The Challenges of Life in the Industrial City

LIFE AND LABOR IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD HIST 1301 | History The Challenges of Life in the Industrial City While there were numerous advantages to living in a city, there were drawbacks for individuals from all social strata. First, a place to reside had to be found. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a sharp increase in the population of cities as individuals from the countryside and overseas moved to these industrial centres. More Britons resided in cities and towns than in rural regions by the middle of the century. Due to a lack of housing development, cities and living areas were frequently congested and claustrophobic. A large portion of the middle class relocated to the newly developed suburbs that sprung up surrounding cities, and they began using electrified or horse-drawn streetcars to work. The possibilities available to working-class individuals were greater. Families of labourers frequently made an effort to reside on the outskirts of cities like London, far from the squalor, throngs of people, and noise. However, these neighbourhoods were frequently incorporated into the city proper as urban areas expanded. The city would eventually find you if you could not afford to live far from it. No matter the city, housing was a challenge and typically scarce. It's possible for families with kids to just need two or three rooms. It was common for cooking, eating, working, and socialising to occur in the same area. Although there were designated sleeping and visiting spaces, they were also rather small. For those in the working class, having a bed of your own, much alone a room, was an unattainable goal. In certain cases, family members and boarders may even share a bed. Housing arrangements differed by location. Single-family homes were preferred in British cities; they were narrow homes with one room on the bottom, another on top, and maybe a third above that. Homes with two rooms on the ground level and more above might be within the financial reach of skilled labourers. Perhaps they even have a little garden. Apartment structures were preferred in both France and the US. These were sometimes constructed side by side in the United States, with many flats on each level. Working-class families lived in two or three rooms, and the inside walls of the apartments may have been devoid of natural light and air. In France, middle-class families and working-class families may live in the same apartment buildings, but not on the same floors. The poorest households lived in the attic, where they were frequently rained upon, roasted in the summer, and froze in the winter. The middle class occupied the second floor, known as the étage noble, with additional families living above them in decreasing order of status as they reached the roof. The worst-off people can reside in pitch-black basement flats that flooded during heavy downpours. In what was once a huge middle-class home, now an apartment building housing many families, others could occupy a single room. Living quarters might occasionally be so little as to beggar the imagination. A 100-square-foot room in Tokyo was occupied by an inexperienced kozukai (errand man) in 1901 together with his adolescent children and wife. Even smaller quarters were occupied by other Japanese. The lowest workers had to compete with other occupants for the right to sleep in a shared sleeping chamber, which they rented out by the night. There were plenty of insects and lice, and the only bedding available was for a price. Some working class people may have accommodation provided for them by their jobs. In 1884, George Pullman, an American railway car maker, constructed a model village for his workers next to the site where his well-known sleeper cars were manufactured on Chicago's south side. Although workers were not obliged to reside in the town, it offered them conveniences that they probably could not have afforded in another place. There were theatres, shops, churches, schools, libraries, and parks. Workers utilised their money to cover their rent and make purchases at the shop for necessities. Every worker had indoor plumbing and gas lighting in their homes, and daily garbage collection was provided. Pullman thought that providing his employees with a tidy, organised workspace would increase their output. Additionally, he thought that by giving them a respectable level of life, he might stop strikes and other more serious types of agitation. In 1893, the town's population was around twelve thousand. But there were issues. Pullman's representatives randomly examined the houses of their workers to ensure that they were kept tidy and maintained, but workers were never permitted to buy their residences. Families of workers who lost their employment were also evicted. On Sundays, everyone was required to go to church. Pullman made the decisions on which books should be maintained at the library and which plays should be seen in public. The saloon was absent. Following an economic downturn in 1894, Pullman reduced employee salaries and let go of a large number of workers. Their rent was already more than that of the neighbourhood, but he refused to cut it. The only option available to the workers was to go on strike. For the same reasons that Pullman had, other American business titans such as piano manufacturer Henry Steinway and confectionery king Milton Hershey also constructed model cities for