Production of houses, and the rise of automobiles helped great an alternative to urban living. His class is about an hour. Today we are talking about the suburbs. How many of you grew up in the suburbs . Almost all of you. What kind of activities would you use to describe the suburbs . Proud. Proud okay. Perhaps an unusual choice. Like being from nowhere. Friss good. Other descriptions, characterizations . Safe. A utopia. Friss a utopia. Family oriented. Friss family oriented. Nicholas were you gonna Say Something . I love this. Good. Some people utopia. Maybe this is different generation. I thought people were going to say lame and boring, which is why i picked this very lame typeface. I thought we would start with an image of contemporary suburbia. This is an engagement shoot. A young couple, taken to the suburban street for their engagement. People get married, they take engagement photos. This went around the internet for a while and lots of people, including myself, laughed at it. What is so weird about that . Why does this image what is the disconnect . You would think it should be a scenic place like the woods, not a neighborhood. Scenic or natural. Usually has a romantic feel, not random cars everywhere. Romantic. People might take it as them to nature, the city where it seems exciting, young couples, we do not usually associate with suburbia. But, what we think about suburbia has changed over time. Today we will spend the class thinking about how the notion of a suburb, and it is a notion, what we think about suburbs have changed over time. It depends where we are talking about and who we are asking. We will think about suburbs as a historical construct and what they mean. But i think sboboy, maybe nicolas, said it is kind of nowhere. But by definition, it is relative. Suburbs only exist, the word suburb is beneath the city. It is related to the city. It is seen as a nowhere land between the city and and rural. I was thinking about this the other day. We think about culture as maybe being urban or rural. Jazz music, hiphop. Those are historically very urban forms of art. And maybe Country Music or folk art, we think of Rural America as having a culture that is very obvious to us, when we would recognize. Having a culture thats very obvious twice. When we would recognize. It is suburban music . Suburban art . Suburban culture. These kinds of things it can be hard to identify. And people that are from the suburbs maybe not drew who grew up there, people are often from suburbs. I say this because at the beginning of the semester i ask people where they are from, and somebody will say baltimore. And someone will say baltimore. And then ill say oh i know baltimore would neighborhood . And it turns out there come from some town at 25 miles outside of baltimore. Theyre 8 Million People who live in new york city, but probably 30 or 40 Million People if you ask where they live will say new york. No one wants to admit they are from new jersey i guess. They do occupy this strange space. So we are going to go back all the way in time, were going to focus on the 20th century, and the mid20th century in particular. We will do some early pretty history to think about how suburbs came to be. And much of even though the word existed in the 14th idea the concept of suburb really began in the 19th century. Particularly in the second half of the 19th century. It has to do with cities cities become associated with chaos, disorder and poor health. As a consequence people are seeking the tonics of nature, as a kind of prescription to better health. People are wanting to escape the city. And one of the ways you are able to do that before they both suburbs, are with urban parks. Here is an example from central part. Construction begins just before the civil war. And the idea was if you cant live outside the city, at least you can get a taste of the country. They may live in these kind of 30 crowded city, but they could have the benefit of fresh air, scenery, flora and fauna mulch most of which is important. And very natural. And wealthy folks could enjoy the curved paths that stood in stark contrast to the grid like streets of manhattan as the 19th century continues and cities become larger and more industrialized, the notion that cities or diseased, filth ridden perverted places to live, only grows. In fact, some doctors begin to coin medical conditions. One is new york ideas, that affects people live in new york, we come more bid and disturbed. And disturbed by virtue of just living in the crowded city, the kickoff any and the noise, and all the crowded people. Late in the 19th century, there are a lot of remedies for this new parks, people fleeing the city, maybe farther than central park. And maybe other parks or natural landmarks. A lot of people are writing bicycles. As a way to escape the city. And have some sense of nature outside. So the suburban kind of style takes off after the civil war. People began to emphasize having a detached home, a cottage style house, having fresh air, accessible space, a yard, a garden. And some of you mention this notion of suburbs being safe and family oriented. That idea begins to take off in popularity as well. We talked about earlier in the class harriet, the famous author. Her sister becomes one of the leading proponents of suburb in terms of thinking about the spaces as ideals for family. To raise a family, and to encourage a kind of domestic feminism. And the suburban ecstatic is seen a number of ways. Well see one example here in new bergh new york. This house was designed by calibrate vox, who is one of the two people that design central park. Theres a lot of overlapping themes here. Is a big house, 5000 square feet, one bathroom. And the idea thats epitomized here, and it also in a lot of suburban architecture was to emphasize nature, and the relationship to nature. So they built this house for mr. Warren who was the treasury of some railroad company. The treasurer of some railroad company. They built it purposefully right on the hudson