Made In America - Bill Bryson [219]
As people flocked to the suburbs, jobs followed. Between 1960 and 1990, five of every six jobs created in America’s thirty-five biggest metropolitan areas were in the suburbs. Instead of pouring into the cities by day to work, millions of Americans hardly went into the cities at all. In the thirty years from 1960, the number of people who commuted across county lines – in effect, lived in one suburb and worked in another – tripled to over 2.7 million.12 The suburbs had taken over.
As early as 1955, the phenomenon was noticed by the writer A.C. Spectorsky, who coined the term exurbia for this new kind of community that was emotionally and economically independent from the metropolis that had spawned it, but it was not until 1991, when a Washington Post reporter named Joel Garreau wrote a book called Edge City, that this vast transition in living patterns gained widespread notice.
To qualify as an edge city by Garreau’s definition, a community must have 5 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of shopping, and more people working there than living there. America now has more than 200 edge cities. Los Angeles and New York have about two dozen each. Almost all have been created since 1960, and almost always they are soulless, impersonal places, unfocused collections of shopping malls and office complexes that are ruthlessly unsympathetic to non-motorists. Many have no pavements or pedestrian crossings, and only rarely do they offer any but the most skeletal public transport links to the nearby metropolis, effectively denying job opportunities to many of those left behind in the declining inner cities. About one-third of all Americans now live in edge cities, and up to two-thirds of Americans work in them.13 They are substantial places, and yet most people outside their immediate areas have never heard of them. How many Americans, I wonder, could go to a map and point to even the general location of Walnut Creek, Rancho Cucamonga, Glendale, Westport Plaza, Mesquite or Plano? Anonymous or not, they are the wave of the future. In 1993, nineteen of the twenty-five fastest-growing communities in the United States were edge cities.
If affordable housing was the first thing most returning GIs wanted in 1945, then without question a car was the second. As late as 1950 some 40 per cent of American households still did not have a car, but that would change dramatically in the next decade as the automobile became not just a convenience of modern life but, for millions, a necessity. In the period 1950-80, America’s population rose by 50 per cent, but the number of cars quadrupled, until the number of cars far exceeded the number of households (because of two-or-more-car families).14
In keeping with America’s confident new age of materialism, cars grew bigger, flashier and more powerful in the post-war years. The man behind it all was one Harley J. Earl, a long-time General Motors designer whose fascination with the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft of World War II led him to put outsize tail fins on the 1948 Cadillac. The next year, racy portholes called venti-ports appeared on Buicks. The year after that Studebaker produced the sleek, bullet-nosed Champion DXL, which actually looked like a plane, and the race was on. By the mid-1950s every car maker was turning out huge, flashy, grinning-grilled, multi-toned, chrome-heavy, monstrously tail-finned road beasts that were the hallmark of the decade – cars that looked, in the words of one observer, as if they should light up and play. The style was called the Forward Look.
Cars were given names that suggested that these things were not just powerful, but barely under control – Firedome V8, Thunderbird, Tempest, Comet, Fury, Charger – and they came with features that promised a heady mix of elegance, comfort and fingertip control. Impressive-sounding features had been part of the car salesman’s armoury