their staff. Towns were also supplied by European companies for their workforce. The first such towns were established in Britain in the mid-1800s and were called Copley and Saltaire. The Crespi family established the town of Crespi d'Adda in northern Italy in 1878 as a home for labourers at their textile mill. Apart from having gardens, the town also had a theatre, a school, a clinic, and a church. All of the residences, with the exception of the doctor's, the priest's, and the plant manager's, were identical in order to promote a sense of equality among the workers. Northeastern Spain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland also developed towns for their miners and industry workers. Some were created purely with the intention of sheltering labourers working by local mines or mills. Others, such as England's Bourneville and Port Sunlight, aimed to give the working class not merely a somewhere to live but also an example of a community. A portion of the workforce resided in the factories where they were employed. The majority of young, single women and teenage girls employed in Japan's textile industry resided in dormitories owned by the manufacturers in cities like Osaka. In the industries in Moscow and Saint Petersburg where they worked, many Russian labourers also resided in barracks. A single room might be shared by many families. Men who were single slept on bunks that were stacked up to the ceiling with no privacy. Workers may have slept in shifts when industries were short on space, and families and single women may have slept in the single men's dormitories. The issue of dirt was almost as big as the dilemma of substandard housing and overpopulation. By the end of the nineteenth century, many parts of this problem had been resolved in certain towns, but others persisted. During the nineteenth century, waste from factories, people, and animals—particularly horse manure— was the main source of dirt. Public transit became essential as cities expanded. The majority of communities decided to adopt omnibuses and horse-drawn streetcars as their option. Thousands of people who lived in cities used them. But more horses were needed to pull goods waggons and the affluent's carriages as a result of these public transportation options, and as a result, the streets of the cities were clogged with horses. The daily dung output of an ordinary horse is from thirty to fifty pounds. There were about 78,000 horses in Paris in 1878. Approximately 600,000 tonnes of manure were dumped on Chicago's thoroughfares annually at this period by horses. They frequently left their dead to fester in the streets after passing away while wearing a harness. Human waste was added to horse excrement and corpses by people who didn't want to use the outside latrines at night or didn't have indoor toilets in their dwellings. Kitchen garbage and the buckets and chamber pots they filled throughout the night were frequently dumped into the streets in the morning. Flies and rodents were drawn to the heaps of dung and trash. The introduction of additional public transit options helped to mitigate this issue to some extent. Horse-drawn streetcars were required to carry commuters from train stations to their destinations within the city, thus at first, the number of horses in cities expanded as a result of commuter railway lines that carried middle-class people to and from the suburbs. Cities didn't start to get cleaner until the late nineteenth century, when subterranean railroads were constructed and streetcar lines were electrified. Electric streetcars were first installed in New York City in 1881. London followed suit in 1901, and Prague in 1891. London was a pioneer in the construction of subterranean railroads, launching the world's first subway, the Metropolitan line of the London subterranean system, in 1863, despite having trailed behind other cities in the introduction of electric streetcars. Other cities came next in fast succession. In addition to Paris in 1900, New York in 1904, Buenos Aires in 1913, and Glasgow and Budapest, subterranean systems were inaugurated in 1896. In addition, these forms of transportation were more cost-effective and quicker than vehicles that used congested surface roadways. Regarding water, garbage was frequently poured into neighbouring bodies of water by urban manufacturers, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. Contaminated water and liquefying waste, such as that left in latrines, might find their way to the sources of public drinking water through the process of capillary action. Because of this, the water occasionally smelled worse than the streets and was generally unclean. The dung, blood, and leftover organs from Chicago's stockyards and slaughterhouses were dumped into a fork in the Chicago River. This section of the river was named Bubbly Creek because bubbles rose to the surface due to the methane fumes created by the organic debris degrading. People arriving by rail in the middle of the night apparently could smell Chicago long before they saw it, such was the volume of trash generated by the stockyards and slaughterhouses. Although they were only one component of the solution, flush toilets stopped people from throwing their waste onto the streets or into backyard latrines. There was still somewhere the rubbish needed to be disposed of. In far too many places, the waste was simply thrown into the same rivers that were used for bathing and drinking water via domestic