Suburbia Today
GEWEN, BARRY
WINTER BOOKS SUBURBIA TODAY BY BARRY GEWEN In the 1950s and early 1960s, we got attacks on suburbia. Today, we get histories. The reason for the change is obvious. What was once a point of...
...The suburban utopia is a city on an island, isolated by a sea of restrictive covenants and community pressures...
...The volume is divided into five sections, dealing with the home, workplace, street, public arena, and development of the land...
...Theethnics, once they had the opportunity after World War II, fled blacks...
...In effect, says Fishman, the classic suburb has collapsed under the weight of inherent contradictions, and has been replaced by a pattern neither urban nor suburban, neither fish nor fowl...
...Fishman is pessimistic about this prospect, but the signs are surely as good as they are bad...
...Any problem requiring public effort—crime, poverty, racial and class divisions—was left behind for others to deal with...
...Those who did not fit in— Jews, blacks, immigrants, bohemians, homosexuals—were denied entry...
...Spiro Kostof's America by Design (Oxford, 388 pp., $24.95), a "companion volume" to his Public Television series of the same name, reminds us that the antiurbanism in America is deep-rooted and powerful—embodied in the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright...
...In so far as it is not this, it is not home...
...He is interested in the idea of suburbia and what it has meant to the people who created it...
...In the 20th century when, as Fishman observes, the major change in the character of the suburbs was their democratization—when, that is, the excluded demanded their chance to be " exclusive" —the contradictions all broke through...
...These artifacts of phony decor are wittily and perceptively recalled in a recent book by Thomas Hine entitled Populuxe, or "luxury for all...
...Vox populi has spoken and apparently the only scholarly task remaining is for academics to trace the evolution of the nation's dominant way of life...
...The closed nuclear family became the bulwark of morality and social order, its residence, as John Ruskin later declared, "the place of Peace: the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubl and di\ ision...
...Now a new book, actually an extended essay, has arrived lo stand as a valuable companion to Crabgrass Frontier...
...Others may see it simply as the culmination of the suburbs—or as their degeneration...
...With so muchin flux, the future of suburbia is unclear...
...By 1980over 100 million Americans, more than 40 per cent of the population, had decided the organization men in their gray flannel suits had the right idea after all...
...That is what makes America what it is...
...Robert Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias: The Riseand Fall of Suburbia (Basic, 241 pp., $19.95) is also a history, but whereas Jackson's approach was primarily social and economic, Fishman's is more intellectual...
...What cannot be disputed is Fishman's observation that the suburbs are undergoing a profound transformation...
...Though he concludes on an ambivalent note for the future, arguing that the suburbs have transmogrified into an entirely new and unpredictable form, his analysis across the generations is in its indirect way as devastating a critique as any of the outright assaults of the 1950s...
...It is worth remembering, too, that they were established in conjunction with the idealized nuclear family, and while that institution is still celebrated by the President and other sentimentalists, it has become foreign to the majority of American households...
...Real estate developers divided and subdivided lots until the supposedly spacious single-family houses of the American dream were bumping up against each other in a claustrophobic and stultifying parody of the suburban ideal...
...the first covered bridge, Philadelphia, 1804...
...There is no focus to the new arrangement, just clusters of living units amid ageneral sprawl...
...What was once a point of contention has become an irrevocable fact...
...Underlying this ideal, Fishman notes, was a concept of the family that took hold toward the end of the 18th century, when a group of English reformers began identifying privacy as a paramount virtue and stressing the importance of protection...
...Inevitably, since the book is based on a TV series, these discussions are superficial, yet they are briskly informative too, a speedy introduction to a very broad subject...
...It also has the appropriate sprinkling of amusing anecdotes, larger-than-life characters and historical firsts: the first mill town, Derby, Connecticut, 1803...
...Whereas the traditional suburb existed on the periphery of the city and continued to be economically and culturally dependent upon it, the technoburb is far more decentralized and independent...
...Fishman's book revolves around the point that the suburban utopia had an underside as necessary to its essential meaning as the virtues that made it the goal of millions...
...Inside these homes, the lifestyles of the rich and famous were purchased cutrate by means of Naugahyde furniture, plastic laminate kitchens, and a vinyl substance called Con-Tact, which was applied to walls in dens and living rooms to give a look of marble or brick...
