What then are the lessons that might be learned from the largest urban presence on the Bay? How have the resources of the city been used to the advantage of the population as a whole and towards the promotion of equilibrium or balance within the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem? The answers fall into at least three broad categories: health care and the quality of life, land use (including its impact on the quality of life in general), and institutional reform (educational, governmental, and social).
See Adna Weber and cities in the 19th Century [17-531];
Weber quotes from George Tucker:
" THE proportion
between the rural and town population of a country is an
important fact
in its interior economy and condition. It determines, in a great
degree, its
capacity for manufactures, the extent of its commerce and the amount
of its wealth.
The growth of cities commonly marks the progress of intelligence
and the arts,
measures the sum of social enjoyment, and always implies excessive
mental activity,
which is sometimes healthy and useful, sometimes distempered
and pernicious.
If these congregations of men diminish some of the comforts of
life, they
augment others; if they are less favorable to health than the country,
they also provide
better defense against disease and better means of cure. From
causes both
political and moral, they are less favorable to the multiplication of
the species.
In the eyes of the moralist, cities afford a wider field both for virtue
and vice; and
they are more prone to innovation, whether for good or evil.
The love of
civil liberty is, perhaps, both stronger and more constant in the
country than
the town; and if it is guarded in the cities by a keener vigilance
and a more
far-sighted jealousy, yet law, order and security are also, in them<
more exposed
to danger, from the greater facility with which intrigue and ambi-
tion can there
operate on ignorance and want. Whatever may be the good or evil
tendencies
of
populous cities, they are the result to which all countries that are
at once fertile,
free and intelligent, inevitably tend."
—GEORGE TUCKER,
Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in
Fifty Years,
p. 127.
[need to turn
his thesis of love of civil liberty upside down and made it an out-growth
of the City]
Perhaps the least contoversial is the contribution of Baltimore to the improvement of health care. Baltimore, like other cities, was forced to pay attention to the health problems of its inhabitants. With disease rampant its economy suffered, trade fell off, people fled in horror. Only in the concentrated populations of the cities could hospitals flourish and the practice of medicine be advanced with such speed in response to wave after wave of epidemics (small pox, yellow fever, cholera, syphilis and AIDS to name but a few). Indeed the eradication of disease (smallpox, for example) could only come from the concentration of resources and talent in large urban places such as Baltimore. Once the nature of how diseases were transmitted was better understood, then the pressures for better water quality, sewage disposal, and generally healthier living conditions could be brought to bear on such practical solutions as enforced building codes, health inspections of food and eating places, clean water supplies and effective sewage disposal. With both the water supply and sewage disposal, Baltimore's track record, while not perfect, effected a change in the surrounding use of the environment so profound as to have far more than a slight impact on the restoration of equilibrium in the ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay.
[in the course, we will deal in some detail with the Preservation of the Gunpowder watershed and the consequences of the development of the Back River Sewage Disposal Plant]
With regard to the effective utilization of the land within the city, Baltimore has not accomplished as much as it might have given the opportunities presented to it throughout its over 200 year history. Indeed there have been major lost opportunities such as the chance for ground rents to have been a major source of public funds for public improvements instead of the major means of private development they proved to be, or the aftermath of the Baltimore Fire of 1904, which could have been a time for reshaping the urban landscape in way that reflected the best of what such planners as Olmsted Associates had to offer, but only gave the city a somewhat better sewer system.
[We will deal with developmental leasing concept of ground rents conceived of by Thomas Harrison in Baltimore in the 1760s and the missed opportunity when the State failed to confiscate Harrison's property for the benefit of the city and with the failure to implement the Olmsted plan and its implications for the city after the fire of 1904, concluding with a section on the importance of focusing public resources on enhancing the experience of place in the city along the lines argued by Tony Hiss in The Experience of Place, 1990.]
In matters of institutional reform, it easy to forget that some of the best ideas for educational, governmental, and social form have emerged from the urban context. With the fortune left by Johns Hopkins, considerable academic talent was focused for a considerable length of time on solving urban problems. Even the History Seminar was required to examine the real world of mental health care and social services and offer an historical context for their improvement. Mention need only be made of Professor Adams's prize student, Woodrow Wilson, Baltimore Mayor James Preston, and Hopkins president Frank Goodnow, to sense that substantive structural change in the organization and implementation of government could emerge from an urban academic setting.
