The American Suburb

The Basics

Jon C. Teaford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415951654
• eBook ISBN: 9781000143638
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The American Suburb: The Basics is a compact, readable introduction to the origins and contemporary realities of the American suburb. Teaford provides an account of contemporary American suburbia, examining its rise, its diversity, its commercial life, its government, and its housing issues. While offering a wide-ranging yet detailed account of the dominant way of life in America today, Teaford also explores current debates regarding suburbia's future. Americans live in suburbia, and this essential survey explains the all-important world in which they live, shop, play, and work.

1
Creating Suburbia

For many Americans the word suburbconjures up an image of post-World War II single-family tract homes, products of the age of automobiles and superhighways. Yet one basic fact of American suburbia is that it has existed virtually as long as the nation itself. It is not an offspring of the automobile or postwar federal mortgage insurance and freeway programs. Suburbia was created over the past two centuries by millions of Americans who wanted to pursue an economic endeavor or lifestyle incompatible with the policies or development patterns of the central city. The American suburb is a prime example of the nation's tradition of expansive freedom and mobility. Taking advantage of the abundance of peripheral land, entrepreneurs and home seekers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries pursued their own particular aspirations in outlying communities. They laid out sprawling factories, estates, residential subdivisions, and shopping malls, creating a way of life not possible within the confines of the central city. Moreover, state lawmakers maximized the opportunity for local self-rule, allowing Americans in all types of outlying communities, whether densely or sparsely populated, industrial or residential, to fashion their destiny exempt from the dictation of central city rulers. Suburbia reflects the desire of Americans over the decades to do it their own way, to create alternative communities in pursuit of a profit or a dream.

Before the Automobile

During the early nineteenth century, the appendages of Americas urban centers were already reaching out beyond the city limits. In the borderlands around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, urban merchants established country seats that served as summer retreats and their principal homes upon retirement. Businesses requiring sprawling sites or engaged in noxious enterprises also lined the roads into cities that could not accommodate them, or would not allow the odors, waste products, or smoke of such establishments. Livestock pens, slaughterhouses, tanneries, brickyards, and glass factories were all among these outcasts. As early as 1799, a Philadelphia newspaper reported that "persons who are disposed to visit the environs of this city . . . are saluted with a great variety of fetid and disgusting smells, which are exhaled from the dead carcasses of animals, from stagnant waters, and from every species of filth."¹ Outside Boston the Brighton Cattle Market flourished, and Massachusett's largest slaughterhouse was in East Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston. Nearby, soap works profited from the slaughterhouse by-products and brick makers stripped the clay beds on discarded farms to serve the building needs of New England's largest city.²

Around New York City the earliest commuter suburbs developed, spawned by the improved and expanding ferry service linking Manhattan with nearby shores. In 1814 the first steam ferry began carrying passengers between New York and the then-independent community of Brooklyn, and the following year a Brooklyn newspaper was already claiming that the nascent Long Island suburb "must necessarily become a favorite residence for gentlemen of taste and fortune, for merchants and shopkeepers of every description, for artists, artisans, merchants, laborers, and persons of every trade in society" In 1823 an advertisement boosting "Lots on Brooklyn Heights" promised that its subdivision was "the nearest country retreat, and easiest of access from the center of business that now remains unoccupied," offering "as a place of residence all the advantages of the country with most of the conveniences of the city" In Brooklyn Heights, "gentlemen whose business or profession require daily attendance into the city" could "secure the health and comfort of their families." Such promises attracted customers. Between 1820 and 1840, Brooklyn's population increased fivefold to 36,000, whereas the population of the central city of New York rose at only half that pace. Meanwhile, ferry service to Brooklyn expanded, and by 1854 the Union Ferry Company offered 1,250 crossings each day, charging only two cents per trip.³

During the decades before the Civil War, ferries crossing the Hudson River opened Jersey City to commuters, and in 1838 the Hoboken Land and Improvement Company was created to develop Hoboken, New Jersey Fourteen years later, one observer found it was "becoming a thickly settled embryo city" By this time, ferries ran every ten to fifteen minutes between New York City and Jersey City at a fare of three cents per person.⁴ In 1836 a subdivision of suburban villas in New Brighton on Staten Island offered yet another housing option to ferry-borne commuters seeking to escape crowded Manhattan. Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey all were becoming bedrooms of New York where weary Gotham entrepreneurs could retreat at the end of each day.

