The built-up area of your city in 1900

[Docere]

It seems like 1910 is the year the innermost districts of N. American cities hit their population peak. For instance the Lower East Side of Manhattan hit its peak at 550,000 that year.

I think inner London peaked around then as well.

[Chef]

The 1890 footprint of Minneapolis is interesting. I don't have a link to a map but I've seen one in person at the Macalester College library. The built out portion of the city consisted of what is now the modern downtown and the adjacent neighborhoods of Old St Anthony and Cedar Riverside. The population was 164,738, so you had 40% of the modern population of the city basically living downtown. The city was extremely dense by the standards of modern America. That version of Minneapolis is almost completely gone, there are a few random buildings left here and there (mostly the mills) but no real fabric remains.

Minneapolis in 1890 was a post frontier boom town. The closest analogue today would probably be Williston, North Dakota. By 1900, streetcar suburbia had started exploding on the fringes of the city as it became more settled, by that point it was more similar to postwar Phoenix in terms of its civic life and energy.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Chef

The 1890 footprint of Minneapolis is interesting. I don't have a link to a map but I've seen one in person at the Macalester College library. The built out portion of the city consisted of what is now the modern downtown and the adjacent neighborhoods of Old St Anthony and Cedar Riverside. The population was 164,738, so you had 40% of the modern population of the city basically living downtown. The city was extremely dense by the standards of modern urban America. That version of Minneapolis is almost completely gone, there are a few random buildings left here and there (mostly the mills) but no real fabric remains.

kansas city sort of echos minneapolis very closesly, in that there was a lot of 19th century tenement housing adjacent/in downtown that was eviscerated by urban renewal/highwats but doesn't have vast amounts of open/brutal "scarring." kansas city was at 132,000 in 1890, not counting kansas city, kansas.

[DecoJim]

The year 1900 is an interesting time in Detroit's history since while already an important medium sized industrial city at the time, it was before the auto industry transformed it (for better or worse).

Detroit population:
1900: 285,704
1950: 1,849,568
2010: 713,777

The following map shows Detroit's borders from 1891 to 1905:


Detroit in 1900 was about 28.4 square miles (73.5 km2).
Detroit today is 138.75 square miles (359.3 km2) plus about 4.12 square miles (10.67 km2) of water.

I believe the vertical "blank area" toward the east side of the city is the wealthy Indian Village neighborhood which was still in development at the time.


An image of downtown:

Wikipedia: Detroit Panorama - Campus Martius

Unfortunately, the old city hall and the 13 story Majestic Building shown in the image both met the wrecking ball in the 1960s after existing for more than 70 years.
The skinny "moonlight tower" to the right of the Majestic Building is now in Austin Texas.

[initiald]

Raleigh was one of the few state capitals that was a designed city, established in 1792 specifically to be the state capital (New Bern, on the coast, was too difficult to defend).

Closest map is this from 1872:


Pano from 1909.

[muppet]

London in 1900 had 6.6 million in its contiguous boundaries, the largest city in the world, and the largest pre-modern city that ever was (it peaked in 1939 nearing 9 million,
before wartime evacuation).

[DecoJim]

Originally Posted by initiald

Raleigh was one of the few state capitals that was a designed city, established in 1792 specifically to be the state capital...

Referring to the featured buildings in the "bird's eye view" drawing... was Raleigh that proud of their Penitentiary and "Lunatic Asylum"?


* * * *

Muppet:
It looks like London wins!!
As I am sure you know, that amazing piece of Victorian engineering from the 1860s, the London sewer system, made the large population sustainable.

[Minato Ku]

By 1900, the built-up area of Paris had already overgrown its city limits.
The urban area of Paris was home to over 3 million people.

[Docere]

When was Northwest Chicago and the "bungalow belt" built up?

[TempleGuy1000]

At the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia had 1.3 million residents in the city limits.

City Hall was also the tallest inhabitable building in the world at the time.

[hammersklavier]

The extent of Philadelphia's conurbation ca. 1900, according to Encyclopædia Britannica:

[Leo the Dog]

source

City Park before being named Balboa Park.

Notice the bay is labeled "Gulf of San Diego".

Also notice where the street grid gets a little funky in the NE section of the map, where the city limits extended to at the time. That is present day Boundary St. I've always wondering what the boundary was referring to. Now I know.

Other maps from the time period refer to Baja California as "Lower California", you'd never see that today.

Tijuana as Tia Juana. (Which explains present day pronunciation with the addition of the first "a")

Present day Imperial Beach was Coronado Heights or South San Diego.

Another thing to note is that there are other maps out there that suggest the San Diego River may have emptied out in the San Diego Bay (under the airport) instead of the Pacific Ocean at Ocean Beach.

[Sam Hill]

Denver 1900 population: 133,859



source

Edit: The website where I found that map claims it’s from 1900. I didn’t look at it very closely when I posted it, but now that I look at it again, I don’t think it’s from 1900 – not unless Denver had much of its street-grid built out decades before it would be developed. Anyway, I tried, lol. Finding a map from 1900 was not as easy as I thought would be.