[We will be discussing the administrative reforms resulting from the work of Woodrow Wilson, Mayor Preston, and Hopkins President Goodnow]
In less obvious and more subtle ways the city also provided a vehicle for major social experimentation and change both for those who came new to the Nation, as well as for those subcultures within the large society who found in the city a way to salvage their own identity and forge their own sense of community and well being. Without a prospering jewish community in Baltimore, there could not have been a “Jew Bill” permitting jews to hold public office in the state. Without a market for a Baltimore News there could not have been successful muckraking campaign in the 1890s and early 1900s by editor Charles H. Grasty to improve the living and working conditions for thousands of newly arrived Russian emigres. Without a thriving free African American community in Baltimore there could not have been a strong underground railroad and abolitionist threat to slavery, let alone a place where the best minds of the African American subculture could find comfort, community, and most important of all, education. We have yet to fully explore the extent to which Frederick Douglass survived and learned because of the support and guidance he gained from the Free Black community of Baltimore. Is it significant that one of the two most successful schools for free Blacks was on the corner of Douglass and Baltimore street and that Frederick Bayly chose to rename himself Frederick Douglass? Where was Hiram Revels, the first Black U.S. Senator educated if not at the Watkins school in Baltimore, the other successful school for Free Blacks in Baltimore? If Baltimore did not offer a solution to the problem of slavery, it was a haven where subcultures such as those of the African Americans, could develop a sense of community and commitment to bettering their world even in the worst of times.
[Over the course we will be discussing the City's role in broadening the base of political participation under the most adverse of conditions (rural resistance to the expanded franchise and proportional representation); effective voices of change: Newspaper editors such as Niles and Grasty who insisted on informing all who could read as well as advocating change; important role of the free blacks in Baltimore played in providing a thriving subculture context for addressing both the horrors of slavery and the benefits of freedom brought by the Civil War. ]
The City provided shelter for those elements in the population that are generally perceived of as socially inferior, perhaps even pariah, that the rest of the world wished would either remain subservient or go away altogether. The city, if not amenable to integration, at least permitted a modicum of freedom not permitted elsewhere to such a degree, that led to a reasonably strong, vibrant subculture of African Americans that at one of the peaks of the cycle of begrudging acceptance in 1870 could parade 20,000 people through the streets of Baltimore in a celebration (the largest in the nation) of the accomplishments to date. It was a celebration not without warning (row after row of houses were shuttered and their inhabitants pretended not to be at home). From the Balcony of the Gilmore House facing the Battle Monument Frederick Douglass would give one of his most eloquent extemporaneous speeches setting the tone for the struggles yet to come. He recognized the importance of the cartridge box (military service), the ballot box (voting rights), and urged that attention be turned now to obtaining the jury box and the knowledge box.
[refer to Document packet to be used in the course; the symbolism of the Ratifiction of the 15th Amendment Parade, Postmaster General Creswell and Frederick Douglass's speeches of May 19, 1870.]
Today, of course, the potential for the city to be the true melting pot of the Nation, has been severely undermined by the white (and some affluent African American) flight to the suburbs. Between 1950 and 1990 the population of Baltimore City declined from an all time high of 949,728 to 736,014 (a 22.5% decline), at the same time the non-white population grew from 226,053 to 448,261 (a 98% increase). Matters worsened in the decade from 1990 to 2000, from the standpoint of population decline (14%) and rising crime rates, while suburban population grew apace. While a litany of the ills besetting the city (from the near collapse of its physical infrastructure such as the sewers and storm drains to its staggering crime rate) might give pause to the most optimistic advocate of a return to the cities, there are compelling reasons why we should try. Anyone watching the evening news of the daily bombardment of Sarajevo or the dramatic increase in the number of homeless living in the subways of Moscow should sense that steps should be taken now to prevent our world from heading down the same path. By pooling resources, pulling (and administratively pushing) people into concentrated urban areas through the use of sizable tax breaks, reasonable cost housing (in the spirit of Cecil Calvert's model) and the forced relocation of new job opportunities to a few existing cities (including Baltimore) there may be a chance that a dynamic balance within the ecosystem can be restored and we can find ways to survive until, or even through the next ice age.
The idea is not a new one, even in our own time. [17-536, Neal R. Peirce article on road to better communities, SUN]
'Back to the Future' for Better Communities
Published on: September 20, 1993
Edition: FINAL
Section: EDITORAL
Page: 7A
Byline: NEAL R. PEIRCE
Sacramento -- Could we ''go back to the future'' to build an America we
like
better than the sterile single-class suburbs, auto-dependent and far from
town
centers, that commercial builders have been pushing on us for the last
generation?Yes, says Grantland Johnson, supervisor of Sacramento County,
California. The model is right in front of us, he observes, in those pre-World
War II communities where housing types and costs vary block by block,
upper- and lower-income people live in closer proximity ...
