Bi-Weekly Topic for July 15, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060115221516/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?SuBurbs
Suburbs / Thiruvanmiyur
By under the fire star
Ecotone: Writing About Place decided to blog collectively today about Suburbs. You can see what others have written here. (People tend to trickle in over a day or two -- if you don't see any other entries, come back later!) I'm modifying this topic a little, to write about Thiruvanmiyur. When I first saw it, Thiruvanmiyur was a village on the southern edge of Chennai. Now it has been swallowed up as the city expands to the south. Here are some impressions of Thiruvanmiyur as I first knew it:
Chickens roll in small piles of ashes and fluff their feathers. Goats stand on their hind legs to tear at the lower branches of trees. Dogs dig holes in the dust to lie in, for coolness' sake. The street is always full of children, crying out to me over and over -- "Hello, hello, hello..." "Good morning, good morning..." If I respond they greet me more urgently, trying for one more response. Animal shit stinks, and human shit too, in the sun. Ten women stand in line at the communal pump, but dozens of brass pots are piled one on top of the other, waiting their turn.
I am sitting on the 23A bus, listening to the slap of clothes being washed on the steps of the temple tank. The water level is low, and red lotuses float on its surface. Men bathe, boys stand in water up to their chests.
Men call out their trades as they walk down the street:
DIT-ti-le, dit-ti-LE, da da da, da da da, da da da, da da da, da Dit-ti-LE!
Va-LAI-ya! Va-LAI-ya pa-LAM!
uppaway! uppaway!
Paper! Paper!
A day for men in costumes. In the afternoon two men collected money for Mahashivaratri. One was beating the drum, and the other wore a rearing gold-foil cobra on his head, from which hung many garlands made of bits of cloth, gathered to look like flowers. They fell to the ground, and more hung from his waist. He wore a brilliant yellow veshti. From across the street he looked like a bride.
Later I went to the beach where a crew was shooting a mythological film. They must have just finished for the day -- a group of fairly ordinary looking people gathered around big pots of food. Then the star appeared from behind a sand dune, in a gauzy veshti covered with gold, his chest and large belly adorned with fake gold ornaments. He wore a wig of long curls and carried a gold helmet. He was twice the size of everyone else.
The next day a whole monkey army was on the beach -- men in knee-length skirts with long tails coming out behind, blue plastic helmets and big, false-looking blue plastic maces. There must have been at least a hundred of them.
How brightly the stars shine now that there is no moon. You can see the Milky Way. It is so quiet that the only sounds are the fan, crickets, and occasional drumbeats from the Mahalakshmi temple. In the field cows stand still as statues. If you turn off the fan you can hear the ocean.
When you go out at 6:00 p.m., the sun is still burning hot, but it's focussed, so you feel that the heat is coming directly from the sun, and not from air, from dust, from every side and all around. The loose dust of the road to the village is marked with the tracks of bicycles, cars, hoofprints of buffaloes and goats, footprints of dogs and bare human feet -- but it is almost always empty. An old woman might stand by the roadside and stare, or an Ayyar from the kitchen might ride by on his bicycle. That's all.
I just saw my first lunar eclipse. Somehow I thought the moon would disappear in blackness, but it's a dull, orange brown, burnt out and dead. No wonder it arouses fear. Tonight is the wedding of Shiva and Parvati in the village temple, but they'll wait until the eclipse is over. Black, cloudless sky, the sound of the ocean, and subdued film music from the festive village.
Tamil New Year's Day -- the village is full of kolam.
kolam, made from rice flour#
Source: http://underthefirestar.blogspot.com/2003_07_01_underthefirestar_archive.html
Foggy Culture
By Other WindI talked with my husband a few years ago about instant teleportation, the ability to travel, to be anywhere, immediately. He loved the idea, but my first reaction to it was grief. I love to travel. How wonderful would it be to broaden the possibilities? Yet, isn’t physical distance a crucial part of traveling? If we could be anywhere instantly, would the exotic, the diverse, survive? My husband didn’t agree with my concerns. Why lament the loss of separateness? The more connected people are the more they understand each other. But to me, the differences that have arisen from being away from each other are exciting and rich. Cultures have gradually become different because of their separateness, so erasing the distance between disparate places might eventually homogenize us all. This process has already begun in the developed world even though we have much more primitive devises of connection than instant teleportation. Why is homogenization such a bad thing? At the time of the conversation with my husband, my reason was that “diversity is necessary in the cultural world just as it is in the ecological world.” I still believe this, but I don’t think global culture and diversity have to be at odds. Diversity does, after all, exist within cultures.
Perhaps what really unnerved me was the idea of the whole world becoming just like my world. I am suburban by nature and truth be told, I am at home in my world, so I will defend it before I pass negative judgment on it.
I like going to the mall. I like movies (not just “films”) and the Super Target. I like the fact that I am connected to a vast number of people across the country and the world through TV and pop music, through toys we all had as kids and food that we all eat. The manufactured Big League Chew bubble gum of my childhood, pink and stringy, is as tactile a memory as any homemade apple pie could be.
I am glad that I can travel on the interstate—the stronghold of suburban connectedness, and that while doing so I can find a bite to eat without thinking or planning too hard.
The insinuation that suburban people are drones irritates me. Most people—urban, rural, small town, suburban—fit in, whether by choice or automation, to the culture in which they live. The desire to be the same is a strong force in most communities and most of us are drone-like at some point or in some fashion. We are also unique.
The claim that small, independent businesses foster better, friendlier customer service than suburbanized chain stores seems forced to me. I’ve been in plenty of locally-owned establishments where the owners and employees haven’t taken any interest in providing a good service and in plenty of chain stores and restaurants where employees really care about doing a good job, about making the customer experience a warm one. Disparity in service has more to do with the individuals giving the service than it does with the type of establishment in which the service is being given.
Yet, while I know suburbs aren’t the horrors they are sometimes told to be, I must say the dwindling of opportunity and encouragement to experience elsewhere and other in the suburban world troubles me. I might enjoy suburbia with its comfort and ease of use, but I don’t want it to overrun its welcome. Malls are fun and interstates are nice to drive, but in general, they are shallow. Their emphasis is replication, quantity, speed. They don’t go deep like two lanes or like a thrift store in the old part of town.
The more suburban a place becomes, the less real energy it seems to have. It becomes more rote and more sanitary. Its people box themselves up in cars and houses or in malls. We get connected to the TV, to the Internet, to trendy clothes and toys, and forget to look outside and connect with the people in our own community and to the land over which we commute. We float on top instead of swimming to the bottom and looking for pearls. Floating is fun, but so is diving.
Away from the workday (which is not pleasurable to many of us), we spend much of our time taking in the breath of others—their presentations of things to buy, things to watch, things to like, things to distract. Many of us are losing our drive to breath on our own. Finding our own air is perhaps too hard in this world of manufactured ease. We are displaced, more connected with an abstract whole than the here and now, and this displacement is dangerous. It is a blinder, keeping us nice and easy despite all the noises we hear. The environment, the changes we’d like to make in our lives, the government, the making up with loved ones—all these can wait until the next commercial or until the clearance sale is over.
