The Golden Dream (29 page)

Mountain views seem, for some reason, to repel in-city dwellers, and urban living is unpopular in Salt Lake City, Denver, and Phoenix—cities which are, incidentally, virtually bridgeless. In cities like these, where the affluent have fled to the suburbs, to go “downtown” at night is to visit empty, and often dangerous, streets and sidewalks. These are the cities where the flight to the suburbs has left an inner city that falls to disuse and decay. Inner-city businesses fail, and shops are boarded up. Doctors, lawyers, and other professional people move their offices to the suburbs. Even the policemen in cities like these dislike the downtown beat at night; they would rather be in the suburbs.

The problem of dealing with inner-city decay has been faced by a number of American cities over the last decade, and expensive attempts have been made to lure people back from the suburbs. Most of these, however, have been unsuccessful. Salt Lake City has lined its main shopping streets with tubs of trees, flowers, park benches, and reflecting pools, without noticeably increasing the number of downtown shoppers. Atlanta several years ago created “Underground Atlanta,” which flourished for a while as a tourist attraction and then, as expensive shops and restaurants failed to do the amount of business expected of them, gave way to cheap gift and novelty stores, poster shops, and “head” shops selling hash pipes of futuristic design. In downtown Salt Lake City, Trolley Square has been developed out of what was the city's trolley car barn. Appealing though the idea might sound, Trolley Square has not been successful and is deserted after 5
P
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M
. In Houston, the same sort of thing was tried in Market Square. It, too, has fizzled, as the owners of buildings grew greedy and charged inflated rents, forcing shopkeepers to overprice ordinary “gifte shoppe” wares. In romantic San Francisco, on the other hand, where in-city living has always had charm and popularity, the renovation of Ghirardelli Square—originally the site of a chocolate factory—has won favor among residents and visitors alike, and is an economic success.

Cleveland is another city with a lakefront but, unlike Chicago, Cleveland has turned its back upon the water and abandoned the shore to a sports arena, a gaggle of factories, and an airfield. The reason generally given for the two cities' opposite feelings about
their respective lakes is that Chicago is on the west shore of Lake Michigan, whereas Cleveland is on the south shore of Lake Erie. Great Lakes tides, it seems, move generally in a north-south direction, causing erosion on the southern and northern shores. Cleveland's lakeshore keeps slipping into the lake, and near the water, billboards advertise for landfill. The situation could, of course, be corrected by levees, but these would be expensive, and Cleveland's city fathers have addressed themselves to other matters rather than consider ways in which the lakefront could be improved. Cleveland's lake is little used for boating or other water sports; though Lake Erie is now cleaner than it has been for years, no man-made beaches have been developed as they have been in Chicago; and though the big lake continues to provide a dramatic view, new buildings face the other way. From the new Holiday Inn, only the multilevel parking garage has a view of the lake. Cleveland blames political corruption for the fact that funds have not been made available to beautify and shore up the sagging lakefront but are now being proposed for a project, much more commercially alluring, to extend a giant jet runway into the water. This would surely destroy the lakefront forever. Still, the possibilities for graft in such an enterprise are mind-boggling.

It is probably too early to assess Detroit's recent attempt to “breathe new life” into its downtown area with the Renaissance Center, but if it follows the pattern of Cleveland's Park Centre, the outlook is not cheerful. Park Centre was designed as an immense downtown apartment and shopping complex, with expensive shops and luxury housing. Again, it was hoped that so many attractive substitutes to suburban living would be offered that the flight to the suburbs would turn around, or at least be stemmed. Today, after a series of receiverships, most of Park Centre's large apartments are untenanted. They have become popular, it is said, with Cleveland's black gangsters, and a recent visitor was told: “Every numbers runner in town lives there.” From the street, one sees tattered curtains flap from broken windows in the apartment tower, and the building's general appearance of poor maintenance and ill repair have done little to attract affluent suburbanites back to the inner city. In Cleveland, with its murder rate higher than either Washington's or Houston's, the local joke is that “Even the muggers and the hot-watch peddlers leave the city at night for lack of business—and head for Shaker Heights.” And even in Shaker Heights, that once famous
pocket of suburban wealth, there is trouble as suburbanites move farther and farther out. The Shaker Square shopping center today looks almost as woebegone as Park Centre.

