The Transformation of the World (67 page)

What did the arrival of the railroad mean for a city? Everywhere, the early “railroad manias” not only involved money and technology but also affected the future shape of cities. Heated debates broke out over the relationship between private interests and public utility, and over the location and design of stations. The great pioneering age of railroad construction, which brought with it a novel technology and aesthetic, was the 1840s in the case of Britain and central Europe. The last of the great Paris stations, the Gare de Lyon, was in full operation by 1857. One reason for this speed of construction was that railroads and stations devoured huge quantities of urban land as they carved their way into the inner city, sending property prices through the roof. By the end of the urban railroad transformation, railroad companies possessed between 5 percent (London) and 9 percent (Liverpool) of the land in British cities and indirectly influenced the use of another 10 percent.
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The argument that they were clearing slums in the process rarely caught on, since little concern was shown about the rehousing of displaced families. The problem was literally shunted aside. Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain lost their home as a result of railroad construction. It might take just a couple of weeks to rip out the heart of a district and to form a new neighborhood on either side of the tracks. Viaducts, much loved at first, did not solve the problem. Railroad lines and stations were loud and dirty. The expectation that they would breathe life into surrounding areas was sometimes fulfilled, but not often. In high-immigration cities such as Moscow, there was also a danger that new slums would spring up around the stations.
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Passenger travel was the first to develop on the long-distance routes in Britain, followed in a second phase by freight transport, which often required the construction of an additional land-hungry station. Only in a third phase, after 1880, did local commuter services begin to appear—a lower priority for railroad companies, and one that sometimes relied on government subsidies.
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In the countries that had pioneered the process of construction, the physical marking of inner cities by railroad stations was generally complete by the beginning of the 1870s.

Railroad stations altered cityscapes: they could sometimes revolutionize the whole character of a city. The main station in Amsterdam, which opened in 1889, was built on three artificial islands and a total of 8,687 piles, driving a huge wedge between the inner city and the harbor front. The much-admired contrast between the cramped city and the open maritime vista disappeared, and Amsterdam changed in its perceptions and lifestyle from a city by the sea to an inland city. At the same time, one canal after another—sixteen in all—were filled in. The aim of the planners was to “modernize” Amsterdam, to make it conform to the model of other metropolises. Only protests by local conservationists ensured
that the canal destruction came to an end in 1901, so that Amsterdam was able to keep at least its basic early modern design.
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Railroad stations posed some of the greatest architectural problems of the age—or anyway they did once the rail companies or relevant public authorities were prepared to spend the necessary money, since the earliest stations (such as Euston in London) were built with thrift in mind. Never before had roofed spaces been designed for circulation on such a scale. The station had to organize movement, to direct machines and people, and to satisfy the requirements of the timetable. New iron and glass materials, tried out shortly before in the Parisian arcades, created a potential for easy construction that was expertly utilized in stations such as Newcastle (1847–50). The facades, on the other hand, had to be weighty and to accentuate strong visual features; many of them were at the end of a street, capable of being seen from a long way around. Stations were often admired as the ultimate artworks, which combined the latest technology with comfort and a pleasing external appearance, Jakob Ignaz Hittorff's Gare du Nord in Paris (completed in 1846) being a shining example.
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Their architects were influential people, with a broad range of skills, who had to make any number of decisions on technical and stylistic matters.
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Nothing went untried: Renaissance (Amsterdam, 1881–91), Romanesque combined with Gothic (Madras, 1868), wild European eclecticism plus Indian handicrafts (Bombay, 1888), the station as fortress (Lahore, 1861), glazed neo-Gothic extravagance with masterly wrought-iron details (Saint Pancras in London, 1864–73), a huge round arch facade (Gare du Nord, 1861–66; Frankfurt am Main, 1883–88), a mishmash of everything (Antwerp, 1895–99), “Moorish” fantasy (Kuala Lumpur, 1894–97), beaux-arts style (Gare d'Orsay in Paris, 1898–1900), allusions to ancient Rome (Pennsylvania Station in New York, 1910), and Nordic neo-Romanticism (Helsinki, 1910–14).
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As these examples show, India also was a stomping ground for early station architects. Istanbul, with two stations built by German engineers (1887 and 1909), allowed itself the nice touch of greeting travelers from Europe with architecture of Islamic inspiration, and visitors from Asia Minor with a classical Greek exterior.

Horses and Pedestrians

People arriving by train in a European city around 1870 used a technology that is essentially still in use today—and a few moments later found themselves in an archaic world of horse transport. In 1800 all cities in the world were still filled with pedestrians and were therefore, in this respect, at the same evolutionary stage.
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Their main outward difference was in the degree of their use of horses, which was not possible everywhere or available to everyone without restriction. In Chinese cities those who did not go about on foot had porters carry them in sedan chairs; horses were uncommon. In Istanbul non-Muslims were forbidden to ride a horse within the city limits, and until the nineteenth century even donkey or mule carts were less used than human traction to carry goods.
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In Japan,
until the end of the Tokugawa period, only samurai nobles were allowed to travel by horse; all others dragged themselves, often barefoot, through streets that were either muddy or dusty. After the opening of the country in midcentury, people were forbidden to walk in bare feet, on the grounds that foreigners would think this shameful.
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In the pedestrian city, the way from home to work could not take too long. This was a major reason why slums tended to concentrate in inner-city areas and why they were cleared so slowly. First there had to be mass transportation affordable even to the low-paid. Preindustrial technologies survived long after the beginning of the “industrial age.” Horse-drawn omnibuses, the first significant innovation in the inner cities, rested upon the same operational basis as private coach travel and involved little technological advance. Later the horse-drawn bus developed as a form of public transport, operating a regular timetable on fixed routes and for a set price. This was an American invention, first introduced in 1832 in New York. It took twenty-four years for it to appear in Paris.
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Such vehicles were inevitably expensive due to their high running costs. A large number of horses had to be kept in reserve; each horse usually worked for only five to six years; fodder and maintenance did not come cheap. Besides, a horse-drawn bus could at best travel only twice as fast as an average pedestrian; it was not a solution for the journey from home to work. Horses also created a lot of muck. Around 1900 the Chicago garbage disposal service was collecting from the streets an incredible 600,000 tons of horse dung a year.
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Smelly manure heaps continued to be a feature of urban landscapes even in ambitiously modernizing countries, and stables were a ubiquitous element of the built environment up to the end of the century.
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The clatter of horses' hooves on pavement and the cracking of whips made a noise about which the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt was not the only one to complain.
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Congestion and accidents were part of everyday life. The disposal of dead horses was itself a major sanitary problem.

