The Public Interest of the Private City: The Pennsylvania Railroad, Urban Space, and Philadelphia's Economic Elite, 1846-1877

On February 16, 1854, the first passenger train wound its way around the mountain division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, consummating after eight years of construction a direct link between Philadelphia and the Ohio Valley. A few days later, with their route to the west finally complete, Philadelphians celebrated the passage of an act that extended the boundaries of the metropolis to make it in territorial terms the largest city in America.¹ The building of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the annexation of outlying suburbs were each part of an urban imperialist program to make Philadelphia the central place in the nation's burgeoning continental empire. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. coined the term "urban imperialism" to describe the rivalries between American cities as they strove to extend their hinterlands through the construction of turnpikes, canals, and railroads between the colonial era and Gilded Age. But while several historians have explored the mercantilist ambitions of civic boosters, fewer have analyzed how promoters imagined the impact their labor would have on the built environment.² In Philadelphia, though, advocates of the Pennsylvania Railroad promised citizens that once the West had been grappled with "iron hooks" the "tribute" of that ever-expanding market would flow into the metropolitan economy, providing employment to restless mechanics and builders, enriching real estate owners, and embellishing an ever-growing city.³

To Sam Bass Warner, whose brilliant middle chapters of The Private City remain among the most influential pages ever written on Civil War-era Philadelphia, the men who made the Pennsylvania Railroad and consolidated the city government were the last of a generation of civic-minded generalists who had run American municipalities since the Revolution. He argues, however, that the heirs of men like Thomas Pym Cope (1768-1854), a merchant prince whose role as president of the Board and Trade and involvement in railroad building and political reform made him an archetypal urban imperialist, withdrew from public life to the private world of the counting house before the secession crisis. The new generation of businessmen, Warner suggests, did not have a strong attachment to place, seeing their terrain as the nation rather than the city.⁴

Nearly forty years after its publication, Warner's work continues to shape the writing of Civil War-era urban history, both in Philadelphia, where the late historical sociologist E. Digby Baltzell bemoaned the private ethic of the city's Quaker upper class, and elsewhere. Even as new scholarship reveals the persistence of a commonweal tradition in American municipal government and uncovers urban citizens' enduring belief in an indivisible "common good," the notion of the mid-century city as a "community of private money makers" endures.⁵ Historians, indeed, have located the reign of "privatism" everywhere from the regulation of cesspits and sewers to the inadequate local funding of neighborhood improvements.⁶

A few years after he finished The Private City, Warner conceded that he had used privatism as a synonym for capitalism, a force he saw as ever-present in shaping the American metropolis, but one that prior to the mid-nineteenth century had been restrained by the fetters of community in a walking city.⁷ The broad outline of his thesis is hard to deny: few historians would challenge the contention that the market and industrial revolutions underlay the transformation of cities in the era. But his caricature of Civil War-era businessmen as motivated solely by the profit ethic misses the enduring importance of their public commitment to urban imperialism. In coming together to build and sustain the Pennsylvania Railroad, Cope's generation—and more surprisingly its heirs—sought not only personal enrichment but also the remaking of Philadelphia's social and spatial order: the transformation of the turbulent but tedious city of the 1840s into the London and Paris of America. The boosters who led the calls for a line to Pittsburgh, indeed, hoped to build a metropolis characterized not just by commercial dynamism but also by the urban gentility that historians have argued became so important to their...