Streetcar Suburbs

In the last third of the nineteenth century Boston grew from a crowded merchant town, in which nearly everybody walked to work, to the modern divided metropolis. The street railway created this division of the metropolis into an inner city of commerce and slums and an outer city of commuters’ suburbs. Streetcar Suburbs tells who built the new city, and why, and how.Included here is a new Introduction that considers the present suburb/city dichotomy and suggests what we can learn from it to assure a livable city of the future.

With almost tender attention to detail and judicious selection of maps, charts, and especially photographs, Mr. Warner marks himself a ‘Boston-lover’ …This volume helps to unfold further the layers of complexities that conceal in obscurity the development of the modern city… A masterly introduction to the subject., Mr. Warner has given us a fine book, a lovely book, about the historic pattern of the housebuilding process in the suburbs… He has put to brilliant use the research resources he was able to find and evaluate. And, by means of his legwork and photography, he has added a nearly three-dimensional quality to his book.

Sam Bass Warner, Jr., is Visiting Professor of Urban History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.