¹ Jackson, K.T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), 6–11.Google Scholar

² For scholars who support the notion of elite/middle-class suburban homogeneity see: Jackson, , Crabgrass Frontier, 8Google Scholar; Warner, S. Bass Jr, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1978), 67–116Google Scholar; and Marsh, M., Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, 1990), 90.Google Scholar See also note 51.

³ For sociologists, see: Douglass, H.P., The Suburban Trend (New York, 1925), 77–8, 86–7Google Scholar; Harris, C.D., ‘Suburbs’, American Journal of Sociology, 49 (1943), 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schnore, L.F., ‘The social and economic characteristics of American suburbs’, Sociological Quarterly, 4 (1963), 122–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For geographers and historians, see Harris, R., ‘American suburbs: a sketch of a new interpretation’, Journal of Urban History, 15 (1988), 98–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wiese, A., ‘Places of our own: suburban black towns before 1960’, Journal of Urban History, 19 (1993), 30–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also note 59.

⁴ US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US: 1930 – Metropolitan Districts (Washington, 1932), 6, 10–13Google Scholar; US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US: 1930 – Population, vol. III, pt. 1 (Washington, 1932), 628, 630.Google Scholar

⁵ Some scholars have obliquely noted that large suburbs did not fit easily into their frameworks. Douglass, , The Suburban Trend, 120.Google Scholar Douglass and others use such terms as ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ suburbs to distinguish smaller from large suburbs: Suburban Trend, 39, 47, 64Google Scholar; Fishman, R., Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), 117, 135Google Scholar; and Stilgoe, J.R., Borderland: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New Haven, 1988), 204.Google Scholar

⁶ While arbitrary, these figures for population size and density are not without precedent. Douglass used 25,000 + to categorize large suburbs: Suburban Trend, 331–3.Google Scholar The 6,000 per square mile criteria came from the observation that major cities such as Cincinnati had such densities. Both population size and density are important here; suburbs with large populations but low densities such as Long Beach (California), Dearborn and Pontiac (Michigan) are not included here.

⁷ Similarly, Robert Fishman found that ‘Only when the London suburb was transported to Manchester and the other early industrial cities of northern England did suburbia demonstrate its revolutionary power to dominate middle-class residential patterns and to transform urban structure’: Bourgeois Utopias, 73.Google Scholar Jon Teaford noted the unity of these industrial cities: Cities in the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, 1993).Google Scholar

⁸ These were selected by identifying all suburban communities in the ten largest metropolitan districts with 1930 populations near or above 25,000 and densities over 6,000. This list was then divided into two groups, residential and employing/industrial, based on Chauncy Harris's analyses of the 1930 population census and the 1935 census of manufactures and trade: Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 11–13. Despite qualifying, satellite cities and independent urban centres were excluded whenever they could be identified. Other metropolitan areas may have had city suburbs; more research is necessary to determine their full extent.

⁹ Only Berkeley, with a 1930 population of 82,109 and density of 8,643 represented a significant exception to the dearth of western city suburbs. St Louis failed to produce either type while Los Angeles' only city suburb, Huntington Park, barely reached the population threshold. Washington, Pennsylvania (classified as diversified by Harris) is excluded here because its considerable distance from Pittsburgh and its broader economic base suggest an independent city; Aliquippa, an industrial city suburb at a considerable distance from Pittsburgh, is included. There is room for debate over which communities belong here. Other disqualified communities include: Hoboken, Elizabeth, Patterson, Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey. Closer analysis might alter the list but should not significantly change city suburbs' description or importance.

¹⁰ For a discussion of these forces, see Taylor, G.R., Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York, 1915)Google Scholar, chs I and IV.

¹¹ Cramer, R. E., ‘Manufacturing structure of the Cicero District Metropolitan Chicago’ (unpublished University of Chicago thesis, 1952), 13–18Google Scholar; and Borchert, J., ‘Social landscapes of a streetcar suburb: 1889–1930’, in Groth, P. (ed.), Vision, Culture and Landscape (Berkeley, 1990), 41–62.Google Scholar

¹² In contrast, other suburbs with large populations were also larger spatially: New Rochelle – 9.9 square miles; Newton –17.9; Dearborn – 25; and Long Beach – 29.6. Computed from ‘Government data on the 960 cities over 10,000 population’, in Ridley, C. and Nolting, O. (eds), The Municipal Year Book –1935 (Chicago, 1935), 164–87.Google Scholar