The railroad, not the steam ferry, however, was the primary progenitor of micl-nineteenth-century commuter suburbs. Offering Americans an unprecedented degree of mobility, the railroad opened the possibility of a semirural lifestyle to those urban toilers who could afford the fare. The result was clusters of suburban homes around outlying depots in urban areas throughout the United States. As early as 1849, fifty-nine commuter trains converged on Boston each day, allowing the city's businessmen to maintain homes in outlying Cambridge, Brookline, or Newton. "Somerville, Medford, and Woburn," advertised one railroad, "present many delightful and healthy locations for residence, not only for the gentleman of leisure, but the man of business in the city, as the cars pass through these towns often during the day and evening, affording excellent facilities for the communication with Boston."⁵ During the 1850s, three commuter railroads linked New York City with Westchester County to the north. As a result the population of Yonkers more than doubled during the decade, and the new suburban town of Mount Vernon took root.

Chicago was emerging as the nation's premier rail center, and as such, a leader in the development of railroad suburbs. In 1855 the opening of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad along the shore of Lake Michigan led one optimistic observer to enthuse: "The New York and Philadelphia suberbs [sic] will now meet with a rival." The Chicago Tribuneproclaimed the lakeshore north of the city "a region which nature has designed as the home of refinement and taste, and soon to be lined with beautiful suburban villages and flourishing cities."⁶ Over the next few years, the line did attract commuters and in the words of a local newspaper, afforded "business men an excellent opportunity to avail themselves of the beautiful quiet of a country residence without shortening the number of hours usually devoted to their daily avocations."⁷ Railroads were also affording this opportunity to commuters living west and south of the city. By 1873 one account of Chicago's suburbs told of five or six thousand heads of households, "all of whom do business in the city, and form a large per cent of the passenger list of the 100 or more trains that enter and leave the city daily."⁸ A year later another author reported that there were "a dozen trains daily, at a fare of ten cents the trip," linking the southern suburb of Hyde Park to Chicago, and hourly trains from the western suburb of Austin conveyed passengers to the city in "only twenty-five minutes" at a commuter rate of "one hundred rides for $7.50." According to this observer, the railroads could expect to carry thousands of additional commuters in the future, for the fact was "thoroughly established that ninety-nine Chicago families in every hundred will go an hour's ride into the country, or toward the country, rather than live under or over another family, as the average New Yorker or Parisian does."⁹

Among the by-products of this rise in commuter traffic were soaring prices for outlying land and widespread speculation in suburban town sites. In 1870 an account of Cincinnati's suburbs reported, "a wonderful advance has taken place in the price of lands" in the suburb of Clifton, "eligible lands in this locality havfing] increased about forty-six hundred per cent in twenty-four years."¹⁰ Three years later a speculative boom swept the Flatbush area outside of Brooklyn. "Lots in the best portion of this place, 25 x 150," wrote one commentator, "are held firmly at $3,000 in some instances which could have been bought a few years ago for $600."¹¹ A Chicago-area booster contended that land in the southern suburb of Woodlawn purchased at $160 per acre in 1866 was bringing $7,000 per acre by 1873. In 1874 this same observer was claiming that in the environs of Chicago "80,000 acres or 125 square miles of territory will be demanded by the ultimate consumers within the next decade." If this proved true, "each of our twelve railroads in the suburban traffic" would be lined with "a continuous belt of village population . . . extending for half a mile on each side of the track for ten miles."¹² Already the city's leading real estate journal claimed that development was engulfing territory that "a few years ago was one complete swamp, having no particular use but for hunting and fishing . . . If building continues at the same rate, the whole section south of the city limits to Englewood will be one dense mass of houses."¹³

By the early 1870s sprawl and speculation were, therefore, eating up the land around America's largest cities. But profit was not the consuming motive of all mid-nineteenth-century suburban developers. Instead, a number of idealistic suburban pioneers sought to fashion an alternative environment where those forced to work in the city could maintain a home life attuned to the tranquility, beauty, and purity of nature and where families could thrive safely removed from the urban ills threatening the health and morals of youth. Laid out in what became known as the romantic style of planning, these ideal suburbs were characterized by large, irregular lots, naturalistic landscaping, and curving streets that conformed to the natural terrain and contrasted starkly with the sharp right angles, straight thoroughfares, and identical narrow lots of the urban grid. They were not simply extensions of the city, indistinguishable in their layout from the neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago. They offered a specifically suburban plan reflecting emerging upper-middle-class views of what suburbia should offer its residents.

