Chicago History | Summer 1984

CHICAGO HISTORY, The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Chicago Historical Society OFFICERS Stewart S. Dixon, Chairman Philip W. Hummer, Vice Chairman Philip D. Block III, Vice Chairman Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Treasurer

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FROlVI THE EDITOR THE EDITOR of Chicago History lives in a suburb and commutes to work in the city. He feels no

particular disloyalty to the city because of this: he likes both where he works and where he lives. Something connects them besides the tracks that carry his train.

Long bonds of sentiment and interest connect city and suburb. In short, history connects them. It is impossible to imagine Chicago without its suburbs, and obviously the suburbs are impossible to imagine without the city at the center. Yet the popular image of the suburbs hardly promotes the connections. Large lawns, families, martinis, and much toing and froing from school, church, and shopping center, always by car, are an American suburban vision.

Since World War II they have become part of the national folklore, and like other chapters of that folklore they reflect some truth and leave much of it out.

What the image does not reflect is the perspective of time. Suburbs were not invented with Levittown or even Riverside. The word "suburb" appears in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Understood as a residential place outside a city, the suburb is an idea as ancient as civilization itself. But what we today regard as the distinctly suburban pattern of living amid distant verdure and commuting to work downtown is of more recent vintage. It is this more modern notion of suburb as a process defining the linkages between the city and a certain kind of country that this issue of Chicago History explores.

It is about a variety of places: London and Clapham, Boston and Brookline, Chicago and Evanston. And it ranges over a period of some 200 years, which encompasses the evolution of the Anglo-American suburb. That history is richer than the images of contemporary suburban life portray, freighted as they commonly are with political meanings. The left see in suburbia the blight of social conformity and ecological folly. The right see vindication of essential national values embodied in individualism and home ownership . For many, suburbs are a lightning rod for all the perceived glory and misery of the modern city. So in Chicago: some argue for effective metropolitan government and more suburban support for city services; others point proudly to Oak Park and Winnetka as already exemplary civic accomplishments.

Next to "commute," "flee" is the verb most frequently coupled to the noun "suburb." The two ~erbs suggest very different things and between them sum up the troubled history of cities and their suburbs, and partly foreshadow their future. "Commute," from the Latin, means to exchange, which is in a sense what the folk who drive their cars or ride the train into town everyday are doing: exchanging one place for another for a part of their day, everyday.

The idea is to make a link between two places in so routinized a way that it becomes the natural order of things. And so it is the natural order of things between suburbs and cities as we have come to know them.

"Flee" suggests something else more troubling: not the connections but the gaps between city and suburb. Less than the evening ritual of leaving the city for the suburbs, it refers prejudicially to the more fundamental act of choosing to live in the suburbs to begin with, as if this were a betrayal of the true city. Partly true, but partly nonsense, the notion of flight and betrayal bedevils current city-suburban relationships and would well be put to rest. The articles that follow transcend it, and reveal the suburbs as part of the larger connected urban world.

TCJ

Cover: Summer in the suburbs: a canopy of green covers Evanston's Ridge Avenue. Photograph by R onald Karr.

Summer 1984 Volume XIII, Number 2

CHICAGO HISTORY

The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society CONTENTS

EDITOR TIMOTHY

C.

JACO BSON

ASSISTANT EDITOR

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R USSEL L LEWIS DESIGNER

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KAREN KOHN DESIGN ASSISTANT LISA GINZEL

A Nation of Suburbs K ENNETH T. JACK SON The Origins of the Suburban Idea in England ROB ERT FISHMAN

36

Brookline and the Making of an Elite Suburb RONALD DALE KARR

PHOTOGRAPHY WALTER W. KR UTZ

p A UL W.

48

P ETRAITIS

The Result of Honest Hard Work: Creating a Suburban Ethos for Evanston MI C HAEL

H.

EBN E R

DEPARTMENTS 4 Copyright 1984 by th e Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Aven ue Chicago, lllin o is 60614

Commentary/ Derek Fraser on Los Angeles

66

Review Essay/ Carol O'Connor

69

Book Reviews/ Robert Thorne

Carl Kaestle

ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in thi s journal are ab tracted and ind exed in Histon·ca/ Abstracts a nd America: History and Life

l LLUSTRATIONS

6-7, cou rtesy Evanston Historica l Society; 8, CHS, ICHi-18276 ; 10, CHS, ICHi-18253, gift of Arthur G. Levy; 13, CHS, ICHi-17972; 16 top, CHS, ICHi -00076; 16 bottom, CHS, ICHi-18254; 18, CHS, I C Hi-06578; 20 CHS; ICHi-18249; 23, CHS. ICHi-18275; 24, courtesy Evanston Historical Socie ty ; 26-27, from Views of the London Borough of Bromley in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1972), courtesy London Borough of Bromley; 29, from London H omes (1952). co urtesy William Clowes and Sons, Ltd.; 31 top, from History and Antiquities of the Parish of I slington (1823); 31 bottom , from London Buildings Yesterday. Today, and Tomorrow, (1943); 32-33, from j ohn Nash, Pn·nce R egent's Architect (1966) , cou rtesy Coun tr y Life Limited and Terence Davis; 34 top a nd bollom, from John Nash, P11·nce Rege nt 's Architect (1967), cou rtesy A.S. Barn es and Company, lnc. and Terence D avis; 38-45 from History of the 10wn of Brookline, Nlassach uselts (1933), courtesy Brookline Historical Soci e ty ; 48, courtesy Evanston I li sto rica l Society; 51 top, courtesy Evanston Historical Society ; 51 bo ttom , from H is torica{ Encyclopeditl of Illinois a11d Hrstory of Evansto" (1906); 52-53, courtesy Evanston Historical Soci e ty ; 55, CHS , ICHi -17433; 56 top, CHS , l CH i-18255; 56 bottom, CHS, ICHi-01691 ; 58-62', courtesy Evanston Historica l Society; 72, C HS, ICHi -10601.

COMMENTARY The pattern in London, Boston, and Chicago-suburbs surrounding a true city-does not hold for Los Angeles, whose famous sprawl represents suburbs without the city.

confronts the urban historian in a stark way with the confusing realities of modern forms of urban living, especially when that individual's previous historical and personal experience has been of the still recognizably Victorian cities of provincial England. In so many ways Los Angeles is at variance with the urban paradigms conceptually and linguistically modeled on the classic industrial and commercial cities of modernizing societies. In its size and sprawl it long ago burst out of the boundaries conventionally accepted as containing even a metropolitan city. We must really think in terms of a huge metropolitan region or province rather than a city when contemplating an agglomeration that has swallowed up all usable land and is surrounded not by "the countryside" but by the physical barriers of deserts, mountains, cliffs, and ocean. The town-country dichotomy, so prominent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has little meaning in Southern California.

The functions the city historically provided for its hinterland no longer act centripetally, but centrifugally. Notwithstanding massive efforts to restore the central city to its place as cultural and financial cynosure, vast numbers of Southern Californians live out their lives as producers and consumers without reference to the center, traversing from periphery to periphery. Of British cities, only London is comparable, but it has an important traditional gravitational momentum towards the center. Not only is central London the seat of government, the locus of historical attractions, and a commercial capital on a world scale, it also provides for Londoners (and, equally important for its continued economic viability, for visitors) concentrated central shopping and cultural opportunities which may still exist in New York and Chicago but no longer survive in LIVING IN LOS ANGELES

Derek Fraser is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

4

L.A. Though Londoners certainly conduct their daily shopping in a local suburban setting, they still look to the West End for major, specialized, and fashion retailing, and for theater and firstrun movies. By contrast no Southern Californian lives more than perhaps five miles from a major shopping mall which contains a wide range of retailing, from exotic small boutiques to major national department stores. Similarly, there are some thirty theaters and cinemas in Westwood alone. Londoners go up to town for Harrods and Selfridges: in Los Angeles it is not downtown but in the suburbs where the elegant may shop in Sak's or Magnin's.

Indeed, Los Angeles has turned the urban terminology on its head. It is a city which, as many here have observed , is all suburbs, yet its suburbs are sometimes cities themselves. We all know, from Chinatown, that water became in the early twentieth century the crucial political weapon by which Los Angeles established an imperial dominance over its regions . The lacunae which remained outside its grip are indistinguishable to the eye of the passing motorist. We may accommodate the separateness of a beach city like Santa Monica, but how are we to comprehend the identities of "cities" such as Beverly Hills or Culver City, completely encased within Los Angeles concrete? Naturally, these communities are proud of their own police force, fire department, and schools, but are they cities in any real analytical or conceptual sense? The distinctiveness of Beverly Hills is protected by a cordon sanitaire, which maintains real estate prices at Disneyland fantasy levels.Now here is the urban consciousness of Beverly Hills better revealed than in education matters. Justly proud of its schools, the city employs its police force to follow children home after school and to lie in wait for them in the early morning to confirm that pupils are indeed city residents.

Like Beverly Hills, many Victorian middleclass suburbs in Britain wished to sustain gentility and exclusiveness through the provision of elite education. The expensive private schools for the children of the suburban wealthy were mirrored by the policy of the London School Board in adopting a differential fee scale to protect its best suburban schools from invasion by the poor.

In such suburbs as Victoria Park in Manchester, Edgbaston in Birmingham, or Headingley in Leeds, the early- and mid-Victorian bourgeoisie were in full flight from the city, escaping the dirt, disease, congestion, and above all, smoke of the industrial environs. In palladian villadom they sought to create an urban version of the countryside marrying the attractions of light, air, and space with the domestic comforts of modern urban civilization. In the. ubiquitous gardens and parks, in the recreated village greens, and in the impressive parochial church or dissenting chapel the haute bourgeoisie attempted to create a safe, clean, desirable world for family life at the fringe of the city, contiguous to it in space but a world apart in social consciousness.

Above all, the survival of this country in the town depended on its social exclusiveness, and the suburban elite reacted swiftly and defensively to repel boarders. When a philanthropic Edgbaston merchant proposed to open one of his fields as a playground, his neighbors warned him of the "serious annoyance and disturbance such a course would bring to the neighbourhood as also to the great deterioration it would cause to our respective properties."

Yet the more the attractions of suburbia became known, the greater became the demand for suburban space. Like Lou Grant's quiet restaurant which deteriorated when its delights were exposed by his society reporter, the Victorian suburb changed its character when speculative builders, lawyers, agents, and even owners succumbed to

the financial opportunities of suburban development of a decidedly petit-bourgeois kind. The suburban world of Mr. Pooter was definitely not that of the urban country house and some suburbs (like Everton in Liverpool) were redeveloped and others (like Clapham) were created for the more modest aspirations of the commercial n.c.o. class.

More than this, the coincidence of transportation developments (suburban railways, trams, buses), soaring downtown property prices, and the new urban panacea of dispersal combined to create a new sort of suburb for an even lower social order.

Where early Victorian urban reformers saw the answer to urban problems in the creation of an infrastructure of drainage, sewerage, and water supply, late Victorian and Edwardian reformers viewed the green open spaces as a necessary overflow to release the tensions of urban chaos and decay. As one observer remarked in 1902, "the housing problem is not to be solved in the slums of Camberwell or Whitechapel but in the green fields of Harrow and Hendon, in Woodford, East Ham and Barking." The building of the working-class suburb, first by private enterprise, later by massive council house projects, gave birth to a form of living which was decidedly urban and non-rural. Now the language of the contemporary critic was transformed: the middleclass flight from the city became a working-class invasion of the countryside. Though low density housing by urban standards, the march of working-class suburbia was perceived as a threatartificial, contrived, and nasty-to the natural, wholesome, traditional world of rurality.

The urban-rural rivalry implicit in suburban development may help to explain the advanced suburban world of Los Angeles. There is something of a parallel.Just as the suburb represented a Victorian alternative to the town, so Southern California poses itself as a contemporary alternative to the city.

5

Our property seems to me the most beau11/ul i11 the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.

on a clay tablet, this letter to the King of Persia in 539 B.C. represents the first extant expression of the suburban ideal.

The desire to combine the best of both farm and city is even older than the letter, however. Today, Ur is a desert scrubland with miserable ruins jutting from terrain of sand and mud. It is about 120 miles northwest of the Persian Gulf in the country we now call Iraq. Four thousand years ago, however, the Sumerian community of Ur in southern Mesopotamia was a place of beauty, graced with trees, palaces, temples, shrines, gardens, and monuments. Between 2300 B.c. and 2180 B.C. it experienced great prosperity, and its population of 100,000 spilled beyond the city's gates into what, Leonard Woolley has written, "might be called a suburb of Ur." The term suburb (or burgus, suburbium, or suburbis) is of more recent vintage.John Wycliffe used the word suburbia in 1380, and Geoffrey Chaucer introduced the term in a dialogue in The Canterbury Tales a few years later. By 1500 Fleet Street and the extramural parishes were designated as London suburbs, and by the seventeenth century the adjective suburban was being¡ used in Eng-land to mean both the place and the resident. European suburbs, called le faubourg by the French and die Vorstadt by the Germans, have a similar lineage. In his remarkable study of medieval Toulouse, John Mundy reports that the twelfth-century use of burgus or suburbiurn referred to the housing clusters beyond the Saracen Wall toward the monastery. Outside Paris the o ld urbane suburb of Saint Germain-en-Laye (not to be confused with Saint Germain des Pres on the Left Bank) grew up on the rich flatlands thirteen miles west of the capital. Built around the chateau where Louis XIV, the Sun King, was born in 1638, this tangle of winding streets dotted with 300-year-old stone houses dates back to the fou1-teenth century. At about the same time, other rich Parisians sought purer air near the WRITTEN IN C U NEIFORM

Kenneth T Jackson is professor of history al Columbia University.

6

A Nation of Suburbs

By Kenneth T. Jackson

Today more Americans live in suburbs than in cities themselves. Kenneth Jackson considers how this came about and whether it can continue.

7

Chicago History, Summer 1984

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, Preceding Page: Cor11er of Grove and Maple in Evanston, c. 1885.

From the modest 1950s tract house to the ample homes on Longwood Drive, Bever/_}~ on Chi-

cago's Southwest Side, illustrates the diversity common within the suburban _selling. Righi, courtesy of Tim Barton for the Comniission 011 Chicago Landmarks.

8

.....

¡-¡

Nation of Suburbs greenery of the Pare Monceau and the Bois de Boulogne. Country life offered a welcome solitude, and across Europe the privileged classes periodically answered the call of unspoiled nature. And because cities were densely settled even poorer citizens could walk to rural surroundings ¡less than a mile distant from even the largest cities.