river. To take advantage of this beautiful view, the natural splendor. And situated the house in a way that it was opening up to the river view. The big parlor rooms they could see the water, theres a big porch on the back where they assumed that the residents would spend their summer enjoying the breeze, and taking in the breathtaking view. You can also see of course, there is a garden, a yard emphasizing the space that could be had in the suburbs. A much bigger house than most people were living in the city, and one that would blend in with nature. He was very concerned about not having the house stick out so much, even though it was large. Youll notice the front of the house has these gables that make the house appear very tall. In the rear the gables are not here but instead theres a hipped roof to de emphasize the vertical itty. Theres also a lot of ornamentation. The idea is these house could express the emotions of the owners. These window hoods on the first floor windows. The elaborate trim along out, ay to have these ornamental flourishes. It 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 of years ago. Nice looking house. He was on the market for 285,000 dollars. Pretty cheap. But it a kind of signal of this earlier impressive eraer but while some people like vox were built in the suburban cottage style houses, others were thinking about creating the first suburban plan communities. A couple of examples, one, Llewellyn Park in new jersey which sat just about 12 miles outside of new york city. And the other riverside in illinois. Which was pretty close, maybe nine miles from chicago. The idea here was not 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. E these planned communities you can see in both the plans here, again they are emphasizing nature, the roads are all curved, they bring in lots of laura and fauna. In Llewellyn Park, the lot sizes are quite large. They do not allow fences. The idea that there was going to be this shared open space, where any individual owner kid roam in this big public nature ground. And, they are kind of interesting examples for several reasons. One of which you will notice in the Llewellyn Park theres a gatehouse. Which they used to promote the idea of privacy, security. Hes kind of fundamental features of suburban life that we think of today. But also of course to suggest exclusivity. And these were in fact Country Homes for very wealthy city people. Later in the 19th century we have the origins of street suburbs, that have houses that are often a little less elaborate. But interesting nonetheless. Streetcars become popularized in the late 19th century, because they become electrified and are able to travel much faster. This is an image of pittsburgh, you could see all of the bridges between pittsburgh, crossing the rivers around it. These bridges are not carrying automobiles, but pedestrians, railroads. Primarily streetcars. All around pittsburgh, new suburban street car suburbs as they call them our developing. Some suburbs like tony hill where businessmen could live, more in these bullet places but could get to the city very easily. We think of problem suburbs primarily of course as residential. They are also industrial suburbs. And homestead pennsylvania, which was about seven miles outside of pittsburgh is an example of one of these industrial suburbs. And a streetcar suburbs, that is connected to pittsburgh via this bridge that was directed in 1895. This is not a zoomed in look here, well when you find striking about this particular suburb, how does it maybe look unusual. Greg . Unlike the other ones the streets are straight and theres no attempt to incorporate nature. Good. Theres a wrecked a linear or linear street pattern, if you notice, they often follow the railroad tracks. Or streetcars tracks, where development is following transportation. Theres factories close to the suburbs too. Theres a great deal of industry here, this is the homestead steel which was purchased by Andrew Carney guy, becomes infamous for a labor strike. This is a center of industry. It kind of becomes a company town, where more than half of the People Living here eventually work for the steele company. We are not gonna spend so much time thinking about these kind of suburbs, its important to remember that manufacturing often does move to the fringes of the cities, it is all kinds of different suburbs. I want to talk about some of the things that precipitate, the modern suburban movement in the late 19 fifties. Some of that stems from the new deal policies that we talked about earlier, and in particular, the creation of the homeowners loan corporation. 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 foreclosures, etc. Part of the new deal wanted to do was to create a boom in the Construction Industry and provide homes for people who needed them. So this was an effort to provide mortgages for people. In the 19th century, most buyers either built their house, or they paid cash for. And mortgages were justome a th, but theyre often very short term. You have to refinance, so they promoted a longer term mortgage, with their for a lower monthly payment. One of the interesting things about the age olc is, they did not want to give out loans that werent going to be paid back. So they had a very intricate process of assessing neighborhoods. Values, they dont 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, they would look at the kind of housing. They would look at how old the housing is, whether its in good shape. To try and determine if it was a really good neighborhood that would hold its value, or a neighborhood that was on decline. They made these maps with colors and letters, to the no a where the best neighborhoods, be c andy but as we see from this map from richmond, virginia, 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 was the highest ratings. And if a neighborhood was populated heavily by africanamericans, it was almost always received a d, or red rating. That was certainly the case in this neighborhood we we will