Stefanie Strebel - Between Dream Houses and God's Own Junkyard - Architecture and the Built Environment in American Suburban Fiction

In fact, the United States embarked on its suburbanisation much earlier than the twentieth century. Historically, the country has always had an “anti-urban bias,” and suburban settlements and their commercial infrastructure “arose from the idea, rather peculiar to America, that neither the city nor the country was really a suitable place to live” (Kunstler 40). A convenient way to illustrate the development of the American suburb is to distinguish between four rough phases or eras, as proposed by Baldassar (476-478): the pre-industrial, the early urban-industrial, the late urban-industrial and the metropolitan era. In the pre-industrial era, there were few suburban settlements with sparse populations; it can be considered a sleeper phase. The division between city and country was still strong, as people were unable to cover long distances to travel to work on a daily basis. In the early urban-industrial era – which the 1920s are part of –, however, suburbanisation was a far more rapid process, as white-collar workers moved out of the cities into their close vicinity in increasing numbers. As Christopher Hitchens remarks in a 2008 article for The Atlantic , “agrarian population moves as soon as it can to the cities, and then consummates the process by evacuating the cities for the suburbs” (122). When it comes to demographics, the inhabitants of suburbia were predominantly white, middle-class and family-oriented at the time. They were attracted by the almost utopian or at least escapist discourse surrounding suburbia in the early urban-industrial era, which promoted this environment as a solution to various problems encountered in the urban sphere.

The American suburb was not without its critics in the early urban-industrial era, however. In fact, the criticism that still defines the suburban discourse in the arts already began to be heard in the nineteenth century, for instance in the following passage of Henry A. Beers’ short story “A Suburban Pastoral” (1894) – a sarcastic title for a text in which the disappearing rural landscape is bemoaned:

There is one glory of the country and another glory of the town, but there is a limbo or ragged edge between which is without glory of any kind. It is not yet town – it is no longer country. Hither are banished slaughter pens, chemical and oil works, glue factories, soap boilers, and other malodorous nuisances. […] Land, which was lately sold by the acre, is now offered by the foot front; and no piece of real estate is quite sure whether it is still part of an old field or has become a building lot. Rural lands and turnpikes have undergone metamorphosis into “boulevards,” where regulation curbstones prophesy future sidewalks, and thinly scattered lamp-posts foretell a coming population. […] [T]he cows have disappeared, and pasture and orchard – where a few surviving apple trees stretch their naked arms to heaven – have passed into unfenced lots intersected by diagonal paths, short cuts of tin-pailed mechanics; bediamonded in the centre by local ball nines, who play the national game there on Saturdays (and eke, it is to be feared, on Sundays); and browsed by the goat – cow of the suburb. (5-6)

Beers depicts the American suburb as a space in-between at the turn of the twentieth century, as a place that destroys the rural pastoral and is devoid of the benefits of the city. At that time, it was a space in transition, still striving to find its purpose and aesthetic. The excerpt above mirrors the accelerating growth of suburbia, in the context of which much was built without proper planning, and which thus paved the way for the eclectic suburban architectural and social landscape of today.

Other sources, too, emphasise the fact that the suburban history of the United States began considerably earlier than with the mass production of tract housing in the postwar years. According to Blakely and Snyder (14), industrialisation – in addition to fostering urbanisation – also spawned suburbanisation, so that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there emerged a middle class which quickly found its way out of the urban cores. Brooklyn Heights, Long Island, the Bronx and Yonkers, for instance, were suburbs of Manhattan, and by 1911, more than one in three lawyers resided on the periphery of this central borough. Stern, Fishman and Tilove report in their book Paradise Planned that by the 1880s, roughly 300,000 people commuted between New York City and its surrounding suburbs, and they quote a New York Times article from 1878 which states that “the continuous region from twenty to thirty miles around is little else than a vast dormitory of New York” (qtd. in Stern, Fishman and Tilove 47). However, back then, American suburbia had a different appearance and different social characteristics compared to its current form, as becomes obvious in the following observations made by historian Lewis Mumford after a walk through Brooklyn in 1921: “It was a little hard to realize that this dissolute landscape, this no-man’s-land which was neither town nor country, was part and parcel of the greatest city on the continent. It seemed to me that I had passed through the twilight zone of an essentially suburban civilization” (“Wilderness” 44). Hence, in some instances, American suburbia was still considered a no-man’s-land, a mysterious twilight zone, a wilderness. It is the suburban landscape of the postwar period that is responsible for the suburban myth, a myth “which poised that suburbs are homogeneous landscapes of white middle-class conformity and uniformity” (Dunham-Jones and Williamson 17). The emerging suburbs of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were architecturally more diverse, which is the main reason they are often not thought of as proper suburbs from a present-day point of view; they do not comply with the image conveyed by the suburban myth.

The Suburb as an Anti-Urban Utopia

Although they were less stereotypical in appearance, the suburbs were clearly on the rise in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and the suburban growth of the 1920s was particularly pronounced. With the Roaring Twenties being the first decade in which more Americans lived in urban than in rural areas, cities began to feel crowded with regard to both population and architecture, and there was a growing discomfort with the urban sphere among large numbers of city dwellers. There was also an increasing dissatisfaction with the modern characterless architecture that had begun to dominate urban territories, so that the newly marketed picture of the detached dwelling became more and more appealing. In King Vidor’s 1928 silent film The Crowd , for instance, the vision of a quiet family home away from the noise of the city is what prompts the protagonist to propose to his partner, and on the train journey to their honeymoon destination, he shows her an advertisement for a model home in a magazine and tells her that this is where they would live. The suburbs thus undoubtedly had a strong appeal even before they began to be marketed on a larger scale, and people felt the urge to escape the crowded American cities with their increasingly oppressive high-rise architecture.

The notion of strongly and oppressively vertical architecture is one among many urban characteristics against which prospective suburbanites reacted. From an architectural and economic perspective, the often-criticised high-rise seemingly became a necessity in the light of booming land prices in cities such as New York and Chicago, but more often than not, high-rises were built out of sheer megalomania, as well as in order to transmit a semiotic message. Edgell (358) insists that “[m]en build skyscrapers because they like skyscrapers. They concentrate them in a district because they like so to concentrate them.” Ignoring all considerations regarding their impact on the individual, high-rises stand as status symbols of individual cities or even entire nations, and they are a translation of political and economic power into the built environment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, buildings grew taller and taller, more often than not in a sculptural and massive style, and were in increasing competition with one another.2 As Frank Lloyd Wright argues, the high-rise or, in order to maintain the Babylonian notion, the skyscraper “demoralizes its neighbors, when it does not rob them, compelling them to compete in kind or perish” ( on Architecture 98) – and this demoralisation and increasing architectural competition soon began to mirror itself in the urban population, causing unease and discomfort with regard to the architectural city. As a consequence, urban flight became a new phenomenon.