Thus the suburb as a residential place, as the site of scattered dwellings and businesses outside city walls, is as old as civilization and an important part of the ancient and medieval urban traditions. Suburbanization as a process, as a lifestyle involving commutation between home and work, however, occurred first in Great Britain and the United States, where it can be dated from about 1815. In the following half century London, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago experienced the most extensive changes on their residential peripheries yet witnessed in the world.

This thematic issue of Chicago History is devoted to the origins and early development of the Anglo-American suburb. This topic is of special importance because people everywhere always have expressed their true nature more clearly by the way they have treated and arranged shelter than by other products of the creative arts. As Lewis Mumford has noted, "the building of houses constitutes the major architectural work of any civilization." Obviously, the particular type of structures that results is a function of the interrelationship of technology, cultural norms, population pressures, land values, and social relationships, but within even rigid environmental and technological restraints a variety of physical patterns is possible. Work, religion, and family life may all be conducted within a single space or in separate, specialized structures.

Whether that pattern emphasizes togetherness, as in Vienna, or separation, as in contemporary America, is a matter of choice. The 250,000 Dogons of Mali in West Africa, for example, thus far have resisted centuries of change. So fierce is their reputation that Christian missionaries and proselytizing Moslems have written off the Dogons as hopeless. Anthropologists note that the Dogon house-compound symbolically represents the cosmological principles of creation particular to the Dogon.

In the United States it is almost a truism to

observe that the residential pattern is suburban.

The 1980 census revealed that about 40 percent of the national population lived in the suburbs, a higher proportion than resided either in rural areas or in central cities. Chicago offers a good example of the trend. Since 1950 the city itself has suffered a net loss of more than 600,000 residents while the surrounding Cook and Lake counties suburbs together have gained well over a million inhabitants. Although Chicago is famous for its skyscrapers, its industries, and its universities, sprawling suburbs and shopping malls are more representative of its contemporary form.

As elsewhere in the United States, suburbia is a manifestation of such fundamental characteristics of modern society as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the privately owned automobile, upward mobility, the breakdown of the family into nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness.

The term suburb is of course vague. The word alone is enough to unleash myths. Only a few people have tried to give it concrete expression.

Columnist Erma Bombeck noted a few years ago: "Suburbs are small, controlled communities where for the most part everyone has the same living standards, the same weeds, the same number of garbage cans, the same house plan, and the same level in their septic tanks." Russell Baker has added, only partially in jest, that either America is a shopping center or the one shopping center in existence is moving around the country at the speed of light.

The stereotype is real, and it emphasizes uniformity, bicycles, station wagons, and patios. It has been sustained because it conforms to the wishes of people on both sides of the political spectrum. For the right, it affirms that there is an "American way of life" to which all citizens can aspire. To the left, the myth of suburbia has been a convenient way of attacking a wide variety of national problems, from excessive conformity to ecological destruction.

Scholars reject the stereotype, but have not come to any consensus. Indeed, a moment of reflection will show how stubbornly the concept defies definition. As metropolitan areas have become a sprawl, suburban ways increasingly have become the ways of people everywhere-or nowhere special. Legal boundaries only add to 9

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Large houses on large lots, here in Oak Park, represent an extreme expression of the American suburban ideal. Europea11 suburbs seldom allowed for such spaciousness.

the confusion. Highland Park in Detroit, Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, and the Park Cities in Dallas are technically independent and yet completely surrounded by large cities. River Oaks in Houston, Beverly in Chicago, and Fieldston in the Bronx are exclusive neighborhoods that are suburban in every way except legal status.

Similarly, the physical size of cities follows no logical pattern. Newark, New Jersey, stuffed into just 23 square miles, is so tiny that a walk of a few blocks from the center of downtown can take one to another city.Jacksonville, Florida, by contrast, has about the same population as Newark, but it sprawls over an area forty times as large, with the result that much of Jacksonville's 850 square miles has the appearance of uncharted swamp and jungle.

Even if we restrict our attention to those com10

mumt1es that are self-governing, we quickly observe that American suburbs come in every type, size, and shape. Hillsborough outside San Francisco and Kennilworth outside Chicago boast of average home prices approaching $400,000, while Camden, New Jersey and East St. Louis, Illinois are so depressed that their abandonment problems are among the most serious in the nation. Dozens of peripheral communities (like Harvey and Hammond) are heavily industrial, while others (like Flossmoor and Barrington Hills) have such rigid zoning restrictions that virtually all apartments are excluded from their quiet precincts. Some suburbs, like Cambridge and New Rochelle, are older than Philadelphia; in contrast, planned communities like Reston, Columbia, and Irvine are alm.ost new. Ethnic suburbs remain common. Chicago's environs

Nation of Suburbs alone include Polish Cicero, .Jewish Skokie, black Robbins, and waspish Lake Forest, as well as places like Oak Park and Evanston that take pride in their ethnic heterogeneity.

Despite such extraordinary diversity it is possible to generalize about the Ame1·ican residential experience. Many readers will deny this assumption on regional grounds, arguing that the differences between new and growing Sunbelt cities and older, industrial metropolises are so basic that they constitute two different phenomena. American cities do vary greatly because of the vastness of the country and because of the type of transportation system that was dominant at the time of their greatest growth. But having lived in all of the major regions of the United States and having visited most of its large cities, I regard the similarities among suburbs as more impressive than the differences, especially when age, distance from the city, and socio-economic class are taken into account. To the extent that distinctiveness is noticeable it often runs counter to what we would normally expect. Thus , the average lot size for a new suburban home was much smaller in subw·ban Los Angeles in the 1970s than in suburban Chicag·o.

The essential similarities in American subu1·ban ization become clear when we shift to an international perspective. The United States thus far has been unusual in three important respects: afnucnt and middle-class Americans live far from downtown areas , in homes that they own, and in the center of yards that by standards elsewhere arc enormous. This uniqueness thus involves density, home ownership, and residential status.

The first distinguishing element of metropolitan a1·eas in this nation is their low residential density. The American people arc scattered even in the larg·est conurbations at average densities of fewer than ten persons per acre. As early as 1873, Everett Chamberlin noted: Chicago, for its size, is more given to suburbs than any other city in the world. In fact, it is doubtful if any city of any size, can boast an equal number of suburban appendages. The number of suburbs of all sorts contiguous to Chicago is nearly a hundred , and they aggregate a population of 50,000 or more, represented by 5,000 or 6.000 heads of families, all of whom do busin~ss in the city, and form a large per cent of the passenger· list of the 100 or mo1·e trains that enter and leave the city daily.

As Michael Ebner demonstrates later in this issue,

Chicago's spread over hundred · and finally thousands of square miles began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dcconcentration then, as now, was largely the product of the privatization of American Ii fe and of the tendency to live in fully -detached houses. By 1980 more than two-thirds of the 86.4 million dwelling units in the United States consisted of a single family living in a singfo structure surrounded by an ornamental yard.

More crowded urban conditions, which arc sharply differentiated from the countt·ysidc, arc more common in other nations . Copenhagen, Moscow, Cologne, and Vienna abruptly terminate with apartment buildings , and a twenty minute train ride will take one well into the countryside. Similarly, open fields surround the narrow streets and crowded houses of Siena and Florence. The example of Sweden, which has a standard of living comparable to the U nitcd States, is particularly revealing. Since 1950 new towns have sprouted around Stockholm, but the highrisc , high-density, low-amenity Swedish suburbs (such as Vallingby, nine miles west of the city center, and l<a1·sta, six miles to the south) with their immigrant concentrations and their strong dependence upon public transportation, arc the physical antithesis of the low-density, automobiledependent suburbs in the United States.

The second distinguishing residential characteristic of American culture is a strong penchant for home ownership. This is best expressed statistically. About two-thirds of Americans own their dwellings , a proportion which rises to th1·cefourths of AFL-CIO union members , to 85 percent of all two-person households headed by a forty-five to sixty-five-year-old, and to 95 percent of intact white families in small cities.

Overall, the American rate i about double that of Germany, Switzerland, France, Great Britain , and Norway. The example of Sweden is again instructive. There only about a third of families own either a mortgaged or a debt-free home , a proportion that has remained fairly stable since 1945, a period of unprecedented prosperity.

The third and most distinguishing characteristic of our housing pattern is the socio-economic distinction between the center and the periphery.

In the United States, with a few well-publicized exceptions like the Gold Coast of-Chicago, status and income are statistically correlated with the 11

Chicago History, Summer 1984 suburbs, which provide the bedrooms for an overwhelming proportion of the college-educated public, of those engaged in professional pursuits, and of all those in the upper-income brackets.

The situation elsewhere in the world provides a striking contrast. In 1976, for example, the wreck of a crowded commuter train near Johannesburg killed thirty-one persons, all but two of whom were black. The racial proportions of that tragedy were but a reflection of the fact that in the Union of South Africa the oppressed black population has a long rush-hour journey to work, while the inner city is reserved for the gracious homes of the privileged white minority. The South African government forbids the building of houses on the immediate outskirts of major cities. Twenty-five miles north of Pretoria, however, a sea of shanties made of scraps and wrappings, sometimes consolidated with metal bars, dominates the environment. Officially the site is not recognized, but such settlements in Winterveld accommodate between 500,000 and 700,000 people. Similarly, a few miles from the elegance and comfort of Cape Town, 20,000 black migrants have built illicit shanties from wooden planks, fiberboard, and plastic sheeting in a suburban slum called Crossroads.

Developing countries exhibit similar characteristics. In Cairo the Europeanized and affluent Garden City section lies along the Nile River almost at the center of the metropolis; the major slums are on the northeastern and southern fringes. In Turkey if a person can erect four walls and a roof on vacant land overnight he traditionally becomes its owner. As a result, gerry-built night houses, or gecekondu, have emerged on the edges of Ankara and Instanbul. In Calcutta the only area with a passable water supply is at the center where the wealthy live. The depths of squalor can be found in the 3,000 legally-defined slum districts, known as bustees, which rim the city.

Western European neighborhoods have not lost their cachet just because modern residential subdivisions have been developed. The highest socio-economic sections of Rome, Barcelona, and Vienna are near the business district; suburban areas are usually lower grade in character. In Amsterdam affluence characterizes the old center, where rows of restored seventeenth-century townhouses line the placid concentric canals.

The core has preserved its historical aura and 12

vitality, but the working class has increasingly been forced outward to the suburbs. In Paris class distinctions tend to be set geographically east or west of the Seine River. The western suburbsBoulogne, Beuilly, Saint Cloud, Meridon, Sevres, and Chaville- became fashionable in the nineteenth centm-y and remain solidly middle-class in 1984, but the increasingly Portuguese and Algerian inner suburbs of the north and east, from St. Denis through Aubervilliers and les Lilas south almost to the Bois de Vincennes, have long been known as "red suburbs" because of their tendency to vote communist and socialist.

South American cities also differ markedly from their neighbors to the north. In Brazil the exclusion of slum dwellers from the urban cores is so rooted in the culture that the Portuguese word used to describe them is marginais, meaning "those on the margin," and the word used to describe their arrival is invasao, or "invasion."

Pastel-colored squatter settlements, called favellas after the name of a flowering tree that grows in profusion on the hillsides, surround sa-o Paulo and Recife. In Rio de Janeiro, the coaches full of tourists heading for the Sepetiba Gulf must pass the shacks at Rocinha, one of 300 favellas scattered around the city. No one knows for sure how many inhabit this shantytown of the Cariocas, but census takers estimate from aerial photographs that the population is between 100,000 and 120,000. Similarly in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City, and Lima, the most degrading poverty is to be found on the outskirts, where flush toilets, sewers, running water, and fire and police protection are virtually unknown.

In Caracas, the richest city on the continent, the mountains surrounding it are dotted with hovels, while the elegant country club district is lower in the valley and closer to town.

The four major essays in this collection attempt to explain the divergence of the Anglo-American experience from that of the rest of the world.

Robert Fishman persuasively documents the important and necessary London antecedents of the American suburban experience, while Ronald Karr and Michael Ebner trace the nineteenth century development of two of the premier residential suburbs of the United StatesBrookline and Evanston.

Rather than summarize or criticize the rich findings of the subsequent essays, I will offer

Nation of Suburbs

Elh11ic suburbs remain commo11 i11 Chicago. H ere, predominantly Polish Cicero.

instead a broad-ranging personal interpretation of the causes and future of American suburbanization. Foreign visitors to this country are fascinated by our slums and see in them a fundamental paradox of our national life. How is it that a rich, powerful, and technologically sophisticated country can tolerate such inefficiency, such poverty, and such contrasts? Why have we neglected our cities and concentrated so much of our energy, our creativity, and our vitality in the suburbs? Clearly no single answer can be held accountable for such an important phenomenon, but I would argue that there were two necessary conditions for American residential deconcentration, the suburban ideal and population growt~ , and two fundamental causes, racial prejudice and cheap housing.

The first necessary condition for the unusual residential dispersal of the American people is a national distrust of urban life and of communal living. This "suburban ideal" has been part of an intellectual tradition which dates back more than

two centuries and which began glorifying homes just outside the city in the 1840s. The aspirations and satisfactions experienced by the family in one of Andrew Jackson Downing's pre-Civil War Gothic cottages are not so different from the aspirations and satisfactions of the contemporary suburbanite. The dream of a detached house in a safe, quiet, and peaceful place has been an important part of the Anglo-American past and a potent force in the development of suburbs. In comparison with the German, Dutch, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish cultures, the English and the Americans never have placed a high value on urbanity and group interaction.

The suburban ideal, while a necessary precondition for deconcentration, is not unique to natives of the United States, however, despite their frequently professed reverence for country life. Immigrants from many lands exhibited a similar propensity for suburban home ownership, and, as Stephan Thernstrom, Roger Simon, and Olivier Zunz have demonstrated,

13

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Mass production oft he automobile, cheap fuel, and better roads helped create the new suburban way of life i,z the 1920s. This view of the Oak Park Arms Hotel in 1925 offers an e,zduri11g medley of suburban images: cars, tree-lined streets, and a procession of baby carriages. Photograph by C.R. Childs.

Polish-, German-, and Irish-Americans occasionally had higher home ownership rates than native born Americans.

