![]() ![]() In the later part of the 19th century, new regulations on housing began to slowly ease the deadliness of the city. In the years after the 1849 cholera epidemic in New York, immigrants continued to stream into the city, at the rate of nearly 23,000 every month-more than enough to replace the parade of corpses flowing out of the city. ![]() Industrial cities survived because new blood in the form of immigrants kept pouring in to replenish their diminished, dying masses. Reliably, the shortest recruits came from the most densely crowded cities. Their poor health stunted their growth: The average height of West Point cadets declined by a half inch between 18, as the nation become more urbanized. ![]() In 1830, a 10-year-old living in a small New England town could expect to see his or her 50th birthday-but that same child, living in New York, would be dead before the age of 36.Įven those who survived suffered the price of urban living. Despite the greater availability of food and paid work, children under the age of 5 who lived in cities died at nearly twice the rate as those living in the countryside. By the middle of the century, writes the historian Michael Haines, big American cities had become “virtual charnel houses,” their primary demographic characteristic being high mortality. By all rights, the urban experiment that began in the 19th century should have failed. ![]()
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