...Suburbia arose as a reaction to the city, and "can never be understood solely in its own terms...
...It was an inspiration to treat suburbia as a kind of utopia...
...WASPS had fled Jews and other ethnics around theturn of thecentury...
...The vision is familiar to us: a landscape of private, detached dwellings on quiet streets safe enough for youngsters to play in, with greenery everywhere...
...They are no longer bourgeois Utopias...
...The contradictions showed up in the suburbs' physical appearance as well...
...Even Hollywood's extraterrestrial creations moved out to detached houses on tree-lined streets...
...Single parents and working wives are no less a blow to the Edenic suburban vision than was the outlawing of the restrictive covenant...
...As a model for modern habitation, Paris may start looking better and better...
...Meanwhile freeways, invented to facilitate the suburbanites' movement to and from the cities where they worked and occasionally played, fought a losing battle against congestion: The more highways that were constructed, the greater the number of commuters who arrived to use them and the worse the traffic jams...
...Then blacks shattered the suburban color line during the 1960s civil rights campaigns and the never-ending search for a bastion of privilege took on an Alice-in-Wonderland quality of everyone fleeing everyone else...
...Utopias, however, are by their nature universal, and this was the fundamental paradox of suburbia...
...Yet the change in the treatment of suburbia has not been as great as it might seem, for the losers are the ones now writing the histories...
...It is a kind of New Jersey writ large...
...thesuburbs triumphed...
...It means the sacrifice of everything implied by the word 'home.'" As with any survey of this sort, America by Design contains its fair share of such colorful quotations (none better than Gertrude Stein's remark that "in the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is...
...In 1903 an architecture magazine referred to apartment-living as "the consummate flower of domestic irresponsibility...
...All that can be said with certainty at the present time is that it will never be what it once was...
...The critics lost...
...Writers, a notoriously urban breed, might justas well object to Mount Rushmore or some other national monument as take on the backyard barbecue...
...The '50s intellectuals may yet have their revenge...
...It must always be defined in relation to its rejected opposite: the metropolis.' At its heart were the principles of exclusion and escape...
...The photographs are frequently striking and as an extra dividend, unavailable to television viewers, there is an excellent bibliography...
...Intertwined with a narrative covering two centuries of residential development was a reiteration of all the old complaints about alienation, conformity and prejudice...
...Its jobs and services are spread across a wide area, located in industrial parks and shopping malls, connected by a network of roads coming from nowhere in particular and going to the same place...
...Ultimately, the issue probably boils down to a question of definition...
...Seen in historical perspective, suburbia now appears as the point of transition between two decentralized eras: the preindustrial rural era and the postindustrial information society.' Whether technoburbia is a genuinely new form, as Fishman insists, can readily be challenged...
...Jackson's chapters had '50slike titles: "The Drive-in Culture of Contemporary America," "The Loss of Community in Metropolitan America.' His story was of failure, not success—"there are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon" —and he explicitly rebuked the Federal government for pursuing housing and transportation policies that fostered racial discrimination and contributed to the decay of our inner cities...
...They have lost their quality of privilege and exclusivity...
...He pursues the notion from its beginnings in London and emergence in Manchester, England, to its classic embodiment outside of Philadelphia and culmination in Los Angeles, with a brief excursion to Paris to examine an alternative urban pattern...
...We could even see a revival of the nation's stricken cities...
...Most significantly, in Fishman's view, the technoburb has rendered the suburb obsolete...
...Gilbert, not especially with Levittown or Los Angeles or the Long Island Expressway in mind...
...Children were to be raised in controlled environments far from any harsh or disturbing outside influences...
...When everybody is somebody, then no one's anybody," wrote W.S...
...Women were to be removed from the workaday world of their husbands...
...The traditional American utopia, dating back to the Puritans, is a "city on a hill," a beacon-light showing the way to the rest of the world...
...AND then again, maybe not...
...The definitive account to date is Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier, which appeared in 1985...
...the first cloverleaf intersection, New Jersey, 1928...
...He has coined the term "technoburb" to describe it...
Vol. 70 • December 1987 • No. 19