The earliest example of romantic suburban planning was Llewellyn Park in Orange, New Jersey, only thirteen miles by rail from New York City Laid out in 1853 by the wealthy merchant Llewellyn Haskell, it was located on a picturesque mountain slope capped by a rugged cliff. Haskell was a member of a religious cult that believed perfection on earth was possible through correct living, and the natural terrain, curving lanes, and three- to ten-acre lots of Llewellyn Park were intended to provide a setting for such a faultless existence. Designed as "a retreat for a man to exercise his own rights and privileges," it was created "with special reference to the wants of citizens doing business in the city of New York, and yet wishing accessible, retired, and healthful homes in the country."¹⁴

Haskell, however, was not alone in his desire for such a natural retreat. In 1857, Chicago-area Presbyterians laid out Lake Forest along the shore of Lake Michigan with a maze of curving lanes winding along the site's ravines and bluffs. In 1869 a visitor described the community as "simply a collection of elegant private parks and ornamental forms," but noted, "the design here . . . is to aid nature by Art and not to bully her."¹⁵ The same could be said of suburban Glendale, north of Cincinnati. Also laid out in the 1850s, it repeated the pattern of curving streets, large lots, and quiet appreciation of nature. Writing of the irregular street pattern, one account observed: "Whichever way the stranger takes, he is constantly impressed with the thought that he has made a mistake, and whatever point he attains is certain to be some one unlooked for." Glendale's residents clearly did not intend to provide easy access to strangers or accommodate those seeking to reach a destination as quickly as possible. Rather in 1870 a visitor described the community as "a collection of beautiful homes, with ample grounds and profuse shrubbery, approached by circuitous avenues, and distinguished for the air of comfort and retirement"; in Glendale "quiet landscapes say to fatigued limbs and wearied minds, 'Here is rest.'"¹⁶

Perhaps the most famous of these romantic suburbs was Riverside, Illinois, laid out in 1869 based on a plan by the nation's foremost landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. Located on a rail line nine miles west of Chicago and conceived as "a model suburban neighborhood" by its promoters, Riverside included the curving streets, large lots, trees, shrubs, and air of rusticity increasingly deemed desirable by well-to-do Americans in search of an outlying home.¹⁷ In a classic statement of romantic planning precepts, Olmsted recommended to Riverside's developers "the general adoption, in the design of your roads, of gracefully-curved lines, generous spaces, and the absence of sharp corners, the idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility."¹⁸ According to Olmsted, properly planned suburbs offered "the most refined and the most soundly wholesome forms of domestic life, and the best application of the arts of civilization to which mankind has yet attained."¹⁹ Under Olmsted's guidance, Riverside would supposedly provide this ideal life for its well-todo residents.

By 1870, then, an upper-middle-class suburban ideal had emerged that continued to influence metropolitan development into the twenty-first century Suburbia was deemed a retreat nurturing happy tranquility and wholesome domesticity, a place conducive to the most desirable family life and combining the advantages of city and country Nature, home, family, and peace were all components of the ideal upper-middle-class suburb and were to be preserved at all costs. In 1870 many Americans believed that the good life was found in such communities, and 130 years later their descendants did so as well.

Suburbia, however, was not all happy, affluent families, lush landscaping, and natural beauty. In the late nineteenth century, as in earlier years, many business concerns located beyond the central city limits, and with the development of large-scale manufacturing, the open spaces of suburbia proved especially appealing to sprawling industrial giants. Among the most common suburban industries were the nation's stockyards and meatpacking plants. In 1865 Chicago's giant Union Stock Yards were constructed south of the city in the town of Lake, and in the years following, packinghouses relocated to the vicinity of this "great bovine city." These enterprises in turn attracted an army of workers whose cottages spread across the north end of Lake. At the beginning of the 1880s the area was home to about 12,000 people; by 1889 this figure had risen to 37,000.²⁰ From 1872 on, the stockyards and packing plants of St. Louis clustered across the Mississippi north of East St. Louis, Illinois, and Nebraska's giant Union Stock Yards was located in South Omaha beyond the Omaha city limits. In 1892 the Cudahy Packing Company left Milwaukee for a new home in the specially created suburban community of Cudahy south of the city limits. Between 1890 and 1910, South San Francisco, across the municipal boundary in San Mateo County, attracted the Bay Area's Union Stockyards and packing plants, and in the early twentieth century suburban South St. Paul became the livestock and packing hub of the Twin Cities area,²¹ These meatpacking suburbs bore little resemblance to sylvan Glendale or tranquil Riverside. In 1886, South Omaha suburbanites complained of "how we are exposed without any protection against tramps and murderers—having no jail, no church, one school house (and that falling to decay), one saloon for every twenty inhabitants, one gambling house, [and] two houses of ill-fame."²²

Yet meatpackers were not the only entrepreneurs attracted to a suburban location. In the Pittsburgh area the great steel mills and other sprawling plants were found in outly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Creating Suburbia
• Chapter 2 Diverse Suburbia
• Chapter 3 Commercial Suburbia
• Chapter 4 Governing Suburbia
• Chapter 5 Housing Suburbia
• Chapter 6 Planning Suburbia
• Chapter 7 The Basics
• Notes
• Index