The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (19 page)

Most important, Los Angeles demonstrated to the world a new model of urban growth—dispersed, multicentered, and largely suburbanized. For modern cities, whether elsewhere in America, in old Europe, or emerging in Asia, Los Angeles now represented the prevailing form of urbanity, the original, as one observer put it, in the Xerox machine.

The rise of the suburban model in Los Angeles suggested a radical break with the evolution of cities. Throughout history, cities have gloried in their towering landscapes and the liveliness of their public spaces. The most sacred and awesome public structures inevitably rose in or around the core. The most dynamic ancient cities—Tyre, Carthage, and Rome— responded to a burgeoning population by building upward and cramming ever more residents into the central space.

The onset of the Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated the rate of urban growth, placing unprecedented pressure on the geography of cities. By 1800, European cities had become at least twice as dense as their medieval antecedents; some American cities, notably New York, were even more crowded.
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Once refuges of security, the inner city had also become increasingly crime-ridden.
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Even so, early in the industrial era, it was not at all clear that the future lay in the periphery. Initially, it was the poor who led the move to the urban periphery, in effect exchanging longer commutes for lower rents. “Even the word suburb,” noted the historian Kenneth Jackson, “suggested inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.”
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Suburbs often remained the abode of all manner of undesirables, the rejects of the city.
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One solution to managing the growth of cities would be to reorganize and revitalize the core urban space, as occurred in the mid-nineteenth century in Paris under the leadership of Napoleon III and his prefect, Baron Haussmann. Britain, the world’s most urbanized country, chose a dramatically different direction, one that would ultimately find its most complete expression in distant Los Angeles.

To start with, London’s problems were of a different order from those of Paris; by 1910, it was the world’s largest city, with three times the population of the French capital.
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Even to affluent Londoners in the nineteenth century, the city appeared to be choking of its own growth. Pleasant neighborhoods like Bloomsbury, Belgravia, and Regent’s Park increasingly seemed like isolated islands of graceful urbanization amid a sea of gray, dense, and staggeringly unattractive industrial slums.
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In their search for a “better city,” London authorities could not command massive resources, like Paris, to redevelop the core of its capital. Instead, the British simply allowed what had been occurring naturally, a gradual, inexorable expansion of the urban space.
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It started initially with the most affluent residents, but as the nineteenth century evolved, the increasingly prosperous middle and working classes joined the exodus to the countryside. If a nice apartment in the middle of the city was the dream of the upwardly mobile Parisian, the Londoner’s aspiration fixed upon a cottage, detached or semidetached, somewhere out on the periphery of the city. London, one observer noted in 1843, “surrounds itself, suburb clinging to suburb, like onions fifty to a rope.”
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Other major British cities evolved in a similar manner. In the great industrial centers of Lancashire and the Midlands, everyone from great industrialists to clerks sought to move away from the belching factories and congested commercial districts. “The townsman,” noted one observer of Manchester and Liverpool in the 1860s, “does everything in his power to cease being a townsman, and tries to fit a country house and a bit of country into a corner of the town.”
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Many Britons saw this pattern of dispersion as the logical solution to Britain’s long-standing urban ills. H. G. Wells predicted that improvements in communication and transportation technology, most especially commuter rail lines, would eliminate the need to concentrate people and industry in the central core. Instead of “massing” people in town centers, Wells foresaw the “centrifugal possibilities” of a dispersing population. He predicted that eventually all of southern England would become the domain of London, while the vast landscape between Albany and Washington, D.C., would provide the geographic base for New York and Philadelphia.
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This vision was widely embraced by those who, like Dana Bartlett, were horrified by the ill effects of industrial urbanism. With the overthrow of capitalism, Friedrich Engels predicted the end of the large megacity and dispersal of the industrial proletariat into the countryside. The dispersing city dwellers would “deliver the rural population from isolation and stupor” while finally solving the working class’s persistent housing crisis.
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Suburbanization also appealed to more conservative thinkers. Setting the stage for later reformers, Thomas Carlyle believed the growth of the industrial city had undermined the traditional ties between workers and their families, communities, and churches. Moving the working and middle classes to “villages” in the outlying regions of major cities could “turn back the clock” to the more wholesome and intimate environment. In the small town or village, he hoped, women and children could be protected from the injurious influences of the city, with its bawdy houses, taverns, and pleasure gardens.
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The British planner Ebenezer Howard emerged as perhaps the most influential advocate for dispersing the urban masses. Horrified by the disorder, disease, and crime of the contemporary industrial metropolis, he advocated the creation of “garden cities” on the suburban periphery. These self-contained towns, with a population of roughly thirty thousand, would have their own employment base and neighborhoods of pleasant cottages and would be surrounded by rural areas. “Town and country
must be married,
” Howard preached, “and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”

