Existing comment:
How San Diego Became the "Air Capital of the West":
As Americans marched westward during the nineteenth century, not only did they carve farms and homesteads out of the territories they encountered, but they established towns -- centers of social interaction, politics, culture, and of course, commerce. Urban historians have long noted how important the profit-motive was to the nation's urbanizing pioneers. Town-dwellers usually sought and found opportunities to engage in trade, manufacturing and real-estate investment and development.
The early arrivals acquired as much local land as they could, whether through purchase, government grants, squatting, or theft from previous settlers. Turning their property acquisitions into profits generally meant attracting new immigrants who would themselves be eager to invest, subdivide and build, and thus realize their own economic success. Thus, much of the urban growth that occurred in the western United States relied on a steady influx of new settlers who would run up the value of the local real estate while starting business enterprises of their own.
The cities -- and other urban pioneers -- that did best at this game typically grew up at one of three types of locations:
- along established transportation routes;
- at "breakpoints" along established transportation routes, where goods or passengers transferred from one mode of transportation to another;
- or at places squarely in the path of anticipated, yet-to-be-bult transportation routes. |