Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [80]
And, almost always, it was an urban life they were seeking. While a small minority migrated from European farms to the larger and more fertile plots in the New World (where mechanical cultivation made farming a much more profitable endeavor), most wanted to give up farming altogether. In 1880, only 10 percent of foreign immigrants to the United States were living in rural areas.
HIDDEN ARRIVALS
Toronto and Chicago
In 1905, Joseph Thorne decided he’d had enough of the cockney slums of Bermondsey, South London, where he and his wife seem to have wound up after falling afoul of London’s arrival cities, and arranged passage to Canada under a contract that indentured him to a year’s farm labor. He sent most of his income home. He then worked in downtown Toronto for a year, saving a small pocketful of money, which he used to buy a sliver of land in the wastelands beyond the city limits—in an ungoverned and unmapped area known as Silverthorn, which was unknown to Toronto officials but teeming with clandestine settlement. He got himself a shovel, dug a hole in the ground, covered it with tin sheeting, and called it home. A few months later, his wife and five children arrived from London, and he scrounged enough wood and cardboard to build a two-room dirt-floor shack.
All around him, spanning the horizon, were similar shacks, lean-tos, and hovels, all built by their owners, all recent arrivals from Europe. This thick ring of shantytown development, resembling in many ways the peripheral slums of Asia today, surrounded and overwhelmed Toronto. When we think of the North American arrival city, we tend to imagine the tenement blocks of New York’s Lower East Side. In reality, European villagers were just as likely to enter the city by building their own unregulated settlements on the outskirts.
The Royles, neighbors of the Thornes, arrived just before the First World War from a rural village with almost nothing to their name, bought a load of second-hand lumber from a job lot on a demolition site, hauled it out by horse and wagon, and used it to build a two-room shack. Wilf Royle, who spent his childhood in this fast-expanding settlement, described the scene around him: “It was quite a while before there were sewers of any kind and floods were notorious. The traditional outhouse was the only sanitation and everybody had one. There was no garbage collection in those days … people got rid of their garbage the best way they could. Some burned it, some buried it and some just left it hanging around.”29
This shack-town slum, making up much of what is today a central-Toronto district known as York, was not an exception. Most of the eastern, northern, and western outskirts of the city were thickly encrusted with these self-built centers on mud roads without piped water or sewage; they covered the neighborhoods known today as Etobicoke, York, the Junction, North York, East York, Davenport, Broadview, and Coxwell. Such shack towns propelled the growth of Toronto in the decades before the Great Depression. And in many other North American cities, arrival cities materialized without permission in this Mumbai-style accretion of owner-built shack housing.
We owe this new understanding of the informality of the North American arrival city to the Canadian geographer Richard Harris, whose study Unplanned Suburbs scrutinizes property records to reveal that self-built peripheral housing of this sort represented at least a third of all housing in Toronto at the time of the First World War—a figure that later scholars have estimated at as much as half of Toronto’s pre-Depression housing.30 Such settlements remained a prominent but rarely mentioned feature of urban life until the late 1920s, when the city annexed these communities, paved them, installed services, and rebuilt most