Hi, everyone.  My name is Sam M. from Mr. Sal’s 9th period 20th Century History class.

This blog is about the problems that our nation experience in the late 1800s and early 1900s when a bunch of people decided to move into the newly developing cities.  The fastest growing cities at the time were New York City, St. Louis and Chicago.  In 1860 only 20% of the people in the U.S. lived in towns or cities with population greater than 2,500.  By 1900 this percentage had doubled.  Because these cities were growing, everyone wanted to move there to try to get good jobs.  The problem was that there weren’t enough jobs to go around and there weren’t enough places for all of the people to live.

The people that were moving into the cities were immigrants from Europe and African Americans from the south in the United States.  The immigrants and African Americans were not treated equally because the people who already lived in the cities were prejudice against them.  Many things made them prejudice, such as the color of their skin, the languages they spoke and the fact that they were trying to steal the Amercan’s jobs.

As far as living conditions were concerned, they were bad in the overcrowded cities.    Tenement buildings were built to house the overflow of people.  These buildings didn’t have the building codes for safety that they have now, so they were also dangerous if there was a fire and they could be unsanitary because too many people would live in an apartment made for only one family.  Apartments were build so close together that the people who lived in them never got any fresh air.  This caused many people to get sick.

Since there were so many people and not enough jobs, people started to fight, gamble, drink, do drugs and whatever else they could think of to get money and escape reality.  Cities weren’t set up to deal with all of this crime and there weren’t enough police officers to go around.  Because of this, crime happened all the time and there was nothing anyone could do about it.  Cities also didn’t have enough firefighters or sanitation systems.  Fires raged out of control and garbage and sewage were all over the streets which polluted the drinking water.

So what did they do about it?  Architects tried to help the problem of overcrowding by designing dumbell apartments which were shaped like the letter “I”.  By doing this, vertical spaces called air shafts could be left between buidings to allow light and air into each apartment.  This didn’t really work though, because the airshafts got to be dangerous.  Tenants threw garbage out the windows into the air shafts.  The garbage rotted on the hot summer days and the smell made people sick.  Also, rats, insects and disease germs lived in the garbage.