If by "suburb" is meant an urban margin that grows more rapidly than its already developed interior,
the process of suburbanization began during the emergence of the industrial city in the second quarter of
the nineteenth century. Before that period the city was a small highly compact cluster in which people
moved about on foot and goods were conveyed by horse and cart. But the early factories built in the 1830's
and 1840's were located along waterways and near railheads at the edges of cities, and housing was
needed for the thousands of people drawn by the prospect of employment. In time, the factories were
surrounded by proliferating mill towns of apartments and row houses that abutted the older, main cities. As
a defense against this encroachment and to enlarge their tax bases, the cities appropriated their industrial
neighbors. In 1854, for example, the city of Philadelphia annexed most of Philadelphia County. Similar
municipal maneuvers took place in Chicago and in New York Indeed, most great cities of the United States
achieved such status only by incorporating the communities along their borders.
With the acceleration of industrial growth came acute urban crowding and accompanying social
stress conditions that began to approach disastrous proportions when, in 1888, the first commercially
successful electric traction line was developed. Within a few years the horse-drawn trolleys were retired
and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and connected every major urban area, fostering a wave of
suburbanization that transformed the compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis. This first phase of
mass-scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous emergence of the urban Middle class
whose desires for homeownership In neighborhoods far from the aging inner city were satisfied by the
developers of single-family housing tracts.