Construction and community in South St. Louis, 1850-1910

This dissertation considers the history of the city-building process on the South Side of St. Louis, during a period when that area was transformed from an unsettled rural landscape to a crowded city neighborhood. This localized experience is then used to develop a new understanding of changes in the American urban landscape through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. St. Louis' colonial origins left a physical and an ideological imprint that would affect the city's growth long after the arrival of American government. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to establish a public authority comparable to that of the city's French and Spanish overseers, decisions about the order of the landscape were left to a small group of politically and socially influential individuals who controlled the development process into the mid-nineteenth century. The municipal government remained hamstrung in its ambitions for the city by its limited means for raising revenue; hence, in spite of their sporadic efforts to develop an evenly developed and evenly served landscape across the city, public officials essentially followed, rather than led, the privately sponsored city-building process. That process is traced through profiles of both the "producers" and the "consumers" of the urban landscape. In the first case, the real estate, finance, and construction businesses are examined as they evolved from the domain of a limited number of agents working in an unspecialized manner, to that of a greater number of participants engaged in increasingly dispersed and fragmented activities, to a newly consolidated and centralized industry, once again operated by a small group of decision-makers. In the second case, four separate areas, developed between 1850 and 1910, are examined in detail with respect to their physical form, their changing population, and the effect of particular development decisions on their relation to the city at large. An examination of one aspect of city-building that could only be coordinated in the public sector--the planning and improvement of streets--shows that public landscape planning accepted the social and physical differences between one part of the city and another that had already developed under the vagaries of private development. The achievement of the civic reform and planning movement after 1900 was less to reorder the urban landscape than to turn the status quo from an accident of history to a logical and desirable state of affairs. Whether we approve or disapprove of the optimistic attempts of progressive reformers to emulate their colonial predecessors by fixing and predicting the relation of the pieces of the city to the urban whole, it is their version of the history of the urban landscape that we have inherited up to this time.