So, I suppose a better cause for the grief I felt upon the conversation about instant travel is not fear of homogenization in general, but fear of this specific foggy brand of culture growing unchecked. I fear one big mega culture of distraction and over-stimulation, of controlled experience, in which most people are stifled. In this sort of society, most of us might not go any deeper into the world outside our boxes than a glance out the window, and we would deceive ourselves in our separateness from that world.
Source: http://otherwind.fademark.net/archives/000333.html
Suburban Bird
by Other Wind This is a guest post is by David, who wanted to post the following image in honor of the Suburbs Ecotone topic:
This picture was taken the morning of July 4, 2003. I have often noticed birds making nests in the signage of stores like this Walgreens’ store. I was lucky to have my camera with me this time. I am glad that some animals can thrive in developed areas. I suppose maybe birds don’t mind at all how ugly strip malls are. Their presence adds a lot of beauty and always makes me smile.
Source: http://otherwind.fademark.net/archives/000334.html
Life On The Margins: The Necessity Of Neighborhood Wilderness
By Fragments of Floyd
Ms. Dickenson may have been on to something with her prairie that consisted of only one flower and a bee. When I was new to the world, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot and one small boy was enough to make a wilderness.
I grew up in the city limits of a sprawling Alabama city, but I was happiest when I imagined myself to be surrounded by 'wilderness'. In the leafy chaos of vacant lots and wooded neighborhood margins I was able to pretend to be a pioneer... like Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier... to imagine that I existed for an afternoon in a place that was just the way God had left it. Playing in the woods--even though it might be just a fraction of an acre-- I could imagine that there I was closer to 'native land', and so I was closer to being a native myself. Playing 'cowboys and Indians' in those tiny woods connected me to an earlier time when men were more in touch with the land than any of our white-collared fathers were.
As I grew older, I found I needed more of the unspoken nutrient of wildness than my small neighborhood woods could provide for me. I went to summer camp and there found my backyard forest magnified a thousand fold. Living for a week smelling of creek water and pine straw with a hundred other feral children made me feel more connected to the larger life of the world than an entire summer of chlorine-smelling swimming pools and organized, sanitized sports ever could.
I fished. Fishing possessed its own sense of isolation and otherness and was its own foreign country fit for a young explorer. Mostly I fished alone and from the shore, and more often than not, I'd find myself thoroughly distracted by some little thing in the woods along the lake and forget fishing entirely. It was not the fish I was after, after all. I tried hunting, but killing things was not the manly adventure it seemed to be when Davy killed him a 'bar' and so I never became a hunter either.
And I played golf. Like many of my friends, I followed my father onto the golf courses that spread into the countryside with the expanding city. Our dads went there to find tranquility, solitude and serenity by chasing behind a little white ball. I worked on a golf course one summer, but I'd wander off into the rough turning logs for salamanders. I decided that for me, just being there was the point-- and guns, rods and reels, clubs and other toys were merely visible tickets into wilder natural places, icons required by a society that seems to expect grown men to display a reason for going happily out-of-doors.
All of the tiny wilderness sanctuaries of my childhood are paved over now, locked behind guardhouses of gated communities, uninviting and forbidden domesticated places. Even the margins and edges from youth were not far enough away to provide lasting wildness. Maybe it has been this experience that has compelled me to find remoter places when looking for a place to put down roots in our later years.
And so today, we live every day well beyond the edges of a town so small there are no suburbs. I have a vast woodlot around me, two creeks full of bright fish and sunlight, tranquility by the sky-full, and no neighbors to disturb in my rambling walks. This little valley may be the 'place' I felt I belonged to long ago. And I have to wonder if I did not start moving to Floyd County while picking berries with small hands, behind my suburban house in a secret patch of woods where natives lived.
(This is the original radio piece (before edits for length) that aired today, now posted for comments, ripe tomatoes and open for the astutidity of Fragments readers... Pascale tells me that astudidity is not a word, but what she means is that it didn't used to be. It's my creation and I'm sticking to it.) Astute Seth writes to remind me to post this-- thanks.)
Source: http://otherwind.fademark.net/archives/000334.htmlGrowing Up in the Suburbs
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
This post is in response to the third Ecotone Wiki joint blogging topic, Suburbs. Other posts on this topic can be found here.
When I started to think about suburbs for this piece, the stereotypical "kids and cul-de-sacs" image surfaced. I pictured green lawns, children being ferried to soccer and ballet and camp and swimming and all the other activities that people--mostly mothers--at work recite incessantly, half with pride, half with resignation. I pictured single-family homes with two vehicles, neither of which fit inside a garage filled to bursting with the detritus of contemporary consumerism. I pictured something alien: not somewhere I'd fit in, feel comfortable.
I hang my laundry on a line outside our front door (front, not back) -- this would probably be enough to get me arrested if I lived in Mace Ranch, not four miles from here. I have no interest in mowing lawns, in washing my ancient car on a regular basis (the summer dust in Davis ensures that this is an essential activity for anyone caring to have a shiny car, to look "respectable"), or in worrying about whether or not I'm conforming to the expectations of the neighborhood. It feels oppressive and confining to me.
Yet I grew up in suburbs. We moved to Spain when I was four from Tiburon, a suburb of San Francisco. Rereading my grandmother's diary of that trip--across the ocean on the Nieu Amsterdam from New York to Southampton, the drive south through France where I apparently got appendicitis, the arrival in downtown Madrid on a hot, sweltering day in early August--I see the anxiety that must have plagued my parents (and grandparents, who were on childcare detail) to find somewhere suitable to live. Suitable: meaning suitable for children, American children, not the immaculately dressed Spanish children in the playground outside our downtown hotel where the ground was dirt, not grass. Not one of those four adults thought we could possibly adapt to living in an apartment, which is how most Spanish people lived. We weren't immaculately dressed. We had different needs, it seems.
There was one place they found that conformed to their expectations of suitability: Mirasierra, a small area to the north of the city (in 1964 Madrid still had sheep regularly crossing the Paseo de la Castellana, sheep having the right of way over cars, to go and graze in the field in front of the Real Madrid soccer stadium). They scoured Mirasierra for a house to rent. We moved into a red-shuttered, granite-and-stucco three-bedroom with a "maid's room" downstairs (where my brother, the youngest, slept, to the absolute horror of Francisca, who wore widow's black and cleaned up after us).
There were shops at the top of the hill on Calle Nuria, which we were allowed to walk to by ourselves from about when I was seven, as long as we stayed on this side of the street. We walked barefoot (no Spanish child would EVER be allowed to do this) to buy our polos de naranja (orange popsicles) and black-market American comics on the diamond-patterned cement sidewalk and splashed in paddling pools and walked across the street to see if Annie or Robbie could play (the neighborhood was filled with foreigners, most of them executives from English, French, German, Dutch, Swiss, or Italian companies--and their children, many of whom by the time they were six could speak three or more languages). We had puppies and a rabbit and a chicken (neither of which survived very long and ended up in Francisca's pot: we couldn't eat them, of course, being unadaptable foreign children). We caught mumps and chicken pox and minnows in the mucky stream further west beyond the grapevines.
Our third Mirasierra house had a pool and we bought it. Franco's Spain was unairconditioned apart from movie theatres, and stiflingly hot nights were mitigated by frequent dips in the pool which my poor father labored to keep free of leaves, lizards, wasps, ants, coins, bobby pins, and hair, hair, hair. We became the envy of friends--many of whom lived in apartments closer to their father's office or to Runnymede, the English/International school we all went to--on account of the pool, and summers were filled with friends of various ages who came over, towels and bathing suits in hand. My mother ferried us to ballet and riding and orchestra practice, just like the Mace Ranch mothers do today.
I loved growing up in that place. The memories serve to soften my reaction to the aspirations of families with young children to live in a safe, green-filled environment, however Stepfordian I might find it. But I don't have children and I don't ever want to mow a lawn, and I like the smell of air-dried sheets too much to give that up. So we live nestled in among the landlord's son's beekeeping equipment in the back, with the walnut tree and the peach tree and the nectarines and plums, with a good view of the fields and the railroad track and the hills off to the west. The cropdusters are at it again. The field workers will be out early in the morning because it's going to be in the 100's again tomorrow, so I need to be somewhat appropriately dressed as I dump the compost onto the field before seven. This is not Mace Ranch.
Posted by Pica at July 14, 2003 09:00 PM | TrackBack
Comments
I have mixed feelings about the "stepfordian" nature of suburbs too. Perhaps children, more free by nature, aren't as stifled by it as some adults are. I like living near downtowon Knoxville, where suburban life, urban life, and rural life all seem to mingle and keep the town from becoming too bland, alhtough I'm sure some people would claim it is bland. Your place certainly doesn't seem bland, with the dust, the air dried sheets, and the bee-keeping equipmnent.
Posted by: Wendy at July 15, 2003 06:48 AMI wonder, Wendy, if large 'small towns' like Knoxville dont have a human scale and an accessibility to 'wild places' that too-large cities somehow lose. Birminghams was like that, a large small town, but now is a large large town, if you know what I mean... it has overgrown its edges and there is not much 'native ground' left, and as I wrote today, so much the pity for our children.
Posted by: fred1st at July 15, 2003 08:39 AMI suppose children make their world wherever they happen to be. I enjoyed reading about yours in Spain -- it revived my envy of the Foreign Service brats I knew outside Washington, DC -- knowing at least bits of several languages, and at home / not at home everywhere.
Posted by: Nancy at July 15, 2003 09:19 PMAs someone who grew up much as you did, in several countries, and as an outsider, I often wonder if people who don't carry the steady memory and experience of one place see the world in the same way as someone who is "part" of the community? What exactly does it feel like to "belong" somewhere? Where people never question your presence or look twice at you because of your looks?
Yet, as your essay describes, your experiences of the place you grew up in are no less vived than that of any other person. You even see things that they cannot.
I've always loved Spain and have often thought of trying to live there. Your essay brought it alive for a moment, and carved out a few sharp details that have made it a more vital world in my eyes.
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Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/07/14/growing_up_in_th.html
7.15.2003
By Field Notes
I've never known any place the way I knew Lubec Street. I knew it as the center of the world, before I found out that the center was someplace below, and that I was alone on the earth's spinning surface. I knew that street from the ground up.
My memories are still there, tethered to the house, to the front lawn. To find them I need only go back to Lubec Street. We played baseball in that yard, climbed avocado trees, played games, hide-and-seek. I remember taking my first solo bike ride across that patch of grass, but that might be my brother I see riding unsteadily across the grass, triumphant and vulnerable. The outdoors was our own domain, theater for neighborhood alliances and the small betrayals of early friendship, and the easy-flung daggers of brother and sister. We didn't consider the exposure, didn't need walls to hide our games, not then. Later, back yards were better.
But early the front yard spilled easily into the street and onto other patches of grass, some not as well kept as ours. But I only notice that looking back now. In that neighborhood time, the only distinctions we made were between parenting styles. Our friends across the street, exotic and Greek, had stricter parents than the rest of us. Their home was more mysterious, dark inside, and we never played there. But their backyard had frogs, and it led through childhood corridors to the backyard of Billy and Jon's house. Billy and I were going to marry and live at Big Bear. I can still feel him whispering in my ear, then see him dive down into the otherworldly blue green waters of his backyard pool. Their Mom taught them the song 'Billy Boy' but inserted "Bill and Jon" instead. So it went like this, "Can she bake a cherry pie, Bill and Jon, Bill and Jon?", and I could never convince Billy that it went any other way.
Lubec Street was an almost parentless place as I remember it. The parents were in the background, feeding us, arranging overnights, buying our toys and tucking us in. The pools were cleaned, meals cooked, mortgages paid and birthday parties thrown. I remember one pool party though: a little kid was in the middle of the pool being held under by a struggling toddler. For long moments, we watched. Then my mom, glamour queen, threw off her wig and sunglasses, dove in and saved them. I remember her rigid determination, the set of her mouth. Life had prepared her for a moment like that. Ocassionally a parent would star in our world for a moment, but they always sat back down with their magazines and their drinks and their chatter so we could get on with the important commerce of neighborhoods: occupying the small spaces, the hollows under hedges, the shaded places between houses, the underwater Marco Polo worlds, places where adults didn't ever go, didn't want to know.
All that was before. Before Dad left. Before we moved to the city away from the swimming pool and the shiny new cars in the driveway; away from the neighborhood where every porch, every lawn and shrub and tree, every hiding space was ours, and where the constellations of childhood were unbroken and steady, watching children run across the lawns of Lubec Street as a small girl counted out to one hundred with her eyes closed, hands pressed into the bark of an avocado tree.
Source: http://www.field-notes.net/2003_07_13_archives.html
Suburbs and Place: An Ancillary Ecotone Entry
By Notes from an Ecectic MindSome words cannot seem to escape their associated stereotypes. When the Ecotone bloggers announced “Suburbs and Place” as their July 15th topic, I immediately thought of Malvina Reynold’s song “Little Boxes.” The lyrics speak of houses made of “ticky tacky” that all look “just the same.” An anthem condemning 1950’s suburban conformity, the song epitomized the reaction of the generation that came of age in the Sixties to the post-war bubble of contentment from which they sprang.
Well, let’s face it. Little Towns just don’t have suburbs. When I contemplate the word I envision rows of houses sitting too close together looking as if an architectural cookie cutter produced each one. I think of the home Aunt K. and Uncle C. shared in Odessa on a parched postage stamp with a zero lot line.
I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, but my father, like many suburban dwelling heads of the house, came home from World War II, took out a G.I. loan and built a house for his wife and young daughter, my older sister. In that white wooden dwelling with a climbing yellow rose bush by the back door they passed the decade of the 1950s.
Papa didn’t wear golf sweaters and Mother didn’t meet him at the door each evening with a martini. They both drank bourbon and he fished passionately, maintaining both a worm bed and a bait tank in the backyard. In his workshop he reloaded ammunition and fiddled with various projects. When they added a room onto the house it was a space specifically designed for parties, complete with a hard wood floor for dancing.
In family photos from the period my sister and her friends cavort in penny loafers for the camera. Papa sports endless plaid shirts and Mother was a fashion plate in spreading skirts and petticoats. I don’t know those people.
The faces are familiar in their 1950s suburbanesque shading, but they were a family for seventeen years before my arrival in 1962. In a way then, the word “suburbs” connotes a kind of personal prehistoric era for me, a time when a portrait of my parents taken while he was still in his Army Air Corps uniform sat in the living room.
Their lives on South 16th Street were nothing like ours on West Cedar. My childhood passed through the fluorescent toned, Dippity Doo-ed, sit-in dominated decade of the Sixties, a world lit by the lava lamp. My sister had the Mickey Mouse Club and Leave it to Beaver. I had Laugh In and Love American Style. She had a world illuminated by suburban dreams of prosperity and contentment. I had a world illuminated by radical protest and restless societal discontent. And still my Mother cannot comprehend how her two daughters could be so different.
Rather than a concept of “place” then, suburb is for me on one level an idea of time and even of transition, an era people by familiar faces but one I can never know much less fully understand. I envy families with widely dispersed children that manage to bridge the temporal gap and build a cohesive unit. We never managed that admirable feat.
I did grow up in a neighborhood with many earmarks of suburbia. We played baseball in M.’s backyard, roasted hot dogs at D.’s, chased the sno cone truck on our bikes, and played all over Buddy Bob’s pickup. We pretended that vehicle sailed the seven seas or hurtled through outer space. Buddy Bob’s stepson R. was about as interesting as drying mud, but he had a great dad.
When I drive through suburban neighborhoods now I wonder if parents let their kids roam al over creation the way we did. I doubt it. The world isn’t that certain any more. In the Little Town in those years our universe wasn’t as complacent as that of a decade earlier. We knew boys who went to Vietnam and some who didn’t come home. Our parents predicted the demise of America a the hands of the hippies and every jukebox in town had a copy of Merle Haggard singing “Okie from Muskogee.” No one could have been alive then and not have felt the tension in the world, but we were still insulated and we were still safe. Something of that “suburban” security lingered on in our world for a few years longer.
So, if I cannot write of the suburbs as a place, I think I do know them as a state of mind. They represented a brief period in the post-war history of our nation when everything was orderly and all the textures and colors of life matched. They were the calm after one storm and the lull before another. For my family individually the years passed with relative ease until, on the dawn of the new decade, Mother suffered a nervous breakdown, I was born, and Papa’s business burned to the ground. They left the white house with the yellow roses and moved to a red brick ranch style home. Change hit our family hard and fast.
As I thought about addressing this topic R. mentioned that at one time her mother would have given anything to live in the proto-suburb itself, Levittown.
“What on earth for?” I asked, horrified at the thought of life in such a uniform setting.
“Because everything looked the same. No one seemed to have more or less than their neighbors.”
But then that was the great allure of that first post-war suburban wave, wasn’t it? The illusion of the little boxes. Unfortunately, ticky tacky doesn’t stand up to a strong wind.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20030825043033/www.ranakwilliamson.com/blog/000612.html
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
By Cassandra Pages
My neighbor wears wild grapevines wreathed about his shoulders. He wrestles and pulls, wrenching the honeysuckle from the earth, and vines from the trees where they once hung in wild joyful loops.
Angry, hot, sweating, he sits now and wipes his forehead with the back of a wrist, sets his face and begins hacking again, reducing the terrible invasion to something he can comb and smile at, satisfied, before turning toward his day.
He sees me looking up and tells me what he’s doing, as if I too might like to relocate the brambles and their kin which lie between my feet and his to some other neighborhood.
I smile politely and tell him that I like to see the birds that live there.
“Oh!” he says, surprised. “Are there birds?”
--
Twenty-five years ago, when I moved to this small village, the hill in back of our property was filled with goldenrod and woodchuck holes, dotted with a few houses above. This whole hillside was orginally a farm; we planted our garden where the chicken coop had stood. Deer regularly came down to eat apples underneath the old trees in our yard, and in the evenings a reclusive hermit thrush sang in the underbrush.
By the same token, back then you couldn’t buy a decent head of lettuce – other than iceberg – from October through June, let alone fresh herbs for your pasta, or a mango, or twenty different kinds of shade-grown organic coffee. You certainly couldn’t spend an afternoon browsing the bookshelves and drinking cappuchino at Borders; there weren’t art galleries or repertory theater companies; and there was a lot less choice about almost everything, from housing to housecoats.
The coming of suburbia to rural northern New England is both blight and blessing, and I find myself participating in both. As often as I cry, “I don’t want to live in Connecticut!” when I see yet another giant concrete-block box store extending the horrible strip mall further into the countryside, emptying not only the original downtowns but the earlier, now-unfashionable malls, I do go there on occasion and am grateful for some of the amenities and convenience. The fact that my area – and my business – have been largely protected from the economic vicissitudes of recent years is a result of a healthy local economy and continued growth – the same growth that eats up farmland and turns woodlots and wetlands into commercial developments.
This sense of inexorable creep resulting in compromise – compromise of place and of personal values – is what suburbia represents to me. Although we’ve participated in forums on sprawl, and served on committees to preserve and strengthen local communities, deep down I recognize the insidious and seductive lure of change, opportunity, and convenience. The difference between me and the “flatlanders” – the suburbanites who come here from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey – is that I’m acutely aware of what’s being lost.
Today, the entire hillside in back of our house has been developed. The winding road where I used to walk every morning is filled with whizzing, commuting cars, and the warbler-filledwoods at the top have been cut and replaced with a 50-unit condominium development. And even with our plantings of wildlife-feeding and -sheltering shrubs, and refusal to manicure the underbrush, the deer and the hermit thrush don’t come to our backyard any more.
“Oh?” says my transplanted neighbor. “Are there birds?”
Living on a Ripple
This is part of the Ecotone discussion on “Suburbs”.
Suburbs are the ripples of big cities. Here in Southern California where I live, the working definition I have developed is that a suburb is a community that connects to a larger metropolitan area. To tell the difference between an independent city and a suburb, you mark the developments: when there are clear, rural spaces between a large city and a smaller one, the smaller city is its own metropolitan area. Where towns and developments run on and on without break, you have suburbs.
Application: San Bernardino is a suburb of Los Angeles. Bakersfield is not.
Census takers and geographers go to great pains to define where metropolitan areas begin and end. I’m told that there are four metropolitan areas in a region where I mark only one. But then government officials use a different definition that also works: metropolitan areas are not only bunched contiguously around the main city or cities, but they also form an economic and political community. You can watch the trucks rolling out from and back into the metropoles, see the warehouses clustering near the decision-making centers. Suburbs are the towns which are not mentioned in the metropolitan district name.
I live where the big pond that is Los Angeles ends. Beneath me stretches a network of streets and a complicated patchwork consisting of housing developments, apartments, planned communities, enclosed shopping malls, strip malls, offices, factories, parks, open spaces, greenhouses, avocado orchards, and strawberry fields. Each fits unabashedly in the haphazard scheme.
Conformity does exist and there are communities near me that go to the extreme of setting up gates to keep strangers out. Some rely on magnetic cards, a system which some thwart by simply following someone else in. Others place guards: the entrances look like border crossings where they want to see some identification and have you fill out paperwork describing your reasons for visiting the country within a country. Many developments — including the one where I live — have strict rules that prohibit tampering with the “look” of the place where you live. I can’t paint my door a bright purple if it suits me because it is in the deed that I must go with the aesthetic sensibilities of the designers and, their successors, the condominium association board.
But I also see freedom here. The writing groups which I am a member of bring in all kinds of people: a Marine, an English professor, a social science Ph.d who went her own way after her dissertation defense, technical writers, the editor of a sailing magazine, housewives, salesmen, and a painter. We critique together and when we do so, we all respect the fact that we have different minds and different tastes in literature.
The same inner life happens behind closed doors. No one feels compelled to paint their interiors in the same colors as the builders put them up and I’ve even known people to freely knock down walls and rearrange things inside their condominiums. The creative urge is sublimated. Entering the home of a neighbor is like suddenly finding yourself inside their minds, surrounded by their tastes and impulses. Yet they do not detach themselves from the community: they remain inside it. There’s no gap between interiors and exteriors, just like there are no gaps between cities. They all run into each other.
How do I feel about living in a place without lines? I’m searching for words and rejecting them. Ambivalent? Contented? Exhilerated? Disgusted? Naseous? I feel the burn of the air on my shoulders and I feel hot. I have opinions about many elements of the place where I live, but the whole is just the pond. And I live on one of its ripples.
Posted: July 15th, 2003 under Ecotone.Comments
Comment from butuki
Time: 7/16/2003, 10:08 am
When I was studying architecture and urban development in graduate school one of the heated questions we always addressed was what constituted an authentic and natural human settlement. None of us ever came up with satsifactory answers, simply because the variation in what humans consider home are as diverse as the cultures and individuals themselves.
I lived in the States for a total of 20 years. As a very young boy it was all I knew and I loved what I lived in, the suburbs of New York City, but after living elsewhere most of my life, my sense of what feels balanced and what too artificial has changed. I find it funny that Americans speak so highly of their ideal of freedom, and yet in the suburban neighborhoods (much less so in the urban neighborhoods) where I dwelled, I felt much more constrained than I do now in the heart of Tokyo.
So much flickers in the mind of the beholder.
Comment from Joel
Time: 7/16/2003, 12:38 pm
I, too, have often felt an exhileration that I call “freedom” when I have lived abroad. When I have reported this to the locals, however, they’ve looked at me strangely.
Perhaps it is because as foreigners, we feel giddy, that people make some allowances for us to be a little kooky? Perhaps it is because the thrill of the different excites us? (though given your long stay in Japan, that theory is easily upset!) Perhaps it is because having been raised feeling the chafe of one set of rules, we feel better when the rules are more to our liking?
No answer here. Just questions.
Source: http://paxnortona.notfrisco2.com/?p=1391
The Barley Fields
By Laughing Knees
The Barley Fields
Open hearth pole from my home, Tokyo, 1984.
This is the 3rd installment of the ongoing series of discussions about place at the Ecotone: Writing About Place site. This week's topic is Suburbs.
On the night my family arrived in Tokyo from New York we were driven into the city from Haneda Airport. It had been a long flight, with a transit in Honolulu for refueling, and we were all tired and a bit dazed. A representative from my father's company met us at the arrivals area and escorted us out to the street, where he had his car waiting for us. The air was heavy with humidity and insects whirled around the street lights over the taxi stand. The air smelled of burning oil and something else, something sweetly organic that a newcomer like me couldn't identify. And all the while a numb sense of dislocation surged up in my belly, like having my sense of balance ripped out from inside me, a sense of being physically there, but my soul lingering in another time far away. When I think back on that moment, it is curious that I can remember the details of arriving in Tokyo, but can't recall a single image of the moment we left New York...
As we pulled out of the airport and made our way into the city, Tokyo rose around us, the dark walls of the buildings lit up by a carnival of bright, flashing neon lights, every building seemingly decorated with gay, vertical signs to silently cheer our arrival. My father, gazing in amazement with his face pressed to the window exclaimed, "Why do they call New York the City of Lights? This is the City of Lights!"
Tokyo would be my home for the next ten years and would shape me in ways that I could not have imagined while I was still living in New York.
Since that day, Tokyo has grown like an insatiable rabbit unmindful of the horde she has been giving birth to. Areas that I once took the train out to to spend time in the country have transformed into chic shopping neighborhoods where the fashionable meet for Sunday brunch and cappucinos. Downtown West Shinjuku, the heart of big business and government today, with its soaring skyscrapers and wide avenues, still billowed with barley fields when I was a boy. It was a Sunday adventure in junior high school for my best friend Alex and me to spend our weekend afternoons riding all the high speed elevators to the top of the brand new buildings and have a look down. By the end of the day we would head home with splitting headaches and nausea, but heady with the elation of having topped all the tallest building in Japan in one day.
Japan has no American halfway point of suburbs. There just isn't the space. You either build or you don't, and where there are no mountains, every available vacancy is paved over and framed and shored up and walled in. You can take a train ride from Tokyo to Osaka, a distance of about 500 kilometers, and looking out the window, never once see the repetition of single family homes and apartment buildings and factories interrupted by any significant stretches of untouched green. In the outskirts of Tokyo proper, where people used to go hiking in low-lying woods and fields, now housing developments, Japan's closest equivalent to the American Back to the Country movement of the 50's and 60's, gobble up hillsides. Entire chains of hills have been leveled to make room for all the people who want to own their own homes, especially during the heady Bubble era, when no one thought twice about the environmental consequences of all the building they were doing.
I was lucky. Tokyo was still down-to-earth enough in the 60's and 70's to allow me to get dirty in the fields and accumulate a repertoire of close encounters with wild creatures, especially birds and insects. I was lucky to have been one of the last children to watch fireflies winking on and off over the susuki fields by the rivers near my house. I had the opportunity to listen to the sad cry of the dusk cicada ( higurashi-zemi, Tanna japonensis. See Cicadae in Japan. Open "Songs of Cicadas", choose your platform sound format, open sound page, and scroll down to "Tanna japonensis". The higurashichorus3.mpeg or .wav file is the best recording.), which is just about impossible to describe to someone who has never heard it (the closest I can come to it is if you take the sound of a pencil being drawn over the slowly moving spokes of a bicycle, alter that sound into that of a locomotive whistle, but with the quality of a harmonica, and multiply the numbers to several dozen all singing together at different intervals) and I feel it is a great loss to the children of Tokyo never to have the chance to know one of the most beautiful sounds of Japan.
I grew up with walls around me, for towns in Japan traditionally wall the streets in up to shoulder height or more. Streets are enclosed on both sides, with houses coming right up to the edge, and traditionally, the entrance hall open right out to passersby. Neighbors and salesmen and people on official business would step right into the entrance hall without ringing the doorbell and announce their presence. It gave a strong sense of belonging and neighborhood watchfulness, with every one aware of what was going on around them, though, as foreigners, we were more often than not thought of as weird and unconventional. I grew used to the paradox of walls enclosing streets while doors allowed anyone in, so much so that, though I visited my relatives in New York on occasional summers, the mowed grass patchwork that constitutes so many American homes, to this day feels alien and exposed, and yet oddly uninviting.
What Tokyo has become I do not love. There is no longer any heart to the growth of the city. The newly developed area I now live in is made up mostly of young families just starting out with their careers and child-rearing. Most of them intend to move on. Since moving here three years ago, not a single person has ever returned my greetings, and half of them give me suspicious stares. One older couple, which unfortunately lives right behind our bedroom window, went so far as to growl, "Go home you foreigners!" And, seeing that I looked somewhat like a Pakistani or Mexican, added as an afterthought, "You probably don't even have a visa, do you? You're here illegally, aren't you?"
It is not possible for me to find peace with myself in a place that I cannot find the motivation nor means to care about. It is like living a half-life, mostly in my head. And so it may be time to move again, and once more face the tearing feeling of dislocation. But I will always carry the old barley fields in my heart, where my childhood lives and where the old roots still drink up a sense of belonging to this place, whatever the dull neighbors may assume. And the dusk cicadas will always sing where none can hear them any more.
Posted by butuki at 06:54 AM in Hiking, Bicycling, Kayaking | Permalink | Comments (8) CommentsFascinating!
Posted by Joel at July 16, 2003 08:38 AMThank you for this remarkable & beautifully written glimpse into your city and your memories of it.
Posted by beth at July 16, 2003 10:27 AMSo beautiful…thank you. I’m intrigued by your description of the cicada sound. I want to hear it, so I did some searching. I found this page with many cicada sound links, but none sounds just as you described.
But they are all beautiful in their own way, and interesting, and maybe you’d enjoy listening.
http://www.isis.vt.edu/~fanjun/text/Link_specc02.html
This is so sharply and beautifully written. And you have such wonderful photographs — thank you! (You remind me how lucky I am to live where being a (white) foreigner usually makes people more friendly than they would otherwise be — an interesting aftertaste of colonialism.)
Posted by Nancy at July 16, 2003 03:00 PMBy popular demand I’ve added a link to a site with recordings of Tanna japonensis. I wanted to put a sound file onto the page, but I have to hear back from the Cicadae in Japan homepage owner for permission. Also I have no idea how to incorporate a sound file, so it’s going to take a few days before I have time to learn how. Anyway, I hope the recording gives a good impression of what I was referring to. Of course, it’s just a recording. There’s nothing like standing in the woods at dusk, the sun going down, shadows gathering, trees all around, and the cicadas singing in almost a delerium of sound. It’s a sound you will never forget.
Posted by Miguel at July 16, 2003 05:17 PMIt’s been wonderful to read you and to make all these journeys with you! I’ve only experienced it before while reading José Mauro de Vasconcelos, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Luis Sepulveda. It seems that you have the same ability of taking us by the hand and help us magically to plunge into your tales. Thank you for letting me to join you.
Yes, I too have known that feeling of dislocation that you felt when you arrived in Tokyo. It is quite similar to what I felt when I arrived in Portugal from Angola. 28 years ago. My roots are still there. Entangled with Mother Africa’s Heart.
Fortunately the Earth is immense. Such as our aptitude for to dream and to love.
(Please, excuse me for my English. You know, it’s not my mother tongue)
It seems like so much is being lost everywhere.
Posted by bill at July 17, 2003 01:06 PMyour journal is astonishingly beautiful. it makes me think of the flicker of a candle flame behind a paper door.
Posted by tara. at July 24, 2003 06:08 PMSource:http://web.archive.org/web/20041206232452/www.butuki.com/archives/2003_07.html#000047
our old suburban home
by Prairie PointThis place of ours was once in the "suburbs." Our house was built in 1946, which makes it older than us. Most of the houses around here were built a little later than that, a few earlier. North of here virtually all of the houses are newer. From that I conclude that at the time it was built our house was near the edge of town. By my thinking that means it was in the suburbs, even though it might have been within the city limits at the time.
The man who built this house operated a restaurant in Highland Park Village, one of the country's first shopping centers, a few miles closer to downtown. He had children who attended the local school. In fact I suspect that most of the people who lived around here were young families with children. When we moved here though it was primarily empty nesters or childless households.
If you take suburban to simply mean the new housing at the edge of the metropolis then almost every place around here either has been suburban at some time or will be in the future. Now most people would call our place "inner-city" or even "downtown." Once it was part of a farm and before that it is said to have been an Indian campsite. I can travel 20 miles to the north today and see farms that I know will very soon be subdivided into housing developments or shopping centers.
Age has given the neighborhood character and, in my eye, added value. People have lived here and made their mark on it. That is what makes the difference between a neighborhood like this one and a new one. I think most people though prefer the new.
Comments
I like it that you are able to trace the history of the house you live in with such specificity. I wonder about the "most people prefer the new" and then look at old houses here in Davis from the 1920s which were just north of the town center, and built for workers (but beautifully, in the Arts & Crafts style). They are tiny, usually two-bedroom, one bath, but they sell for fortunes now, because of their age and unique style. Davis has since expanded way north of that area. Will the housing developments of today--ugly, monotonous, overbearing, where the garage is about 1/3 of the footprint--ever be looked at in this way? It's hard to imagine...
Posted by: Pica at July 16, 2003 08:29 AMDespite its age our house had only one previous owner. I learned a little of the history when I met their son at the time I bought the house and subsequently a little more from neighbors who had known them.
Posted by: bill at July 16, 2003 10:48 AMYou wonder sometimes about the constinuous story we all hear... of the ever growing city. I don't think I have ever heard a story of a modern city turning back and shrinking. It is as if the city is chasing after an older brother or sister who has gone off into the horizon, and the city is dragging everything after himself. Perhaps it is like the rings of a tree, where the core withers and dies and creates a donut effect. Hopefully cities grow stronger this way. It is nice to hear of an "old" suburb that has matured and honed a warm patina of wisdom and richness.
Posted by: Miguel at July 16, 2003 12:16 PMIt's a relief to see a piece about suburbs that doesn't wail about their ugliness, etc. Just telling it like it is is what I like to see, Mr. Bill.
Posted by: Joel at July 19, 2003 12:06 AMI don't disagree with those writers who think modern suburbs are ugly and inhospitable. I just did not choose to write about that myself.
Posted by: bill at July 20, 2003 07:38 AMWhich is still refreshing to see....
Posted by: Joel at July 22, 2003 01:22 AMSource: http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/archives/000109.html
Suburbs
by Creek Running North
[This entry is written as part of a collective writing effort on suburbs. Other works in this effort can be found at the Ecotone wiki.]
Some months ago, I wrote a column for the Contra Costa Times on invasive exotic species, and the misguided opposition one can sometimes find to reasonable efforts to control their spread. Some people find uncomfortable parallels between invasives control and immigrant-bashing. The column was intended to point out the differences between the two issues, and contained a few throwaway sentences on the immense value of human diversity to Californian society.
A few weeks after the piece saw print, I started getting hate mail. Not a huge amount, but enough to unsettle me a bit, and from places well outside the Times' distribution radius: Iowa, Atlanta, New York. The writers spewed hatred of Latino and Asian immigrants, and generally opined that I must be a traitor, an idiot, or both. How did they all find this column, in the Home and Garden section of a fine but not exactly nationally prominent newspaper? I was perplexed.
It turns out that a man named Walter Pringle had posted a link to my article on a racist website. Walter Pringle, it turns out, lives in El Sobrante, a suburb one valley south from Pinole.
There's a well-worn parable about long spoons, dining tables, and heaven and hell. The punchline is that the only difference between heaven and hell lies in your reaction to circumstances. If Walter Pringle is uncomfortable with immigrants, he must certainly be living in hell: El Sobrante is one of the most racially diverse suburbs I've ever seen.
We decry the spread of suburbs, and rightly so. More and more of California open space falls each year to the spread of the Terra Cotta Carcinoma, the distinctive walled communities that are neither communities nor distinctive, named after whatever it was they killed to build the houses, in the familiar process of necronomination. "Oak Meadow Acres," "Sequoia Ridge," "Bay View Estates."
As a child, I lived in most of the different kinds of landscapes available in Western New York in the 1960s and '70s: farm, small town, suburban development, inner city. From age 8 to 12, I spent non-school hours in a burgeoning suburb outside Buffalo watching lot after lot get swallowed up in colonial revival three-bed two-bath boxes. But still there were buffers. The woods across the road from my house are still undeveloped after thirty years. There was the creek, from which we kids extracted Devonian fossils, where we built tree forts and smoked sections of wild grape stem and snuck nude swims when we thought adults weren't looking. Kids on Manitou Drive still had the freedom to drown or break arms or otherwise interact with nature.
No such buffers exist in many of the suburbs now being built in California. There is open space, to be sure: laws demand it. But that open space is often a lawn, tennis courts and manicured gardens and pavement, or else widely scattered blocks of intact hillside, with distinct separation between wild and tame. None of the little threads of wildness I grew up with are allowed to insinuate their way into the curving grid of cul-de-sacs. No weed-choked frog ditches here. Someone might drown or - even worse - sue.
Older California suburbs are different. The last house we lived in was built, with thousands of others, in a rush to provide housing for shipyard workers in World War Two Richmond. In every architectural respect the neighborhood was identical to some of the most soul-destroying suburbs I knew back in Buffalo.
But 40th and Nevin was not the kind of suburb I grew up with. Leave alone for a moment the fact that our neighbors in Richmond had a far broader range of skin colors and accents than the '40s vintage burbs in Western New York ever allowed in the 1970s: that's a pleasant detail, but not the crucial one. The crucial difference was that we knew the neighbor's names within a week of moving in.
El Sobrante is a bleak-looking place. Its name translates roughly as "the leftovers," the name itself a leftover from the days of the Spanish land grants. Central Richmond was part of the Castro Ranch, Pinole the westernmost part of Rancho Del Pinole. What was the land in between? El Sobrante. Through a car window, it's an unremarkable sprawling collection of ramshackle houses and shoddy storefronts; the kind of place where a roadkilled dog might linger at the curb for days before someone moves it.
But get out of the car, and a remarkable place emerges. An old Foster's Freeze, red white and blue tile decor still intact, houses a Tandoori chicken joint where even the yogurt is made on the premises. A few doors down is El Chalan, which bills itself as a "Peruvian-Italian" restaurant. On the little bridge off San Pablo Dam Road where Appian Way crosses San Pablo Creek - a finger of the wild threading itself behind the luggage stores and donut shops - anti-war demonstrators held quiet vigil through the first months of this year. And up the hill, beaming down on its community like a sun, is the gold-leaf onion dome of the local Sikh temple. I can only imagine what it's like to be an anti-immigration crusader in this little suburb. Me, I'm getting hungry for a Tandoori chicken sandwich. Less than six bucks, and they'll make yours with garlic naan if you ask.
But that's what reinvention is all about, and California is where reinvention was invented. Tomorrow's anti-suburban sentiment will take this riotous, exhilarating diversity for granted, much the way we suburban kids of a certain age assumed the existence of swimming pools in every third backyard. There will come a time, and probably not far off at that, when no one will even notice the spectacle of a joyous mob of White and Black and Mexican and Asian and Arab street kids mobbing the local ice cream truck, its Sikh driver advertising his presence by playing an ice cream truck version of Home On The Range.
But right now, that scene - which played out every day in our Richmond neighborhood - seems as good a summation of the California suburb as one can find.
Posted by Chris Clarke at July 16, 2003 04:38 PM TrackBack URL for this entry:
Source: http://www.faultline.org/place/pinolecreek/archives/000168.html
Discussion
A number of the posts about suburbs are also posts about childhood, and children's love of wild or secret places. That would make an interesting subject for later -- children's places. The other main thing that jumped out at me was ambiguity, which is appropriate to suburbs' between-ness. I enjoyed reading all of these pieces, though I didn't really expect to -- I thought the subject too bland. Which goes to show the narrowness of my own mindset, or the deep cultural association between the words 'suburbs' and 'blandness,' or 'emptiness.' -- NancyGood point. And I'm going to add "ChildrensPlace?" to our list. I was surprised too by the breadth of these latest entries. It seems there is also a theme of the loss of freedom, especially for children, that has occured as the suburbs have grown and anxiety increased. Is this partly due to the loss of longterm personal relationships that created a fabric of trust and security? Do anxiety and transience feed on each other? -- Beth
Nancy, I was noticing the same thing, memories of childhood that kept resurfacing and an almsot mournful lament for the poor suburban children of today who don't have what we did, but instead live super-scheduled, over-protected lives. Michael Moore lays the blame for the culture of fear (specifically fear of the African American male) squarely at the feet of the media, but I wonder too whether transience doesn't also make our society more likely to buy into it? I have to say I was in a couple of places recently where I was laughed at for locking the doors of cars--where nobody locks their car or their house, and it made me curious about what different elements in a place make it "seem" more safe. Scale is certainly one. A sense that a majority of people in this place have been there a LONG time. Also, I'm pretty sure, racial homogeneity. I think these places are not inherently safer than others, but there is the perception that they are. -- Alison
I just finished reading [Allan's post] where he asks "What if the tension over urban growth is not about traffic, or noise, or overburdened schools, but instead, at an archetypal level, is really about beauty?" I think he's onto something. The laments in the various posts over loss of rural childhood habitats, lack of freedom in suburban communities, loss of cicada song, hacking away at the understory of our yards, and even the lost feeling of safety all have aesthetics at their heart. The early childhood suburbs that I wrote about with some love and yearning are quite different from the suburbs of Irvine, California (largest planned community in the world) which I inhabited as a very unhappy teenager. That kind of suburb, where there truly is no beauty, no soul or opportunity for soul, are killers of imagination, stealers of the secret places children need, and without those, no child is safe. --Lisa
The observation about beauty, I think, is a good one. A big part of what is so disliked about post-WWII suburbs are the exterior spaces which, even in the residential areas, are places where almost no-one wants to be. It is, I think, very odd--there is more than enough space to dance in the streets only, somehow, people don't. (And the police would probably arrest them for it.)
Ed Allen, one of the great teachers of architecture, argues that architectural taste is largely formed in childhood. The more I learn about architectural visions the more I think he is partly right, and partly...something else intervenes, and people raised in one sort of place discover a preference for others. Raised in stone-and-steel Manhattan, I turn out to have an unexpected sympathy with Japanese wood designs. A woman I know, raised in earthquake-prone, wooden Portland, Oregon, has a feeling for the arches, vaults, and domes of unreinforced masonry.
In discussing suburbs, it's important to distinguish between the pre-World War II US suburb and the post-WWII. Pre-war, suburbs were largely for the uppper-middle class. The primary transit technology was rail, a mix of trolley and commuter. The trolleys gave their name to the urban form; the "trolley suburb." The houses were often carefully designed by architects--names like Greene and Greene and Julia Morgan come to mind.
Post World War II suburbs were intended as housing for veterans. A number of financial and legal devices were put together to make it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of the US middle class to own a plot of land and a small house near a major city. The primary transit technology, pushed hard by automobile and oil industries, was the automobile. And the designs... The buyers--they didn't know what to ask for. How could they? So they got what the builders (who mostly didn't hire architects) gave them. It became all quite the mass manufacturing industry--the main difference between a suburban development site and a factory was that the workers moved from place to place, instead of the work coming to them.
More notes tomorrow, maybe. Meantime, here's some references:
- Rowe, Peter G. Making a Middle Landscape, MIT Press 1991.
- Roth, Leland, ed. America builds: source documents in American architecture and planning. Harper & Row, c1983. Where to go to read the words of the people who did it.
- Jackson, Kenneth. Crabgrass frontier: the suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, 1985.
- Warner, Sam Bass. Streetcar suburbs: the process of growth in Boston, 1870-1900. Harvard University Press, 1978.
--Randolph Fritz, randolph@panix.com
Helpful insights, Randolph. Happy you joined the discussion, hope you'll return often. -- FredFirst
Randolph says: "The trolleys gave their name to the urban form; the 'trolley suburb.' The houses were often carefully designed by architects--names like Greene and Greene and Julia Morgan come to mind."
As the spouse of a confirmed roller coaster addict, I should add that trolley suburbs often included amusement parks - Coney Island was one, and there was one on the Key Route in Alameda, CA, several in Pennsylvania, and more elsewhere. Which means that the trolley suburbs were more than places where rich people went to rest... they were public destinations, where families would go to enjoy ferris wheels and other attractions, or stroll on the beach or in the countryside for a weekend, before returning to the cities where they lived.
And I'm with Fred: good to have you here, Randolph. -- Chris C.
The first time I heard the word "ecotone" was from my sister, who was telling me where to look for a home in a mid-sized city 20 years ago. But what she meant was not a place where human development met nature in the suburbs, but a boundary within the city. Now I live in a big, old "trolley suburb" and I'm fascinated to encounter "ecotone" again.
The trolley tracks at the end of my modest street are long gone, but I love the broad old houses that faced them, built of dark brick with deep, turn-of-the-century-style eaves and decorative windows. Towering oaks and mottled sycamores, elderly silver maples and the occasional doomed elm shadow even the smaller streets, where the hoi polloi used to have to hike down to the train stop. The trees and houses all bespeak maturity, stability, like an old-growth forest -- except for the silver maples, which are doubtless waiting for a chance to kill someone with a huge, brittle limb.
Even the wildlife is stable. My own lovely, menacing silver maple harbors exactly two -- never three or one -- aggressive, reddish-gray squirrels. A skunk visits my stoop about every other summer Monday -- Tuesday is garbage day. There is a raccoon out there somewhere. Robins and cardinals patrol my yard indifferent to me in the garden, and sparrows live year-round in my ivy.
But my city is as surely an ecotone as the outer 'burbs that chew up farmland faster than ranchers gulp rainforest. It's a social ecotone, a place where economic, racial and ethnic groups jostle, where a small change in climate can substantially change the landscape.
We have modest wealth and modest poverty. An approximate racial balance on the street is skewed wildly in the public schools, either because so many kids go to church schools or the young families move on after the first five or six years. They leave behind the elderly and the truly determined liberals, and a spirit of community as good as any small town's. The liberals are sponsoring a referendum on a gay-partnership registry. Conservative Christians of all races are outraged. The schools -- well, it's easy for the story to become more political than personal.
I, a child of a small, hill-country town who fought paranoia when moving to a city of only 16,000, probably chose this teeming, scary place not because of my politics but because of my grandfather, who moved into a sturdy, comfortable urban neighborhood like mine around 80 years ago. We kids could roam his wide, dusty back yard while the grownups talked; I remember the pear tree and the long-disused patio in the deep, grassless shade behind the garage. There was a mysterious, forbidden and fascinating attic; crumbling shades on the sleeping porch that flapped terrifyingly on Christmas eve and a faint smell of gas in the cellar. I swear that hint of gas in the cellar sold me on my first house. Moving here, I think I fell for the tree.
My grandfather's house still stands, unchanged and largely unpainted, back in New York state. Money has left his neighborhood for raised ranches and cathedral ceilings in less challenging places. What I have left is a box of his pressed-wax crayons and a disintegrating mandolin -- and, of course, an imprint, an imprint that jibes with my politics (so different from Grandpa's!), that has kept me in place so far. Then again, my daughter is just 6; much could happen still.
Thanks for sharing the forum!
-- P.
Thanks for writing here and for this welcome contribution! It took me a minute to figure out who was writing... but I got there. Can't believe you encountered the word "ecotone" that long ago - I had never heard it until Fred's suggestion. I hope you'll continue adding to our discussion. --Beth
I haven't figured out who it is. But I'd like to know! --Lisa
---
"P." is an old friend of mine - we've known each other since high school. He's an excellent writer and I'm encouraging him to a) write more, as in "here", and b) start a blog. --Beth
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060115161337/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?DiscussSuburbs