Suburbs . Okay. Almost all of you. And what kind of adjectives would you use to describe the suburbs . I cant hear you. Proud. Proud. Okay. Perhaps an unusual choice. Nicolas. Like being from nowhere. Like being from nowhere. Good. Other descriptions . Characterization . Safe. Safe. Good. As lechie points out. Cassidy. Utopia. A utopia. Emily . Family oriented. Family oriented. Nicolas, were you going to Say Something . No. Drew . I loved it. Okay. Good. I mean, some people u taupia, maybe this is a different generation. I thought people were going to say lame and boaring which is why i picked this very lame type face the. And i thought wed start with an image of contemporary suburbia which is this is an engagement shoot. A young couple who have taken to the suburban street for their you know people get married. They take engagement photos. And this was this went around the internet for a while. And lots of people including myself laughed at it. So whats so weird about that . Why does this image seem whats the disconnect . Allie . Usually engagement pictures are at like i dont know at a scenic place like outside like in the woods or something and this is like in a neighborhood. Okay. So somewhere maybe scenic or natural. Usually have a more romantic feel to it, not just ran dop cars parked everywhere. Okay, romantic. People might take them in nature or the city, places where it seeps exciting. Young couples we dont usually associate with suburbia. But what we think about suburbia has changed over time and today, were going to spend the class thinking about how the notion of a suburb, and it is, of course, a notion what, we think about suburbs have changed over time. It depends where were talking about and who were asking. But were going to think about suburbs as a kind of his tore calf construct. And what they mean. But i think somebody maybe it was nicolas, im not sure, said its kind of nowhere. But by definition, its relative. Right . Suburbs own exist the word suburb is beneath the city. Its related to the city. Its seen as a kind of nowheres land between city and rural. I was thinking about this the other day. You know, we think about culture as maybe being urban or rural, yaz music, hiphop, those are historically very urban kind of fors of art. And maybe Country Music or folk art, we think about Rural America as having a very a culture thats very obvious to us and one we would recognize. But what is suburban music . Suburban art . Suburban culture . These kinds of things . It can be hard to identify and people who are from the suburbs may be not those of us who think theyre utopians or drew who loves growing up there, but you know, people are often embarrassed to be from suburbs and i say this because at the beginning of the semester, i often ask students where theyre from and somebody will say bat more. Ill say oh, i know baltimore. Well, what neighborhood . And it turns out they live in some podunk town you know, 25 miles outside of baltimore. Or you know, there are 8 Million People who live in new york city but probably 30 million or 40 Million People who you ask where they live they would say in new york. Nobody wants to admit theyre from new jersey i guess but they do occupy this kind of strange space. So were going to go back all the way in time. Were going to focus on the 20th century and the mid 20th century in particular but well do some early prehistory to think about how suburbs came to be. And much of although the word existed all the way back in the 14th country century, the concept of suburbia really began in the 19th century, particularly in the second half of the 19th century. And it has a lot to do with cities and weve talked about how cities are growing and over time they become associated with chaos, disorder, poor health. And as a consequence, people are seeking theton yiskz nature as a kind of prescription for better health, people are wanting to escape the city. And one of the ways theyre able to do that before they build suburbs are with urban parks and heres an example. From central park, construction begins just before the civil war. And the idea was if you cant live outside of the city, at least you could get a taste of the country. So they may live in these kind of squalid dirty, crowded city. But they can have the benefit of fresh air, scenery, flora and fauna, most of which was imported but nevertheless, seed very natural and wealthy folk could enjoy the curved paths that stood in stark contrast to the grid like streets of manhattan. And as the 19th century continues and cities become larger and more industrialized, the notion that cities were diseased, filth ridden perverted places to live only grows. And in fact, some doctors even begin to coin medical conditions, one is new yorkitis that affects people who live in new york who become morbid and disturbed by virtue of just living in the crowded kayiotic city with the cacophony, the noise, and all of the people. And so late in the 1th century, there are a lot of remedies for this, new parks, people fleeing the city, maybe farther than central park but other parks or other natural landmarks. A lot of people are riding bicycles as a way to escape the city. And have some sense of nature outside. So the suburban kind of style kind of takes off after the civil war and people begin to emphasize having a detached hope, an cottage style house, having fresh air, accessible space, a yard, a garden. And some of you mentioned had notion of suburbs being safe and family oriented. And that idea begins to take off in popularity, as well. We talked about earlier in the class Harriet Beecher stow the famous author, her sister actually becomes one of the leading proponents of suburbia in terms of thinking about these spaces as ideal for family to raise a family and to encourage a kind of domestic feminism. And the suburban as they tick is seen in a number of ways. Well see one example here from a house in newburg, new york. This house was designed by calvert vox who is one of the two people who designed central park. So theres a lot of overlapping themes here. This is a big house, 5,000 square feet. Eight bedrooms. Only one bathroom. And the idea thats epitomized here but in also a lot of early suburban architecture