Borderland
Stilgoe, John R.
W hen universities try to purge frivolous courses, Suburban Architecture can find its way onto the hit list, between the History of Sports and the Poetry of Rock and Roll. In telling us that...
...Americans shaped their retreats an air of exclusiveness that is un-Amerias fantasies, perhaps in a grudging can...
...the beauty of Constable, World War writers and academics were of Van Ruisdael, was what the early calling the borderlands conservative, borderlands were after...
...the growth of a new, one's privacy...
...and long, fruitful alleys...
...it had its beginnings in the late eighteenth-century "ribbon village," the one-street village gradually bleeding into other one-street villages...
...E suburbia was not merely a 1,: r matter of cities growing, oozing ectoplasmically into the hinterlands...
...For all his skepticism about "industrial capitalism," when it comes to a battle between the urbanizing, Europhilic "Lost Generation" and the American traditionalists who spearheaded not only the patriotic revival of the 1920s but also the antiquing craze, he's on theside of the nativists...
...Persistent nos- petty, tacky, and anti-intellectual...
...Between Senate sessions, Daniel Webster bred llamas on his Marshfield, Massachusetts, farm...
...Borderland is a brave attempt to correct the prevailing orthodoxy that Americans living just outside of major cities have only shallow roots in history and a relationship to the major achievements of American culture that is tenuous at best...
...Yet the book is full of fascinating trivia, and it is hard not to share the author's nostalgia for our now-vanished borderlands...
...Here is an Orange, New Jersey, development of the 1830s: The development quickly acquired a reputation for housing almost scandalous modernists, "long-haired men and short-haired women," in the words of one resident...
...Stilgoe believes the suburban landscape is the product of a uniquely American experiment as daring as—and similar to—that upon which the pioneers embarked...
...Ultimately, Borderland is as much about the shifting response of the intellectual classes to suburbia as it is about suburbia itself...
...Prettily illustrated igency...
...Stilgoe doesn't write in glittering prose, and has the academic's habit of overproving his assertions...
...ban development of six cities—Boston, That suburbs could be crowded, unNew York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, private, and dirty was a rude awakening Cleveland, and Chicago—and dis- to the wealthier areas, and they began to cusses briefly the early automobile take on the accoutrements of what we suburbs of the West Coast...
...wide and impressive, sometimes oppressive...
...Perhaps modeling himself on Jefferson, William Hamilton built a mammoth greenhouse on his property in West Philadelphia, and was responsible for domesticating the gingko and the Lombardy poplar...
...The single-horse stable was playing the role of the modern garage by the time of the Civil War...
...35.00 Christopher Caldwell 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 There is in fact a lengthy intellectual tradition in the American borderlands, though hardly of the type one would expect...
...or-chards well planted...
...One looks forward to seeing this champion of prosuburbanites in the era of Daniel Webster take on antisuburbanites in the era of Beaver Cleaver...
...It was a matter of balancing ty novel Station Wagon Set enjoyed "the beauty of scenery with the need brisk sales in 1938), by the Second of neighbors...
...Yet, around the 1870s, with expansion in public transportation, urban sprawl began to take on the form in which we know it today...
...The bibliography, which stretches to twenty-five tightly printed pages, covers references from Piers Plowman and The Scarlet Letter to real-estate brochures and old Stanley tool catalogues...
...15801845, pits himself against a snickering academic consensus to the contrary...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 47...
...In an age when academics make extravagant claims for the most marginal cultures, yet continue to view suburban America as if it were just one long "Dick Van Dyke Show," Stilgoe is breaking important new ground...
...Little boxes" did not come in with Levittown...
...We read of farming at 30th Street in Manhattan, and pond-skating at Fifth Street in Philadelphia...
...Here Borderland ends, just as the debate between the "good-life" suburbanites and "ticky-tacky" city-dwellers takes on the dimensions by which we know it today...
...If present-day patrician communities brimming with radical ideas—Brookline comes to mind—are a political anomaly, they are certainly not a historical one...
...C tilgoe's reading on the subject is 1...
