Americans had to learn not only to plan their cities but also to live comfortably in the fast-growing communities that they erected. They needed to adapt their lives to the urban pace and to develop institutions to bring order out of the seeming chaos. In a city like Newyork(the biggest city), rates of accidental deaths and homicides began to drop after 1870 as city dwellers learned to control recklesss behavior and pay attention on the streets.
whichbrought a decline of spontaneous mobs and endemic drunkenness at the same time that the saloon developed as a stable social institution in immigrant neighborhoods.Cities developed community institutions that linked people in new ways. Apartment buildings offered a new environment for the middle class.Department stores, penny newspapers, variety show theaters, and baseball provided common meeting grounds and interests for heterogeneous populations. Department stores such as A. T. Stewart's, John Wanamaker's, Marshall Field's, and others of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s made emerging central business districts acceptable places for women as consumers and helped to introduce women into the religious labor force. Ballparks and theaters were shared spaces where allegiances and jokes crossed ethnic lines. Ethnic banks, newspapers, and mutual insurance societies offered training in American ways at the same time that they preserved group identity.
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/argu/trends/trend_30.htm
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