The horse-drawn tram or streetcar, which made its debut in 1859 in Liverpool and spread in the 1870s to continental Europe, did not solve these problems, but it did mark a certain advance since the use of rails doubled the weight a horse was able to draw. Costs and fares went down, though not dramatically. Nowhere was the “horsecar” more popular than in the United States. By 1860 New York had 142 miles of rails, and 100,000 people a day used the service. In the 1880s there were 415 “street railway companies” in the United States, which carried 188 million passengers annually.
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In Istanbul, where water transport has remained important up to the present day, tramlines were laid on the existing broad, Western-style streets. The trams made the Turkish metropolis look like a great European city, even though stick-wielding men walked in front of the horses to shoo the infamous Istanbul dogs away from the rails.
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In Britain (though not in the United States) tram companies were forbidden by law to speculate in land, and so they had little incentive to open new routes in
the suburbs. But horse-drawn buses and trams did contribute to the differentiation of social space. They enabled the middle classes—who could afford the fare as well as the rising price of real estate along the tram routes—to live far from their place of work, thereby triggering the disintegration of what sociologists call “workplace communities.”
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To come into their own, horse-drawn buses and trams needed the railroad, since their main strength was as a feeder for intercity and suburban trains. In turn, the train made the wider use of horses indispensable, since it increased the total circulation of people within the city. It is a curious paradox that literally until the end of the century, there was no improvement in inner-city transit that came close to matching the most advanced transportation of the age. In 1890 people still moved with 1820 technology through the streets of Europe and America.

In 1890 a total of some 280,000 horses were deployed on buses and trams in Great Britain.
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For no other city do we know as much about the use of horses as we do for Paris. It is estimated that in 1862 there were 2.9 million horses in the whole of France (a large part of them in agriculture and the army); Paris had at least 78,000 in 1878, and approximately 56,000 in 1912.
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Hackney carriages had been in use since the seventeenth century, and in 1828 they were introduced for the first time in a kind of regular service. Horse-drawn buses spread only after the founding of the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus in 1855, while at the same time new types of demand for transportation began to appear. The new Bon Marché department store, for example, had perfectly run underground stables with more than 150 horses and a large fleet of vehicles that could take customers home. The post office, the fire brigade, and the police also required horses. Welloff individuals kept saddle and carriage horses until well into the automobile age; there were more than 23,000 private carriages in London alone in 1891.
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In the French Second Empire, under English influence, promenades on horseback became more popular than ever before. Riding lessons, racecourses, and the hiring of horses were a feature of middle-class leisure. The key social distinction ran between those who could and those could not afford to have a carriage with a private driver. The lower classes profited from this last golden age of the horse by having access to cheap horsemeat.
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In the long run, of course, overland coach travel was no match for the railroad. But it did not disappear overnight. Indeed, in the early nineteenth century, mail coaches reached their height of efficiency and elegance in Europe, in accordance with the policy—first developed in France—of carrying passengers as fast as letters. In England cross-country coaches had never been used as much as they had in the transition to the railway age. At the beginning of the 1830s, the London-based Chaplin & Company maintained a fleet of sixty-four passenger carriages and 1,500 horses. In 1835, every day saw fifty coaches leave the capital for Brighton, twenty-two for Birmingham, sixteen for Portsmouth, and fifteen for the ferry port at Dover. Altogether, the long-distance coach business in London had a capacity of 58,000 seats for passengers. Like the sailing ship, it
reached its peak of technical perfection right at the end of its heyday. Improved vehicles and road services (tarring), deriving from both private economic initiative and political decisions, meant that, under favorable weather conditions, the 530-kilometer journey from London to Edinburgh could be completed in two days, as opposed to the ten it had required around 1750. Whereas a traveler needed four to five days to go from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, the Frankfurt to Stuttgart run, after the “express coach” was introduced in 1822, took twenty-five instead of forty hours. The ideals of smoothness and punctuality had never seemed so close.
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On level roads, the best coaches could reach speeds of twenty kilometers per hour or even slightly more. At the other extreme were the heavy coaches used by American settlers, whose teams of four or six horses struck west across the continent at no more than three or four kilometers an hour. The railroad would render them obsolete by the 1880s.
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Elsewhere in the world, suitably modernized, the horse kept a place in long-distance travel until the end of the century and beyond. In 1863 a good road opened between Beirut and Damascus, and an express coach could complete the trip in twelve to fifteen hours; as many as a thousand horses were kept available for it. It is true that a rail line opened in 1895 and cut the time to nine hours, but only in the 1920s did the train finally knock the horse out of the race.
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