Sun reporter Neal R. Pierce would continue to refine his argument. See for example:
II. So then, how did Baltimore emerge? What does it's early history have to tell us?
“Slow Beginnings, 1729-1776"
I. Introduction
A) In her chapter “The Empty Century,” Sherry Olson sets the context and tone in her first paragraphs:
p. 1-2: “The [geographical] features [along the banks of the Patapsco River to its mouth] belonged to a town site of magnificent potential. The place was a natural haven for ships. It possessed streams with plenty of fall for turning mills, and also admirable timber on the necks, a generous agricultural climate, a great variety of soils, an abundance of fine springs of water, and a along ridge of excellent red brick clays, called the bolus by John Smith, but later known as the minebank for its nuggets of iron ore.
Yet for a hundred years no city grew. Unlike Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston, Baltimore was never a significant center of colonial trade, enterprise, government, or culture. Laid out in 1730, it was still a mere village of twenty-five houses in 1752, and at the onset of the Revolution it was a small town of six thousand persons and ten churches, and it had just acquired its first newspaper. The failure to develop a colonial city on the Patapsco cannot be blamed on a strong rival. Colonial Maryland had no truly urban life, and its economy required no system of market towns. ...
[overlays of county/population growth (26-216); Evans map, 26-245
II. Baltimore's Problem: finding a reason other than Tobacco for being a Port Town in an economy where London (and to a lesser extent, Glasgow) served that function well enough.
Those 18th century Marylanders who would have liked to have seen Baltimore become a thriving Port (Lord Proprietor and developers of the iron industry such as Charles Carroll of Annapolis, Dr. Charles Carroll, and the Tasker Family (whose progeny married into the Virginia Aristocracy) had a hard time of it.
Baltimore had to wait until the settlements of the hinterland produced enough crops to make a town/city worthwhile. Even then it would take entrepreneurs such as Dr. Stevenson to promote the redirection of the hinterland export trade from Philadelphia to the banks of the Patapsco. Only when the major crop of the hinterland (wheat) was combined with the major crop of the Eastern Shore (also wheat) and brought to Baltimore for re-export as grain or flour (milled in the Baltimore area) did Baltimore begin to take grow significantly as a port town.
To put Baltimore into the urban experience of Europe (specifically London): In 1320 London had a an estimated population of about 40,000 people. That London was a teeming city even then is evidence by Robert de Lincoln's bequest in 1318 of one penny for each of the known 2,000. In 1322, when alms were distributed at Black Friars, the crowd was so vast that 50 people were trampled to death. It would not be until about 1810 that Baltimore's population would exceed the 40,000 that London had five hundred years earlier.
A seminal work on the origins and growth of American Port Towns is “Economic Function and Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century by Jacob M. Price in PERSPECTIVES IN AMERICAN HISTORY, vol viii, 1974, pp. 123-186.” We won't discuss the work in detail except as it relates to the Chesapeake, but his chart on p. 176 places Baltimore into the context of the development of the major towns of America in the 18th Century.
possible illustrations:
17_531. comparison of urban populations around the world at the turn of the 20th century:
26-245 Hermann
map, portion showing Baltimore; noted that Hamill Kenny, 14-479 and Maryland
Geological Survey diisagree on name of Balimore, but from Celtic and may
mean “the large town from Celtic bilte more”; see 4-1519, p. 421
17-531 Weber
quoting George Tucker, Progress of the US. in Population and Weealth; also
used table showing urbanization in world as of 1899; noted that geographical
size, population density and above all entrpreneuship make for a city,
although natural terrain (fall line, etc. can play an important role
depending upon how it is utilized, adapted to changing markets, demands
for the city's commercer, etc.)
6-237 comparative
population of european and American Cities, 17th-19th Century
12-49 Hollar
17th century map of part of London
26-454 clinton
papers, map of Eastern Shore of Maryland, source of grain trade
26-370 Schaefer
and Jacobs, Stadium, today's city product of State and City government
al promotion and entrepreneurship, but it is a tenuous way to rebuild
a city at best (witness Jacob's fate, cost to taxpayer for upper-middle
class white entertainment)