The second necessary condition for American suburbanization was massive and sustained urban population growth . In 1800 only Philadelphia and New York had as many as 50,000 residents, and both were concentrated within areas of less than two square miles. But American cities virtually exploded in the nineteenth century, a time when only Great Britain experienced a comparable urbanization rate. By 1890 the Bureau of the Census could announce that the Western frontier was no more. Now, as the Reverend Samuel Lane Loomis told that year's graduating class at Andover Theological Seminary, Americans were living in "an age of great cities." In that year, the nation's population was already one-third urban and the population in the Northeast was more 0

14

than half urban. With 2 million inhabitants, New York was already the second largest city in the world, and Chicago and Philadelphia each contained about a million inhabitants. Places like Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Birmingham, which hardly existed in 1840, had become major regional metropolises. The urban trend continued in the twentieth century, and by 1980 the census bureau credited thirty-eight metropolitan areas with populations of more than a million persons. But instead of growing vertically and residentially more dense, American cities spread horizontally.

Rapid population growth does not explain the deconcentration of the United States, however.

Dozens of Latin American and African cities have experienced urban explosions as spectacular as any in this country without duplicating the dispersed pattern of a Chicago or a Los Angeles.

Nation of Suburbs Rather, I would argue that the fundamental causes of suburbanization have been racial and economic.

No discussion of the settlement patterns of the American people can ignore the overriding significance of race. In comparison with the relative homogeneity of Denmark, Germany, England, or Japan , the cities of the United States, and particularly the larger metropolises, have long been extraordinarily diverse. In suburban terms, this has provided an extra incentive for persons to move away from their older domiciles - fear.

After the mass migration of blacks from the South g¡ained momentum during World War I, and especially after the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, millions of families moved out of the city ¡'for the kids" and especially for the educational (as measured by standardized test scores) and social (as measured by family income) superiority of smaller and more homogeneous suburban school systems. In their understandable preoccupation with improving the status and opportunities of minorities, civil rights activists and federal judges were unconcerned with the impact of racial change on cities and suburbs. Ordinary people, however, were concerned, and because they loved and feared for their children, they simply speeded up a process that probably would have occurred a few decades later in any case-the middle-class white abandonment of the inner city.

Economic causes have been even more important than skin color in the suburbanization of the United States. Despite common complaints about the high price of housing, the real cost of shelter has been relatively low and affordable. Six factors have brought this about.

The first element has been per capita wealth.

From its earliest day as a nation, the United States has been peculiarly blessed by nature.

Explorers marveled at wealth previously undiscovered. Although income comparisons are not available for the nineteenth century and are crude even in our own time, the best information we have suggests that the American people, at least in material terms, were the wealthiest in the world between 1790 and 1970. In 1949, for example, the American republic, with about 7 percent of the earth's population, had 42 percent of its wealth. Sweden, West Germany, and Switzerland, as well as several oil-producing states, have recently overtaken the United States, but no other

people have enjoyed such abundance over such a long period of time. The real message of America to the world , as David Potter has noted, alway has been economic abundance, not freedom. As a '"people of plenty," Americans could afford the wastefulness of low-density housing on the metropolitan fringe. In contrast, the Japanese have experienced centuries of scarcity, and their national psyche abhors waste. Even the droppings of humans are recycled as fertilizer on the tiny farms of that island nation.

The second component of low cost has been inexpensive land. Although purchasers rarely have regarded real estate as cheap, and some developers quite literally have made millions of dollars on land speculation (Henry Morgenthau in the Bronx and Otis Chandler in Los Angeles are well-known examples), a broader view would reveal that building lots in orth America typically have been priced from one-fourth to onehalf of comparably sized and located parcels in Europe and Japan. Forests and farms never have been in short supply in the United States, and large tracts of land within two or three miles of a construction zone and adjacent to roads and rail lines typically could be purchased at bargain prices, encouraging large-scale, speculative investment. Significantly, the only nations with home-ownership rates equal to the United States are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which also offered the advantage of lowcost plots.

The third component of affordable price has been innovative transportation technology, which has brought home sites within easy commuting range of workplaces. Americans always have manifested remarkable enthusiasm for mechanical gadgetry, and although the omnibus, the steam railroad, the subway, and the automobile were all developed first in Europe, it was in the United States that they were adopted most enthusiastically and where they most immediately affected the lives of ordinary citizens. At any time between 1830 and 1955 American cities provided faster, more frequent, more efficient, and more cost-effective transportation options than communities elsewhere. The mass production of automobiles reinforced the pattern because for the first seventy years of the twentieth century, the real price of both cars and fuel fell while wages rose. Even in 1984 the cost of 15

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Cheap residential construction, . d b,v balloon frame sym bo I1ze .,? huuses (Morgan Park c. _1900), and efficient comntuter rarlways, (Chicago and North Westem Ridgeland station in Oak Park) we.-e key to the rise of suburban living in the nineteenth century.

Right, photograph by John McCarthy.

16

Nation of Suburbs operating an automobile remains cheaper in the United States than in other advanced nations. As Homer Hoyt, the nation's most distinguished demographer before World War II , noted a half century ago: "The location, size and shape of our cities has thus been a function of the transportation system prevailing during its main period of growth."

The fourth component of low cost has been the balloon-frame house. The development of an inexpensive and peculiarly American method of building houses with two-by-four-inch wooden studs simplified construction and brought the price of a private dwelling within the reach of most citizens. Each region of the United States has a favored exterior material for new singlefamily houses-wood clapboard in the Northeast and North Central states, brick in the South, and stucco in the West-just as the British prefer brick and the French choose stucco . But in the United States, more than 90 percent of all singlefamily houses have been of the balloon-frame type for the past century, regardless of exterior sheathing. Such structures are uncommon in other countries, in part because their citizens regard the balloon-frame as flimsy, but also because they lack the timber resources of the heavily forested United States.

A fifth component of low price has been the role of government, particularly at the federal level. The prevailing myth is that the post-war suburbs blossomed because of the preference of consumers who made free choices in an open environment. Actually, as Barry Checkoway has noted , most post-war families were not free to choose among several residential alternatives.

Because of government policies favoring the suburbs only one possibility was economically feasible. The result, if not the intent, of Washington programs has been to encourage decentralization.

FHA and VA mortgage insurance, the highway system, the financing of sewers, the placement of public housing at the center of ghetto neighbm-hoods, and the locational decisions of federal agencies and the Department of Defense, to name only the most obvious examples, have been a powerful spur to suburbanization.

But the most important inducements to singlefamily residences have been contained in the murky provisions of the Internal Revenue Code, and especially in the unusual American practice

of allowing taxpayers to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes from the ir total taxable income. The present income tax in the United States began as the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act and was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. From the beginning, "in terest on indebtedness" and "other taxes" were exempt from taxation. The first tax measure, however, allowed a $4,000 exemption for married persons.

Thus, only half of 1 percent of the American people were obliged to file returns.

As an inducement to home ownership, residential tax benefits first became important in the 1940s, when tax rates were raised substantially to offset the cost of World War II. Their importance in the suburban trend occurs because rental payments are not deductible whereas many housing costs are. Thus, a person renting an apartment (or house) must pay the rent from his net or after tax income, with no deductions of any sort. If the individual is subject to a marginal tax rate of only 25 percent, a rent of $390 per month requires $520 of pre-tax income per month. At a marginal rate of 50 percent, a rent of 600 per month requires $1,200 of pre-tax income. Homeowners are treated more generously. Moreover, because persons with the largest houses typically have the highest interest payments and property taxes, it is they who receive the largest subsidies. According to this system, a $18,000 a year bank teller living in a private apartment earns no housing subsidy. But the $150,000 per year bank president living in a $300,000 home in the suburbs has a veritable laundry list of deductions. All $27,000 in interest payments would be subtracted from income, as well as all 7,000 in property taxes. His $34,000 subtraction would save him approximately $17,000 in taxes, or almost $1,500 per month. Indeed, for high-income professionals it is almost prohibitively expensive to rent and thereby fail to receive the advantages of favorable tax treatment. Thus, it happens that the average housing subsidy in an elite suburb will exceed by several times the average subsidy to a welfare family in the inner city.

The size of this subsidy to home ownership is staggering and exceeds by four or five times all the direct expenditures Congress grants to housing. In 1981 deductions for property taxes and for interest payments on mortgages added up to a federal subsidy of $39 billion, and by 1984 the 17

Chicago History, Summer 1984

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The ex tension of horse-drawn and later electric streetcars and the extension of suburbia went hand in hand. In this advertisement, city dwellers were lured with the promise of efficie nt transportation, the amenities of schools and churches, low house prices-and 110 city taxes.

18

Nation of Suburbs total had risen to $53 billion per year. Economists even argue that if the homeowner were governed by the rules applicable to an investor in other assets, then he would have to pay taxes on the imputed rent he receives as a landlord from a tenant, who happens to be himself but who could' be anyone. These tax benefits make it increasingly likely, as taxable income rises, that home ownership will be preferred to renting.

And with each passing year, the personal income tax becomes a more important factor in the financing and location of housing. Simply put, the Internal Revenue Code finances the continued growth of suburbia.

Federal, state, ~nd local governments in the United States also have been influential through what they have not done. In Europe the national and municipal governments have traditionally exercised stringent controls over land development, and they have operated on the theory that the preservation of farms and open space is an appropriate national goal and that suburban spraw l is undesireable. In Germany truck farmers tend their crops within 2,000 yards of the skyscrapers of Dusseldorf, the richest city on the continent, not because alternative land uses would not yield a higher return , but because the government rejects the very possibility of development. In Great Britain the Town and Country Planning Act (and subsequent legislation) laid the foundations for effective land planning by restricting suburban growth. The English have been so successful in this regard that the rate of farmland conversion to residential use has actually been lower since World War II than it was in the 1930s. In the United States, by contrast, the essential agents of growth have been individual investors working with privately owned parcels.

The building effort has been unregulated in the European sense of that term.

The sixth and final economic factor encouraging suburbanization has been the capitalistic system itself. One need not be a Marxist to observe that outward residential growth in North America coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism and the separation of the population into extremes of wealth and poverty. The free enterprise system provided incentives to land speculators, subdivision developers, building contractors, realtors, and lending institutions.

When the economic system went into cyclical

decline, as it did in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1970s, the construction of new housing and the movement of population to peripheral areas slowed.

These six economic factors , along with racial prejudice and a pervasive fondness for grass and solitude, made private and detached houses affordable and desireable to the middle class and produced a spread-out environment of work, residence, and consumption that has been thus far more pronounced in the United States than elsewhere.

The Future In 1968 the distinguished Columbia sociologist Herbert J. Gans wrote in the New York Times Magazine that "nothing can be predicted quite so easily as the continued proliferation of suburbia."

More recently, futurists have been predicting that electronic information technology will make traditional cities obsolete as communication costs drop (whether through computer modems or cheaper telephone rate) while transportation costs remain relatively high. A 1982 report by the Institute for the Future (under contract with the National Science Foundation) suggested that one-way and two-way home information systems, called teletext and videotext, will penetrate deeply into daily life, making the home a place of employment as both men and women conduct much of their work at a computer terminal. Jack Niles, a senior research associate at the University of Southern California, said that while there were only 10,000 to 20,000 telecommuters in the country in 1983, most of them part-time, the number would jump to almost 10 million by the end of the 1980s. Concentrations of people will presumably be unnecessary as more and more social interaction takes place through the medium of electronic circuitry.

Such predictions, I think, will be proved wrong in the next quarter century. While there are some thriving pockets of telecommuters, these tend to be populated by highly individualistic writers and programmers, or by consultants who are just striking out on their own and like the low overhead of a home office. Companies that have tried systematically installing terminals in workers' homes largely have abandoned their experiments in the face of employee discontent. Most have discovered that their best employees miss the normal social interchange with their "second 19

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Planned developments, thoug h m ore common in E urope, were know n i11 A m e,,ca as well. The developers of Chicago sMayuâ&#x20AC;˘ood boasted free ly that their suburb offered buyers comprehensive am e11ities that cam e to be associated with ea rly suburba 11 living.

family" in the office. The companies themselves have found that by removing executives from the mainstream they miss hearing rumors and news and stumbling into old friends and poten-¡ tial business contacts.

Instead of an even more deconcentrated nation , I would argue that the long process of suburbanization, which has been operative in the United States since about 1810, will slow over the next two decades and that a new kind of spatial equilibrium will result early in the next century.

Quite simply, there are powerful economic and demographic forces which will tend to undercut the decentralizing process.

The most important limiting factor involves energy. Until October 17, 1973 when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), meeting in Kuwait, decided to raise the price of their oil by 70 percent, suburban homeowners took for granted that petroleum, like the wind and the rain, would always be there when they needed it. When the Arabs imposed an embargo 20

on oil supplies to the United States and the Netherlands, Israel's two strongest allies, in 1973, however, Americans first realized that th eir lowd e nsity lifestyle was dangerou sly d e p e nd ent upon ch eap fuel. In fact, as noted previously, the real cost of en ergy, adjusted for inflation , fell be tween 1900 and 1973.

In terms of oil, low prices meant high consumption. In 1979, after yet anoth er and larger OPEC price hike, American s still consum ed an average of 1.4 gallons per person , per day, compared with .3 for Western Europe and .2 for .

J apan . In 1983, following the fed eral government's additional 5 cent p er gallon levy, United States gasoline taxes remained below 20 cents per gallon , compared to figures typically eight times that high in other advanced countries.

And most of the 19 cents was going to the Highway Trust Fund to maintain exi sting roads.

Usage varies considerably by state. In Texas, where the pickup truck is a substitute for the cowboy's horse, where distances are great, and

Nation of Suburbs where railroads cross urban streets at grade (Houston has 1,000 such crossings while New York City has none) , gasoline consumption was 671 gallons per person in 1980, the highest among major states. In New York, where the population is more concentrated and where public transportation is he~vily patronized, gasoline consumption was only 349 gallons per capita, the lowest of the states. These figures illustrate the obvious: the closer residences are to workplaces and services the greater will be the savings on fossil fuels for transportation. One estimate for the District of Columbia suggests that continued urban sprawl in the region by 1997 would lead to a 60 percent increase in gasoline consumption over 1975.

The nature of the dwelling also has a substantial impact upon energy consumption. The basic principle is that the less exterior wall and roof space per unit, the less energy will be needed for heating and cooling. Thus, a row house with party walls will consume 30 percent less energy and an apartment 50 percent less than a fully detached house with all four walls exposed to the elements. Together with the high cost of land, such calculations have led to a late twentieth century American return to the row house, now given the more pretentious title of townhouse or condominium.

