CASUAL

...So I wasn't about to let him out-suburb me...

...We've stayed buddies since college, a friendship built on the incredibly durable foundation of petty rivalry and one-upmanship...

...RICHARD STARR...

...Al Gore in his "sprawl" speech earlier this year talked about "lonely cul-de-sacs" as the epitome of suburbs so illconceived and distant from city centers that "a commuting parent often gets home too late to read a child a bedtime story...

...People move to the suburbs when their children no longer comfortably fit in the old house or apartment and they're shopping around for a good high school...

...And they tend to confuse the joy of urban living with the joy of being 23...

...Speak for yourself, Motorcade Al...

...Nor is it all that quiet—not with all the pick-up basketball games that go on out front...

...This is why millions of people buy houses on them, often even paying a premium for the privilege...

...Unhappy adolescence, I think...

...You may have forgotten," I e-mailed back, "that when the Starrs moved to suburbia two years ago, we went all the way: split-level house on a cul-de-sac...

...With nothing to go on but the cliches of local TV reporters, you might conclude that the sure way to avoid violent crime in America is to steer clear of cul-de-sacs and live on a noisy street, ideally one where the neighbors don't keep to themselves, the trees aren't leafy, and the lawns are poorly manicured...

...It may be lonely at the top—the vice president is an authority on that—but it's not lonely on America's cul-de-sacs...

...They get out of college and move to the city...

...Nothing doing, I said...

...When cul-de-sacs make the news, they are without exception reported to be either "quiet" or "tranquil," unless a particularly vicious crime takes place on one, in which event the cul-de-sac in question turns out to have been not just quiet but also "isolated" and "secluded" and sometimes even "out of the way...

...I just hope he doesn't find out that my lot is less than half the size of his half-acre...

...Not that big old houses don't have their advantages...

...They then grow up with lousy memories of being 14 and blame it on the house their parents moved to that year...

...We were both starving but ambitious students at the time, looking for part-time work...

...In the realm of anti-fashionable living, you can't trump a suburban cul-de-sac these days...

...He got published before me, though—I still remember getting the triumphant clip in the mail— and we've been gloating back and forth like this for a couple of decades now...

...So what explains the cul-de-sac bashing...

...If you grow up in a big old house in a marginal city neighborhood, as Nick did, or the boondocks, as I did, it's probably easier to appreciate the superiority of modern suburban living...

...As generations of children have known, despite whatever grown-ups may say, the street is a wonderful place to play, maybe the best...

...If you're my friend, you won't let it bother you when I get the job...

...There are disproportionate numbers of 23-year-olds living in urban neighborhoods...

...To the contrary, a dead-end street makes for a more intimate neighborhood...

...I think I win this round...

...This was the capper on years of subtle digs at cul-de-sacs in the media...

...I did, and, happily, he didn't—let it bother him, that is...

...The secret to supervising large numbers of children, Nick used to quote his father, is squeaky floors...

...He spotted the help-wanted ad first and warned me, "If you're my friend, you won't apply, too...

...The same principle is at work in the overly romantic view people tend to have of city living...

...That's true enough, but Nick's about to find out that split-level houses offer fantastic lines of sight—simultaneous surveillance of three floors from Dad's living-room couch...

...Cul-de-sacs exploit this fact of life...

...This means that you find a disproportionate number of 14-year-olds living on cul-de-sacs...

...But cul-de-sacs, as I hope Nick is lucky enough to find out when he buys his next house, are great places to live...

...Now that Nick has tenure, I can reveal that I got my start in journalism because he applied for a menial job at the American Spectator, then an obscure conservative magazine in Bloomington, Ind...

...Casual CUL-DE-SAC COOL My old pal Nick e-mailed me last week to say that he was trading up from his charming limestone bungalow a block from the campus where he teaches to a split-level on a half-acre lot...

...Then I might have to buy a Chevy Suburban...

...Not long after that, it was widely reported that one of the Columbine High School killers lived on a "quiet cul-de-sac," though it surely can't have been very quiet when he was practicing bomb-making...