10.Suburban Development between the Wars, pp. 172 - 189
11.Federal Subsidy and the Suburban Dream. pp. 190 - 218
12.The Cost of Good Intentions, The Ghettoization of Public
Housing in the United States, pp. 219 - 230
Notes on the Readings:
There’s nothing particularly mysterious about what we’ll be discussing. What you’ll need to do is use some of your memory to tie this material into materials we’ve seen or discussed before, and as I've repeated the readings from
Friday, I don't the four chapters is too burdensom. The closer we get to our own eras the more familiar the general layout becomes.
Chapter 9:
So far we’ve seen that there are different physical configurations for suburbs, depending on the technology prevalent when they were formed. Railroad suburbs string out along the main lines of the railroad companies themselves, rather like beads on a string. Streetcar suburbs develop first along the lines of the streets, chiefly the principal streets connecting outlying towns with city centers. Because trolleys are capable of starting and stopping frequently, density is pretty uniform along the route, save at intersections between trolley lines.
Here, the task is to understand how suburbs created in response to the automobile are different from those which are created in response to the streetcar. We’ll return to this again later, when we look at the development of the interstate highway system, and at the time in our history when two or more cars, rather than one or less, became common for all but the working poor.
The driving foce behind the creation of the automobile suburb was, of course, the automobile. Not just any automobile..."horseless carriages" had been around for more than ten years when mass production techniques introduced by Henry Ford allowed to sell automobiles at prices which ordinary Americans could afford.
The video shows many aspects of the Henry Ford assembly line. Imagine working under such conditions. The Model T was in production for 19 years, unlike today's cars, some of which come out with "new" models on a half-year cycle. The total number produced during that time period was over 15,000,000. Now, a good year in the automobile industry produces about that many.,
The current question is whether the high price of oil and diminishing resources of petrolium may make the cost of operating the family car so expensive that the suburb as we know it may lose its dominance as the ideal environment for living and raising families.
Chapter 11:
We know that many people resent government assistance to the poor, and “Welfare Queen” is a political stereotype which has often appeared in American politics since about 1980. Government policy operating on behalf of the middle to upper classes is less often thought of or discussed in the public arena. We’ll see the impact of government policies which influence who can own a home, why home ownership is considered a desirable public good, and why it might not be unfair to call this particular set of government policies “white collar welfare”.
Chapter 12:
We’ve already seen how technology, combined with differences in the economics of different systems of transportation, began to segregate Americans by economic class from the earliest days of the modern suburb. This chapter will show how attempts to “do something for the poor” actually enhanced that separation. Zoning restrictions forbidding multiple family dwellings isolated many suburbs from housing “projects,” which were modeled as stripped down apartment buildings. Remember some of the scenes from Suburbs, Arcadia for Everyone, to see alternative ways to provide adequate housing for the working poor. One doesn’t have to warehouse people in hi-rises to provide decent housing for poor people.
Levittown, made possible by the Automobile. Note, However, that the garage is not a universal feature yet. Nowadays, we incorporate garages into the house, turning the family car into another member of the household.
Chapter 12 suggests that public policies which encouraged suburbs, whether mortgage subsidies and tax policy or the building of improved highway systems and interstates was not without social cost. Think, for example about the racial or ethnic makeup of the high school you attended. How would it have been different in the age before the automobile suburb?
There should be no major problems with the sections of Jackson assigned for this class. We're all intuitively aware that the automobile revolutionized the house. It also revolutionized and continues to revolutionize the infrastructure.
For Monday, October 21
Chapter 4 introduces us to the idea of comfort achieved through domestic furniture. The two terms, "Commodity," and "Delight" can roughly be equated with the ideas of functional and aesthetic qualities of things which furnish houses. An object demonstrates commodity if it accommodates itself to our needs, including our physiological needs. An object delights us if it maintains our interest and pleasure. About the time of the American Revolution we begin to expect our domestic furniture (at least some of it) to do both of these. Rybczynski suggests that in a world divided between "squatters" and "sitters" we need to be sure we don't assume one or the other of these postures is objectively superior to the other.
Internet Study Preparation Exercises:
1. Visit the Metropolitan Museum of Arts American Decorative Arts web site and locate the 1640 armchair, the 1740 Roundabout Chair, and the 1758 Easy Chair and think about how these demonstrate the evolution of the ideas of commodity and delight.
2. Take the Virtual Reality Tour of the Hart Room, and consider the ways in which it does, and does not represent qualities we expect of modern domestic rooms. Note that you can explore the major elements of the room in detail by clicking on them.
Three American Arm Chairs
These Three Chairs represent a little over 100 years in the evolution of the easy chair. Knowing very little about furniture, it still should be a fairly simple task to place them in sequence of development. Try it. Which is earliest, which is latest, which is intermediary? What makes you think so?
Read, in Rybczynski,
Chapter 4, "Commodity and Delight," pp. 77 - 100
To date, we've seen how houses evolve from single roomed, semi-public affairs to multi-roomed structures which allow for intimacy through the creation of privacy, and we've located the origin of this idea in northern Europe, chiefly Scandinavia. We've also seen the feminization of domestic space occur, through innovations of the Dutch. This day we'll add a contribution to the American House, courtesy of the French.
Chapter 10:
We have renewed our familiarity with the "ups and downs" of the housing market in the years since 2008. The years between World War I and World War II were a roller coaster, economically speaking. First the "Roaring Twenties" and second "The Great Depression". The house in which I live was built in 1928, the year before Black Tuesday and the Stock Market Crash of 1929. What happened when the bubble burst? This chapter will give you some ideas about that.
For Friday, October 25
Read, in Jackson,
Chapter 13,The Baby Boom and the Age of the Subdivision, pp. 231 - 245
Chapter 14, The Drive-in Culture of Contemporary America, pp. 246 - 271
Notes on the Readings:
Chapter 13:
There is nothing too troublesome here. You’ve seen Leavittown in the suburb DVD, and subdivisions are still springing up all around us. The scale of these is important to consider, as is the employment of the same kinds of mass production techniques as went into the automobile which made them possible.
Chapter 14:
Your generation grew up in an American world where the interstate highway system was a given. Consequently you’re probably not entirely aware about how super roads altered the domestic landscape. This chapter will articulate some of the changes in living patterns these highways caused. I’ve already indicated that a decision by the book designers of Crabgrass Frontier made decisions which made the illustrations for this book less useful than the might have been. You’ll have to hunt for the principal ones in the second picture collection between pages 250 and 251. However, you may not need these illustrations at all. You’ve experienced superhighway suburbs all your lives. We’ll explore a number of phenomena of this era, including box stores, “the mall” and we’ll also see how one can calculate whether a suburban era was largely created in the superhighway era or earlier by the presence (or absence) of a particular landscape feature. Need a hint? Here’s a one word one... “hopscotch”.
One thing you're also going to notice is that some of this drive-in culture which Jackson saw as an everlasting feature may not quite be as evelasting as it seemed. Things like the Drive In Move or the Drive in Restaurant where one ate in his car served by a "car-hop". How many of those are left? Does anyone remember such things?
