses, wagons, and streetcars all were in the street together, in what reformers increasingly saw as a dangerous mix.

Streets were still social spaces at this time. Paul Strand once placed his camera above and at an angle to an intersection in New York and took a photograph not from a driver’s point of view but from that of a resident looking out a second-floor window. He used strong contrast that made the faces into profiles or cast them into darkness. The people in this way were rendered as representative urbanites, eliminating their individuality. It is hard to assign class status or ethnic origins to almost anyone on this street. From this vantage point, the passing crowd and the bustle of traffic formed a lively scene that was engaging to look at, one that beckoned one to come out and join the urban procession. Indeed, at the time, walking in the city was considered a pleasure, and it was often the subject of magazine articles. Pedestrians constantly ventured into the street, which they shared with the traffic. In this setting, one could buy a newspaper, take a stroll while smoking a pipe, or fall into conversation.

These first two examples, of muscle and technological energy, together suggest how forms of movement might be used to construct quite different urban formations. Muscle power, whether human or equine, was the basis of city life, transportation, and commerce during most of the nineteenth century. This was a compact, densely populated, horizontal city. The cable car and electric streetcar could move much faster than a horse car, and a subway or elevated line tripled the distance passengers could travel in the same time as a horse car. This had the effect of expanding the city geometrically. Moreover, the same electrical motors that drove streetcars were harnessed to elevators, making skyscrapers more practical, especially as electricity could also pump a water supply to the upper floors, provide lighting and ventilation, and facilitate the flow of messages via telephone and telegraph. In short, the vertical city emerged simultaneously with the streetcar, which facilitated moving multitudes in and out of city centers. The early electrical city was a dense, layered public space that extended above and below ground. It was accessible to millions of pedestrians, who dominated its core. This was the city of nightclubs, dance halls, enormous department stores, grand hotels, chophouses, and specialized boutiques. Around 1920, it was epitomized by New York and Chicago and aspired to by most other American cities. People thronged to this urban space, as described by David Nasaw in Going Out.⁶ There were some variations. For example, Boston resisted the skyscraper but built one of the earliest subways, and Philadelphia clung to its streetcars and had fewer early skyscrapers.

But in every American city, the pressure of multitudes in the center raised the level of commerce and forced a rationalization of the street. Paved with asphalt, regulated by the new traffic lights, and increasingly given over to transportation alone, the pedestrian was compensated by the creation of new venues such as department stores, hotel lobbies, and grand railway stations, as well as by new vistas seen from the observation decks of the skyscrapers, the new bridges, the elevated trains, and the sidewalks through the deepening canyons of the streets. Many of the towers had appeared on or near Broadway, notably the Flatiron Building (1903), the Singer Tower (1907), and the Woolworth Building (1913). Broadway had long been the premier shopping street in New York, but increasingly it also served as the major corridor connecting Times Square and the Wall Street area.

Jump forward a century and across the continent to Los Angeles. Its freeway system reaches a frenzied apotheosis at the junction of Routes 110 and 105. From a helicopter, the multiple overpasses may seem almost a vast, multilayered sculpture. Having recently driven through this spot, however, I can attest that no aerial photograph suggests the driver’s experience of this site: the traffic is often congested, and getting in the wrong lane can mean a forced exit and a long struggle to get back on the freeway again. Reyner Banham argued that Los Angeles had four ecologies, one of which he named autopia. The street, which used to be a form of commons where all citizens met and which was not only for transportation but also for social encounters, shopping, and casual exercise, had become a limited and encapsulated ecology all its own. Banham concluded that the actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes. It demanded a high level of attentiveness and extreme concentration that seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical.⁷ This state of mind is not that of reverie but of an intensive absorption in continual movement that leaves no time or spare mental energy for contemplation. The freeway driver is constantly trying to avoid an accident and is always in a state of imminent danger. One false move, one careless fellow driver, one blowout or one moment of inattention, can lead to maiming or death. Angelenos, Banham found, had to make an almost total surrender of personal freedom for most of the journey, during which they are immersed in an incredibly demanding man/machine system.⁸ All over the United States, the new Interstates abolished the immediacy of the neighborhood street or the many distractions of the older highways. The driver on the interstate was not a flaneur who could drop into myriad establishments on a whim. The limited-access highway increased the normal speed in good part by creating a homogeneous environment that did not draw attention to itself, one that was often landscaped into sameness and that was therefore not distracting. Indeed, the problem for the driver on an interstate was boredom, potentially leading to inattention.

