There was no time in Boston that was most emphasized, than the 1850’s to 1900’s. In the city of Boston there were a lot of changes that had occurred between the second half of the 19th century, not only with the city but also with the people living in Boston. Boston has always been changing and in transition. Boston had changed majorly from being the merchant city to the industrial metropolis. The population of people went up about ? in 50 years of its physical change.
When Boston was a merchant city in 1850, it was tightly packed and crowded, then once it because an industrial metropolis in 1900, it was a spread out to a 10-mile radius, containing 31 cities and towns. The metropolis was created from a partnership of large companies and individual people. The inner part of the Boston was the low-income housing and work. The outer part of the city was for the middle and upper class income housing. Not only were there physical changes in the city, but there were also other changes occurring during the second half of the 19th century that had been brought up from the growth in the city.
A major change that occurred and affected Boston to get up and go was industrialization and immigration. British Isles were the men who kept coming to Boston in big numbers in the 19th century. When 1875 came along there were sixty thousand Irish men living in Boston from immigration. The Irish men and their children were almost half of Boston’s population even though the city was already growing rapidly. When Irish immigration wasn’t happening as quickly, they were taken over from other immigrants. In 1890 the Jews and Italians became a major part of the population as well.
During the 50 years of immigration in the 19th century, the era brought a unique kind of life. In the 1850’s Boston was barley a two-mile radius; it was normal to see movement from people’s feet and communication face to face, because there was no transportation or other ways to communicate quickly. Horse carriages were created in the 1850’s, but the horse carriage affected not many people because they had to be able to afford one privately or to afford the cost of using one. It was the same with the omnibus that was created in 1826, because it moved slowly and didn’t hold many people.
The steam railroad was another form of transportation that was introduced in 1835 and it was a better form of transportation because it moved quicker and could hold many more passengers, but it was also expensive and didn’t always take the people to where they wanted to go because it didn’t stop very often, and only went one route. There were land changes that occurred during the second half of the 19th century such as the South End and the Back Bay. The South End was almost entirely taken up by houses in 1880 and then went to the Back Bay that was almost completely taken up by houses in 1900.
Only the rich could afford to live on these pieces of land, because they were so expensive. Street railways were created and they were the most aggressive expansion in the 19th century. From the 1880’s to the 1890’s street railways took up at least six miles from City Hall in Boston. The service of the first railway began in 1852. The first street railway in Boston would go between Harvard Square, Cambridge, Summerville, and Union Square. The increase in the street railway brought excitement for the entrepreneur’s as well in other cities in America.
Eventually the street railways replaced the omnibus’s that were already running day-to-day. In 1873 there were only two street railway companies who were able to stay alive and those were the Metropolitan Street Railway and the Highland Street Railway. The downtown streets in Boston were very hard to deal with while creating the street railways because the streets were so narrow, so eventually the main streets became the “horsecar thoroughfares. ” Boston never stopped expanding in every moment Boston could get expansion was happening. In 1887 Henry Whitney created a syndicate.
Once he bought and received all of the stock he wanted, he then made a suggestion to put all of the companies in one. The companies agreed to just make one large company than to have a bunch of small companies. Once the companies were together as one, there was an increase in the making to make the transportation better. By 1900 the electric railways were lying at least six miles from downtown Boston. Needless to say, there were many changes in Boston with the people and the industrialization. Some of the changes may have been negative or positive, but there was always a way that was found to make the changes better.
