Made In America - Bill Bryson [218]
Of necessity, most people in colonial America lived densely packed together in cities – in 1715 Boston’s 15,000 inhabitants shared just 700 acres of land – and went almost everywhere on foot. Walking was such an unquestioned feature of everyday life that until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the term pedestrian, there was no special word to describe someone on foot. (Interestingly, pedestrian in the sense of dull or unimaginative is significantly older, having been coined in 1716.)
Not until the development of the steam passenger ferry in the 1830s did the possibility of retiring at night to a home in a separate (if invariably close by) community begin to take root. The passenger ferry transformed a few places like Tarrytown, Stony Point, and Brooklyn, New York, but the expense, limited carrying capacity and slow speed of ferries kept their overall effect slight. The history of suburban living in America really begins with the railways. Starting with Naperville, Illinois, in 1857, railway suburbs began to pop up everywhere. Orange and Secaucus, New Jersey, Oak Park, Lake Forest and Evanston, Illinois, Scarsdale, New York, Darien and Fairfield, Connecticut – these and hundreds of other communities were either created or wholly transformed by the railways. Even California, a state not normally associated with railways, spawned a number of such communities, notably San Rafael and Pomona.10 As railway suburbs grew, two new words entered the language, commute and commuter, both Americanisms and both first recorded in 1865.11
The growing popularity of the railway suburbs inspired an entirely new type of community: the model suburb. As the name suggests, model suburbs were purpose-built communities, primarily for the well-to-do. Where railway suburbs had grown willy-nilly, often absorbing existing communities, the model suburbs were built from scratch, and offered not just handsome residential streets, but everything else their well-heeled citizens could require: parks, schools, shopping districts and eventually country clubs. (The Country Club, built in the Boston suburb of Brookline in 1867, appears to have provided both the name and the model for this most suburban of social centres.) Among the more venerable of model suburbs are Beverly Hills, California, Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Forest Hills, New York.
The development of the streetcar in the closing years of the nineteenth century provided a new boost and a measure of democratization to suburban living with the rise of streetcar suburbs, which pushed cities further into the countryside and offered the prospect of fresh air, space and escape from the urban hurly-burly for millions of office and factory workers and their families.
Even taken together all these early types of suburbs never added up to more than a peripheral feature of American life. Two factors conspired in the 1940s to make the suburbanization of the country complete. The first was the need for cheap, instant housing immediately after the war. The second was the rise of the automobile in the early 1950s.
In 1945 America needed, more or less immediately, five million additional houses as war-deferred marriages were consummated and millions of young couples settled down to start a family. The simplest and cheapest solution was for a developer to buy up a tract of countryside within commuting distance of a city and fill it with hundreds – sometimes thousands – of often identical starter homes. The master of the art was Abraham Levitt, who began scattering the eastern states with his Levittowns in 1947. By making every home identical and employing assembly-line construction techniques, Levitt could offer houses at remarkably low cost. At a time when the average house cost $10,000, Levitt homes sold for just $7,900, or $65 a month, with no down payment, and they came equipped with major appliances.
Soon housing developments were going up along the edges of every city. By 1950, one-quarter of Americans lived in suburbs.