In 1983 the word "glut" replaced "crisis" in most discussion of oil, and the memory of predawn gasoline lines faded. But the world 's reserves of oil are definitely limited, and , according to Humberto Calderon Berti, energy minister of Venezuela and president of OPEC in 1980, may be exhausted as early as 2010. Regardless of how much oil remains under the earth, there is really only one important question: is the real cost of energy in relation to disposable income going to go up or down? The answer, unfortunately, is up, because the development costs of finding and extracting oil are increasing dramatically as the world draws off oil from the easily established oil fields. And because most fossil fuels lie beneath the politically volatile Middle East, it is probably a delusion to believe that the industrial world can ever return to the days of energy abundance.

Thus, the maintenance of our current suburban lifestyle will not only require a dependence upon attenuated oil supplies, but an increasing reliance upon such hazardous energy sources as

nuclear power plants and liquid natural gas.

A second economic constraint on the continued proliferation of suburbia involves the cost of land. In the United States, the percentage of a home price devoted to the purchase of real estate itself rose from 11 percent in 1948 to 29 percent in 1982. As we noted earlier, the availability of inexpensive building plots was an essential precondition for the rapid deconcentration of the American metropolis.

A third economic constraint of future suburbanization involves the cost of money. Before 1975 individual savers were willing to accept low interest payments for passbook accounts, the bulk of which was lent out to homebuyers. Since 1977, however, virtually all substantial savers have been putting their liquid assets into some sort of money market fund. For generations, passbook depositers essentially subsidized home ownership because they had no alternative to the low-interest passbook accounts . Federal legislation now guarantees that amounts as low as $500 have access to high-yielding returns. It is therefore not likely that Americans will ever again have access to home loans at below market rates.

A fourth factor inhibiting further deconcentration involves building technology. Since the development of the balloon-frame house in the nineteenth century, technological change in the residential construction sector has lagged behind other sectors of the economy, and restrictive building codes continue to retard the introduction of more prefabricated techniques in the United States, which now is less advanced than Europe in developing inexpensive construction methods.

There have been some evolutionary changesprefabricated roof trusses, kitchen cabinets, and whole bathroom drop-in cores- but their impact upon overall costs has been slight. Not surprisingly, the median price paid for a new home in the United States rose from $45,000 in 1977 to $74,000 in 1982.

Finally, it is appropriate to note that the federal government, which did so much to spur suburbanization after World War II, began to stress conservation, rehabilitation, and mass transit with the passage of the Community Development Act of 1974. Although President Reagan has attempted to reverse some of these initiatives, proposals to build new highway~ and to encourage dispersal do not find a sympathetic ear even 21

Chicago History, Summer 1984 in the White House. The interstate system is 99 percent complete, and there are no new circumferential expressways on the drawing boards.

Indeed, we will do well to maintain the roads we already have.

In addition to these economic factors, race will become less important as a distinguishing characteristic between cities and suburbs. Black suburbanization became a major phenomenon in the 1970s as more minorities entered the American middle class and as legal decisions, such as the Mount Laurel judgement in New Jersey and the New Castle case in New York, began requiring suburban communities to accept a "fair share" of the disadvantaged populations in their areas.

Moreover, the migration of blacks to northern cities has come to a virtual end. Indeed, more than 80 percent of the black population is already urban, indicating that shifts on the scale of that experienced earlier in the century will not be possible. A rise in the average age of city residents, and in particular a reduction in the number of male teenagers most prone to felonious assault, will lead to a further drop in the crime rates of central cities. The impetus to suburban movement caused by these forces will be proportionately reduced.

Even if the oil crisis is, as President Reagan insists, more a matter of manipulation than of supply, and even if the stocks of oil are adequate for the twenty-first century, there are many signs that the halcyon days of the suburb and especially of the automobile lie behind us. Abandoned gasoline stations have proliferated in the past decade, as 20 percent of the retail outlets in 1973 have abandoned their pumps. Empty tourist courts are reminders that the fast pace of change can make commercial structures obsolete within a quarter-century of their erection. Even that suburban bell weather, the shopping center, which revolutionized merchandising after World War II, has come to seem small and out-of-date as newer covered malls attract both the trendy and the family trade. Some older centers have been recycled into bowling alleys or industrial buildings, and some have been remodeled to attract larger tenants and better-heeled customers. Many others stand forlorn and boarded up. Similarly, the characteristic fast food emporiums of the 1950s, with uniformed "car hops" who took orders at the automobile window, are now 22

relics of the past. One of the survivors, Delores Drive-In, which opened in Beverly Hills in 1946, was recently proposed as an historic landmark, a sure sign that the species is in danger.

Because structures built to accommodate the demands of the automobile are likely to have an ephemeral life, it is a mistake for cities to duplicate suburban conditions. In 1973 a RAND study of St. Louis suggested as an alternative strategy that the city become "one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life" rather than try to revive traditional central city functions. That sort of advice comes from people who study statistics rather than cities. Too late municipal leaders will realize that a slavish duplication of suburbia will destroy the urban fabric which makes cities unique. Memphis's Union Avenue, once a grand boulevard lined with the homes of the well-to-do, recently has fallen victim to the drive-in culture. In 1979 one of the last surviving houses, a beautifully landscaped stone mansion, was leveled to make room for yet another fast food outlet. Within three years, the plastic and glass hamburger emporium was bankrupt, but the scar on Union Avenue remained.

The urban cycle recently has caught up with the inner suburbs. Many are already encountering fiscal, educational, racial, and housing crises as severe as those which troubled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s. In these aging areas, a stable tax base coupled with increased service costs necessitated by a more elderly and less affluent population have put heavy pressure on revenues. Although there never has been a monolithic suburban experience in the United States, from Pasadena and Santa Ana in California to New Rochelle and Mount Vernon in New York, major twentieth-century problems can now be seen to have an important suburban dimension.

Even in the booming Washington metropolitan area, every single jurisdiction within the Capital Beltway lost population in the 1970s, while every area beyond the circumferential roadway continued to grow. The shibboleth of newness contained the seeds of its own destruction.

As the suburban world begins to experience unmistakable signs of decay, both central cities and rural areas are making a comeback. Although statistics of population, jobs, and income do not support the thesis that a back-to-the-city movement has reversed the century and a half old

Nation of Suburbs

The nature of a later suburban age was shaped by the near universal ownership of the autom obile. Whether the dn¡ve-i11, self-serve world that g rew up i11 the late 1950s and 1960s will survive rocketing fu el costs and land vahtes remains to be see 11 . For rtow, this part of the suburbart la11dscape see ms finnly with us.

suburban trend, the gentrification of older neighborhoods may be the harbinger of major demographic changes in the next two decades. The earliest indications of an urban re vival came in the Georgetown section of Washington in the 1920s, and soon thereafter the renovation of brownstones in Brooklyn Heights became a fashionable pursuit. Since 1965 important sections of Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Baltimore have witnessed a reversal of the typical urban growth model as upperstatus newcomers have replaced lower-income households. In New York , the form e r stables of Washington Mews have becom e chic residences; in Brookl yn , renovation has spread from Park Slope to Fort Greene and Carroll Gardens ; and in Charleston , former slave quarters have become fancy apartments. The tran sition has been so marked in Washington, esp ecially on Capitol Hill , that black citizens have begun to form block associations to resist white invasions. Even Los

Angeles, which has long been satirized as a city without a center, has begun developing a true, high-rise downtown business district. Population density in central Los Angeles has increased almost 40 percent since 1950, and there is a palpable sense of energy downtown, where more than 5,000 new apartments were built in 1982 alone.

Another signal that the United States may be entering a post-suburban age comes from the countryside. According to the 1980 census, small town and rural America, after 170 years of consistent decline, is making a comeback. Indeed, metropolitan areas have been lagging behind rural regions since 1975.

I would argue, therefore, that suburbanization is best seen as part of an urban growth developmental model. The spatial arrangement of cities depends less on ideology than on economics, less on national idiosyncracies than on industrial development, technological achievement, 23

Chicago Hist01y, Summer 1984

Not all suburbs in Chicago or anywhere else lived up to the verdant image of this shady street in Eva11s/011, but all imitated it and as they did so they created the diverse suburban world we know today.

24

Nati'on of Suburbs and racial integration. Thus, American cities are not so much different from as ahead of those in other countries, and we might expect cities elsewhere to follow the "North American" pattern just as soon as they have enough automobiles, highways, and disposable wealth to make it work.

Recent changes in Europe support the thesis that suburbanization is less culturally induced than dependent upon technology and affluence.

Split-level and colonial houses have been popular in England since the mid 1970s, Houstonstyle traffic congestion is choking European cities from Helsinki to Barcelona, and rich industrial families in Turin have been leaving the city for the safety of the neighboring hills. In Sweden, single-family home construction has recently begun to dominate the market, and in Paris, middle-, and upper-income professionals are now suburbanizing in the direction of Versailles. Even the fashionable Copacabana district on Rio de Janeiro's oceanfront has been yielding prestige to the newer neighborhoods of Ipanema, Leblon, and Barra Da Tijuca farther out from the central city. This conforms to Leo F. Schnore's prediction in 1965 that Latin Americans would tend in the direction of their United States counterparts.

No other nation, however, is likely ever to be as uburban as the United States is now, if only because their economic resources and prospects are even more limited than the American republic. Thus, the United States is not only the world's first suburban nation, but it will also be its last.

The extensive deconcentration of the American people was the result of a set of circumstances that will not likely be duplicated elsewhere.

Whatever the shape of the future, either in the Old World or in the new, no amount of urban gentrification or rural revival can obscure the fact that suburbanization has been the outstanding residential characteristic of American life.

The process may slow in the next half century as rising energy costs encourage higher population densities and less sprawl, and as "urban" problems of crime and obsolescence become typical of the inevitably aging suburbs. But the national cultural preference for privacy, for the detached home on its own plot, will not easily be eroded. Charles F. Kettering, after Thomas Edison perhaps America's most important inventor and engineer, thought studying history was a waste of time. Arguing that "you never get anywhere

looking in your rearview mirror," he preferred to focus on the future because, he added, "we will have to spend the rest of our lives there." Kettering was wrong. Decisions made in the past impose powerful restraints on the futtu-e. The location of buildings, of streets, and of highway systems imposes a measure of permanence on the form of community. Quite simply the investment costs of building are so great that no generation could afford to replace old fabric with new; adaptation of the old has always been dominant. As H.M. Dyos and M. Wolff have noted: "Inertia is part of the dynamic of urban change: the structures outlast the people who put them there, and impose constraints on those who have to adapt them later to thei1· own use."

The framework of growth, therefore, however hastily devised, tends to become the permanent structure. For better or for worse the American suburb is a remarkable and probably lasting achievement. The words of an anonymous English jingle of the 1870s are apposite: The richest crop for any field Is a crop of bricks for it to yield.

The richest crop that it can grow, Is a crop of houses in a row.

For Further Reading This essay is a much abbreviated version of a forthcoming book by Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Fronlier: The Suburbanization of the United Stales ( ew York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Previous articles on this subject by the same author include: '·Urban Deconcentration in the Nineteenth Century: A Statistical Inquiry," in Leo F. Schnore, editor, The New Urban History: Quantilative Explorations by Amen·can Histon·a11s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975): 110-142; "The Effect of Suburbanization on the Cities," in Philip C. Dolce, editor, Suburbia: The American Dream and Dilemma (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976): 89-110; ·'Race, Ethnicity and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration,"Jou.mal of Urban History (August, 1980): 419--452; "The Crabgrass Frontier: 150 Years of Suburban Growth in America," in Raymond A. Mohl and James F. Richardson, editors, The Urban Experience: Themes i11 A nie1ican History (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1973): 196--221; and "Metropolitan Government Yer ·us Suburban Autonomy; Politics on the Crabgrass Frontier." in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz, editors, Cilies in American Hislo,y (New Yo1·k: Knopf, 1972): 442-462.

25

View of flromley, so11thwesl ofLondon, in the mid-e1ghtee11th century.

of his classic d e piction of London in 1685, Thomas Babington Macaulay found it necessary to remind his readers of 1849 that "the town did not , as now, fade by imperceptible degrees into the country. No long avenues of villas, embowered in lilacs and laburnums, extended from the great center of wealth ...."

Instead , even the richest merchants and their families lived in the crowded center of the City of London in houses which were also their offices, shops, or warehouses. Since 1685, Macaulay comments, the "chiefs of the mercantile interests" have removed their families to "suburban country seats surrounded by shrubberies and flower gardens ...

Lombard Street and Threadneedle Street are merely places where men toil and accumulate.

They go elsewhere to enjoy and to expend.'"

This division between districts where men "toil and accumulate" and others where they and their families "enjoy and expend" was already obvious in Macaulay's London and has become even more ubiquitous in our own time. Nothing has done more to hasten this urban transformation than the emergence of the mod ern suburb: the singleclass residential district at the edge of a large city whose wage earners commute daily to jobs in the center; the consciously anti-urban haven of domesticity where members of the middle class can enjoy quiet, greenery, and the absence of the lower classes.

Such suburbs were already an important part of the Victorian city, as Macaulay observes and as such recent researchers as H.J. Dyos, F.M.L. Thompson , and Donald Olsen have shown. But the suburb , as I hope to show, was not a Victorian invention. The villas of 1849 "embowered in lilacs and laburnums" were the product of a long process of change which goes back to the eighteenth and even the late seventeenth centuryback to the very London of 1685 that Macaulay depicts in his history.

But how did the suburb emerge out of a city whose most basic principles of organization contradicted the suburban idea? Much of what seems to us most natural about suburbia today was virtually unknown in 1685. First, and most obviously, the seventeenth-century outskirts of London were places the middle class strove to AT TUE BEGINNING

Robert Fishman is associate professor of history at Rutgers University.

26

The Origins of the Suburban-Idea in Engiand

By Robert Fishman

London's suburbs offered shelter from city life for a rising middle class and established part of an enduring suburban tradition.

.,.

Chicago History, Summer 1984 avoid. The word "suburb" then designated a disreputable district to which the poorest urban residents were relegated- places similar in many respects to the shantytowns around Third World cities today. A nineteenth-century antiquarian has left us this description of Cripplegate, a typical seventeenth-century London suburb. It was inhabited, he remarks, by a population of tanners and skinners, catgut makers, tallow melters, dealers in old clothes, receivers of stolen goods, charcoal sellers, maker¡s of sham jewelry, coiners, clippers of coin and silver refiners, who kept their melting pot ready for any silver plate which might come to hand, toilers in noisome trades and dishonest dealers .. .. Forgers of seals, of bills, of writs, professional pick-purses, sharpers and other thieves, conjurors, wizards and fortune tellers, beggars and harlots found a refuge here.