...Yet, while the glamour and bon realization that the populated parts of ton of the "exclusive" suburb persisted Europe were somehow more pictur- into this century (Faith Baldwin's socieesque...
...All lampooning to the contrary, suburbanites have been guardians of much that is beautiful and genuine in American life, and Stilgoe is baffled that their contributions have of late been so undervalued...
...Stilgoe invites us to see a similar variety in our own suburban structures, and he's keen to explode the myth that suburbia is a spanking new invention...
...The new "streetcar suburbs"—Allston/ Brighton, Brooklyn, South Chicago, West Philadelphia—were not really suburbs at all, as Stilgoe points out, though developers did rely on a vestigial countryside and positive mythology about borderland living to lure proing the historical reasons behind it spective homeowners...
...Many Llewellyn Park residents practiced radical Swedenborgianism, atheism, homeopathy, mysticism, spiritualism, and even a sort of nature worship that inspired a May Festival .. . More permanent intellectual contributions, particularly in horticulture and animal husbandry, were made by country gentlemen living near cities...
...Such lone experiments created an independent network of freelance intellects that has done much to keep American cultural life aloof of passing fads and fashions, from Bauhaus sugar-cube apartment blocks to "Robot-modernist" furniture...
...call suburbia today: neighborhood assoCholera, pollution, and other urban ciations and charters, zoning laws, mini-health hazards...
...This last is a radical de-romantic aesthetic—Stilgoe credits a parture from traditional neighborly atticomplex web of factors for the move tudes: hedges, fences, and other obstructo the borderlands that began in the tions, said Edward Payson Powell, "give 1820s...
...The nineteenth century was marked by an unusual diversity of suburban architecture: country seats, gentleman farms, Gothic "follies," cottages ornes, villas, even triple-decker apartments...
...Those who know Dorchester, Massachusetts, as a warren of crack dealers and gang violence will feel a bit sad to hear a nineteenth-century observer refer to it as "one of those agreeable suburbs of Boston," with mansion grounds "which are a complete museum of horticulture, full of every known variety of fruit tree...
...Flushing, Long Island, now best known for such architectural treasures as La Guardia Airport and Shea Stadium, was in our grandfathers' times a rolling farmland laced with dry-stone walls reminiscent of rural New Hampshire...
...the triumph of Jack- mum lot sizes, and the obsessive plantsonian democracy and, with it, the col- ing of trees, in order to both reaffirm lapse of urban-based Federalism as a the ruralism of the place and protect political force...
...Stilgoe has promised us another volume, picking up where this one left off, which will cover the present-day suburban landscape...
...most early commuters lived well away from the big city...
...talgia for the English landscape was another factor...
...And that most grotesque of modern American sights—the neon "strip' didn't come in with the superhighway...
...the houses of Colinsville, Connecticut, were built on uniform plans in 1826...
...He even hints at a strong sympathy for the tacky, uniform housing developments that went up just after the Second World War—a characterless box on a street without trees didn't look too bad to a man who a year before had been crawling under machine-gun fire at Normandy or guarding an airstrip on Iwo...
...In telling us that "suburbs deserve scrutiny," John Stilgoe, professor of history of landscape at Harvard and author of Common Landscape of America...
...Stilgoe is very comfortable in the period when suburbs enjoyed the praise, not the opprobrium, of the American intelligentsia...
...Rents were ris(climbing real-estate prices, unclaimed ing (Stilgoe blames "industrial capitalfarmland nearby, and so on), Stilgoe ism"), and for the first time people considers urban flight primarily the were fleeing the city not out of philoproduct of an intellectual movement of sophical belief but out of economic exmajor dimensions...
...Limousine liberals have a long pedigree...
...BORDERLAND: ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN SUBURB, 1820-1939 John R. Stilgoe/Yale University Press/353 pp...
...While never ignorChristopher Caldwell is an editor and columnist living in Boston...
...these are hardly the adven(were it in color, I'd have said lavishly) turous transcendentalists associated with maps, paintings, photos, and with early nineteenth-century borderdrawings, Borderland covers the subur- land living...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
