I have always lived in the suburbs. By the word “suburb,” I mean a planned neighborhood with pre-platted lot lines, consistent setbacks from the street and from other houses, and a restricted set of home models and exterior paint colors to choose from.
My current neighborhood, Jamestown Hundred, fits this description. My house is a “Turquoise,” and the other models were other gemstones – Diamond (the biggest), Ruby, and so forth. In our previous suburban neighborhood, our house was a “Cambridge;” other models included the Newport and what we called the “Mega-Newport;” an extended version of the Newport.
I lived in two suburbs when I was growing up: one was called Bel Air, in Falls Church, Virginia. There were two house models, but they differed only by the placement of the front door and front window.
This picture was taken the first year we lived there – there isn’t any landscaping yet, and one of the first things my father did when they moved in was to plant some bushes and sow some grass seed. You can see that we have the “other” model from the one in the advertisement – our house had the front door on the side, and our front window was different.
The advertisement shows the price for these houses – with no down payment for veterans, a category that included my father – and it seems ridiculously low to us now. But I remember my mother saying that her “dream house” had been a three-bedroom brick home with a full basement, and this house was a two-bedroom frame house on a concrete slab.
In 1960, my parents bought a house in a different suburb called Annandale Terrace, about four miles from Bel Air. This time my mother got more bedrooms, a brick exterior, and a full basement. Annandale Terrace offered five house models – a rambler, a split-foyer, two split-levels (one with three bedrooms and the other with four bedrooms), and an odd side-to-side split level.
The song “Little Boxes” (Malvina Reynolds, 1963) poked fun at subdivisions like the ones I have lived in. Here are the lyrics:
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
It’s fashionable to poke fun at the suburbs these days. The various house-hunting programs on HDTV feature people who want to buy a house with “character,” and they want to avoid “cookie-cutter” houses. The houses that I lived in the suburbs (including the one I currently live in) didn’t have much “character,” and they all looked pretty much alike.
People were attracted to the suburbs after World War II because these neighborhoods met a need. The Great Depression and World War II had disrupted long-standing patterns of life in the United States. People left their home communities for a lot of reasons – forced out by poverty, moved around by the government to meet wartime needs (both civilian and military) – whatever the reason, the old ways of doing things weren’t working.
In my family’s case, World War II relocated my parents from Tucson, Arizona, to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. In Tucson, both of their families had lived with extended family. That was a normal pattern in those days. But in Virginia, they didn’t have extended family to put them up for a while – and neither did most of the people who relocated to the DC area in the late 1940s. William J. Levitt created the first “Levittown” on Long Island in 1947, and the idea took off throughout the country. The houses were designed to be built rapidly, efficiently, and at low cost. The Bel Air subdivision was based on the Levittown model, and it was enormously successful.
The suburbs created a new way to shop for a house. Potential buyers no longer went from place to place to place to look for a house. A suburb was a kind of department store of housing – one-stop shopping. Need three bedrooms? Look over here. Four bedrooms? Right this way. No stairs? Got you covered. Want a different paint on the exterior or different colored shutters? Specify it on the contract and we’ll customize it for you.
There were, of course, downsides to these suburbs. Most of them were red-lined, meaning that they included restrictive covenants that prohibited selling houses to African-Americans. This perpetuated racial segregation at a time in the United States where widespread prosperity could have decreased it. The isolated locations – generally far away from shops, restaurants, and services – meant that people living in the suburbs became dependent on their cars. In an age when most families had only one car, this left the women home with their children all day, with little diversion to maintain their mental health. Read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique if you need to be reminded what this was like.
The suburbs were child-centric. They created pockets of similarly-aged children that formed the basis for new schools, community athletic programs (mainly for boys, at least at the beginning), swimming pools and parks, and a commitment to the idea that “it’s all about the children.”
This all had an impact. The children of the homogeneous 1950s suburbs rebelled to become the “tune in, turn out, drop out” generation of the 1960s. The Social Media meme “Okay Boomer” tells us how that turned out.
Loved this article. Among my many nerdy interests is development and architecture. I was delighted to see the photos of your house and neighborhood. My opinion about architecture and residential planning after WWII has always been "What were we thinking?" Of course I know the answer: build it quick; build it cheap; finish it today. We had lots to think about after the war. I never lived in the 'burbs until I was married and living in Falls Church, where we lived in a little "California contemporary."