Yet the rise of suburbia meant more than the rich moving to the outskirts and the poor being pushed into central slums. The suburban idea implies a single class of residents and a single function - housing-whereas the eighteenthcentury city was based on the remarkable multiplicity of urban space. The wide social distinctions between classes did not then preclude close physical proximity. John Strype describes the parish of St. Giles in the Fields in the 1740s as a "mixture of rich Inhabitants, to wit, of the Nobility, Gentry, and Commonality, but, withal. filled with Abundance of Poor." Not only was the house of a well-to-do merchant closely surrounded by what one writer described as "Stinking allies, dark gloomy courts, and suffocating Yards ," but in this "medley of neighborhood" the most diverse activities could be found: Here lives a personage of high distinction; next door a butcher with his stinking Shambles! A Tallow-chandler shall be seen from my Lord 's nice Venetian window; and two or three brawny naked Curriers in their Pits shall face a fine Lady in her back Closet, and disturb her spiritual Thoughts.

Even within each structure, this multiplicity continued. It was not only the Spitalfields weaver who lived with his loom or the grocer who lived above his shop. Henry Fielding, for example, established his magistrates' court in the lower front room of his own house. Family space and working space typically interpenetrated, especially since most enterprises were extensions of the family with live-in apprentices and everything 28

from manufacturing to elaborate financial transactions being done "on the premises." Outside the home, the coffeehouse or tavern was not only a place for leisure, but also the place where the merchants in a particular trade gathered for serious bargaining.

Behind this multiplicity of uses one can perceive an environment in which work and leisure themselves intermingled. The family was open to the pressures and hardships of work, but work itself was tempered by its multiple associations with family life and leisure. The suburban removal of the family from this urban matrix was more than a "revolution in domestic habits ," as Macaulay put it. The suburban idea was part of a larger transformation in urban life and form.

Who, then , invented suburbia and why?

I make no claim here to having discovered a hitherto unknown genius - a suburban Christopher Wren-who invented the idea in his study and secretly imposed it on the world .

On the contrary, I have been struck by how little the suburb was the product of conscious planning.

The suburb was the collective invention of the London bourgeoisie, who, through adaptation and trial-and-error, devised a form of housing that suited their ideals of family life and its relation to work and the city. These ideals were not unique to the London merchants and professionals, but they alone had both the numbers and the wealth to impose a new pattern on the environment. And London itself, unconstricted by its old walls, traditionally open to expansion into the countryside, was a uniquely favorable site for the experiment.

In attempting to outline the evolution of the suburban idea and discuss some of its implications for urban and cultural history, I discern three stages in this evolution. The first is the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonization of the London countryside by residents of the city who built villas for their use on weekends and in the summers; the second stage is the mid-eighteenth-century trend among wealthy merchants to make their villas their yearround family residence while continuing to commute daily to the city by private carriage; and finally, the conscious imitation of this "villa style" by land developers around London who laid out their estates not as urban streets or squares but as "villages" of detached or semi-detached

Suburban England virtue, they could easily attain to as much happiness as could be attained here below.

By the mid-eig htee nth century th e connection betwee n the suburban ,,ii/a and elevated social status was already well established. But suburban living was subject even then to fashionable ridicule, as r"n

H ogarth 's fam ous cartoon "The Man of Taste."

houses. First seen in the 1790s, the speculator's village achieved its definitive form in John Nash's Park Village of 1824.

The Villa in the Village A specter haunts the Victorian suburban house and even the twentieth-century tract house: the ghost of the classical villa. It is, of course, a long process of descent and diminution from Pliny the Younger's mansion to the contemporary builder's Mediterranean modern split-level; but the classical villa expresses in its pure form the ideal which is essential to the suburban dreamthe dream of a life of civilization and ease in the midst of nature. The Renaissance revived the ideal , and Palladio gave it enduring architectural form . He called his great Villa Rotonda a villasuburbana because it was a villa outside the city walls intended for refreshment and contemplation: The ancient sages commonly used to retire to such places, whe,-e being oftentimes visited by their virtuous fri ends and relations, having houses, gardens, fountains, and such like pleasant places, and above all their

Inigo Jones first brought the Palladian ideal back to England in the early seventeenth century; by 1720 the style was enshrined in Lord Burlington's villa at Chiswick, a free copy of the Villa Rotonda itself. Combining the prestige of the landed estate with the aura of classical associations, the villa was especially attractive to the newly rich who possessed no "ancestral acres" and wished to maintain their ties to London.

The banks of the Thames above London soon were lined with elaborate villas until Horace Walpole-who purchased his Strawberry Hill in 1749-could call the Thames "our Brenta."

The fashion spread remarkably quickly to the London bourgeoisie and even to the ordinary tradesman. A satirical journal of 1753 describes a lawyer who "grew ambitious of introducing himself to the world as a man of taste and pleasure: for which purpose he put an edging of lace on his servants' waistcoats, took to keeping a brace of whores, and resolved to have a VILLA." John Strype observes that "merchants and tradesmen" of the first rank possess "seats in the country, whither they retire the latter end of the week, returning to the city again on Mondays and Tuesdays."

As the¡ quiet villages around London were "improved" with merchants' villas, the shopkeeper and the more modest tradesman also sought a "country box" for use on Sundays. Their modest retreats often were mocked by observers accustomed to grander things. A writer of 1754 recounted a visit to a "box" about three miles from London on the side of a public road , from which it is separated by a dry ditch, over which is a little bridge consisting of two narrow planks, leading to the house. The hedge on the other side of the road cuts off all prospect whatsoever, except from the garrets, from indeed you have a beautifu l vista of two men hanging in chains on Kennington common ... .

Inside the "hall" is decorated with a pair of stag's horn, a portrait of the shopkeeper clad in aristocratic finery and a portrait of his wife "in the habit of a shepherdess, smelling to a nosegay, and stroking a ram with gilt horns."

On a somewhat higher plane, Samuel Johnson with subtler satire recounts the story of a modest trader who "thought himself grown rich enough to have a lodging in the country, like the mercers 29

Chicago History, Summer 1984 of Ludgate Hill."

I found him at Islington, in a room which overlooked the high road, amusing himself with looking through the window, which the clouds of dust would not suffer him to open. He embraced me, told me I was welcome into the Country, and asked me, if I did not feel myself refreshed.

Johnson goes on to reflect on the vanity of human wishes.

Despite jibes that "if the taste for building increases ... we shall be able to boast of finer country-seats belonging to shop-keepers, artisans, and other plebians, than the most pompous descriptions of Italy and Greece have ever recorded," the taste for building did increase. To be sure, these villas and "boxes" were never originally intended to replace an urban residence.

Tis not the Country, you must own, Tis only London out of town.

Nevertheless, the taste for villas did get the urban bourgeoisie "out of town," if only for the weekend.

Soon they would stay.

Clapham: A Serious Paradise One can trace on a map the construction of villas and the transformation of quiet villages like Hackney, Hoxton, West Ham, Islington, Bromley, or Stepney into "very favorite country residences of some of the most eminent bankers, merchants, and tradesmen in London." It is harder to identify when these "favorite country residences" became the primary residences for their owners. I shall, therefore, look in detail at a single representative suburb, Clapham.

Clapham is known in English history not for its architecture but for its morals. As the home of William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay, and others, this village is forever identified with evangelical reform. Yet these "fathers of the Victorians" who initiated so much of what we now regard as Victorian culture, were also founders of suburbia.

Five miles southeast of the City of London, Clapham was distinguished by its unenclosed commons. Even in the late seventeenth century it was a favorite spot for retirement-Samuel Pepys died there-and in the eighteenth century wealthy merchants from London built their villas around the picturesque mini-wilderness of the commons. In 1792 Henry Thornton, a young London banker who had been born in Clapham, 30

bought the villa of Battersea Rise and moved in with William Wilberforce, a friend , cousin, and political associate. When both men married, Thornton built Wilberforce a house nearby, and the two set out to make Clapham a center for the evangelical movement.

By 1800 Clapham was not only pious but fashionable. Over forty detached and semidetached "gentlemen's seats" lined the commons, almost all with extensive grounds and elaborate gardens. And almost all were year-round family residences owned by a city merchant who commuted to his work by private carriage or public coach. In this still-rural setting, these prosperous families formed a single community, socially and physically distinct from the city. Clapham was a true suburb.

In Clapham one can see the precise social milieu and intellectual attitudes that created the first suburbs. The urban multiplicity of London held no attraction for the Clapham residents.

They were affected, first, by a larger trend among the middle and upper classes to separate themselves physically from the urban masses . In part this sure! y reflected di verging habits of personal hygiene between classes, but also the middle class felt threa.tened by lower-class profanity, dirt, and criminality as they never had before. In a society based on status, the widest inequalities can be taken for granted by both sides; in the emerging class society, social inequality must be protected by physical segregation.

Beyond this, Clapham had no love for the vast range of culture and amusement which London offered. The theaters, clubs, coffeehouses, assemblies, and taverns bred an "excessive fondness of amusement" which diverted men from their business and women from the home. In the sphere of work, Wilberforce defined the "necessary" virtues as "industry, sobriety, punctuality, temperance, health and regularity." Even in their philanthropies the Clapham sect practiced the virtues of hard , unremitting labor. "He had an industry in doing good," Cowper wrote of Henry Thornton's father. The Clapham men had no difficulty in seeing the city as a place to " toil and accumulate."

In their writings and in their daily lives, the members of the Clapham sect moved between two opposing spheres: work and family. Yet if the former was dominated by diligence and

Suburban England

111 /he eighteenth ce11tury, Islington (above) became a favorite counLry residence for London professionals. b1 the nineteenth ce11/11ry, suburban Clapham (nght) was the resull ofa deliberate al/empt to i11sulate Victoria11 middle class family life from the moral pe11/s of the city.

I,

I ( ¡1. \I

1

1 ' :,.1F"" ,;,, ( ~, . ,,, 1

31

Chicago History, Summer 1984 self-control, the latter was to embody pleasure, affection, love , and faith. The Clapham writers celebrated what Lawrence Stone has recently called "the closed domesticated nuclear family," and they believed that the special bonds of affection within this realm could be easily destroyed by the wide-ranging sociability of the city. Their families must therefore be removed from the sinfu l temptations of urban life; they must, moreover, be separated from the sphere of work, whose valid but antithetical principles might also disrupt the bonds of family love.

For the older intermingling of work and family life, the Clapham writers substitute a sharp break, a break that takes physical form in the separation between city and suburb. Outside of productive labor and what Hannah More ca ll s "the sacred quiet of a virtuous home·• there is only frippery and diversion. More, who was the sect's spokesperson on domestic matters (though she never in fact lived in Clapham), deleg-ated to wives the special responsibility of creating an atmosphere of love in the home which would lure husbands away from clubs and outside amusements. As a result the steady and growing attachment. .. e ach party studying to p1·omote the eternal as well as temporal happiness of the other ... such a heart would compa1·e its interesting domestic scenes with the vapid pleasures of public resort, till it would fly to its own home, not from necessity but from taste; not from custom, but choice; not from duty, but delight.

These domestic delig·hts were not solely in Hannah More's mind. The many memoirs of the Clapham sect all point to the spontaneous affection that generally prevailed in the houses around the common; the love and companionship that united the families; the appreciation of the beauties ofnaturn. Families spent hours together in the gardens or walking on the common.

Wilberforce, especiall y, "used to go into ecstacies, especia ll y about flowers."

This temporal happiness pointed to something· higher. Wilberforce asserts that the home "tends to associate religion and domestic tenderness; to identify them with each other, and thereby augment both." He and fellow members of the Clapham sect revived the Prn·itan custom of family prayers to reassert the sacred basis of family life.

E.M. Forster, a descendant of Henry Thornton , observes in a "domestic biography'· of one of

32

Above and Right: The gothic collages created by architect j ohn Xa sh in Blaise Hamlet, Gloucestershire in the earlv 1880s we re an atte mpt to create an o rdered residential setting in th e st_,,/e of th e

English rural t•illage.

Thornton's daughters that "Batte1·sea Rise Library with the united family kneeling seemed more sacred to them than any consecrated edifice."

Suburban England J.C. Loudon put it, "as townhouses have in all ages been concentrated and symmetrical, so country houses have ... been comparatively scattered and irregular." The taste for the picturesque gave architects and their clients a rich variety of forms with which to express the charms of domestic happiness. To the cligni t y of the classical one could acid the romance of Gothic, the beauty of Italianate and the simplicity of the English cottage. Such cottages, of course, had nothing in common with the insalubrious hovels of real farmworke1-s. A cottage, wrote Thomas Malton, is a small house in the country; of odd. irregular form, with various, harmonious color ing, the effect of wind, time, and accident; the whole environed with smiling verdure, having a contented, cheerful. inviting aspect. ...

In contrast to the profane city, the suburban home thus becomes the repository of eternal values . The classical ideal of civilized leisure is transposed into active worship and love. Separated from the corrupting or distracting influences of the city, the home can maintain its highest purpose. For the household was expected to endure not only through this life but the next.

The members of the Clapham sect firm ly believed that they would meet again in Heaven where, presumably, they would set up household once more in a setting even more beautiful than Clapham Common .

Toward a Suburban Style By 1800 Clapham was only one 111 a rrng of villages around London which had become dormitory suburbs for the upper-middle class.

The city was, in Cowper's words, "begirt" by villas "like a swarth Indian with his belt of beads."

The first houses had hardly affected the stillrural atmosphere of the London countryside; but as quiet village streets were transformed into busy avenues lined with houses, the need arose for a style of architectu1-e and a method of conscious planning that would preserve the vanishing serenity. ln domestic architecture this meant a turn away from the stiff formality of scaled-down Pal laclian classicism, which in any case was too closely associated with urban townhouses. As

Such cottages were built for the middle class by the hundreds.

This architecture, however, had to be combined with a ground p lan that preserved its verdant setting. The architect John Nash observed in 1812 that "handsome houses" were being built on the sides of all the roads near the Metropolis, wherever there is an open field or a garden to look into; but in the course of time those situations .. . [are lost] by the fields being built upon ....

The solution was to lay out who le tracts on the "suburban" pattern of detached or semi-detached houses, each with its own grounds. lt accorded we! I with the interests of landowners whose estates were too far from the fashionable centers of London to be successfu lly developed as continuous streets and squares, but whose land might be sold if planned for villas. Sir John Summerson has identified the first such planned development proposed for the Eyre estate in St. John's Wood- then the remote northwest corner of the city-in 1794 . With its circle and crescent, the plan is reminiscent of Bath, but instead of classica l terraces the plots are occupied by semidetached vi ll as with generous grounds.