look at in a minute. Which today is randolph. It had an effect on neighboring neighborhoods. You can see just to the side of this neighborhood is a yellow grouping, that is currently bird park in richmond. The reports for this neighborhood said it would have been higher, would have gotten a blue rating, a b rating, but was downgraded because it is next to an africanamerican neighborhood. And there is a park on this side of the see for neighborhood. So, africanamericans are walking through this neighborhood. Thereby, supposedly, devaluing. When the assessors wrote reports like this, in other neighborhoods they included all sorts of detailed information. Maybe you cannot see, but under inhabitants, it would often say salaried workers, managerial class, to define the kind of people that worked there, as a way to understand how much money they made, as a way to understand if this neighborhood would become prosperous or maintain itself. But in neighborhoods dominated by africanamericans, the assessor usually just listed negro and that was enough to designate a red designation. And then there was the term redlining, discriminating against groups by withholding government services, etc. There is been some debate about how much of these ratings mattered in terms of lending practices. But there is no doubt there is certainly a sign of how new deal benefits were being meted out disproportionately. It is perhaps not also a surprise there is a correlation between these maps and poverty rates today. This is an overlay, a map of the original holc map from 1937. The areas shaded in red underneath it show a 20 or more poverty rate. Perhaps the gomenvem was good at predicting the future and hes neighborhoods were really in decline. Or more likely, the government helped cement the fate of these neighborhoods. So what does it have to do with suburbanization . You notice the areas in red in richmond are at the center, the core of the city. That was often the case. This is a map of chicago. Another from cleveland. And finally, in oakland. All of se 1940, or 1937. You notice the red is that the city center, the core of the city. And so the government started to promote by giving loans and on incentivizing in other ways, development at the fringes of the city. Which happened at the expense of the city center. It also began the process of associating inner cities, city centers, as the neighborhoods of decline. And similarly, that those neighborhoods of decline where the neighborhoods in which africanamericans disproportionately lived. And these ideas would be become linked in a way that was would be hard to untangle for a very long time. Following up on the homeownershome ownersloan corporation, a bigger and more important new deal association, the fha, 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 ensuring private loans that will provide very longterm loans, with very little down payments. Often less than 10 was needed. This similarly operated in a way the promoted discrimination. The fha was more likely to ensure new Housing Development rather than reconstructing or rehabilitating old development, which meant new housing was likely to be built outside the cities. They were more likely to insure mortgages for singlefamily houses, the kino would be very popular in suburbs. And appallingly, many that they subsidize, they promoted the idea of restricted covenant. Agreements that the suburbanites then moved into these neighborhoods would be held to, that made sure they would never sell their house to somebody that was not white. Excluding very explicitly africanamericans. These covenants would eventually be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948 in shelley versus kramer. But discrimination managed to continue in a variety of other ways. These programs are in place before the war. But once the war begins to die down, soldiers are returning home, the g. I. Bill is enabling economic growth. We have postwar, suburban boom of that follows world war ii. During the war, towards the end of the war in 1944, there were about 144,000 new houses built in a single year. By 1950, there would be roughly 2 million houses built in that exact year. By 1950, the rate of suburban growth was more than 10 times that the rate of the city center. These new suburbs were often much less dense. Often the houses looked very similar, and so did the people. The most famous and largest example of the postwar suburbs was in levittown in long island, 25 miles east of new york city. Where Abraham Levitt and it is his two sons by 2000 acres a potato farm in 1946. And eventually build 70,000 houses. 17,000 houses. And do so in a way that is reminiscent of mass production. As you can see here. Nonunionized workers would go from house to house and do the same task,oftentimes times very minute, over and over again. They really helped revolutionize the building process. As you can see from this aerial image, they had precut mber that came from the levitt farms. They made these call cry creek concrete slabs and dump the material out and they would quickly build a house. They were able to build a house at a rate exceeding 150 over. A week the result is that the houses were very affordable because they were built so quickly. The earliest model sold for 7,900. It is hard to do economic comparisons to today. But it would probably be Something Like 85, 000, 90,000 in todays money. It became very affordable for people in the middle class. People start moving in in 1947 to houses that look like this. This is one that is still standing, but the original cape cod style and floor plan. What do you make of this particular house, compared to other suburban houses . What is interesting . Good, it is one floor. It is very basic, it is simple, compact. Good. These cape codstyle houses were only 750 square feet. They only had one bathroom, they were two bedrooms. These seem pretty small to us and our suburbs today. But at the time, it seemed pretty spacious. And roomy. And had a lot of exciting features for people. Most notably,