was to emphasize nature and its relationship to nature. So they built this house for mr. Warren who was the treasure riff some railroad company. The treasurer of a railroad company. They built it purposefully right on the hudson river to take advantage of this beautiful view, the natural splendor, and situate the house in a way that it was opening up to the riverview. The big parlor rooms inside the house were in the back of the house so that they could see the water. There was a big giant porch on the back where they assumed, vox assumed that the residents would spend their summer enjoying the breeze and taking in the breathtaking view. And you can also see, of course, theres a garden, a yard. Emphasizing the space that could be had in the suburbs. A much bigger house than most people were living in in the city and one that was supposed to blend in with nature. So vox was very concerned about not having the house stick out so much. Even though it was large, so youll notice that the front of the house has these gables that make the house appear very tall but in the rear, those gables are not there, but instead, theres a kind of hipped roof to deemphasize the verticality. And there was also a lot of ornamentation and the idea was that these houses could express the emotions of the owners, there are these windowhoods on the first floor windows. Elaborate trim along the gables, as a way to stand out, as a way to have these ornamental flourishes was going to be part of this suburban style architecture. Which was very much intended for wealthier folks who could escape the suburbs. This is just kind of interesting to see what the house looks like today. This was a couple years ago. Nice looking house. It was on the market for 285,000. Pretty cheap. But it remains a kind of signal of this earlier impressive era. So while some people like vox were building these suburban cottage style houses, others were thinking about creating the first suburban planned communities. And a couple of examples, one, Llewellyn Park in new jersey which sat just about 12 miles outside new york city and the other riverside in illinois which was pretty close, about nine miles from chicago. And the idea here was not just to create these nice cottage style homes with their own yard and garden, but to create an entire community where similar kinds of folk could come and develop these suburban developments. These neighborhoods, these planned communities. And you can see in both of the plans here again, theyre emphasizing nature. The roads are all cuffed. They bring in lots of flora and fauna. In Llewellyn Park, the lot sizes are quite large and they dont allow fences and so the idea was there was going to be this shared open space where any individual owner could kind of roam in this big public nature ground. And theyre kind of interesting examples for several reasons but one of which youll also notice in the Llewellyn Park, theres a gate house which they used as a way to appropriate the idea of privacy, security, these kind of fundamental features of suburban life that we think of today but also of course, to suggest exclusivity. These were in fact Country Homes for very wealthy city people. Later in the 19th century, we have the origins of streetcar suburbs that have houses that are often a little lessee lab rat but interesting nonetheless. And streetcars become popularized in the late 19th century because they become electrified and theyre able to travel much faster. This is an image of pittsburgh and you can see all of the bridges between pittsburgh crossing the rivers around it. And these bridges are not carrying automobiles but rather pedestrians, railroads but primarily streetcars. And so all around pittsburgh, new suburban streetcar suburbs as they called them are developing, some tony suburbs like Squirrel Hill were managers and businessmen can live in these nice more bucolic spaces but still manage to get to the city pretty easily. We think of suburbs primarily, of course, as residential but theyre also inindustrial suburbs and homestead, pennsylvania, which is about seven miles outside of pittsburgh is an example of one of these industrial suburbs and a streetcar suburb thats connected to pittsburgh via this bridge that was erecteded in 1895. So this is not a zoomed in look here, but what do you find striking about this particular suburb . How does it maybe look . Unusual. Greg . Unlike the other ones, all the streets are very straight and theres no attempt to incorporate nature. Good. Theres very recti linear street pattern, linear street pattern. If you notice, they often follow the Railroad Tracks or streetcar track where development is following transportation. Yeah. Looks like theres factories close to the suburbs, too. Good. So theres a great deal of industry here. This is the homestead steel works that are eventually purchased by andrew carnegie, becomes famous or infamous for a labor strike. But yeah, this is a center of industry and kind of becomes a company town where more than half of the People Living here eventually work for the steel company. So were not going to spend so much time thinking about these kinds of suburbs but its important to remember that manufacturing often does move to the fringes of the cities and that there are all kinds of different suburbs. But i want to talk about some of the things that really precipitate the modern suburban movement in the mid1950s and some of that stems from the new deal policies that we talked about earlier. And in particular, the creation of the homeowners loan corporation. The holc, a new deal byproduct that was trying to help people afford homes. As we discussed a couple of weeks back, the great depression, of course, produced tremendous homelessness forecast closures, et cetera. And part of what the new deal wanted to do was to create a boom in the Construction Industry and also provide homes for people who needed them. So this holc was an effort to provide mortgages for people. In the 19th century, most buyers either built their house or they paid cash for it. And mortgages were just beginning to become a thing but they were often very short term. You would have to refinance and so the holc promoted a longer term mortgage with therefore a