This plan never was put into practice, and it was left to John Nash to create a unified suburban development which would sum up the experience of the past hundred years and provide a model for the future. In 1811 1 ash was appointed to plan the development of the Crown Estate of Marylebone Park, now Regents Park, also in the northwest corner of London. I:ÂŁe proposed to turn the empty fields into a "neighborhood 33

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Nt:sh s tale11ts were van¡ed. ranging from the formal sweep of R egent Street i11 central Londo11 (above) to his 011lv part~y reali.zed design for anstocratic suburba11 villas (below) i11 Rege11 t s Park.

34

Suburban England composed of the great and opulent" with classical villas for the aristocracy-most never in fact built- surrounded by a belt of grandiose terraces which still stand. As a kind of afterthought he designed in the northeast corner of the park a model middle-class suburb which he called Park Village.

The inspiration for Park Village came from Nash's work on villas outside London, but also from his model village, Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol. In 1809 a wealthy Quaker had commissioned him to construct nine dwellings for the elderly. Nash used the opportunity to build a perfect embodiment of the picturesque ideal of the village. Grouped around a miniature green, the cottages were a virtuouso display of studied quaintness and artful naturalism.

In Park Village Nash applied these principles to the middle class suburb. He used his hig¡hly sophisticated skill to create out of an empty field the illusion of a community close to nature with roots deep in the past. A "Village Road" winds artfully through the estate to give th~ prized variety and irregularity to the plan. Extensive lawns and plantings provide greenery and privacy. The "cottages" are substantial middle-class residences, but they are adorned in every style of Gothic, Italianate, chalet, or cottage architecture that Nash could devise. Park Village was intended to be a complete alternative environment to the city, a self-contained world of natural beauty, domesticity, comfort, and escapism. Its principles were applied throughout nineteenthcentury suburbia, and they are still very much alive in the twentieth century. With Park Village the suburban idea becomes a reality.

"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns ... It has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relationships ... It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of. .. sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation ... The Bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil. ..." These words from the Communist Manifesto suggest the paradox of Park Village and of suburbia in general.

At the same time bourgeois economic initiatives were building up the cities and destroying the traditional balance between man and nature, this class was creating for its home a pseudoenvirnnment of tradition, domesticity, and union with nature. Behind the growth of suburbia lies

a growing dissociation of middle-class values. As always, Dickens gives us the best image of this. In Great Expectations he shows us Mr.Jagger's hardfaced clerk Wemmick who lunches on dry biscuits and has a mouth like a post office slot. But Wemmick is also the proud possessor of a Gothic cottage at Walworth (near Clapham), which he has ornamented with a miniature pond, mock battlements, and a tiny cannon which goes off every night at ni-ne. Dickens shows him softening every evening as he leaves the city and hardening in the morning when he returns. When Pip asks his opinion on a personal matter, Wemmick replies that his answer depends on whether he is at Walworth or the office.

"Walworth is one place and this office is another .... They must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments must be taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken in this office."

The suburb was intended to be the solution to urban civilization, but we can see that it is part of the larger problem. To borrow a phrase from Theodor Adorno, the suburb and the city are two torn halves of a unitary whole, but halves that can never add up to the whole. The suburb, finally, represents middle class alienation from the urban world that they themselves were creating.

For Further Reading John Summerson's classic Georgian London rev. ed.

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1978) is the best introduction to London in this period . It might be supplemented by Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City rev. ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1967) which contains many remarkable insights into the city that produced the first suburbs. Francis Sheppard, London: 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971) is an excellent synthesis of recent research.

For the history of suburbia in particular, one should start with F.M.L. Thompson, editor, The Rise of Suburbia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982) especially the editor's thoughtful and comprehensive introduction.

Donald}. Olsen, The GrowthofVictorianLondon(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976) has an excellent chapter on "the villa and the new suburb." Two important studies of individual London subu1¡bs whose origins go back to the eighteenth century are H.J. Dyos, Victonan Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1961) and F.M.L. Thompson, Hampstead: Building a Borough 1560-1964 (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

35

"Brookline is the richest suburb of Boston and in many respects the most attractive, with numerous beautiful estates and tasteful 'vilas' and charming drives." From Boston: A Guide Book, 1903 AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS CENTURY Brookline, Massachusetts, could well claim to be the nation's suburban showcase. Its fame extended beyond New England; historian Jon Teaford reports that "during the second decade of the twentieth century Chicago suburbanites cited suburban Brookline, Massachusetts, not their own central city, as the best governed city in America."

Included among the 20,000 inhabitants of this fortunate community were celebrities such as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, financial publisher Henry Varnum Poor, art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, economist Edward Aktinson, and poet Amy Lowell. Architect Henry H. Richardson had lived there until his death in 1886. Mero bers of proper Bostonian clans, called Brahmins, such as Cabot, Lowell, Amory, Lee, and Lawrence were nearly as well represented in Brookline as on Beacon Hill or in the Back Bay. Brookline's emergence as an elite suburb was not accidental. No formal master plan was ever drafted, no planning commission ever formed; yet Brookline was as much a product of deliberate calculation as any Riverside, Radburn, or Levittown. Generations of town leaders had worked to guide its growth, creating a community that embodied the common values they cherished. Development in accordance with the leaders' values was encouraged, while undesirable growth was confined when it could not be excluded altogether. Their shared sense of purpose-indeed, even mission -was the product of more than two centuries.

Up to 1840 commercial farming, not the presence of affluent suburbanites, was the source of Brookline's prosperity. Originating as the Muddy River district of Boston, Brookline remained part of that town until 1705. The boundaries it assumed in that year have remained largely unchanged, encompassing approximately six square miles. As early as 1770, when the town consisted of no more than 350 inhabitants, Brookline on a per capita basis was one of the wealthiest communities in New England. Nearly every adult Ronald Dale Karr is public services librarian. at the Transportation Library\ Northwestern University.

36

Brookline and the M

By Ronaid 1 I

Social segregation, securi~v, and see, Boston. Its planners knew what the_ influence from ;

A house off Walnut Street in So uth Brooklin e near the colonial town '., ce nter.

Photograph by Ronald K an :

¡ng of an Elite Suburb )ale Karr

e,y made Brookline the garden of v wanted and how to resist undue he metropolis.

male inhabitant of pre-Revolution Brookline was a farmer or farm laborer. After the American Revolution, artisans and tradesmen arrived, were joined by large numbers of farm laborers, and a village settlement grew up around an ancient crossroads tavern. A small but significant group of wealthy Boston merchants purchased large estates, primarily in the southern and far northern sections of the town. At first these Brahmins were only summer residents, but by 1840 some had made Brookline their primary address and the population grew to 1,365.

True suburbanization of Brookline dates from 1843, with the platting of the town's first subdivision. By 1850 a network of residential streets had been built on the outskirts of Brookline Village. Public transportation had produced the commuter, who worked in downtown Boston but slept each night in Brookline. Omnibuses had begun operating¡ out of Boston in the late 1830s, making two trips a day to Brookline, ten daily by 1848. Rail commuter service prompted still more commuting. The tracks of one of New England's earliest railroads, the Boston and Worcester, skirted the northern edge of Brookline. The line opened in 1834 but it was not until 1848 that a one-and-one-half-mile branch line to Brookline Village was constructed, offering through commuter trains to Boston. In 1858 the latest transit innovation, the horse-drawn streetcar, reached Brookline. By 1860 the town's population stood at 5,164, by 1870, 6,650. As recently as 1840 Brookline was still a farming town. Ten years later, its population nearly doubled, it had become a suburb.

Unlike their modern counterparts, nineteenthcentury elite suburbs were not homogeneous.

With the arrival of the first commuters had also come hundreds of impoverished Irish immigrants. They made up 31 percent of the town's male work force in 1850 and 37 percent in 1870.

Some 22 percent of Brookline households in 1850 were headed by an Irish-born man or woman; by 1870, fully 40 percent. Indeed, by 1870 Yankees headed less than half of all Brookline households.

The economic and social differences between the Irish and the New England-born were striking.

In 1850, 78 percent of Irish-born adult males worked as day laborers, most Irish girls and women, if employed, were domestic servants. As late as 1870, 62 percent of Irishmen were still 37

Chicago History, Summer 1984 listed as laborers, this in contrast to only about 12 percent of New England natives in 1850 and 4 percent in 1870. In 1870, 63 percent of the New England-born household heads held white collar jobs, the Irish-born about 3 percent. More than three out of five Yankee households owned real estate, less than a quarter of Irish households.

Almost two-thirds of the households with a New England-born head included live-in domestic servants, only 4 percent of Irish households.

Even within Brookline's narrow bounds the two groups lived apart, with most Irish families crowded into two dreary neighborhoods.

The political, economic, and social life of nineteenth-century Brookline remained firmly under the control of its Protestant Yankee plurality, particularly those prosperous families who kept live-in servants. Included within the servantholding group were about twenty Brahmin households who enjoyed an importance out of scale with their numbers: collectively they owned about one-seventh of the town in 1870.

The values held by this elite-especially those of the upper-middle class-can be reconstructed from the town's newspapers, and here we find the conventional bourgeois verities of thrift, hard work, achievement, sexual propriety, and clean-

Pai11ting of the first locomotive to

38

1w1 011

the Brookli11e Bra11ch Railroad.

liness much in evidence. "Don't lose a minute, " the Brookline Chronicle admonished in 1875. "The man who has nothing to do is the most miserable of beings. If you have no regular work, do chores as farmers do when it rains too hard to work in the field. In occupation we forget our troubles, and get a respite from sorrow. The man whose mind and hands are busy finds no time to weep and wail." Parents were urged to instill selfdiscipline in their children. Success was said to be within the grasp of anyone who virtuously strived.

But beneath this confident reassertion of the middle class credo lay insecurity, uneasiness, and even doubt. Every middle-class family knew that disaster could strike without warning. Medicine could not stop epidemic diseases such as diptheria, whooping cough, and scarlet fever from periodically racing through the town, carrying off scores of children. In 1875 and 1876 for example, half of the town's deaths were children under five. Nearly every issue of Brookline's newspapers contains accounts of crime, including burglaries of middle-class households. Since the upper-middle class in nineteenth-century Brookline consisted largely of the families of entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals, the status of a household rode on the success of

Brookline the family business. Economic slumps, such as the extended depression of the 1870s, raised the specter of bankruptcy and social ruin. Fire could wipe out the gains of years of striving in a single night: the great Boston fire of November 7, 1872, resulted in serious losses for at least thirty-nine Brookline residents.

Both the poor beneath them and the rich above them made the upper-middle class uneasy. The poor were often castigated for their rude behavior, sloth, filth, and intemperance, as well as for their Catholic religion and Irish culture. At the same time there were expressions of sympathy, even of grudging respect. The great depression of the 1870s showed that not all poverty stemmed from moral depravity. Strikes were occasionally countenanced , and Catholicism gained acceptance as the years passed, with church social activities such as charities, fairs, and picnics receiving favorable treatment in the local press.

Toward the truly wealthy there was a mixture of respect, envy, and fear. The pursuit of wealth was the engine that kept the wheels of progress rolling and the working people striving, but with the emergence of powerful corporations, holding companies, and trusts, the rich began to be viewed with greater suspicion. The unscru-

pulous means by which wealth was often acquired came under attack; in 1883 the Chronicle reprinted a piece by Henry Demarest Lloyd warning of the evils of monopoly.

Confronted with the disturbing contradictions of urban capitalism Brookline's upper-middle class sought refuge in a rustic environment. As Boston expanded and New England became industrialized a nostalgic appreciation grew for the natural rural life of old. This impulse , variously labeled the rural ideal, the arcadian myth, and the pastoral ideal, had a particularly strong grip on members of the upper-middle class, who were mostly the products of small towns or farms. Editorials, speeches, and letters proclaimed the natural beauty of the town.

Brookline, said the Transcript in 1873, had "the real flavor of the country, not of that mongrel character which is neither town nor country, and with the attractions of neither."

As the town gTew, of course, some rural features were inevitably lost. Before a truly suburban style of architecture and landscaping became available near the end of the century suburban development took urban forms-detached houses built close together along straight streets. This still left plenty of open space outside of the

Harvard Square, Brookline and the Railroad B,,dge in 1885.

39

Chicago History, Summer 1984 settled areas for farms and large estates. Even so, some felt that Brookline in the 1870s was already overdeveloped. Writing in 1874 town historian Harriet Woods lamented "the necessity which dictates the building of crowded houses so close together that every vestige of rural beauty is sacrificed, and that the chief attractions, which have for years made our town proverbial for its charms, are rapidly disappearing before the march of greedy speculation." A letter in the Brookline Chronicle five years later was even gloomier: Brookline is often called the Garden of Boston, so cultivated, shady, and Oornl, so rich in broad estates and tasteful in its residences. Many years ago it was all this, and more, for it then was not as now injured by Progress (so called), which stretches its mercenary hands over the country, levelling hills, filling valleys, destroying trees, blasting rocks, longing to transform all that is valuable in nature to its own uninteresting level.

This ruralistic jeremiad did not go unchallenged. In a basically bourgeois community prosperity and growth were difficult to reject completely. Alongside the laments and odes to rural beauty were affirmations of progress. An 1876 description of Brookline entitled "Garden Town of America" emphasized not the community's

rural charms but rather "the very air of neatness about our well-kept streets; the artistically laid out grounds and residences of our citizens, and the costly public buildings" which "bespeak to the visitor the abode of wealth and culture."

The upper-middle class sought a community which provided security and serenity, a buffer from the artificiality of the city and the unsettling consequences of industrial capitalism. In company with the upper-class Brahmins, they were able to control the environment of nineteenthcentury Brookline, including the price, location, and quality of development. Aiding them in their e fforts was a long-standing tradition of elite rule and activist local government. Between 1705 and 1750 the members of just three families held two-thirds of all major town offices and descendants of the three clans retained power well into the nineteenth century. In the 1830s and 1840s a band of reformers, mostly new to the town, took control of the government and embarked on an ambitious agenda of reform. The school system was revamped, town roads were improved , and attempts were made to overhaul the ancient system of relief for the poor and to control liquor sales and curb public drunkenness.

The Aspinwall House (1660-1891) and thee generations of Aspi11walls 011 the day the old e/111 fell.

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Brookline Various factors insured that real estate development conformed to the standards of the uppermiddle class. Before 1885 most developers were local residents, themselves members of this class.

