ABSTRACT
After the Civil War, New Orleans's demographics and human geography changed. The black population surged by 110 percent between the censuses of 1860 and 1870, which bracketed the trauma of the conflict and the ensuing emancipation. It rose another 54 percent by the turn of the century. Caught up in its own woes, the unwelcoming city nevertheless offered better opportunities to freedmen than the sugarcane fields. As urban social structure changed in the postbellum era, so did urban form. Industrialization, telephony, electricity, mechanized transportation, and the rise of centralized high-rise business districts effected massive transformations upon urban America in the late 19th century. The change coincided with the second great wave of immigration to the United States, mostly from southern and eastern Europe. Postbellum New Orleans, saw its residential settlement pattern shift from the spatially heterogeneous toward one of greater spatial homogeneity.
