During the second half of the 19th century, America’s cities underwent a dramatic transformation. The big cities of the East were supersized and urban planners raced to keep up. On the other side of the country, new cities grew out of nowhere as the Wild West was tamed. Happily for modern-day history enthusiasts, new photographic technology meant that America’s urban explosion was captured on camera.
Click through this gallery to explore amazing 19th-century photos of American cities, from the Big Apple to the Windy City…
Machinery manufacturer Joseph Saxton loved tinkering with new inventions. In 1839 he created his own apparatus using a cigar box, a glass lens and a silver-coated metallic plate to take a photograph (known as a daguerreotype) by exposing the plate to sunlight for a few seconds. He pointed his equipment out his office window and the image he captured – of Central High School – is now thought to be the earliest surviving photograph taken in the United States. The school still exists but in a different location, so the view that Saxton recorded has long since disappeared.
The port of Cincinnati expanded rapidly after steamboat services began operating along the Ohio River in 1811. It soon became a transport hub, linking the Midwest by river, canal and railway, and so many pig carcasses were processed here that the city became known as Porkopolis. By the time this daguerreotype was taken in 1848, the city’s population had rocketed to 115,000 and these riverside properties were among Cincinnati’s most valuable real estate.
Atlanta was only a decade or so old when this image of Whitehall Street was captured, but business owners had already set up lucrative enterprises. Atlantans could easily buy cigars, tobacco – and slaves. The business in this photograph, Crawford, Fraser and Company, was just one of several slave traders in Atlanta. One in every five residents of the city was enslaved until the Civil War ended slavery in the South.
At the turn of 1848, San Francisco was a relatively minor port with just 1,000 inhabitants. That all changed with the discovery of gold in the nearby hills. Over the next year, thousands of enthusiastic gold-diggers rushed west in the hope of making a fortune, and by 1849 the population had surged to approximately 25,000. Between 1849 and 1851 (when this daguerreotype was captured) fast-growing San Fran suffered six major fires which devastated large portions of the city, but the flood of newcomers continued to arrive by boat and wagon every day.
The 13-mile (21km) street we now know as Broadway has a long history. It began as a native Wecquaesgeek trail which was widened and turned into a major thoroughfare by European colonists. By the time this photograph was taken, the first theatres had begun cropping up on Broadway’s Manhattan section, and the street was home to towering buildings, streetcars and gas streetlights.
While New York was already a metropolis, western cities like Iowa City were just being founded. This photograph captures Iowa City during a decade when its population quadrupled. Growth was driven by the mighty Iowa River, which was dammed upriver to irrigate the young city’s fertile farmlands and power riverside mills. Three years after this image was captured, Iowa City’s population boom came to a sudden end. Iowa City lost its status as the state capital, and its successor Des Moines became the new destination of choice for westbound migrants.
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As the United States expanded, so did the heart of the American government. The Capitol Building was too small to house the increasing number of politicians and officials that used it, so President Millard Filmore signed off on a refurbishment that saw the old building expand to twice its former length. The old dome looked out of place in the new design, so it was removed and rebuilt brick by brick, as this image shows.
Photographer James Wallace Black captured this bird’s-eye-view of Downtown Boston from a hot air balloon in 1860, and it’s thought to be the earliest surviving aerial photograph of the United States. The spire of the Old South Meeting House rises at the bottom of the image. It was from here in 1773 that angry colonists marched to the city’s docks (at the top of the photo) to dump the tea in Boston harbour.
This photograph was taken only nine years after Omaha’s founding, by which time thousands of white settlers were flocking over the Missouri River to stake a claim in what used to be Indian Country. Omaha was a base from which Mormon migrants struck out to the west, but enough people stayed to build the Territorial Capitol Building, shown here on the horizon.
Although Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, Charleston was seen as the heart of the Southern rebellion. Union troops were keen to capture the city, but despite intense bombardment, Charleston held out until the last weeks of the war. As this photo shows, Charleston was devastated by artillery shells and the city would bear the scars for years to come.
Twenty years after the Gold Rush, prospective miners continued to flock into San Francisco. Many made their way west by rail as transcontinental railroads gradually expanded and linked the nation from coast to coast. This 1868 photograph of San Francisco, captured from the top of Telegraph Hill, shows the city was growing with a regulated grid pattern. It also gives a rare view of the Golden Gate Strait more than 60 years before construction began on the iconic bridge.
During the 1870s, New York City hit a major milestone – the first American city to reach one million people. The massive metropolis required the city to provide decent transport, and the 1870s saw the construction of new infrastructure like Grand Central Station and the Brooklyn Bridge. Many of the Big Apple’s wealthier residents lived in newly built townhouses like these in Manhattan, where wide tree-lined streets overlooked Madison Square Park.
The eagle-eyed might spot a store named 'El Dorado' in this photograph of Helena’s Main Street. A term originating from Spanish, meaning 'The Golden One', it is a clue to the city’s roots. Helena began life as a transit camp during the Montana Gold Rush and was formally established as a city just six years before this photograph was taken. It was a lucky place to live – by 1888 the local gold seams meant that 50 different millionaires called Helena home.
This photograph of Chicago doesn’t quite tell the full story. At the time that it was taken, Chicago had undergone a rapid rebuild. It might look like a thriving metropolis, but just six years earlier, the Great Fire of Chicago burned through the city. The blaze destroyed more than 17,000 buildings and left one in three Chicagoans homeless. Under the Great Rebuild, streets like Madison and State (pictured here) saw big businesses move into new premises built with a popular new material, terra cotta.
Denver was originally another gold mining town, but the supply of the precious metal was soon exhausted. The small town survived as a supply hub for the region, and a second mining rush began when silver was discovered in the nearby hills. Thanks to this second motherlode and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1870, Denver’s population rocketed from 5,000 to 100,000 in just 20 years, and this photograph captures the city in the middle of that boom.