The town's first real estate syndicate, the Brookline Land Company, was organized in 1860. Although they had stockholders throughout the metropolitan region the land companies were dominated

by Brookline residents.

Market forces encouraged the construction of fine houses similar to those already standing, since builders knew that they were the easiest to sell. But when a subdivision was nearly sold, a developer anxious to unload his remaining lots mig¡ht be tempted to cut these into smaller, more salable parcels, put up higher density housing, or even erect commercial buildings. This had occured in streetcar suburbs such as Roxbury and Dorchester, converting once fashionable areas into lower-middle class and even workingclass neighborhoods. Restrictive covenants were widely used in Brookline to stabilize subdivisions and reassure nervous upper-middle-class buyers.

The subdivider wrote restrictions into his original deeds of sale that were binding on all subsequent owners and enforceable in court by any landowner.

Virtually every upper-middle-class development in nineteenth-century Brookline employed these controls, beginning with the town's first subdivision in 1843. Typical restrictions were prohibitions of commercial use and requirements that any buildings be set back a minimum distance from the street and cost at least a specified amount.

(Restrictions aimed at particular ethnic or racial groups rarely were employed.)

Town government policies complemented the actions of builders. Low taxes on large parcels of undeveloped lands encouraged the maintenance of substantial estates. Small lots and houses paid a much higher rate than larger properties. Lands in ten to forty acre parcels in 1870 typically were assessed at one to three cents a square foot, compared to seven to fifteen cents a foot for owners of lots under an acre.

Before a street in a subdivision could become the responsibility of the town and eligible for connection to the town's water, sewerage, street lighting, and gas systems, it first had to be accepted by the town selectmen. The rising standards of the middle class made the distinction between an accepted and unaccepted street ever more critical, since few were likely to want to buy

l#,/11ut and 1#1rre11 streets, the center of old Brookline.

41

Chicago History, Summer 1984 homes on a street without access to the latest conveniences. It is little wonder then that successful developers worked closely with the selectmen and frequently participated directly in politics themselves. Brookline's two leading political figures in the 1870s and 1880s, William Aspinwall (18lg-1892) and his arch-enemy Alfred D. Chandler (1847-1923), were heavily involved in land development. Both sought town endorsement, even financial support, of their own schemes while denouncing the other's as barefaced raids on the public treasury.

By 1870 the town's upper-middle class had developed a sense of identity strong enough to make Brookline the first important American suburb to reject annexation by its central city.

After the end of the Civil War, Boston had annexed the adjoining suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury, Charlestown, and Brighton, until Brookline was surrounded on three sides by the city. Within the town a noisy band of annexationists launched a campaign to have Brookline also incorporated into Boston.

In 1873 they succeeded in pu hing an annexation act through the legislature, but the merger would not take affect unless approved by the

Brooklines Country Club, Clyde Street.

42

voters of both locales.

Annexationists argued that the town's destiny could be realized only through union with Boston.

They made it clear that the primary need for merger was to speed development; expensive municipal services and utilities would become available to aid growth. Above all, annexation would remove the single greatest impediment to growth, namely "the Ring," the coterie of insiders who governed the town and blocked needed improvements.

Their opponents cringed at the thought of Brookline losing its identity and control over its own destiny. The town meeting, the best safeguard against municipal corruption, would be gone. Annexation, it was charged, would open the town to intensive development. Would Brookline, asked the Brookti:ne Independent, sacrifice her freedom and independence, her glorious record of the past, and prospects of the future, her quiet and peaceful immunities, her proud consciousness of self-sustaining dignity, her world-wide fame for wealth and refinement, for beauty of naturnl scenery, and for the intelligence and order that pervades her community? Will she end all this to become the smallest, most insignificant, outlying, suburban-ward

Brookline of a commercial, money-worshiping metropolis? Is this an inheritance, a birthright to be bartered for a mess of pottage and a little water?

Foes of annexation countered charges that Brookline was in the grip of a "ring" with accusations that the annexationists were a pack of land speculators-. There was evidence to sustain this contention as nearly all of the leading annexationists held real estate in northern Brookline, the area with the greatest immediate development potential. George Griggs, who as much as any one man led the fight, had inherited a sixtyfive-acre farm in this vicinity, and for more than twenty years had been trying to develop it. In the early 1850s he had led the drive to build a road, Beacon Street, across previously inaccesible northern Brookline and so link it directly to Boston. Twenty years later Beacon Street was a promise unfulfilled, a narrow country lane that mocked the broad thoroughfare to the city that Griggs hoped for.

More than ideology divided annexationists and their foes. Farmers generally supported annexation; upper-class estate owners did not.

Annexationists tended to be long-time residents, particularly of northern Brookline, who sought

to open the town to intensive development, while those anxious to preserve the town's independence were more likely to be newcomers intent on preserving the rural charm that had attracted them in the first place. It was these new arrivals of the 1840s and 1850s-both upper-middle-class commuters and Irish laborers-in conjunction with the old Brahmins who succeeded in thwarting annexation. In October 1873 the Brookline town meeting rejected annexation with Boston and again in 1875, 1879, and 1880. Voters were quite comfortable with the " ring" that governed the town and with good reason: this group of upper-middle-class businessmen and professionals and building contractors gave its constituency what it wanted-limited, highquality growth, environmental protection, and jobs for local laborers.

Before the coming of the automobile no suburb, no matter how prosperous, could set itself entirely off from the rest of the metropolis. Despite the rhetoric of the annexationists, Brookline's leaders in the 1870s did not want to halt all development. Rather, they sought to contain development whenever possible to areas already subject to building, leaving as much of the town rural

Beacon Street before widening, corner of Carlton Street.

43

Chicago History, Summer 1984 and open as possible. The poverty-ridden Irish who came to the town after 1845 were allowed to erect their shanties and tenements on poorly drained lands on the outskirts of Brookline Village because the growing suburb needed their strong backs and the domestic services of their women. In 1848 the selectmen declared zones where necessary but "offensive trades and employments dangerous to public health " might be practiced. Constant pressure from the better classes made sure that these were kept as far from respectable neighborhoods as possible. Not surprisingly, railroads and gas wo1-ks found it most convenient to locate their facilities near the neighborhoods of the poor.

As late as 1885 Brookline consisted of a dense! y populated core (Brookline Village), ringed by districts of upper-middle-class detached housing; beyond this zone lay little but farms and estates, aside from a few isolated clumps of houses. All this began to change rapidly in the mid-1880s, largely due to the efforts of one man, Henry Melville Whitney (1839-1923). His father, General James Whitney, a prominent western Massachusetts businessman and politician, was one of the leaders of the annexation movement and

A winter scene i11 the 1890s, Beaco11 Street 11ear A 1110,y estate.

44

Henry joined in the fight.

Frustrated in his efforts to incorporate Brookline into Boston ("The administration of our town affairs beats anything done by the Tweed dynasty," he wrote his brother in 1875), Henry Whitney, like most annexationists, turned to Beacon Street to unlock the development of the northern part of the town. By 1885 he was at work on a bold scheme to open northern Brookline to wholesale development. Considerable resources were at his disposal. As a successful businessman and prominent Democrat he enjoyed access to many of the wealthiest and most prominent figures in Boston ; fifteen years involvement in Brookline politics and real estate had made him knowledgeable in the town's ways. Although he had had a home there for many years, in the spring of 1886 Whitney quietly bought up 100 acres along Beacon Street, then assembled a syndicate of other major land owners in the vicinity.

In August he revealed his plans. He had commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted, aided by the town's most prominent engineering firm , to draft plans for "a grand boulevard of a uniform width of200 feet." Members of the syndicate pledged to donate all land necessary for the widening if the

Brookline town would undertake the construction.

Whitney had done his homework. Already lined up in support of the project were Brahmins Amos A. Lawrence, Henry Lee, Francis Cabot, William I. Bowditch, Robert S. Peabody, and Augustus Lowell-all Brookline residents-as well as Wil1iam Aspinwall, politician and land developer, and James Driscoll, Brookline's most prominent Irishman . Nearly all of these men had opposed annexation, which made their support all the more remarkable. The boldness of the scheme caught opponents unprepared. Resistance collapsed entirely after Whitney offered, first, to contribute $100,000 to the project, and then to underwrite half of the total cost. After a few hearings the town approved the project. Construction began in May 1887.

An integral part of the plan was a streetcar line to be built in the center of the boulevard. Whitney prudently had obtained a charter for his own streetcar line, the West End Street Railway Company, to provide the service. When one of Boston's four existing car companies objected and offered to build its own line, Whitney was in no mood to dicker; he quickly bought control of the company, and then, almost as an afterthought, acquired the remaining three companies as well.

All four were merged into the West End, which became the world's largest single transit company.

Thus Beacon Street had led to the nation's first major consolidated transit system-something Chicago would not see for another sixty years .

The Beacon Street line also rates mention in transit history because in July 1889 electric trolleys began operating on it, the first application of the Sprague system in a major American city.

Beacon Street under Olmsted and Whitney became an urbane, elegant, Parisian-style boulevard, lined with fashionable buildings. Townhouses, apartments, and stores came to line the broad avenue. Whitney's West End Land Company owned 3.8 million square feet of land along Beacon Street and held options on 1.2 million more. Like most nineteenth-century developers the company sold lots and left construction to subsequent holders. Covenants placed restrictions on buyers: stables were to be at least 100 feet distant and buildings set back 20 feet from the curb. Land sold briskly. Whitney and his associates prospered, while the town, which had expended 465,000 for the improvement-no

mean sum-saw valuations in northern Brookline jump by more than $4 million, yielding an additional $57,000 in yearly tax revenues.

The conversion of Beacon Street into an urban boulevard ended whatever vestiges of rural charm that remained in northern Brookline, yet few seemed to mind. The opening of the trolley line stimulated construction throughout the vicinity.

Apartments and townhouses, rarely seen in the town before, proliferated. The epitome of the new urban style in Brookline was the Beaconsfield Terraces, a series of townhouse blocks erected off Beacon Street in the early 1890s. Thirty-two townhouses, each with fourteen large rooms, had been built in "a combination of the English and German medieval castles' architecture, modified to insure all the modern conveniences." The development featured steam heating from a central boiler house, a casino, a 250-horse stable, and a six-acre private park. The price for admission to this Valhalla was $20,000 to $35,000 per unit. Blocks of moderately expensive ten- to fourteen-room detached houses on grid lots directly fronting streets also were built. If these urban-styled houses resembled those built in the 1870s and 1880s in the better sections of Dorchester and Roxbury, it was with good reason; their builders had migrated to Brookline from those older streetcar suburbs. Brooklin e's population rose from 9,196 in 1885 to 12,103 in 1890, 16,164 in 1895, and 19,935 in 1900.

The upper-middle class and even the upper class tolerated the Beacon Street project largely because it attracted more upper-income families who served to dilute the town's Irish community.

The proportion of households with live-in domestic servants increased from 36 percent in 1870 to 42 percent in 1900, while households headed by the Irish-born fell from 40 to 22 percent. Even the coming of age of the sons of immigrants did not greatly improve the position of the Irish within the town, since many left, to be replaced by more immigrants who remained confined to their ghetto near Brookline Village.

The development of northern Brookline still left large portions of the southern sector in farms and estates. For more than a century this region formed the core of the town's upper-class community, and the Brahmins were in no hurry to change things. "It is quite safe to say," Brahmin Theodore Lyman wrote of his neighbors in 1880, 45

Chicago History, Summer 1984 "that nine-tenths of the inhabitants prefer to live comfortably on their places, and do not yearn to open a sixty-foot street through them, or cut them into houselots, or in any other way to 'improve' them." Most estate owners in the 1890s would have continued to agree.

With the successful improvement of Beacon Street developers began eyeing the open lands of southern Brookline. The most audacious of the schemes that unfolded in the 1890s was a quixotic attempt to launch a streetcar-suburb development in this region.John J. McCormack, the wealthy son of a successful Irish immigrant, was a prominent real estate agent, builder, and politician. In May 1893 he announced "a great sale of 100 building lots" on Clyde Street deep in the heart of southern Brookline. Here he laid out seven conventional grid streets, featuring rectangular lots of 5,000 to 7,000 square feet.

(Subdivisions of similar configurations were then being built near Beacon Street.) By June sixtyeight lots had been sold. With an experienced and politically connected developer, a conventional design, and buyers at hand , the project seemed off to an excellent start.

Whether intentionally or not McCormack had struck a hornet's nest. To both upper and uppermiddle-class residents alike his development was a bold provocation that demanded a strong response. Estates of the wealthy lay near the subdivision, and immediately adjacent was the entrance to the Country Club, one of metropolitan Boston's most fashionable new institutions.

McCormack compounded his crime by selling to a predominately Irish clientele; indeed, the Catholic Archbishop of Boston had purchased several lots, presumably to build a church. The lots had sold for only 10 cents a square footcompared to as much as $1.00 near Beacon Street- raising the specter of cheap housing.

The opposition hounded McCormack everywhere he turned . He found himself confronting high-priced lawyers and engineers who denounced his petition to construct a road to connect his isolated development to the rest of the town and for the town to accept his streets. Without sewers, finished streets, schools, churches, stores, and access roads, and far from public transportation, few lot owners were able to build. The severe depression after 1893 was a further drag on development. By 1897 the town had seized many lots for

46

failure to pay taxes and McCormack's subdivision was largely unoccupied.

In 1895 two promoters named O 'Hearn and Kelly offered for sale forty-eight lots, a scant 3,000 square feet apiece. The land sold briskly, mostly to Irish-Catholic buyers. Without controversy, the streets were accepted and utilities installed. By the end of the century a score of buildings had been erected, chiefly multifamily

structures. Why the very different fate of in many ways a similar development? Location was the main reason . O'Hearn's and Kelly's lots were adjacent to Whiskey Point, not the Country Club; a streetcar barn had just been built nearby.

In such locations middle- and lower-income housing was acceptable.

Even respectable Yankee developers found it difficult to operate in southern Brookline. The emotional ties of the Brahmins to this region ran deep, and they were prepared to use all means at their disposal to preserve it. Under the leader-

Brookline ship of Brahmin Henry Lee they organized an effective opposition to Alfred D. Chandler and his allies' attempts to replicate the Beacon Street widening. Chandler had commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted to prepare plans for widening Boylston St~eet and Chestnut Avenue, connecting them with Beacon Street to form a single grand circle. At first the Boylston Street project seemed to be g¡oing well and the selectmen voted to

along curvilinear streets, was now more attractive than townhouses, apartments, and closely set detached houses. When the town meeting finally agreed to proceed with the widening of Boylston Street in November 1899, including the building of a streetcar line, no building boom ensued in southern Brookline. Development had been delayed long enough for a low density style of suburban development to g¡ain popularity.