¹³ For example, Somerville, one of Boston's ‘first suburbs’, gained city status in 1872. Binford, H.C., The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860 (Chicago, 1985), 225.Google Scholar

¹⁴ US Census Bureau, Census Abstracts of the US for censuses: 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For example, Parma, Ohio, easily surpassed Cleveland's three city suburbs in population but never approached them in terms of density. J. Borchert, ‘Suburbs’, in Tassel, D. Van and Grabowski, J. (eds), Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington, 1986), 932–42.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Le Gacy, A.E., ‘Improvers and preservers: a history of Oak Park, Illinois, 1833–1940’ (unpublished University of Chicago thesis, 1967), 4–6Google Scholar; , J. and Borchert, S., Lakewood: The First Hundred Years (Norfolk, 1989), 106–9.Google Scholar In other ways, the development of a wider range of services produced less dependence on the central city. See Schauffler, M., The Suburbs of Cleveland: A Field Study of the Metropolitan District Outside the Administrative Area of the City (Chicago, 1945), 391.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In some cases state borders or significant water barriers made annexation efforts unlikely.

¹⁸ Teaford, J., City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970 (Baltimore, 1979), 95–6.Google Scholar City suburbs retained their political independence whether their governmental form took the shape of city, village, town or a borough. This sets city suburbs apart from inner-city suburban areas that accepted annexation.

¹⁹ Teaford, City and Suburb, 90, 85–6, 91–2Google Scholar; see also Gacy, Le, ‘Improvers and preservers’, 194–206Google Scholar; and Buchbinder-Green, B., Evanston (St Louis, 1989), 94.Google Scholar Some city suburbs apparently did not attract interest from their central city and remained independent by default, including Boston's Chelsea, Somerville and Revere and Detroit's Hamtramck and Highland Park. Teaford, City and Suburb, 60–1, 87Google Scholar; and Wood, A.E., Hamtramck A Sociological Study of a Polish-American Community (New Haven, 1955), 16–17.Google Scholar

²⁰ US Census Bureau, 1930 – Metropolitan Districts.

²¹ Theoretical and empirical work demonstrate the significance of density, although suburban scholars have been reluctant to apply it. Wirth, L., ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1938), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lampard, E.E., ‘American historians and the study of urbanization’, American Historical Review, 67 (1961), 49–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berry, B.J.L., Simmons, J.W. and Tennant, R.J., ‘Urban population densities: structure and change’, Geographical Review, 53 (1963), 389–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Douglass concluded that density and size could not be used ‘as a significant basis for the comparison of suburb with suburb’: Suburban Trend, 75.Google Scholar His 1925 book appeared, however, before the city suburb had fully emerged.

²² These figures are computed from population data in US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US; and spatial data in ‘Government data on 960 cities’, 164–87. Since much land in central cities was devoted to commerce, wholesaling, office space, manufacturing, parks and roads, the urban densities do not fully reflect the peak densities in residential neighbourhoods.

²³ Computed from data in US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US, 35, 57, 166Google Scholar; and ‘Government data on 960 cities’, 164–87.

²⁴ Green, H.W., Population Characteristics by Census Tracts – Cleveland, Ohio – 1930 (Cleveland, 1932), 54.Google Scholar

²⁵ Le Gacy, ‘Improvers and preservers’, 142.

²⁶ Wood, , Hamtramck, 25.Google Scholar

²⁷ US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US, 35–6, 49–51, 57–8, 73–4, 115–16, 141–8, 159–62, 165–9, 193–4, 203–4Google Scholar; and ‘Government data on 960 cities’, 164–87.

²⁸ , J. and Borchert, S., ‘Migrant responses to the city: the neighborhood’, Slovakia, 31 (1984), 8–45Google Scholar; Ebner, M., Creating Chicago's North Shore (Chicago, 1988), 242Google Scholar; US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US, 259.Google Scholar East Orange, Montclair and Evanston had significant African-American populations: Douglass, Suburban Trend, 97–8.Google Scholar While often restricted to peripheral enclaves, working-class and/or ethnic neighbourhoods often attracted a wide range of businesses, professionals, churches and other community organizations. Goggins, D.L., Pathways to an Era's Past: A Look at Evanston's West Side History (Evanston, 1983), 2–6Google Scholar; US Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the US, 257Google Scholar; Crouchett, L.P., Bunch, L.G. III and Winnacker, M.K., Visions Toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland, 1989), 22, 66Google Scholar, footnote; Le Gacy, ‘Improvers and preservers’, 188–9.

