If forced to compare an ice cream flavor with suburbia, many would pick vanilla. Yet, as Amanda Kolson Hurley writes in her new book, Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City, this is just one of many “misinformed clichés” about these peripheral communities. City-dwellers internalized these attitudes early on. In the early 1950s, novelist Raymond Chandler spoke for many urbanites when he disdained suburban life for its “eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement.”
“You take it, friend,” he declared. “I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.”
Distaste for suburbia persists, with New Urbanist gurus like Andrés Duany describing suburbanized cities, such as Phoenix, as places “where civic life has almost ceased to exist,” though he offers no real evidence to back up this assertion. Social critic James Howard Kunstler goes even further, suggesting that the “state-of-the-art mega-suburbs of recent decades have produced horrendous levels of alienation, anomie, anxiety, and depression.”
Yet, as Hurley fortunately reminds us, the suburbs actually have a long, and in many cases quirky, history. In her study of six suburban developments, she shows how these communities emerged outside cities not as unglamorous places generating profits, but as oases from urban stress, with utopian goals.
Ambridge, a Pittsburgh suburb dating to the 1820s, for example, was originally settled by the Harmony Society, a German religious sect that practiced celibacy. Though industrious, the Society's adherents lacked offspring, which delivered the community's own “death sentence,” as Hurley wryly notes. In later decades, radical forms of communalism thrived beyond Pennsylvania's Butler County, with numerous early suburbs adopting Communist or anarchist ideologies.
Hurley tells the story of Stelton, a colony established near Piscataway, New Jersey, in 1915 by political radicals and, unlike Ambridge, teeming with children. Stelton's population typically ranged from 150 residents in the winter to more than 300 by the summer. Its location, not far from New York City, provided easy access to commuter trains; residents would leave their socialist paradise to earn a living in capitalist Manhattan. Ideology aside, Stelton's residents exemplified a continuing suburban aspiration: mixing “rural peace” with opportunities in the big city.
Hurley also addresses the broader history of suburban living. Many factors drove the desire to escape city life—cost, space, a yearning for privacy, and a widening societal divergence between the urban center and its periphery. By the New Deal era, families flocked to suburban “greenbelt” towns, which drew their inspiration in part from the Garden-City Movement founded by British visionary Ebenezer Howard. The concept, which produced communities like the federally planned and financed Greenbelt, Maryland, outside Washington, focused on rental housing for government workers. But the movement ultimately failed, with private contractors lobbying against the construction of federally built suburbs. Though radical in conception, Greenbelt sadly reflected the cultural mores of the period, for example, by discriminating against African-Americans. Yet today, blacks constitute the majority of Greenbelt's 24,000 residents.
Read Full Article »