Park Centre's shopping mall is, meanwhile, in even worse shape than the apartment tower that rises above it. More than two thirds of the available shopping space is still unrented and uncompleted, and the wide indoor plazas, corridors, escalators, and courtyards are almost spookily deserted. More shops seem to close than open, and an air of fiscal failure is pervasive. As one wanders through these empty vistas, amid abandoned construction, one wonders what sort of folly could have prompted men and women of supposedly sound business sense to presume that such endeavors could possibly have succeeded. On the lower level, an area that has been given the name Eat Street boasts the largest seating capacity of any dining area in the state of Ohio, and in the unpatronized vastness of Eat Street's many fast-food operations—offering everything from pizza to burgers to fried chicken and back again—one can easily believe this extravagant claim.

One wonders whether the cause of Park Centre's economic woes may be not the venality and greed of the local merchants but the curious view held by chambers of commerce across the country that what the public wants is something cute. Is it for being cute that the suburbs appeal to so many millions of people nowadays? If so, the chambers of commerce in cities like Cleveland are fighting cute with supercute. It is the brand of cuteness that seems to think it is cuter, or fancier, to spell “Centre” Britishly, rather than the way most Americans—and certainly most Middle Westeners—spell it, and that feels dining will be enhanced when it takes place in something called “Eat Street.” Cuteness abounds in Park Centre shop-naming. An emporium called Incredible Edibles, for example, is a delicatessen. A clothing shop is called Clothes Circuit. One of Eat Street's fast-food outlets is named Tummy Acres. And so it goes.

Because all the cuteness smacks of Madison Avenue hucksterism, or at least an imitation of it, and because the merchandise offered at the cute-named establishments is of an assembly-line quality that can be found in an airline in-flight gift catalogue, cuteness not only becomes quickly cloying but begins to smack of the second-rate and of retailing desperation. Cute becomes synonymous with cheap—with sandal shops and candle shops and shops that sell macramé and inexpensive jewelry. (Along Scottsdale's much-touted Fifth Avenue, the “exclusive” shops now
confine themselves almost exclusively to extravagant examples of the sandalmaker's and the candlemaker's arts, along with a number of stores that sell nothing but imitation Indian squash-blossom necklaces and artificial turquoise rings.)

What the real estate developers of these costly complexes have failed to realize, along with the chambers of commerce with whom the developers work in happy collusion, is that all the archness and coyness add up, in most Americans' minds, to silliness and vulgarity. They underestimate Americans' present sophistication and, in terms of taste, are at least twenty years behind the times. Even the man who delivers your milk has, in all likelihood, been to Europe at least once, and having seen the real thing, he will not be impressed by—in fact, he will be repelled by—a fake trattoria in the basement of a Midwest high-rise.

Cuteness is certainly one of the forces that is doing in Park Centre. In Boston, on the other hand, the restoration of the Quincy Market area—where, among other things, the nineteenth-century architecture around Faneuil Hall was treated with respect—real charm has been substituted for cuteness, and the venture has been a great popular and commercial success. But then inner-city Boston has always been an appealing place to live and visit.