²⁹ Spelman, W.B., The Town of Cicero: History, Advantages, and Government (n.p., n.d.), 15.Google Scholar

³⁰ Wood, , Hamtramck, 19–21Google Scholar; Zunz, O., The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1982), 354.Google Scholar Zunz notes that ‘Highland Park was completely different’ from neighbouring Hamtramck.

³¹ Le Gacy concludes that ‘Oak Park people were solid, middle-class, white-collar wage earners’: ‘Improvers and preservers’, 182.

³² Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 6, and n. 7. Berkeley, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland, East Orange, Evanston, Lakewood, Montclair, Oak Park and Wilkinsburg each had ‘more than 14 per cent of gainfully occupied … in professional occupations in 1930’.

³³ Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 6–7, n. 8. These included: Berwyn, East Cleveland, East Orange, Irvington, Lakewood, Maywood, Medford, Oak Park, Somerville and Wilkinsburg.

³⁴ Cramer, ‘Manufacturing structure of the Cicero District’, 18. Other industrial city suburbs emerged largely as the result of single major factories: Hamtramck around a Dodge Motor Company plant. Highland Park around a Ford Motor Company plant, Garfield around the Forstmann and Huffmann mill and Passaic adjacent to the Botany mills. Zunz, , Changing Face of Inequality, 291Google Scholar; and Goldberg, D.J., A Tale of Three Cities: Labor Organizations and Protest in Patterson, Passaic, and Lawrence, 1916–1921 (New Brunswick, 1989), 55, 46.Google Scholar

³⁵ Cramer, ‘Manufacturing structure of the Cicero District’, 49–50. A problematic aspect of joining industrial and residential city suburbs is their respective differences in ‘Out-’ or ‘in-commuting’ to work. As significant employment centres, industrial city suburbs appear more like satellite cities than suburbs (see Schnore, L.F., ‘Satellites and suburbs’, Social Forces, 36 (1957), 121–7).CrossRefGoogle Scholar None of the industrial city suburbs cited here, however, are identified in Taylor's Satellite Cities; the effort has been to exclude those so identified. More importantly, many residential city suburbs also served as employment centres both for white- and blue-collar workers; while they seldom employed as many workers as industrial city suburbs, the difference, again, is more one of degree than kind. See the following discussion and notes 39–42. Blue- and white-collar workers commuted to central cities from industrial city suburbs such as Cicero as much as they did from residential ones.

³⁶ Harris,‘Suburbs’, 12–13.

³⁷ Wood, , Hamtramck, 23–4Google Scholar; and Goldberg, , A Tale of Three Cities, 55.Google Scholar Zunz reported differences between Hamtramck (85 per cent of the employed were factory workers in 1920) and Highland Park (60 per cent); the former had just over 8 per cent of its population in professional, white-collar or proprietorial occupations while Highland Park had nearly 40 per cent so employed. The Changing Face of Inequality, 354, 356Google Scholar, Table 13.4 and 358, Table 13.5. Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 6–7, n. 8.

³⁸ Ibid., 13.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Suggesting the complexity of city suburbs, Berkeley's next largest groupings of employed residents were professionals (19 per cent), and clerical workers (16 per cent). Federal Writers' Project, Berkeley: The First Seventy-Five Years (Berkeley, 1941), 116–18.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Borchert, , Lakewood, 40–1, 48–51Google Scholar; and Borchert, , ‘Residential city suburbs: the emergence of a new suburban type, 1880–1930’, Journal of Urban History, 22 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Table 6,292.

⁴² Green, H.W., Planes of Living in Cuyahoga County As Depicted by the Real Property Survey, part I (Cleveland, 1940), 76.Google Scholar This makes the neighbourhood more like that of an industrial city suburb where residents often lived and worked in the same community. The extent of industrial and other employment in many city suburbs, residential and industrial, helps bridge the gap between city suburbs while other factors set both types apart from satellite cities.

⁴³ Le Gacy, ‘Improvers and preservers’, 179–80. By 1940, Oak Park had 630 stores with an annual business of $36 million dollars.

⁴⁴ Guarino, J., Oak Park (St Louis, 1988), 100–1Google Scholar; Buchbinder-Green, , Evanston, 85, 124, 155, 160, 161, 167Google Scholar; Borchert, , Lakewood, 162–3.Google Scholar Well-to-do suburbanites in each of these city suburbs also established exclusive social clubs along the lines of those founded earlier by central city elites. Families, however, were more welcome in these private community clubs, as they were in nearby suburban country clubs.