Determined to turn his theories into reality, Howard was the driving force behind two of England’s first planned towns, Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn in 1920. His “garden city” model of development soon influenced planners around the world, in America, Germany, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere.
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Even before the first “garden cities” were being developed in Britain, America also embraced the notion of urban deconcentration. By the 1870s, prominent Philadelphia families already were escaping the crowded streets of William Penn’s old city for the leafier west side and toward Germantown to the north. The ensuing development of suburban railroads carried much of the city’s business and professional establishment away from the central Rittenhouse Square area to residences in Chestnut Hill and other Main Line communities.
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The shift to the suburbs was particularly robust in the far West and across the industrial Midwest. Land was generally less expensive and urban culture far less developed. The reasons for moving to the periphery seemed self-evident to working-class people, like one Chicago meat-cutter who in the 1920s exchanged “a four bedroom house on the second floor of an apartment house” for “a six room house with a big yard” in Meadowdale in the far western suburbs.
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As automobile registrations soared in the 1920s, suburbanization across the rest of the country also picked up speed, with suburbs growing at twice the rate of cities. Cities, noted
National Geographic
in 1923, were “spreading out.”
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The Great Depression temporarily slowed the outward migration, but not the yearning among Americans.
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At the nadir of national fortune in 1931, President Herbert Hoover noted:

To possess one’s home is the hope and ambition of almost every individual in this country, whether he lives in a hotel, apartment or tenement. . . . The immortal ballads,
Home Sweet Home, My Old Kentucky Home,
and the
Little Gray Home
in the West, were not written about tenements or apartments ....
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SUBURBIA TRIUMPHANT

Following World War II, the pace of suburbanization in America again accelerated, accounting for a remarkable 84 percent of the nation’s population increase during the 1950s. Thanks in large part to the passage of legislation aiding veterans, home ownership became an integral aspect of middle- and even working-class life. By the mid-1980s, America enjoyed a rate of home ownership, roughly two-thirds of all families, double that of such prosperous countries as Germany, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Norway. Nearly three-quarters of AFL-CIO members and the vast majority of intact families owned their own homes.
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Once a nation of farms and cities, America was being transformed into a primarily suburban country. No longer confined to old towns or “street-car suburbs” near the urban core, suburbanites increasingly lived in ever more spread-out new developments such as Levittown, which arose out on the Long Island flatlands in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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New York planning czar Robert Moses, who helped devise the road system that made developments like Levittown viable, understood the enormous appeal of these new communities:

The little identical suburban boxes of average people, which differ only in color and planting, represent a measure of success unheard of by hundreds of millions on other continents. Small plots reflect not merely the rapacity of developers but the caution of owners who do not want too much grass to cut and snow to shovel—details too intimate for historians.
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The suburbs, noted the historian Jon C. Teaford, provided an endless procession of lawns and carports, but also “a mixture of escapism and reality.”
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They offered a welcome respite from both crowded urban neighborhoods and old ethnic ties. There one could make new friendships and associations without worrying about old social conventions. And with their ample yards, new schools, and parks, noted the novelist Ralph G. Martin, the suburbs seemed to offer “a paradise for children.”
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Clearly the preference of millions, the suburbs won few admirers among the sophisticated social critics and urban scholars of the time. The new peripheral communities were decried for everything from scarring the landscape to being cultural wastelands. Over the last half of the twentieth century, suburbs were held responsible for turning America into “a place-less collection of subdivisions,” for “splintering” the nation’s identity, and even for helping to expand the nation’s waistlines.
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As the poet Richard Wilbur wrote in the mid-twentieth century:

In the summer sunk and stupefied The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.
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As subdivisions ran into old, established communities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, they often undermined long-standing economies and ways of life. One observer wrote about an old Connecticut mill that, once the center of the local economy, had been shut down and now sat mute, “intimidated by the headlights of commuters as they race up and down the valley, weary from the city and hungry for home.”
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The harshest critics tended to be dedicated urbanists and impassioned city dwellers. Lewis Mumford identified the suburbs as “the anti-city,” sucking the essence out of the old urban areas. As more residents and businesses headed for the periphery, he argued, the suburbs were turning cities from creative centers into discarded parcels of “a disordered and disintegrating urban mass.”

Perhaps the most telling criticism of suburban migration focused on an expanding racial divide between the heavily white suburbs and the increasingly black inner cities. Clearly, some new suburbanites, and the developers catering to them, shared a deep-seated racism: In 1970, nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white. “In some suburbs,” complained the author William H. Whyte, “[you] may hardly see a Negro, a poor person, or, for that matter, anyone over fifty.”
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Long concentrated in the rural South, African Americans now dominated the populations of many large cities, particularly in the North and Midwest. By the 1960s, more than 51 percent of African Americans lived in the inner cities, compared with only 30 percent of whites.
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This pattern was most notable in industrial cities such as Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Oakland, California.
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The ensuing social crisis caused by the growing gap between the city and the suburbs threatened to tear the nation apart—and devastate the urban cores. In 1968, Lewis Mumford could write convincingly about the “progressive dissolution” of American cities.
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At the time, many cities seemed consumed with social pathologies, from illegitimacy to crime and drug addiction.
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“Social disorder,” The New York Times complained in 1968, “is rampant in New York.”
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In contrast, the suburbs appeared to many whites as a welcome refuge from high crime rates in the inner city.