Introduction to the Science of SociologyPark, Robert Ezra
General
Introduction to the Science of Sociology
Park, Robert Ezra
Sociology
In this way physical and sentimental distances reinforce each other, and
the influences of local distribution of the population participate with
the influences of class and race in the evolution of the social
organization. Every great city has its racial colonies, like the
Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, the Little Sicily of Chicago,
and various other less pronounced types. In addition to these, most
cities have their segregated vice districts, like that which until
recently existed in Chicago, and their rendezvous for criminals of
various sorts. Every large city has its occupational suburbs like the
Stockyards in Chicago, and its residence suburbs like Brookline in
Boston, each of which has the size and the character of a complete
separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a
selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within
cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are
composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races
but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of
2,000,000 laborers.
The people of the original East London have now overflowed and
crossed the Lea, and spread themselves over the marshes and
meadows beyond. This population has created new towns which
were formerly rural villages, West Ham, with a population of
nearly 300,000; East Ham, with 90,000; Stratford, with its
"daughters," 150,000; and other "hamlets" similarly overgrown.
Including these new populations we have an aggregate of nearly
two millions of people. The population is greater than that of
Berlin or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Philadelphia.
It is a city full of churches and places of worship, yet there
are no cathedrals, either Anglican or Roman; it has a
sufficient supply of elementary schools, but it has no public
or high school, and it has no colleges for the higher
education, and no university; the people all read newspapers,
yet there is no East London paper except of the smaller and
local kind.... In the streets there are never seen any private
carriages; there is no fashionable quarter ... one meets no
ladies in the principal thoroughfares. People, shops, houses,
conveyances--all together are stamped with the unmistakable
seal of the working class.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all is this: in a city of two
millions of people there are no hotels! That means, of course,
that there are no visitors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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