A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
THE PERFECT HOUSE: ARCHITECTURE
Suburbia: from avant-garde to no place special
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
In the past while -- for no reason other than the common desire of men pushing 65 to understand something about the times we've lived through -- I have been revisiting the architecture of suburbia.
It means, among other things, making lists of the movies and TV shows I've seen (and happened to remember) that had suburban settings. There was, of course, Leave It to Beaver from the 1950s, and more recently -- after the myth of suburban bliss collapsed -- Edward Scissorhands, American Beauty and The Ice Storm.
But revisiting suburbia has also entailed going back through diaries and memories to locate the experiences that shaped my take on the suburbs, which is, on the whole, more benign than most urban observers of my generation.
The earliest of these experiences happened in the early 1950s, on the day my sister and her husband took me to see their new house in a suburb set down on former cotton fields. The very idea of a "new house" was exciting, because I had never seen one. "House," to my country kid's mind, meant something antique -- my grandparents' ample, shadowy Edwardian homestead, for instance, with dark wood panelling and ancient, overstuffed everything.
My sister's new house, on the other hand, was the most modern thing I'd ever seen. The compact array of kitchen appliances gleamed like the flight deck of Buck Rogers' space ship, the living room walls were smooth, hard and white -- not a sag or gluey scent of wallpaper anywhere. And -- I remember this with peculiar vividness -- the shiny wood flooring did not creak.
In this magical zone of new houses, there were no grouchy floors, no dismal shadows cast by tall trees, no roadside dirt shoulders that turned to red mud after a rain.
Only a radiant dream of green lawns without trees, with many bright white walls, and a plate-glass picture window opening toward the peaceful parallels of lawn, sidewalk and street.
Being a southern American of just 10 or so, I did not know that some grownup critics believed post-war mass suburbia to be a new kind of horror. Had I known Lewis Mumford existed, I would have thought him crazy for slandering suburbia as a "multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances, in a treeless communal waste," with brain-dead inhabitants "conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould."
But, then, I also hadn't heard of William Levitt, the arch-fiend in Mumfordian mythology, whose fabulously successful strategies for mass-producing houses had given the decisive push to the out-bound march of U.S. and Canadian suburbia.
Levittown had been a market sensation in its glory years, between 1947 and 1951, when Mr. Levitt was busily dotting this expanse of Long Island potato fields with nearly 18,000 assembly-line dwellings.
Myriad returning GIs wanted houses that were clean and new. The developer delivered by putting standardized mass production to work in housing. Mr. Levitt sent in teams of workers charged with completing each of 26 separate operations in sequence -- roofing and plumbing and wiring and installing the steel sinks, General Electric refrigerators, Bendix washing machines and other goodies that came with the purchase price. In the most feverish months of building, Mr. Levitt was finishing 30 houses a day.
The first thousand houses sold within two days of the offering. The place was right, the price was right. It was new country, with plenty of fresh air, easy road access to nearby industries -- and it was memory-free. Prospective buyers first had to sign a rental lease at $60 a month for one year, in return for an option to purchase their rented house for just $7,500.
Six thousand Cape Cods went up in 1947 and 1948, whereafter Mr. Levitt offered 11,447 ranch styles, which similarly sold like hotcakes until all the lots were used up, in 1951.
By the time I got to Levittown, the new had worn off, and everything had been softened by time. The lawns and lanes once open to the sun are now generously shaded by old trees. The meandering dirt streets we see in early aerial photographs are all paved, the strip shops that once lined the major thoroughfares have fallen prey to the monster malls. And because Mr. Levitt's creation was long ago swamped by the general creep of tract-house development surging out from New York City -- about an hour east of Levittown on the Long Island Rail Road -- it's hard to tell just where the township begins and ends.
After a while, the lesson seems to be, one generation's avant-garde suburbia turns into another generation's "no place special." It's a vast transformation that nobody could have predicted, back when both suburbia and I were young.
AoD
Suburbia: from avant-garde to no place special
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
In the past while -- for no reason other than the common desire of men pushing 65 to understand something about the times we've lived through -- I have been revisiting the architecture of suburbia.
It means, among other things, making lists of the movies and TV shows I've seen (and happened to remember) that had suburban settings. There was, of course, Leave It to Beaver from the 1950s, and more recently -- after the myth of suburban bliss collapsed -- Edward Scissorhands, American Beauty and The Ice Storm.
But revisiting suburbia has also entailed going back through diaries and memories to locate the experiences that shaped my take on the suburbs, which is, on the whole, more benign than most urban observers of my generation.
The earliest of these experiences happened in the early 1950s, on the day my sister and her husband took me to see their new house in a suburb set down on former cotton fields. The very idea of a "new house" was exciting, because I had never seen one. "House," to my country kid's mind, meant something antique -- my grandparents' ample, shadowy Edwardian homestead, for instance, with dark wood panelling and ancient, overstuffed everything.
My sister's new house, on the other hand, was the most modern thing I'd ever seen. The compact array of kitchen appliances gleamed like the flight deck of Buck Rogers' space ship, the living room walls were smooth, hard and white -- not a sag or gluey scent of wallpaper anywhere. And -- I remember this with peculiar vividness -- the shiny wood flooring did not creak.
In this magical zone of new houses, there were no grouchy floors, no dismal shadows cast by tall trees, no roadside dirt shoulders that turned to red mud after a rain.
Only a radiant dream of green lawns without trees, with many bright white walls, and a plate-glass picture window opening toward the peaceful parallels of lawn, sidewalk and street.
Being a southern American of just 10 or so, I did not know that some grownup critics believed post-war mass suburbia to be a new kind of horror. Had I known Lewis Mumford existed, I would have thought him crazy for slandering suburbia as a "multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform distances, in a treeless communal waste," with brain-dead inhabitants "conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould."
But, then, I also hadn't heard of William Levitt, the arch-fiend in Mumfordian mythology, whose fabulously successful strategies for mass-producing houses had given the decisive push to the out-bound march of U.S. and Canadian suburbia.
Levittown had been a market sensation in its glory years, between 1947 and 1951, when Mr. Levitt was busily dotting this expanse of Long Island potato fields with nearly 18,000 assembly-line dwellings.
Myriad returning GIs wanted houses that were clean and new. The developer delivered by putting standardized mass production to work in housing. Mr. Levitt sent in teams of workers charged with completing each of 26 separate operations in sequence -- roofing and plumbing and wiring and installing the steel sinks, General Electric refrigerators, Bendix washing machines and other goodies that came with the purchase price. In the most feverish months of building, Mr. Levitt was finishing 30 houses a day.
The first thousand houses sold within two days of the offering. The place was right, the price was right. It was new country, with plenty of fresh air, easy road access to nearby industries -- and it was memory-free. Prospective buyers first had to sign a rental lease at $60 a month for one year, in return for an option to purchase their rented house for just $7,500.
Six thousand Cape Cods went up in 1947 and 1948, whereafter Mr. Levitt offered 11,447 ranch styles, which similarly sold like hotcakes until all the lots were used up, in 1951.
By the time I got to Levittown, the new had worn off, and everything had been softened by time. The lawns and lanes once open to the sun are now generously shaded by old trees. The meandering dirt streets we see in early aerial photographs are all paved, the strip shops that once lined the major thoroughfares have fallen prey to the monster malls. And because Mr. Levitt's creation was long ago swamped by the general creep of tract-house development surging out from New York City -- about an hour east of Levittown on the Long Island Rail Road -- it's hard to tell just where the township begins and ends.
After a while, the lesson seems to be, one generation's avant-garde suburbia turns into another generation's "no place special." It's a vast transformation that nobody could have predicted, back when both suburbia and I were young.
AoD