Cites: the Splendid and the Gross.

So now that we've talked about immigrants flocking to he the country, where did most of them live and work?

During the late 19th century America had experienced whats known as urbanization. This meant that people who lived in the cities lived different from the life of a farmer. They had schedules, rode trolley cars, paid rent to live in apartments, and fun stuff like that.

So what did this change do to cities? Well, first skyscrapers. These were super tall buildings, because in the city there may not have been space to move around, but they could always go up. 

Mass transit was also a thing that came out of this. Mass transit was a public system, a large number of people could ride without lots of expense. So we had street cars & subways making their debut during this time.

But as usual, there were some problems with the growing cities.

Tenements were low cost, multifamily housing designed to squeeze as many families and possible into them. So with all the immigrants moving in, guess where they went? 

There were a lot of people crammed into these tenements.

Also, we had water and sanitation problems. Cities were gross and the streets were often unpaved and there were even dead horses in the streets. I wish I were joking, but I'm not. Alleys between the tenements were littered with trash and waste. This is like a horror movie.

And along with everything else there were fires, crime, and conflict, oh my! 

One of the biggest examples of the fire can be seen in the history of Chicago. In 1871 a fire rushed through and destroyed Chicago killing 200-300 people and leaving 100,000 people homeless. 

That's a lot.