The Shaping of the City of Binghamton by the Motor Car, and Consequently the Roads, in the Early Twentieth Century
By Kathryn Schubert
The automobile came to Binghamton with potential, offering the city the final steps of a technological upgrade from an agricultural city to an industrial one, represented by the transition of the horse and buggy to the automobile, but rather than becoming a beacon for the future, the automobile became a mechanism of class segregation and a "driving" force of decline in the city of Binghamton.
As soon as the motor car came to Binghamton, the city of Binghamton's growth began to slow down as people moved away from the city centers to larger plots of land and where they could commute. The city of Binghamton itself began to suffer because streets were being laid out without thought.
Timeline of the Motor Car in Binghamton
In 1837, Binghamton’s first major method of transportation, the Chenango Canal, came to Binghamton, bringing with it new trade and a new population. Binghamton’s railroad was the next big step, and it was first established in 1843, doing much the same as the Chenango Canal, more trade, an increasing population… The railroad and the rivers both transformed the Chenango valley, as the tracks and the water criss-crossed over much of the valley’s base, which in the future caused problems for the development of city streets and structures.
Transportation was important to Binghamton from its roots, because if people were able to move to a new city, and there was potential there, people would. Over in Germany, in 1879, the first “automobile” was created and driven by Karl Benz, and this was an invention that would come to reshape the world as it was known in the late nineteenth century. According to an engineering review, the “street-car” (a wagon shaped vehicle that drove on tracks in the road) arrived in Binghamton in the year 1886, and was installed by a man named Charles Van Depeole, who was also responsible for several other large upstate New York cities’ streetcars. By 1908, Binghamton was a supposedly bustling city, with a county population of nearly 80,000, but Binghamton was awarded only $640,000 in replacement value while similarly sized cities at the time were awarded much more. This suggests that even from this early stage, Binghamton public works were not doing as well as they could have been. Toward the end of the year 1909, the Motordom magazines were published by the New York State Automobile Association, and by 1915, Henry Ford’s automobile was affordable to most middle class families in the U.S.
The invention and adoption of the motor car and resulting streets in the United States meant a division in community-- people no longer had to work where they lived, or vice-versa. People of early twentieth century Binghamton began spreading out to the hills surrounding the Chenango valley, where plots of land were larger and not impeded by the aforementioned criss-crossing of rivers and railroads. Motor cars were much more than simple machines. Rewinding several years in the timeline, in 1911, the well-known journalist and urban planning critic, Charles Mulford Robinson, wrote his report of the city of Binghamton to the Mercantile-Press of Binghamton, called “Better Binghamton.” In this report, Robinson urged city planners to reconsider how the city of Binghamton was developing. He claimed that streets were being laid haphazardly, and that no serious thought was being put into Binghamton’s potential as an influential city.
Several years later, in 1923, the Broome County Motor News magazine was published, and detailed many of the automobile shops and dealers and makes that were available in Broome County. These magazines also included responses to the adoption of the motor car in Broome County and even automobile population sizes and accident and mortality rates due to the automobile. According to Broome County Motor News there were 22,000 registered personal automobiles in Broome County for a population of about 120,000 people. By 1920, the population increase in Binghamton had hit its peak, at 44%, and by the 1970s, the population of Broome County was decreasing.
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New York State Automobile Association. Motordom. Albany, N.Y.: Motordom Publishing Co. 1912-1934.
Robinson, C. Mulford. Better Binghamton: a report to the Mercantile-Press Club of Binghamton, N. Y., September 1911. Cleveland, O.: Printed by The J. B. Savage Company. (1911).
Steele, Peter. "Binghamton and Brooklyn: A Middle Class Comparison." PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2009. Dissertation in ProQuest Dissertations Publishing: 8-20.