City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870-1920

6. Home and Neighborhood

6 Home and Neighborhood In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Philadelphia’s residential patterns changed greatly. Large-scale social and economic currents shaped the city into an “industrial metropolis.”1 Forces such as immigration and industrialization drastically altered the residential landscape of the Quaker City. As I have shown, lower-level white-collar workers felt these influences in the workplace,but home was no different.An investigation of the residential patterns of clerical workers in 1870 and 1920 can show how these forces came to alter their housing choices.In 1870 the city was in the early throes of industrialization. By 1920 it had become a mature industrial metropolis. The housing choices of industrial-era office and sales workers fit into two general patterns during this period. First, thousands of clerks and salespeople lived in row houses in typical urban residential settings, either as heads of households or more often as dependents. City directories and the federal manuscript census for 1870 and 1920 allow us to explore these residential patterns. These sources, however, cannot adequately describe the second important facet of clerical residential life. Industrial Philadelphia developed a furnished-room district in the early twentieth century,and many unmarried men and women flocked to it seeking inexpensive rooms to rent. In lodging houses—or furnished-room houses, as they were called in Philadelphia —single office and sales workers led lives of relative independence from family supervision.Their behavior in the furnished-room district challenged societal norms, especially those regarding sexuality. The 1870s lay in the middle of a thirty-year period during which the social and economic patterns of the mature industrial metropolis emerged.In 1850 Philadelphia still more closely resembled the colonial walking city than it Home and Neighborhood 143 did its twentieth-century successor. People of varying class and ethnic backgrounds lived near one another and close to their workplaces. The Chicago school of sociology’s model of concentric urban zones, which features a core of poor or working-class city dwellers and a periphery comprising the better-off, did not neatly fit the city. In fact, the reverse held true—peripheral districts exhibited a working-class flavor while middle-class and elite Philadelphians clustered in the city itself. After the 1850s, as the city industrialized , massive changes began to reshape the city’s neighborhoods, and Philadelphia gradually came to fit the Chicago school’s model,2 the process culminating in the early twentieth century as middle-class suburban districts developed. In 1854 the city absorbed all the surrounding communities in Philadelphia County and increased from 2 square miles to 130. Between 1850 and 1880 the city experienced a substantial influx of Irish, German, and British immigrants, known as the “Old Immigrants.” Philadelphia started to develop a web of mass transit that connected outlying districts with the central city, and its housing stock expanded because of a building boom that continued in the twentieth century. Its economy began to industrialize. In the thirty years after 1850 the city’s population doubled, reaching over 800,000. Simultaneously, its population density declined, largely because new construction in outlying neighborhoods outpaced population growth.3 Philadelphia was not highly segregated ethnically during this period.4 Only African Americans experienced significant levels of housing segregation.The Irish intermingled with Germans and native-born Americans. Individual groups did not dominate the city’s wards. Rather, occupations had a more significant influence on where people lived. Most individuals lived near their places of work.Neighborhoods such as Northern Liberties,Manayunk, and Kensington contained sizable working-class majorities concentrated around mills. Unlike their blue-collar counterparts, the city’s white-collar workers were already moving away from their places of work by the 1860s and 1870s. After 1854 the residential population in Center City, the neighborhoods that had formed the preconsolidation city and fell within William Penn’s original gridiron plan, began to shift. The area between Seventh Street and the Delaware River lost population, while that west of Seventh grew as Philadelphia ’s population pushed away from the city’s historic center. A central business district (CBD) of offices and retail stores coalesced around Market Street.5 It stretched north toArch Street and south toWalnut Street.Westward it reached Broad Street, and its eastern boundary was the Delaware River. Some of the district’s small business owners and clerical workers bunched in residential neighborhoods nearby, but after the 1850s, as...