Edit again: Actually, it might be accurate. It does correspond fairly well with the maps in this excellent article: Denver’s Single-Family Homes by Decade: 1900s

[Centropolis]

didn't denver have a fairly substantial victorian silver-era boom, and then sort of flatlined out for a while before picking back up? i seem to recall more heavy-duty victorian architecture there than a place like kansas city which i think boomed more steadily.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Docere

When was Northwest Chicago and the "bungalow belt" built up?

primarily 1910-1960, with a big giant 15 year gap in the middle for the great depression/WWII.

pre-war bungalow belt is easily discernible from post-war because of that stark and prolonged gap in construction.

the overall land-use scheme remained the samel (long skinny SFH's on long skinny 25' wide city lots with all blocks bisected by a service alley for garage access), but the architectural styling sure did change quite a bit.


typical pre-war bungalow belt street from the '20s:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9586...7i13312!8i6656





typical post-war bungalow belt street from the '50s:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7851...7i13312!8i6656

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

primarily 1910-1960, with a big giant 15 year gap in the middle for the great depression/WWII.

pre-war bungalow belt is easily discernible from post-war because of that stark and prolonged gap in construction.

the overall land-use scheme remained the samel (long skinny SFH's on long skinny 25' wide city lots with all blocks bisected by a service alley for garage access), but the architectural styling sure did change quite a bit.


typical pre-war bungalow belt street from the '20s:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9586...7i13312!8i6656





typical post-war bungalow belt street from the '50s:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7851...7i13312!8i6656

we sort of have a hodge-podge scatter of those kinds of bungalows:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6303...8i6656!6m1!1e1

usually they fill in gaps left in neighborhoods that primarily boomed just before and after world war one. usually those gaps were clay-mine or coal pits / dog-hole fields later back-filled in. most of the bungalow-belt looks like this, though:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/10...945104!6m1!1e1

they wised up and started building front and rear sleeping porches.

[Sam Hill]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

didn't denver have a fairly substantial victorian silver-era boom, and then sort of flatlined out for a while before picking back up? i seem to recall more heavy-duty victorian architecture there than a place like kansas city which i think boomed more steadily.

Well, according to Wikipedia’s "History of Denver" page:

The city's economy was gaining a more stable base rooted in railroads, wholesale trade, manufacturing, food processing, and servicing the growing agricultural and ranching hinterland. Between 1870 and 1890, manufacturing output soared from $600,000 to $40 million, and population grew by a factor of 20 times to 107,000. By 1890, Denver had grown to be the 26th largest city in America, and the fifth-largest city west of the Mississippi River. The rapid growth of these years attracted millionaires and their mansions, as well as poverty and crime.

Also according to Wikipedia:

Census Population
1870 - 4,759
1880 - 35,629
1890 - 106,713
1900 - 133,859
1910 - 213,381

One of my favorite things about this city is all of the Victorian mansions in the urban core. Most of them were converted into apartment buildings long ago. IMO the coolest apartments in the city are in converted mansions. Not only are you in an old building with the hardwood floors, crown moulding, clawfoot bathtubs, steam radiators, etc. – which can make a Coloradan feel like he’s on the East Coast or something – but you often have a quirky, meandering floor plan, which makes the apartment fun and unique.

[Citylover94]

Boston was the fifth largest city by population in 1900. All of the most central neighborhoods in Boston/surrounding cities were built out by this time with the urban core encompassing Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, and Everett.


Source

Populations of Cities in the Map

Boston- 560,892

Cambridge- 91,886

Brookline- 19,935

Chelsea- 34,072

Everett- 24,336

Somerville- 61,643

Newton- 33,587

Watertown- 9,766

[pacarlson]

Originally Posted by Sam Hill

Denver 1900 population: 133,859



source

Edit: The website where I found that map claims it’s from 1900. I didn’t look at it very closely when I posted it, but now that I look at it again, I don’t think it’s from 1900 – not unless Denver had much of its street-grid built out decades before it would be developed. Anyway, I tried, lol. Finding a map from 1900 was not as easy as I thought would be.

Edit again: Actually, it might be accurate. It does correspond fairly well with the maps in this excellent article: Denver’s Single-Family Homes by Decade: 1900s

Denver was almost exactly 3x the population of Houston!

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Sam Hill

Edit: The website where I found that map claims it’s from 1900. I didn’t look at it very closely when I posted it, but now that I look at it again, I don’t think it’s from 1900 – not unless Denver had much of its street-grid built out decades before it would be developed. Anyway, I tried, lol. Finding a map from 1900 was not as easy as I thought would be.

It's not unusual in maps of that area to see streets that had been laid out but not yet built or inhabited (and which may or may not have ever even come to fruition). For example, some of the 1900 street maps I've seen of Toronto include areas that I know weren't built up until at least 20-30 years later. Not sure why they did that, but it explains why a lot of them will seem more extensive than they actually were at the time.