B.M. Scott
13 August 2025
History of United States Popular Culture
The Nineteenth‑Century City Street: A Cross‑Section of Urban Life
Preface and Overview of Series
In considering the role of the city street, it is useful first to reflect upon its historical significance in relation to mobility and the growth of industry. Prior to the advent of the Ford Model-T and the mass motor age, the street served as a vital medium for the transport of goods, the conduct of trade, and the circulation of people and information. As the physical conduit linking production to market, it underpinned the rhythms of commerce and the expansion of urban economies. Even in the smallest of cities, such histories leave their traces. I write from a small city in Indiana. Within the context of the period in discussion, the area was distinguished by its brick industry—a high‑output enterprise whose products paved many of our oldest streets as well as those of surrounding towns and cities. The brickwork achieved particular renown in supplying the original surface for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, later concealed under successive layers of asphalt but never erased from the city’s industrial memory. Here, as elsewhere, the street is not merely a backdrop but a participant in the history of popular culture.
It is this interconnection between the physical street and the currents of cultural life that forms the focus of this multi-part series focused on the history of popular culture. Across the 19th and 20th century (leading into the current age), we will examine: the relationship between popular culture and the urban street; the function of the downtown district and its subsequent decline; the transformation of cemeteries from graveyards to landscaped gardens; the role of film in shaping and reflecting popular culture, from the humble nickelodeon and the community playhouse to the opulent movie palace of the bourgeoisie. We will consider the pioneering work of Oscar Micheaux in African‑American cinema, alongside the changing composition of motion‑picture audiences in the 1930s; the dynamic between the motor vehicle, film, and evolving moral codes in the early twentieth century; and the movement from class‑coded leisure spaces toward a more individualized culture of entertainment spurred by the Great Depression. Our inquiry will also encompass the development of recreational parks as instruments of social regulation; the ways in which liberal‑arts institutions sought to emulate their aesthetic and moral sensibilities; the shared architectural and experiential logics of hospitals, hotels, and schools; the nineteenth‑century shift from the English liberal‑arts ideal to the German research‑university model; and the entanglement of war, amusement parks, diners, and roadside culture in the shaping of everyday life. Throughout, this series will remain attuned to the philosophical dimensions of these phenomena—seeking not only to describe the changing forms of popular culture, but to interrogate the urban spaces in which they have been imagined, contested, and lived.
The Nineteenth‑Century City Street
Few twentieth‑century thinkers have interrogated the meaning of urban life with greater acuity than the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, urbanization was not only the expansion of buildings, utilities, and transport, but the production of social spaces: the shaping of environments that in turn shaped the rhythms, relationships, and identities of those who inhabited them. The street, in this account, was no inert conduit for traffic, but a living and politically charged arena where commerce, sociability, ritual, and conflict interwove — a place in which the “right to the city” could be both enacted and denied. To examine the nineteenth‑century American street through such a lens is to move beyond its physical fabric, perceiving instead the contested processes through which collective life was produced, displayed, and continually remade in public space.
In the nineteenth century, as the United States was transformed by the overlapping forces of industrialization, immigration, westward expansion, and an increasingly complex commercial economy, the city street emerged as one of the most vivid and indispensable sites of public life. In the republic’s burgeoning urban centers – from the granite‑fronted mercantile quarters of Boston to the sprawling, gridded wards of New York, from the lumber‑lined avenues of Chicago to the steep thoroughfares of San Francisco – the street became both the structural and symbolic thread binding together the full spectrum of urban experience. Here, the raw energies of economic growth, demographic change, and cultural innovation were made visible and tangible. It was at once framework and theatre: a conduit for the movement of people, goods, and ideas; a stage for commerce and conviviality; and a testing ground for civic identity and democratic performance. As Tocqueville observed in his journeys through Jacksonian America, the street and town square were more than accidental backdrops for public assembly—they were the fertile ground upon which the habits of association, mutual aid, and civic responsibility were cultivated. The American penchant for forming societies, debating policy, and assembling in the open was nowhere more evident than in the press of the urban crowd.