drains into sewage systems. By 1858, six feet of refuse had accumulated along London's Thames banks, and the smell was so bad that Houses of Parliament caretakers had to cover the windows with drapes dipped in lime chloride, a disinfectant, to prevent the parliamentarians from fainting. Another disinfectant, carbolic acid, was dumped into the river to help with the stench, which was called the Great Stink. Joseph Bazalgette, a railway engineer, rebuilt London's sewage system between 1859 and 1875 as a result of the Great Stink. Bazalgette's efforts earned him a knighthood. In the 1880s, London started treating its sewage at two large pumping systems before transferring it to the North Sea, where it was discharged until 1998. This significantly improved the city's sewage disposal practices. During the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, comparable systems were constructed in other towns. Even public restrooms were constructed in certain places. In the late nineteenth century, the air in cities was also polluted. Burning coal produced energy and steam power, and as industrial cities became larger, coal smoke became a problem. Every surface, including people's clothes, was covered with soot. If windows were inadvertently left open, the result was furniture covered with it. Residents of London noticed how the pollution in the air changed the hue of sunsets. In addition to filthy streets, water, and air, Osaka, Japan kids learnt that their hometown was known as "the City of Smoke." For others, this was a source of pride. Many people in the nineteenth century suffered from respiratory issues as a result of breathing in coal smoke. Asthma, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema were prevalent. In nineteenth-century England, respiratory illnesses were thought to be the cause of around one-third of child mortality. Waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid killed thousands of people in cities throughout the century. Water or food contaminated with the faeces of sick individuals can spread both of these infections, which cause dehydration due to vomiting and severe diarrhoea. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a number of cholera pandemics until advancements in industrial technology made it possible to construct safe water and sewage systems and promote decent personal hygiene. But in the latter part of the nineteenth century, there were several outbreaks in both the less affluent areas of cities that had upgraded their water and sewer systems and in those that had not. In Vienna, cholera claimed the lives of 3,000 individuals in a few months in 1873. Over eight thousand people in Hamburg, Germany, perished from it in 1892. In 1885, a vaccine was eventually created. And last, sickness was also a result of overpopulation. Although TB impacted individuals in rural regions as well, it spread swiftly and claimed more lives in industrial centres due to the overcrowding in homes and workplaces. All socioeconomic groups were affected by the illness, but the impoverished were more severely affected because they frequently lived in overcrowded conditions and lacked sunshine, which destroys TB bacteria. Alcoholism was a serious health issue in nineteenth-century cities, particularly among working-class males, even if it wasn't always lethal. Working-class men would frequently seek out saloons, taverns, bars, cafés, and beer halls in cities following a demanding day. For manufacturing workers, dock labourers, and miners, alcohol alleviated physical discomfort, reduced frustration, and relieved boredom. Along with free or affordable meals, an employment exchange where men might find new work, a location to hear the newspaper read aloud or have a letter written were all frequent services provided by establishments that sold alcohol. Men discussed politics at drinking establishments as well. Since Sundays were the sole day off for American and European labourers, a lot of men drank alcohol during the day. Supervisors said that males frequently showed up for work on Monday mornings drunk or still buzzed. Employers reduced Saturday work hours in half in an effort to tackle this issue, reasoning that if men started drinking sooner, they would stop earlier. After much effort on the part of labour groups, employees were eventually granted two full weekends off. City prostitution in the nineteenth century was widespread, both formal and casual. While many prostitutes were just young, unmarried women who could not make ends meet on their pitiful earnings, some were professional prostitutes who resided in brothels. They could just want a man to buy them supper or new clothes, without asking for anything in return. Throughout the eighteenth century, prostitution as an institution underwent modernization as well. Brothels promoted themselves in local guidebooks that were available for purchase at train stations. Several professional prostitutes said that their lifestyle afforded them greater privacy, less labour, and higher pay than that of a factory worker or domestic servant. Other women claimed that they had been seduced into living such a lifestyle. On the other hand, STDs were widespread. Syphilis was a common illness among prostitutes and their customers, and married men occasionally infected their spouses. Infertility or kids born still or with visual or mental impairments were the outcome. After years of suffering, syphilis killed its victims since there was no known treatment.