Residential Patterns in the Pre-Automotive American City

Geographers have long found a distinction between two sets of factors in location a useful one to draw (Hanson 1999). The labels used for them have varied--they include situation and site, horizontal and vertical factors, location and locale, and space and place--and have not always exactly coincided in meaning. All the same, they correspond sufficiently for the two kinds of variables to be distinguished, labeled, and contrasted. The former term in each pair denotes the elements of an area's location vis-a-vis the world beyond it; the latter, the characteristics that occur in the area itself. One thesis that has often been drawn from the distinction is that when travel and transportation become easier, faster, and cheaper, the relative importance of horizontal or situation factors in location should decline and that of vertical or site factors, at least of more or less immobile ones, should increase. "With the diminution in transport costs and the consequent reduction in spatial barriers to movement of goods, people, money, and information, the significance of the qualities of place has been enhanced" (Harvey 1989, 10). Edward Ullman applied the thesis to patterns of intraurban land use, proposing that increased mobility, particularly through the rise of mass automobile ownership, had transformed the relative advantages for residence of different districts within cities ([1962] 1980, 192-94). It favored the development of attractive but once difficult-to-reach sites "on the basis of their intrinsic natural and cultural characteristics," and it reduced the importance of "close-in urban locations" whose advantages of what Ullman termed "location or situation" had previously made them the most highly valued ones. To test the assertion, and through it the broader thesis on which it rests, we compare the familiar patterns of the twentieth-century American city with those, to date less systematically documented, that prevailed in what has been called the walking city just prior to the transportation revolution brought about by the electric trolley and then the automobile (Warner 1962). SITUATION, SITE, AND AMERICAN CITY FORM The categories of situation and site mark out sets of different, and often diametrically opposed, residential advantages and disadvantages for particular locations within an urban area. Proximity to the urban center, as the point of maximum generalized accessibility, is a classic example of a situation advantage. At least in the United States, with its antiurban tradition, however, locations close to the center will also, all else being equal, be unattractive on the score of site, and more remote areas will be regarded as more desirable for residence, with the privacy they offer a particularly valued feature (Johnson 2008). As early as 1815, well-to-do Pittsburghers whose independent means freed them of the need to travel daily to the city center preferred marginal over core locations for residence (Swauger 1978). The same inverse relation between the two qualities appears in respect to vertical as to horizontal distance. Areas high above the city center possess a disadvantageously remote situation, but an advantageous site possessing the amenities of views and breezes (as do upper floors within buildings). Lots located on the main streets enjoy high accessibility and its correlate, greater visibility, but suffer, compared with more-secluded sites, from the disamenities of heavy traffic. (1) If the association of wealth with each of these variables changed in sign between the walking and the automobile-age city, it would bear out Ullman's conjecture. A wealth of studies in the postwar decades based on block-group or census-tract-level census data supports the hypothesized present-day preeminence of site qualities in American cities. Drawing on the data of the 1980 census, Michael White documented "a steady increase in average income with distance from the center of the city . …