lower monthly payment. But one of the interesting things about the holc is, is, of course, they didnt want to gub out loans that werent going to be paid back. So they had a very intricate process of assessing neighborhoods. Values, and they didnt want to give loans to neighborhoods that they thought would be in decline. So they created a very detailed system where individual assessors would go to a neighborhood and they would look at the kind of housing, they would look at how old the housing is, whether it was in good shape to try to determine if it was a really good neighborhood that was going to hold its value or a neighborhood that was on decline. And they made these maps with colors and letters to denote a was a were the best neighborhoods, then b, c, and d. But as well see from this example of a 1937 map from richmond, varks the most salient feature in the assessors reports had to do with race. And in this case, white neighborhoods tended to be shaded in green or blue, which were the highest ratings and if a neighborhood was populated heavily by africanamericans, it would almost always receive a d or red rating. And that was certainly the case in this neighborhood that weigh look at in a minute which today is randolph. And it had an effect even on neighboring neighborhoods. You can see just to the side of this neighborhood is a yellow grouping. Thats currently bird park in richmond. And the reports for this neighborhood say na it would have been higher, it would have got. A blue rating, a b rating, but was downgraded because its next to after africanamerican neighborhood and theres a park on this side of the c4 neighborhood. So africanamericans are walking through this neighborhood. There supposedly key valuing them. And when the assessors wrote reports like this in other neighborhoods, they included all sorts of detailed information. And maybe you cant see, but under inhabitants often it would say searled workers, managerial class to define the kind of people who work there as a way to understand how much money they made as a way to understand if this neighborhood was going to become prosperous or at least maintain itself. But in neighborhoods dominated by africanamericans the assessor usually just listed negro and that was enough to warrant a red designation. And this is the part of the origin of the term known as red lining which came to mean discripnating against certain minority groups in terms of providing services, financial services, government services, et cetera. Now, theres been some debate about how much these ratings actually mattered in terms of lending practices. But theres no doubt that theres certainly a sign of how new deal benefits were being meted out disproportionately and perhaps its not also a surprise that theres a correlation between these maps and poverty rates today. This is an overlay, a map of the original holc map from 1937. And the areas shaded in red underneath it are areas that are that experience more than 20 poverty rate. And perhaps the government was simply good at predicting the future and these neighborhoods were really in decline or more likely, the government helped cement the fate of these neighborhoods. So what does this have to do with suburbization . Youll notice that the areas in red in rich monday tended to be at the center, at the core of the city. And that was often the case. This is a map of chicago. Another from cleveland. And finally, in oakland, all of these from 1940 or 1937 like richmond. And youll notice that the red is at the city center, the core of the city. And so the government started to promote by giving loans and insenty advising in other Way Development at the fringes of the city. Which happened at the expense of the city center. And it also began the process of associating inner cities, city centers as the neighborhoods of decline and similarly, that those neighborhoods of decline were the neighborhoods in which africanamericans disproportionately lived. And these ideas would become linked in a way that was hard to that would be hard to untangle for a very long time. Following up on the homeowners loan corporation, another even bigger and more important new deal program known as the fha, the federal housing administration, which becomes a huge part of the postwar suburban boom that incentivizes suburban building by making home loans much more affordable and goes even further than the holc in providing insuring private loans that will provide very longterm loans with very little down payments, often less than 10 was needed. And this similarly operated in a way that promoted discrimination. So the fha would often, was more likely to insure new Housing Development rather than reconstructing or rehabilitating Old Development which, of course, meant new housing was more likely to be built outside of the cities. They were more likely to insure mortgages for Single Family houses, the kind that would be very popular in the suburbs. And perhaps most appallingly in many of the new suburbs that the fha subsidized in a way, they appropriated the idea of restrictive covenants. Agreements that the suburbanites who moved into these neighborhoods would be held to that made sure they would never sell their house to somebody who was not white. Excluding very explicitly africanamericans. These covenants would eventually be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948 in shelley versus cramer. But discrimination managed to continue in a variety of other ways. So these programs are in place before the war but once the war begins to die down, soldiers are returning home. The gi bill is enabling all sorts of economic growth. We have really postwar suburban boom that follows world war ii. And during the war towards the end of the war in 1944, there were about 144,000 new houses built in a sengal year. By 1950, there would be roughly 2 million houses built in that exact year. And by 1950, the rate of suburban growth was more than ten times that the rate of the city center. So these new suburbs were often must less dense before, often the houses looked very similar and so did the people. And the most famous and largest example of these postwar suburbs was in levittown in long island, about 25 miles east of new york city. Wh