In Los Angeles, such a road system was built in an area that had remained largely rural until the twentieth century but then suddenly discovered oil literally beneath its feet. By 1910, the city was covered with oil derricks. Add the mass production of automobiles that began in 1913, and apparently all the forces were at work to produce a sprawling urban landscape where half of all the space could be devoted to automobiles. Yet Los Angeles in the early decades of the twentieth century had a vast and profitable trolley and interurban system. It made the fortune of Henry Huntington, who not only controlled the transportation system but also bought real estate in the areas where he planned to expand service. (The fortune that Huntington made through control of streetcars made possible the Huntington Library.) The arrival of the streetcar raised land values, but once the lots had been sold, the trolley system was a less attractive investment. As in most of the United States, streetcars were quite profitable between about 1895 and 1920 but then rapidly lost their attraction as investments. By the 1930s, few lines could compete profitably with the automobile, and the hard-pressed local governments of the Great Depression did not try to save them.

Los Angeles grew from fewer than a hundred thousand people in 1900 to the second largest urban population in the United States a century later. New York City’s population density is more than three times as great as that of Los Angeles. But Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas sprawl far more, and they have less than half the population density of Los Angeles. None has more than forty-one hundred persons per square mile, and most considerably fewer. Were New York as thinly populated as Phoenix, it would have to expand from 299 to 2900 square miles.⁹ The scale of this expansion measures the difference that the gas and oil energy regime made in the material culture of newer cities, and it also suggests the enormous technological momentum of that energy regime in the American West, the most urban of all U.S. regions.

And yet the sprawling Los Angeles freeways were not inevitable. Portland, Oregon, was growing into a city at precisely the same time, but it chose quite a different urban form. In part this can be explained by the city’s restricted location in a river valley that enforced more density than in some other western cities. Portland had a brief period of horse cars, from 1874 until 1889, when it opened its first electric streetcar system. This operated until replaced by buses in 1940, but streetcars and light rail were reintroduced starting in 1982.

Portland rejected the blandishments of the Federal Interstate Highway Program, which, starting in 1955, offered cities 90 percent of the construction costs of limited-access highways. As a result, Portland retained a more integrated downtown area and kept alive its hotels, shops, and cultural life. The decision not to build interstate highways through the city meant, among many other things, that it sustained one of the largest and finest bookstores in the United States, Powells. Portland kept its inner city vibrant during the last decades of the twentieth century, when most urban centers were collapsing. Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago, for example, all built interstates to varying degrees, and by 1970, all lost at least 22 percent of their population to the suburbs. Detroit and St. Louis embraced interstates and lost half of their population in the same period. In contrast, Portland’s population grew by more than 30 percent. There were other factors that affected population growth in each of these cities, but tearing down many houses and slashing neighborhoods in half with six-lane expressways was an almost military assault on them. The new roads brought noise and pollution that made cities less desirable places to live. In contrast, Portland not only installed an aerial tramway but also, in the 1980s, built (and later expanded) a light-rail system to serve its suburbs. It was the first U.S. city to complete a modern streetcar system, opened in 2001. The streetcar service runs every thirteen minutes, or nine times during a two-hour period. Moreover, in the central city, the streetcar is free.

The aerial tramway runs between the university hospital on the ridge above Portland down to an expansion wing at river level.¹⁰ There was no room for expansion on the ridge, and the two sites are thirty-three hundred feet apart, with one more than five hundred feet higher than the other. The hospital and the city together funded the tramway as a practical link between the two facilities. Travel takes only three minutes between them, with ten departures an hour in each direction. The ride has also proven popular with tourists and local residents, and each car can carry up to seventy-nine people, or the equivalent of twenty busloads of people every hour in each direction. It is also fast, taking a direct route that no bus could replicate down the steep hillside. Moreover, bicycles can be taken on board, and the Portland streetcar line stops just opposite the lower tram entrance, making it a viable link for commuters.

There is no technological reason why streetcars, tramways, monorails, and other innovative solutions are not more common in American cities. Nor is economics necessarily the explanation for the predominance of roads. It is true that the tramway in Portland cost $57 million, double what a similar tram would cost at a ski resort, and this may seem expensive. But new road construction in urban areas is extremely costly. An Oregon study of such roads found that they often cost more than $10 million for each lane mile, due to the expense of building overpasses, purchasing rights of way, and expropriating property.¹¹ Even a simple two-lane road crossing over an interstate and several other highways and then switchbacking up the ridge to the hospital would have required at least four lane miles, at a cost of roughly $40 million. Consider, too, that the tramway now pays for itself through four-dollar round-trip tickets; that much of its construction cost was covered by the hospital, not the taxpayers; and that the city did not lose tax revenues in perpetuity for the houses otherwise torn down to build a road. From the city’s point of view, the Portland tramway may have been a bargain. It preserved the tax base and the density of urban population. It eliminated some wear and tear on existing highways and thereby reduced the cost of highway repairs. Yet the choice was a cultural one, not driven by economic considerations.