Detroit is best known as Motor City, but it was a thriving metropolis long before Henry Ford and his peers set up shop there. The city was well placed to link the waterways of the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal and the railroad network, and in the 19th century it was best known for its pharmaceutical industry and cast-iron stove factories. Here, a horse-drawn carriage – the original form of horsepower – passes in front of City Hall, a building which was demolished in 1961.
When this statue of the Goddess of Liberty was placed on the top of the Texas State Capitol in 1888, residents of Austin claimed it was the seventh-biggest building in the world. Whether true or not, the State Capitol was certainly the centrepiece of a growing city. The University of Texas began its first classes in 1883, and three years after the Capitol's completion, a new charter significantly expanded the city's area from four square miles to 16 (approximately 10 to 41sq km).
Big cities need big infrastructure to support them, but Johnstown fell victim to flawed engineering after a dam spillway on the Conemaugh River became blocked during heavy rainfall. Water pressure built up, the dam collapsed, and a wave travelling at 40 miles per hour (64km/h) crashed into Johnstown downstream on 31 May 1889. More than 2,200 people died in the disaster as building debris, trees and even steam locomotives were dragged along in the flood surge.
Just seven days after the Johnstown Flood, a second disaster struck America when the old city of Seattle was razed to the ground in a devastating fire. Tightly packed wooden buildings, many of which dated to frontier days, allowed the conflagration to speed through the streets. This photograph shows the scene two months later, when the rebuild had already begun. A new Seattle arose, and this time, new city regulations mandated that downtown buildings were constructed from brick and stone.
The rapid expansion of American cities during the 19th century didn’t just mean an ever-expanding urban sprawl. Many local authorities ensured that green spaces were retained even in the busiest cities, including Boston Common – the oldest city park in the United States. The Common provided an oasis of calm for Bostonians, although the park transformed into a hive of activity during public protests, balloon displays, football games and city celebrations.
Towards the end of the 19th century, American cities began to take on a new glow. Many downtown areas had been lit with gas lamps for decades, but Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp brought brighter and more reliable lighting to urban streets. That was certainly the case in New Orleans, pictured here. Raised electric wires powered lights and streetcars on Canal Street, and the Orpheum Theatre got in on the action with its own dazzling sign.
The first Mormon settlers arrived in Salt Lake City in 1847 and began constructing their magnificent temple almost straight away – although it wasn’t ready for more than 40 years. This photograph, taken in April 1892, captures a massive crowd in the surrounding streets as the temple capstone was laid to complete exterior work. By then, as many miners as Mormons had moved to the area and more than 40,000 people called Salt Lake City home.
As American cities became busier and more cramped, urban planners responded by taking trains into the sky to reduce their urban footprint. Chicago’s ‘L’ (short for elevated) opened in 1892, and it’s pictured here with the steam locomotive Clarence A chugging over Lake Street. Although many cities later replaced their high-rise rails with underground subways, the ‘L’ is still going strong in the Windy City.
Chicago’s transport infrastructure was upgraded to help visitors on their way to Jackson Park, which in 1893 played host to a special world fair. The centrepiece to the exhibition, pictured here, was a large water basin created to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. More than 27 million people attended during the fair’s six-month run, and they were entertained by fairground rides, exhibitions and artistic performances. It all ended with a bang – literally – when Chicago mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated by a gunman two days before the fair ended.
Idaho Springs sprang up in the Colorado hills after the discovery of gold in 1859. By the 1890s, when this photograph was taken, mining had shifted from the small-scale efforts of individual prospectors to deeper mines owned by businesses. At least two electric companies powered the town which, as this image shows, was a busy place. As subsequent generations of wedding photographers have found out since, getting everybody to look at the camera must have taken quite an effort!
As the 19th century came to an end, Broadway was turning into Los Angeles’ busiest street. In the same year that this photograph was taken, J.W. Robinson Co. opened a new department store nearby, kickstarting a commercial boom. Within a few years, Broadway would be extended north via the Broadway Tunnel and would transform into LA’s premier theatre district.
Believe it or not, Key West was Florida’s largest city when a photographer captured this sleepy street scene. The little island of Key West was perfectly located for wreckers to scour the waters for downed ships to loot and for maritime farmers to harvest an unusual crop: the Gulf of Mexico’s high-quality sponges. Key West’s isolation meant that Miami, Jacksonville and Tampa soon overtook it in terms of population, but it remained the hub of the American sponge industry for years.
New York City grew so rapidly during the 19th century that the Lower East Side saw hundreds of thousands of immigrants crammed into basic tenements and it was reportedly the most overcrowded district in the world. This particular street, known as Bone Alley, had extremely high mortality rates due to poor sanitation and ventilation, leading to widespread disease and death among residents. To combat the dire conditions, Bone Valley was levelled shortly after this photograph was taken. It was replaced by a public park to provide some much-needed fresh air and green space in New York’s slums.
Portland had long been considered a gritty, hard-edged port town, and even its own city newspaper named it “the most filthy city in the Northern states” thanks to rudimentary sanitation. Despite its dubious reputation, Portland thrived on the back of maritime trade. The Oregonian Building was the first steel-framed building in the West when it was built in 1892, and when this photograph was taken in 1898, the square building with a corner tower was still the tallest in the city.
Between 1880 and 1920, over four million Italians arrived in America, and so many settled in the district around Manhattan’s Mulberry Street that it became known as Little Italy. This artificially coloured photograph gives a glimpse of the busy street in its heyday when almost 10,000 Italian-Americans lived in the district. But as this gallery proves, American cities never stand still. By the 2010 census, not a single person in New York’s Little Italy was actually born in Italy.