One thing that has happened in the affluent suburbs over the years is that their affluent residents are growing older. The young couples who flocked to suburbia in the years immediately after World War II and who, in a deflated postwar real estate market and with GI loans, bought properties and built houses—to which have been added swimming pools, saunas, tennis courts, and burglar-alarm systems—are now past middle age. Their children are grown and in many cases have children of their own. In Rye, for example, the average resident in 1955 was thirty-six years old. Today, he is forty-seven. With age has come a conservative stance—an opposition, for instance, to increased school taxes, from which suburban school systems have suffered. If the cities have become predominantly Democratic, the wealthy suburbs have become predominantly Republican. In the so-called Five Towns area of southeastern Long Island, everyone talks of how things have changed. The Five Towns—Hewlett, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Lawrence, and Inwood (the first four were considered fashionable, while the fifth, Inwood, was “where the help lived”)—were originally settled by prosperous Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe around the turn of the
century. They had made money in such endeavors as New York's garment industry, but they still had decidedly socialist and trade-unionist views that they had carried with them from the pogroms of czarist Russia and Poland. For years—particularly during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s—the Five Towns comprised a truly golden ghetto, and life revolved around the Lawrence Beach Club and Woodmere Academy, a private school. Five Towns boys and girls married each other and moved away and so, in time, did their parents—back to the convenience of Manhattan or to the roomier reaches of Westchester County. Into their pleasant houses moved conservative Orthodox Hasidic and Yemenite Jews. Today, according to novelist Beverley Gasner, who, along with her husband, grew up in Lawrence and now lives outside Washington, “It's all different. It used to be lovely—cozy and homey, like a little club, like an extension of your family. Today, the streets are deserted on Saturday because of the Sabbath. The rest of the week, it's a sea of beards, side curls, and yarmulkes.”

Blacks have begun moving to the suburbs too—in small numbers, to be sure, but still at a rate that has not particularly delighted the predominantly white suburban establishment. Economic factors—particularly the high price of land and houses—remain the primary barrier to suburban integration. But equal-opportunity programs over the past decade have placed more and more black families at an income level where they can afford the open space and green lawns that first attracted whites. Still, black leaders say that there is a strong psychological reason why blacks remain reluctant to buy homes in white suburbs, where they have been conditioned to expect snubs and discrimination. As one black woman declares: “It's easy enough to get kicked around where we are. Why spend a hundred thousand dollars to get kicked around somewhere else?”

Economically successful blacks have therefore tended either to stay in their old neighborhoods or to move to affluent black communities—such as Collier Heights outside Atlanta, or Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, and Leimert Park, south of Los Angeles. In the sprawling San Fernando Valley northeast of Los Angeles, only 2.4 percent of the population was black as recently as 1975, as opposed to a 19 percent black population in Los Angeles as a whole. Recently, a campaign sponsored by the Fair Housing Council and the Ford Foundation has been urging middle-class blacks to move into the Valley. A commercial jingle that chants: “Move on in, move on in, move on in to L.A.'s Valley,” has been promoted on
local black radio stations, while billboards depicting black and white families sipping cocktails together and enjoying other convivial suburban social situations have sprouted along local highways. Mr. Ken Kelly, a black real estate man and chairman of the campaign, conducts guided tours of San Fernando Valley towns for prospective black buyers, and says: “What we're trying to do is communicate that times have changed, that the mainstream is open to blacks—use it if you want to. I won't say that all discrimination is gone, but we are trying to tell them that it's a lot different than it used to be.” It is too early to say how successful this particular promotion will be, and Mr. Kelly admits that many blacks are unwilling to leave black communities because of generations of fear of what happens when a black tries to rock the white man's boat. The campaign came at a time when the Los Angeles Board of Education faced a court order to bus in order to integrate schools, and emotions were running high among both blacks and whites on the busing issue. But Mr. Kelly takes the attitude: “If somebody had done something like this ten years ago, maybe you wouldn't have needed busing. The schools would already be integrated.”

The suburban population growing older, more stodgy, more set in its ways … neighborhoods changing, either for the worse or becoming prohibitively expensive … integration, or the lack of it … school systems that are threatened … taxes … battles for (and against) zoning changes … widening streets to accommodate heavier suburban traffic … the noise from the thruways … the air-pollution level. These are the topics that dominate the suburban Friday- and Saturday-night cocktail parties in the late 1970s, that are discussed around the pool and outdoor barbecue, within the indoor sauna, at the beauty parlor, in the supermarket, and at the garage sale. These issues, and others like them, have turned a younger generation sour on the suburbs, and sent them fleeing to farms in rural Vermont, or back to the cities their parents fled, in order to see whether, perhaps, the answer isn't city living after all. “We worked so hard to get away from Houston Street!” wails a New York Jewish mother whose daughter has moved into a SoHo loft.