⁴⁵ McArdle, P. (ed.), Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate: Essays on Berkeley's History, 1845–1945 (Berkeley, 1983), 258.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Borchert, J., ‘Visual analysis of a streetcar suburb’, in Groth, P. and Bressi, T. (eds), Understanding Ordinary Landscapes (New Haven, 1996Google Scholar, forthcoming); and Van Tassel, and Grabowski, , Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, 16.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Groth, P., Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley, 1994).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Perkins, M.B., Evanstoniana: An Informal History of Evanston and Its Architecture, comp. and ed. by Buchbinder-Green, B.J. (Evanston, 1984), 125, 127–33.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Borchert, , ‘Visual analysis of a streetcar suburb’, and Borchert, ‘Residential city suburbs’, 294–6.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Bartholomew, H. and Associates, The Comprehensive Plan: Cicero, Illinois – Preliminary Report (Northbrook, III., 1973), 14Google Scholar; Cicero Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Cicero, Illinois (Cicero, 1985), 32–3Google Scholar; and Blei, N., Neighborhood (Peoria, 1987).Google Scholar For Passaic, see Goldberg, , A Tale of Three Cities, 54.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Contrast this with Margaret Marsh's descriptions in Suburban Lives, 90Google Scholar: communities that were ‘safe, homogeneous, and purged of the poor… and the ethnically suspect’. Other scholars suggest greater diversity in period suburbs; in a review of suburban literature, Carol O'Connor found ‘it… possible that individual suburbs… used to be more heterogeneous than they are today’, but provided little explanatory framework. O'Connor, ‘The suburban mosaic: patterns of land use, class, and culture’, in Gillette, H. Jr and Miller, Z. (eds), American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (New York, 1987), 253.Google Scholar Ken Jackson also found diversity in late nineteenth-century railroad suburbs where ‘about 30 to 50 per cent of the heads of households… were affluent businessmen’ but ‘towns had a larger, poorer group of citizens whose function was to provide gardening, domestic and other services for the wealthier class’: Crabgrass Frontier, 99.Google Scholar

⁵² Borchert, , ‘Residential city suburbs’, 300–1.Google Scholar

⁵³ Ibid.; Le Gacy, , ‘Improvers and preservers’, 243.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Goldberg, , A Tale of Three Cities, 55.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland adopted city manager governments. Lakewood's Chamber of Commerce unsuccessfully promoted a city manager plan, although it generally achieved most of its agenda. Borchert, ‘Suburbs’, 942; and Bordiert, ‘Residential city suburbs’, 300–1. Residential city suburbs were less likely to have (or need) ‘reform’ governments, but those that did divided evenly between commission and city manager forms (14 per cent each). In contrast, 37 per cent of industrial city suburbs had commission governments suggesting that elites with middle-class allies probably controlled governments in those communities as they did in Passaic. ‘Governmental data on the 960 cities over 10,000 population’, 164–87.

⁵⁶ For example, see the case of industrial city suburb, Garfield, in Goldberg, , A Tale of Three Cities, 55.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ While historians and others have often ignored developments in suburban communities after their initial formation, clearly all communities continued to undergo change.

⁵⁸ See Harris, ‘American suburbs’; Wiese, ‘Places of our own’; and Taylor, H.L. Jr, ‘City building, public policy, and the rise of the industrial city, and black ghetto-slum formation in Cincinnati’, in Taylor, (ed.), Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1850–1970 (Urbana, 1993), 30–54.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ The main suburban classificatory schemes developed by scholars – (1) transportation systems (i.e. streetcar and automobile suburbs) and (2) function (i.e. housing or employing suburbs) – often obscure as much as they reveal about the suburban landscape. For historians and geographers who have advanced the former see: Warner, , Streetcar Suburbs; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, chs 2, 5, 6, 9Google Scholar; and Muller, P.O., ‘The evolution of American suburbs: a geographic interpretation’, Urbanism: Past and Present, 4 (1977), 1–10.Google Scholar Sociologists have developed multiple categories based on function: Douglass, , The Surburban Trend, 74–122Google Scholar; Harris, ‘Suburbs’, 1–13; Schnore, ‘The social and economic characteristics of American suburbs’, 122–34; and Schwartz, B., ‘The suburban landscape: new variations on an old theme’, Contemporary Sociology, 9 (1980), 640–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar