Good 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
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:
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!
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-- 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
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"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