Physically, the street linked the elemental components of the nineteenth‑century American city in a visible network of exchange. The industrial wards – with their factories, machine shops, printing houses, and iron foundries – opened directly onto thoroughfares that flowed into dense residential blocks or led to commercial strips alive with shop windows and market stalls. Along the waterfronts of New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans - piers and wharves discharged bales of cotton, crates of fruit, barrels of flour, and tens of thousands of immigrants directly into the restless current of urban life. At key intersections, churches, schools, political clubhouses, and Masonic halls faced one another across the carriageways, signaling their intention to act as moral and social anchors for the communities beyond their doors. Theatres, music halls, and later nickelodeons oriented their facades towards the passing stream - drawing sustenance from the street as both audience and advertisement. Department stores in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia rose with plate‑glass windows stretching almost the length of a block, displaying their goods to the multitude and fusing commerce with spectacle. The street, however, was more than a passive stage for the unfolding life of the city; it was an active and generative environment with rhythms and customs of its own. By day, artisans carted their wares to market; clerks hurried to offices, and children socialized near streets and alleyways. Vendors marketed their goods – oysters in winter, ice in summer, newspapers at all hours. By night, gaslight transformed the streets into illuminated corridors through which promenades, revelers, and night‑shift laborers shared the same pavements. The rumble of horse‑drawn omnibuses, the clang of streetcar bells, and the strains of music spilling from saloons and dance halls merged into a symphony of the modern city. Smells from bakeries and breweries mingled with the acrid smoke of chimneys and the brine of the docks; the visual field teemed with signs, placards, and a jostling, ceaseless crowd.
It was along these thoroughfares that the rituals and civic dramas of the young republic played out most vividly. Robert Bellah would later contend that the robust civic culture of America rested on the “habits of the heart” - forged not only in family and school, but in the informal stage of the city street and the saloon. These daily encounters forged bonds—however fleeting—that knit together the anonymous multitude into a community bound by shared ritual and mutual expectation. Political candidates mounted soapboxes at street corners; parades of militia companies, fraternal orders, and ethnic societies wound their way along the principal avenues. Independence Day and Decoration Day re‑cast commercial arteries into temporary sites of commemoration. Crowds gathered before the bulletin boards of city newspapers to read war news in the 1860s or election results in the heat of a contested campaign. Yet the same spaces that accommodated celebration also witnessed confrontation - viz., strikes and riots periodically transformed the street into contested territory between crowd and law enforcement. Saloons opened directly onto the pavement, creating porous boundaries between private conviviality and public sociability, reinforcing the street as a place where domestic life spilled outward into the common domain. The diversity of the American populace was nowhere more conspicuously on display than in the street. Immigrant enclaves transformed neighborhood thoroughfares into cultural microcosms, each with its own language, shop signs, cuisines, and festive calendars. In New York’s Lower East Side, Yiddish theatre marquees stood beside tavern signs in German. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, elaborate shopfronts and temple facades embedded Old World architectural forms within the American streetscape. Such heterogeneity made the street both an engine of cultural exchange and a site of social tension. On the same block, working‑class boarding houses abutted middle‑class parlors - proximity collapsing distinctions preserved elsewhere – though never eradicating structures of inequality.
To traverse these streets – on foot, by omnibus, or by the clattering streetcar – was to move through a continually shifting mosaic of sound, color, language, and gesture. Strangers pressed shoulder to shoulder, shopkeepers leaned from doorways to hail custom, and children wove between carts and carriages. News spread as rapidly in shouted fragments as in printed broadsides; a passing parade, a freshly pasted handbill, or a re‑arranged shop window could redirect the flow of pedestrians as decisively as any official event. The publicness of the street meant surveillance and performance co-existed - viz., neighbors observed one another, employers kept watch over employees, the police monitored crowds, and citizens engaged in deliberate acts of self‑presentation in dress, conduct, and manners. The street was the crucible in which the practices, tensions, and aspirations of nineteenth‑century urban life were most sharply condensed.
The Saloon: From Revolutionary Forum to Labour Crucible
While the street’s physical form and bustling energy set the stage for American urban life in the late nineteenth century, it was within the establishments lining its length and the new technologies traversing it that much of the daily negotiation of popular culture occurred. Among these, the saloon stood pre‑eminent. A quintessential institution of the Gilded Age, the saloon occupied a space that was at once commercial, social, and morally charged.
The American saloon’s lineage stretches back well before the teeming urban landscapes of the late nineteenth century. In larger urban centers like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, its origins may be traced to the colonial tavern and public house—institutions that, by the time of the Revolutionary War, had become central nodes in the transmission of political information. Taverns - and later - saloons in the emerging republic functioned not solely as dispensaries of food and drink, but as critical relay stations in the informal networks of news, dissent, and debate that wound through the city street. It was here, beneath low rafters and amid the commingled aromas of ale and tobacco, that artisans, smallholders, and urban workers debated Parliamentary impositions, read broadsides aloud, and plotted their interventions in the civic sphere. The boundary between private affability and public discourse was permeable. The latest intelligence from the legislature, battlefield, or foreign press might pass, by way of the tap-room, and straight to the pavement. In this sense, the saloon served as both incubator and amplifier of popular sentiment—a place where rumor, grievance, and ambition translated into collective action.
By the nineteenth century, especially as the industrialization reconfigured both the city and the working day, the saloon’s political role grew more pronounced. As waves of immigration and rapid urban growth reconstituted the social landscape, saloons became central venues for neighborhood organization and mutual aid. It was within these wood-paneled interiors that workers, many of whom found themselves at the margins of power, could exchange information, find employment, and—crucially—contemplate the possibilities of collective self-assertion. The formal advent of labor unions in the United States may be dated to the early nineteenth century, with the first lasting city-wide organizations emerging in the 1820s and 1830s among skilled tradesmen—printers, carpenters, cordwainers—who sought not only to regulate wages and conditions but to coordinate public protest. By the mid-nineteenth century, as the wage-earning proletariat swelled, national organizations such as the National Labor Union (founded 1866), the Knights of Labor (1869), and later the American Federation of Labor (1886) were established - each layering new forms of discipline and aspiration above the more amorphous culture of street-level solidarity. Throughout these developments, the saloon remained intimately entangled with the labor movement, functioning as a quasi-clandestine recruiting ground, meeting hall, and logistical base.
In the late nineteenth century—an era of strikes, lockouts, and heightened class conflict—the American saloon was often the nexus where union organizers gathered signatures, disseminated pamphlets, and marshalled support in anticipation of industrial action. Striking workers would congregate at favored establishments to receive updates, debate tactics, and—at times—rally the morale necessary to confront strikebreakers or police. The porous border between the saloon and the street extended the reach of union rhetoric, ensuring that the calls for solidarity, fair wages, and better conditions were not confined to formal assemblies, but circulated ceaselessly through the city’s vast social network. For Max Weber, the city—above all—was the birthplace of associational autonomy - it was here that guild associations and political clubs asserted their independence from feudal or parochial control. The street, accordingly, became both witness to and participant in the rational organization of protest and the continual negotiation of urban liberties. Thus, from its inception as a node of revolutionary information exchange to its entrenchment as a pillar of working-class sociability and labor mobilization; the American saloon’s history is one of continual negotiation between dissent and aspiration. This history is legible only within its own walls but in the ever-shifting drama of the city street itself.
In the crowded immigrant wards of the post‑Civil War city—particularly from the 1870s onwards—there emerged a new species of urban association: the street gang. Many of these groups had their origins in the loose fraternities of boys and young men who spent their days in the public thoroughfares as “street Arabs,” newsboys, bootblacks, or casual laborers. For those navigating poverty, disrupted family structures, and the absence of formal social provision, the street itself functioned as home, workplace, and field of contest. Ethnic loyalties, neighborhood boundaries, and shared experience of exclusion shaped the formation of tight‑knit bands that claimed particular corners, alleys, or blocks as their own. In some instances, these affiliate members confined themselves to companionship and mutual defense, while others drifted into petty theft, protection rackets, or service as lookouts for older criminal networks. The demarcation between legitimate mutual‑aid lodge, boisterous youth clubs, and emergent gang could be indistinct; in certain districts, ties to labor unions or political ward organizations further blurred the line with gang members acting as enforcers during strikes or elections. In such ways, the same associational energies that underpinned democratic mobility in the nineteenth‑century city also - under different pressures - produced the territorial street gangs that became a permanent feature of the American urban landscape.
Most importantly among these pressures was acute social marginalization - e.g. successive waves of immigrants (Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Chinese, and others) who encountered nativist hostility, limited upward mobility, and barriers to entry in established trades and neighborhoods. With municipal welfare provisions rudimentary at best, many youth were left to fend for themselves on the streets - forming defensive alliances against both rival groups and authoritarian indifference. Economic precariousness constituted another key pressure. In districts where employment was casual, seasonal, or chronically insecure, the street became not only a site of informal labor (i.e. news-selling, shoe-shining, portering) but also a zone of competition for work, space, and survival—a condition that frequently bred both solidarity and rivalry. The rapid turnover of residents, overcrowding, and fluctuations in ethnic composition gave rise to heightened territoriality: a given alley or corner became the core of communal identity, jealously guarded against outsiders. Policing and governmental responses further shaped this world. Authorities often treated immigrant districts with suspicion or neglect, at times colluding with political bosses to tolerate - or even utilize - certain gangs for electioneering, enforcement, or suppression of rivals. This combination of official hostility and tacit complicity allowed some gangs to flourish as semi-legitimate actors in urban politics. The inherent fluidity of urban association meant that the boundary between legal and extra-legal action was easily transgressed, particularly during moments of social disruption such as strikes, riots, or mass unemployment. Under these conditions, alliances could turn inward and defensive. In this sense, where the promise of egalitarian inclusion or upward mobility seemed foreclosed, the street gang offered an alternative structure of belonging and agency, albeit one defined by exclusion, rivalry, and, at times, violence.
The City Street and Institutional Networks of the Late Nineteenth Century
Threading these varied institutions and altering the very experience of the street was the rise of mass transit. Until the mid‑nineteenth century, the geography of the street was bounded by the distances manageable on foot or by horse‑drawn carriage. The advent of the omnibus, the horse‑drawn streetcar, and, by the 1880s, cable cars and electric trolleys transformed the urban scale. Mass transit extended the boundaries of daily life, rendering the city larger and more segmented while increasing the intensity of its core. Streetcars redrew the commercial map, concentrating trade along their routes and re‑aligning residential patterns. They also produced a new kind of urban crowd – strangers thrown together in swaying, crowded cars, learning fresh habits of proximity, etiquette, and self‑assertion. Yet they also magnified social divisions: affluent passengers could decamp to suburban districts, while working people undertook longer commutes, and conflicts over fares, segregation, and labor conditions brought the politics of the street into the streetcar itself.
Beyond conveyance and commerce, the street was a primary forum in which the hierarchies and boundaries of the nineteenth‑century city were enforced, challenged, and renegotiated. Its ceremonial uses underscored its symbolic importance: parades of fire brigades, fraternal orders, ethnic societies, veterans’ organizations, and political machines transformed thoroughfares into processional theatres. On national holidays streets were festooned with bunting; on occasion, they were stilled in mourning. Such spectacles contributed to the performative democracy of the period. Yet the same qualities that made the street ideal for celebration made it equally potent for protest. In strikes, riots, and moments of racial or nativist unrest, the street became a battleground. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, for example, turned portions of Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Chicago into open conflict zones, reinforcing the street’s dual capacity for unity and volatility.
By century’s end, the American street had become inseparable from the very experience of modernity - noisy, crowded, illuminated, and unceasing in movement. It served as an instrument of economic growth; a forum for political expression; a crucible of cultural homogeny; and a mirror of the city’s contradictions. To step into the street was to participate in an ongoing civic drama in which the individual could disappear into the crowd or seize the pavement as a platform for self‑assertion. In the broader sweep, the nineteenth‑century American street functioned as a space of acute contradiction and creativity. Simultaneously open and regulated; festive and surveilled; intimate and anonymous - it was the medium through which the city perceived itself – as spectacle, as market, as stage, and as battleground. As Georg Simmel observed in his reflections on the metropolis, the constant nearness of strangers, the saturation of sensory stimuli, and the sheer pace of urban exchange produced a distinctive modern temperament: the blasé attitude, at once detached and hyper‑attentive. The nineteenth‑century American street demanded just such faculties. One might pass from the clamor of vendors to the solemnity of a civic procession within minutes; from the intimacy of a saloon doorway to the anonymity of a crowd. In this shifting terrain, the individual was alternately spectator and participant—an American cousin to Baudelaire’s flâneur, reading the street as living text while also being inscribed within it.
