During the Gilded Age, the social geography of the city changed enormously. Cleveland, Ohio, provides a good example. In the 1870s, Cleveland was a small city in both population and area. Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller could, and often did, walk from his large brick house on Euclid Avenue to his office downtown. On his way, he passed the small homes of his clerks and other middle-class families. Behind these homes ran miles of alleys crowded with the dwellings of Cleveland’s working class. Farther out, on the shores of Lake Erie, close to the factories and foundries, clustered the shanties of the city’s poorest laborers.

Within two decades, the Cleveland that Rockefeller knew no longer existed. The coming of mass transit transformed the walking city. In its place emerged a central business district surrounded by concentric rings of residences organized by ethnicity and income. First the horse car in the 1870s and then the electric streetcar in the 1880s made it possible for those who could afford the five-cent fare to work downtown and flee after work to the “cool green rim” of the city. Social segregation—the separation of rich and poor, and of ethnic and old-stock Americans—became one of the major social changes engendered by the rise of the industrial metropolis.

Race and ethnicity affected the way cities evolved. Newcomers to the nation’s cities faced hostility and, not surprisingly, sought out their kin and country folk as they struggled to get ahead. Distinct ethnic neighborhoods often formed around a synagogue or church. African Americans typically experienced the greatest residential segregation, but every large city had its distinct ethnic neighborhoods—Little Italy, China-town, Bohemia Flats, Germantown—where English was rarely spoken.

Poverty, crowding, dirt, and disease constituted the daily reality of New York City’s immigrant poor—a plight documented by photojournalist Jacob Riis in his best-selling book How the Other Half Lives (1890). By taking his camera into the hovels of the poor, Riis opened the nation’s eyes to the filthy, overcrowded conditions in the city’s slums (see chapter 21, “Visualizing History”).

However, Riis’s book, like his photographs, presented a world of black and white. There were many layers to the population Riis labeled “the other half”—distinctions deepened by ethnicity, religion, race, and gender. How the Other Half Lives must be read more as a reformer’s call to action than as an entirely accurate portrayal of the varied and complex lives of “the other half.” But it served its purpose. Tenement reform and city playgrounds grew out of Riis’s exposé.

While Riis’s audience shivered at his revelations about the “other half,” many middle-class Americans worried equally about the excesses of the wealthy. They feared the class antagonism fueled by the growing chasm between rich and poor and shared Riis’s view that “the real danger to society comes not only from the tenements, but from the ill-spent wealth which reared them.”

The excesses of the Gilded Age’s newly minted millionaires were nowhere more visible than in the lifestyle of the Vanderbilts. Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the uncouth ferryman who built the New York Central Railroad, died in 1877. Today he still holds first place among the richest men in America (when adjusted for inflation). He left his son William $90 million. William doubled the sum, and his two sons proceeded to spend it on Fifth Avenue mansions and “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island, that sought to rival the palaces of Europe (see chapter 18, “Visualizing History”). Alva Vanderbilt, looked down on by the old-money matrons of New York, launched herself into New York society in 1883 with a costume party so opulent that her detractors had to cave in and accept her invitation. Alice Vanderbilt, her sister, topped all the guests by appearing as that miraculous new invention, the electric light, resplendent in a white satin evening dress studded with diamonds. The New York World speculated that Alva’s party cost more than a quarter of a million dollars, more than $5 million in today’s dollars.

Such ostentatious displays of wealth became especially alarming when they were coupled with disdain for the well-being of ordinary people. When a reporter in 1882 asked William Vanderbilt whether he considered the public good when running his railroads, he shot back, “The public be damned.” The fear that America had become a plutocracy—a society ruled by the rich—gained credence from the fact that the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owned more than half the real and personal property in the country. As the new century dawned, reformers would form a progressive movement to address the problems of urban industrialism and the substandard living and working conditions it produced.