Moreover, riding the Portland tramway has become a popular tourist attraction and a valued experience for local residents. It provides an unparalleled view of the city and the surrounding mountains as far as Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Hood. It has become a new urban space, where people encounter one another face to face and gaze at sunrises and sunsets and the night landscape of scintillating lights. A new highway could not do that.

As a final example, consider a train station, to be completed in 2013 near the intersection of two freeways in Anaheim, California. Nearby is the Los Angeles Angels baseball stadium, and additional buildings are being erected, because offices and apartments will benefit from being close to the new hub. This station is part of a larger initiative to refocus Californian transportation habits by building a high-speed rail service. Not only have the freeways long been choked with traffic, but the air is often highly polluted, and California’s CO2 emissions are well above the national average. The fact that the Anaheim station will be run on solar power underscores the difference between the older and the emergent energy systems, as the public relations material on the website emphasizes.¹²

The California high-speed railway is part of a growing national reaction against relying on the automobile almost exclusively to solve transportation problems. Regional railway networks have begun to revive, notably in the Boston area. Cultural geographer John Stilgoe has recently developed a book-length argument that cars and trucks are inherently unable to solve transportation problems for large cities, because the land needed to accommodate them is simply too expensive.¹³ Los Angeles would seem to be a good example.

At the Anaheim station, several existing rail lines will intersect with the new high-speed system that is to start in both Sacramento and San Francisco and run to San Diego, with stops in San Jose and Los Angeles. Most travel in California is still by automobile, and to a considerable degree, the new rail system seems designed with drivers, particularly commuters, in mind. Through much of its extent, the line closely parallels existing roads. The stations may not become nodal points for nondrivers, although the hope is that apartments and businesses will grow up around them. It is too soon to know whether suburban train stations will become focal points for new communities, although they will usefully link commuting and shopping in an appealing synergy.

The system as a whole can only gain the benefits of high speed if trains are restricted to a few stops. The expectation is that express passengers can travel the roughly six hundred miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours and to San Diego in just under four hours. This will be a faster alternative than flying if a constant high speed is maintained, but in that case many cities along the right-of-way will not get express service. The total cost of this project is estimated to be more than $45 billion, almost $15 billion of which has been allocated by the State of California ($10 billion through a ballot proposition) and the federal government ($4.5 billion). Construction on the central portion of the line began in 2012. This is probably a good strategy: in the 1820s, the Erie Canal was also built by starting in the middle, which spurred demands for completion of links to the major cities at either end.

If all goes according to plan, in 2018 California will have trains like those that already exist in Japan, France, Spain, and Germany. As it happens, the railway system of the United States reached its greatest extent almost exactly a century before, in 1916, with 254,037 miles of track, enough to crisscross the United States eighty times.¹⁴ At that time, there was good overnight service from New York to Chicago; many more passenger trains existed; and often, trains ran faster than they do today. A full-scale redevelopment of the railroad, coupled with wide adoption of alternative energies, would move the United States onto a new path of greater energy intensity (more GDP produced for each BTU used). An achievable goal would be the level already reached in Denmark or Germany, where, since the 1980s, energy use per person has only been half that of the United States.

CONCLUSIONS

The five examples presented here trace a series of energy transitions between about 1890 and the present: from muscle power to electrification to the internal combustion engine to a modest shift toward alternative energies. Each of these transitions has profound implications for the form and texture of urban life. The muscle-power city relied on human and animal energy to function, and indeed, the number of horses in cities increased during the nineteenth century as a direct result of industrialization.¹⁵ But muscle power had reached its limits by the 1880s, and electrification supplied streetcars, elevators, escalators, and brilliant lighting to expand the city upward into the skyscraper, outward toward new streetcar suburbs, and temporally into the evening hours, which became far more useful when illuminated. Americans used electrification to intensify the activities at the urban core and to expand outward to incorporate a larger population. Although electrification increased the density of the city, Americans soon afterward began to use the internal combustion engine to deconcentrate