By means of commerce and sociability in the saloon, and through the new patterns of proximity and circulation afforded by mass transit, the street emerged not merely as a backdrop for urban life but as an active agent in shaping it – the place in which modern American identity and the forms of its popular culture were most powerfully made visible and real. As Lefebvre would convey - the street was not reducible to an assemblage of paving stones, façades, and traffic, but a socially produced space — a crystallization of political forces, economic imperatives, and everyday practices that animated it. It was both the outcome of historical processes and the arena in which new social possibilities could be forged. The nineteenth‑century American street, read through this lens, was as much an agent in shaping collective consciousness as it was a product of urban growth. Its legacy persists in contemporary debates over who controls public space, whose voices may command it, and how the daily choreography of urban life embodies — or resists — the ideals of democracy that streets have long been said to represent.
Invitation to Reflection
The foregoing analysis has approached the nineteenth‑century American street as both a physical environment and a socially produced space — a crucible in which the currents of commerce, conflict, sociability, and identity converged. In keeping with the reflective spirit of this series, the following questions are offered not as an end to the discussion, but as prompts for further thought, dialogue, and interpretation across historical and contemporary contexts.
- In what sense can the nineteenth‑century American street be understood as a “socially produced space,” rather than merely a backdrop for public activity? How does Lefebvre’s concept reshape our reading of urban life?
- To what extent did the rituals and institutions of the street—parades, saloons, streetcars, and political gatherings—foster a sense of democratic participation, and where did they reinforce divisions of class, ethnicity, or power?
- How did the processes of inclusion and exclusion, particularly among immigrant communities and the urban poor, shape the formation of both mutual‑aid societies and territorial street gangs? Where did the line between solidarity and rivalry begin to blur?
- What lessons might contemporary cities draw from the nineteenth‑century street’s capacity to accommodate conflict, sociability, and democratic expression within a common space? How do present‑day debates about public space echo or depart from these earlier dynamics?
- In the context of rapid technological and demographic change, does the American street still serve—as a crucible for the making and remaking of collective identity? Or have our streets lost their once‑central role in civic and cultural life?
Further Reading
Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York. Vintage Books, 2008.
Bailey, Peter. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge
UP, 1998.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne,
Phaidon, 1995.
Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Updated ed.,
University of California Press, 2007.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap Press of
Harvard UP, 1999.
Corbould, Clare. "Streets, Sounds and Identity in Interwar Harlem." Journal of Social History, vol. 40, no. 4, Summer
2007, pp. 859-894.
Fogelson, Robert M. Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. Yale University Press, 2001.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, 1992.
Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. Harper Perennial, 1999.
Laitinen, Riitta, and Thomas Cohen. "Cultural History of Early Modern Streets—An Introduction." Journal of Early Modern History,
vol. 12, no. 3/4, Aug. 2008, pp. 195-204.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.
Nasaw, David. Children of the City: At Work and at Play. Oxford UP, 1985.
Norton, Peter D. "Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street." Technology & Culture, vol. 48, no. 2, Apr.
2007, pp. 331-359.
Powers, Madelon. Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920. University of
Chicago Press, 1998.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Penguin Classics, 1997.
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. Penguin Books, 2003.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Translated and edited by Kurt H.
Wolff, Free Press, 1950, pp. 409‑424.
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop,
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Weber, Max. “The City.” Max Weber: Selections in Translation, edited by W. G. Runciman, translated by E.
Matthews, Cambridge UP, 1978, pp. 231‑246.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class,
1788–1850. Oxford UP, 1984.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
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