Today, this district-in eyesight of downtown Boston -remains Brooklin e's most pleasant neighborhood , a forgotten world of mansions, broad lawns, and picturesque drives.

Brookline in 1900 was the embodiment of the values of its leading classes, particularly the upper-middle class. Secure in their undisputed control over town government-no Irishman ever held a major town office and Brahmins only seldom -the upper-middle class determined the shape of the community in which they wanted to live. Affluent newcomers and commuters, attracted by Brookline's fashionability and physical charms, quickly adopted its preservation as their own creed. If the promotion of security, segregation, and scenery required the virtual suspension of the values of industrial capitalism by which they conducted their business in Boston, so be it. Brookline's future was too important to be left to the unchecked pursuit of profit.

For Further Reading

Trolley car on Beacon Street today. Beacon Street has retained mu.ch of its character as Olmsted and Whitney 'sgra11d, wide thoroughfare.

Photograph by Ronald Karr:

approve the scheme. But when the question was put before the town meeting it was turned down by a large majority.

Even modest improvement schemes continued to be rejected by the town until Lee's death in November 1898. By then, however, the grand urban boulevard style of Beacon Street was going out of fashion in suburbia. The enticing possibilities of truly suburban architectural styles, of widely spaced homes on irregularly shaped lots

The standard history of Brookline is John Gould Curtis, History of the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933); but the town's newspapers, the Transcript, Independent, and Chronicle, provide the richest source of information about the late nineteenth century. Since 1902 the Proceedings of th e Brookline Historical Society have presented a trove of local lore; in particular see Cynthia Zaitzevsky, "Frederick Law Olmsted in Brookline: A Preliminary Study of His Public Projects," 1975-78, pp. 42-65.

Brookline's emergence shou ld be viewed in the context of metropolitan Boston. Indispensable are Sam B. Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870--JX\?(Cambridge: Harvard University Press and MIT Press, 1962) and Douglass Shand Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800--1950 (Boston: ew York Graphic Society, 1978). Also helpful are Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 2d ed. enl. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1968); Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge: Harvard U nive rsity Press, 1947); and Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E.P. Dutton , 1947).

47

The Result of Honest Hard Work: Creating a Suburban Ethos for Evanston

By Michael H. Ebner

Moral discrimination made Evanston a place apart from its very beginning and long determined the character of its relationship with the larger city.

This question was posed by theEvanstonlndex, a weekly published since 1872 that had come to be acknowledged as the voice of the community's best people.

It was answered on April 17, 1894 in the largest electoral turnout thus far in the North Shore suburb. Seventy-eight percent of the 2,093 men who voted said no. The balloting capped a series of measures taken by Evanstonians over four decades to establish and preserve a community identity separate from Chicago. Other Chicago suburbs were not as successful as Evanston.

Chicago added 125 miles to its existing 43 in 1889, absorbing the entire South Side (including Hyde Park) in what remains the largest accretion of outlying land in the city's history. And in 1892, the village of Rogers Park to the south of Evanston also allowed itself to be consolidated with Chicago.

Evanston had struggled to maintain its village identity through its transformation into a suburb and then a city, and the annexation vote once again made Evanston's citizens conscious of the uniqueness of their suburb. The people of Evanston held their community in high esteem.

"True Evanstonians," proclaimed Mayor Oscar Mann as he discussed his own opposition to annexation with Chicago, valued their community for its "individuality." Unlike some suburbs, such as Brookline, Massachusetts, whose sense of identity derived from being socially exclusive, Evanston's ethos, or communal character, was moral, and expressed in a strong stand in support of temperance. If most cities in nineteenthcentury America were flawed morally and socially by the ramifications of the assorted vices associated with the sale and consumption of liquor, some of their suburbs, like Evanston, remained intent upon preserving their purity. As historian Perry Duis observes, this reinforcement of "SHALL EVANSTON BE ANNEXED TO CHICAGO?"

Michael H. Ebner is associate professo;¡ of history at Lake Forest College.

Fountain Square, Evanston c. 1889.

49

Chicago History, Summer 1984 suburban sanctity symbolized "the triumph of moral geography."

If residents in some locales lacked a clear sense of the spirit of their community, the circumstances of Evanston's founding and development made it distinctive in that its ethos achieved an unusually well-defined ideological expression.

Frances E. Willard, the legendary temperance and reform advocate, identified the singularly important precept underlying the Methodist founding of Evanston and Northwestern University in this way: "The happiest thought of those good men who founded our classic village was to incorporate in the university charter some provision that no intoxicating liquor should ever be sold within four miles of the campus." As to preserving this dictum, Willard deemed it the result of honest hard work. Keeping this moral ethos foremost in the community while it grew and changed was the difficult task the people of Evanston faced in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Visitors recognized and appreciated the unique character of Evanston. A handbook for travelers published in 1891 portrayed Evanston as "quiet, grave, and in part distinguished," attributing this "fame and prosperity" to the four-mile limit incorporated within the charter of Northwestern.

A clergyman taking leave of his congregation in 1884 told an assembly: "When I think of Evanston, refined and cultured, and of the loving and kind people, it is hard to believe Old Adam and Original Sin and all the rest." Everett Chamberlin, in his post-fire guidebook Chicago And Its Suburbs (1874), instructed readers: "Evanston bears the stamp of its devoutly-inclined founders ... its morals are as strict as those of a New England village."

A pre-fire guide to metropolitan Chicago, James B. Runnion's Out Of Town (1869), added: "The physical and architectural character of Evanston is peculiarly American. It is laid out at right angles, as rigidly as Methodism itself could demand."

The earliest settlement of this locale held few clues of the communal character that would eventually develop. It had been inhabited in 1826 by Stephen J. Scott, but more important was the arrival in 1834 of Abraham Hathaway. According to local historian J. Seymour Currey, Hathaway's log cabin served as something of a roadhouse or a "grocery" for travelers journeying to or from Chicago. Currey explains: "Here 50

he kept liquor for sale and the place soon became the headquarters of counterfeiters and fugitives from justice, and generally speaking a vile resort."

The area was not a suburb so much as it was an extramural settlement. By the mid-1850s, just before it officially became Evanston, several hundred persons inhabited the locale then known as Ridgeville Township, with timber the principal commodity. As the land was cleared it was given over to agriculture.

These scattered outposts existed just beyond the borders of cities- be it London, England, Sydney, Australia, or Chicago-occupied by those who were, as English historian H.J. Dyos tells it, "in every sense on the fringe of urban society."

The function of these outlying regions changed as cities expanded physically and economically.

In Chicago this burst of growth occurred in the mid-1840s and Evanston owes much of its expansion in this period to the beginning of suburbanization (which in turn was related closely to innovations in transportation). However, its development unfolded, at least initially, according to a unique plan and in the service of an important mission.

We can find a starting place for both Evanston and its ethos with the founding of Northwestern University. On May 15, 1850 nine devout young men, representing the city's three Methodist Episcopal churches, convened in a law office over a hardware store .at Lake and Dearborn streets in Chicago. Following prayer, they resolved that "the interests of sanctified learning required the immediate establishment of a University in the northwest under the patronage of the Methodist Episcopal Church." What came to be Northwestern University was chartered in January 1851; its board of trustees was drawn from the Methodist Episcopal conferences of the surrounding region, but no religious affiliation was required of prospective students or faculty.

John B. Evans, a physician and entrepreneur acknowledged as "the master spirit" in Northwestern's founding, clearly associated his vision of a great university serving the Middle West with the future of Chicago, and the trustees went so far as to purchase property within the city during 1852. But Clark T. Hinman, Northwestern's first president, objected. His motives are uncertain, but his influence prevailed. Hinman persuaded the site committee to explore "the

Evanston

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y â&#x20AC;˘

I

I

I

Evanston owes its transformation from obscure Chicago outpost to the city we know today to the founding of Northwestern University.

Clark T. Hinman, (1ight) first president and one of the fou11ders of Northwestem. Chicago was co11si<lered as the site of the u11iversity, but Hinman's choice of a suburban location prevailed. Colvin's Dry Goods Store, (above) c. 1853 preceded Northwestem but its upperfloor meetiug room was soon given over to functions of the new village's institutions, such as classes of the Northwestern Female College and services of the Methodist church.

11-

Chicago History, Summer 1984

View of Hinman Avenue with the First Congregational Church (left) c. 1887. Trees and stately buildings made Evanston visually a place apart.

suburbs on the line of some of the roads that are being built here, buy a farm and locate your institution, lay off a village to help build up the institution and sell lots."

The selection of the location -designated Evanston to honor Dr. Evans-owed much to the transportation revolution then transforming Chicago. Only ten miles of railway track entered the city in 1848, but by 1856, astonishingly, the figure exceeded 3,600 miles as eleven new lines were constructed. Essential to the development of Evanston was the railroad that began operating in January of 1855 (today known as the Chicago & North Western), proceeding due north of the city on an ascending ridge in close proximity to Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, the university's site committee, chaired by Orrington Lunt, explored a variety of possible situations between the border of Indiana and what would become 52

Lake Forest. Lunt enthusiastically commended Evanston in mid-1853, and Dr. Evans verified that the projected railway line would in fact be laid near the site. In October 1853 the trustees acquired a 379-acre tract known as the Foster farm, and soon thereafter some additional parcels of land, which would contain the university as well as its accompanying village. Orrington Lunt tells of his initial reaction to the place: "It continued in my dreams all that night, and I could not rid myself of the fairy visions constantly pressing themselves upon my thoughts- fanciful , beauteous pictures of the gentle, waving lake, its pebbly shore and its beautiful bluffs." The visage also was heralded in a public announcement issued proudly by the Northwestern trustees as "affording the lovers of good taste every facility desirable for the most lovely residence in the country ...." A skeptical traveler, stopping to visit

Evanston

+

Railroads, especially the lin e that would become the Chicago and North Western, were key to the siting of Northwestem University and to Evanston's early growth. Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul station, Davis Street in Evanston c. 1890.

Evanston in late May 1855, concurred readily: "Our excursion yesterday convinced us that we were entirely mistaken and that all that has been said of its beauties is correct."

In considering the proliferation of newly established colleges and \lniversities by the midnineteenth century, historian Daniel Boorstin once suggested that some existed to boost the economy of the surrounding communities while others-certainly Northwestern University amongst them -possessed a true "missionary spirit." In Evanston the purest expression of that spirit was temperance. "No spiritous, vinous, or fermented liquors shall be sold under license, or otherwise, within four miles of the location of said University, except for medicinal, mechanical, or sacramental purposes ," declared an 1855 amendment to the university charter. This so-called four-mile limit, as it has been referred to

since its adoption, readily came to embody the mission of Northwestern and its surrounding environs. The tone was set for the charter class of ten undergraduates enrolled for their freshman year: "The college bell tolled out the hours of recitation and devotion, and the beginnings of college life in Evanston were laid." Thus from the very beginning the relationship between town and gown was direct, immediate, and carefully defined. It was not a matter of chance. Evanston and Northwestern were altogether self-conscious as to their purpose and mission. "We have never seen a community anywhere," pronounced the official Torthwestern catalog issued for 1858-59, "in which so large a preponderance of opinion was strictly moral and religious." With none too subtle indirection the catalog contrasted the merits of the four-mile limit and the e¡vils associated with Chicago: "Parents may send their sons here

53

Chicago History, Summer 1984

The Chicago saloon (here, early twentieth century) represented a scene that Evanston determined not to permit within its borders.

54

Evanston with the utmost confidence that they will be placed at a distance from temptation and be brought under the most wholesome influence."

The sanctity of the four-mile limit was a central theme in local affairs. As early as 1858 a "liquor saloon" was shut down by a "midnight raid." From.the beginning the limit faced a series of legal challenges. Most notably, the celebrated 1862 case of John O'Leary v. The County of Cook. Here the Supreme Court of Illinois judged constitutional the contested amendment to the university's charter. The resultant need for law enforcement contributed to Evanston's December 29, 1863 decision to incorporate as a town.

This was quickly followed on January 6, 1864 by the election of five trustees. In 1869, however, the voters rejected 82 to 197 a proposition to advance Evanston's status to a city, fearing that the special legislative act for that purpose would diminish legal strength of the limit.

Comparisons with other communities were fastened upon as a device for reminding residents of Evanston just how central the dictum was to their communal well-being. When a controversial statewide Sunday-closing law went into effect in mid-1872, the boast came forth: "Of course as Evanston had a thorough and effective law before, we do not notice the difference." When a particular community-Woodstock in McHenry County, Oak Park or Hyde Park at some distance, or adjacent places such as Wilmette, Gross Point, or Niles Center-enacted local legislation, be it for temperance or license, the new ordinance was dutifully called to the attention of the people of Evanston for the purpose of edification and reiteration. "We knew well that Wilmette was all right," was one such observation, following a vote by the trustees of the neighboring village to reject an application to license a saloon.

And when a judicial election in Cook County ended in defeat for a "rowdy, free-whiskey, and no-Sabbath" slate, the electoral count in Evanston prompted the encomium: "We are more proud than ever of Evanston ... sound clear to the core, every time."

By 1870 Evanston's population stood at 3,062 .

Its growth was gingerly, but large enough to support six congregations. orthwestern University had dedicated its three-story University Hall in September 1869, its first modern building.

A public school erected in 1860 had been enlarged

twice by 1870, and two new school houses were planned. A public library association was incorporated and a drainage commission was authorized in order to clear low-lying swampy ground for future development. The next year a locally owned and operated utility, Northwestern GasLight & Coke Company, initiated service on a limited scale to residents desiring gas illumination in their homes. As early as 1870 Evanston ranked with the townships of Hyde Park, Lake View, and New Trier as the status suburbs of Chicago. The per capita value of its property, the proportion of its population which was native born, and the proportion engaged in professional occupations were the highest of ten surrounding townships.

The Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 contributed significantly to the growth of Evanston.

Within one month the newspaper reported on the "strangers" within Evanston as a result of the fire, concluding: "They are learning, now, how much cleaner and more quiet and pleasant is our village than the city, and how much better it is for their children." In early September 1872, the citizens of Evanston took the initiative that led to the adoption of a village charter late the next month. The electorate overwhelmingly approved, convinced that the Act of 1872 for Cities and Villages would now permit the enforcement of the four-mile limit. Six months later, in April of 1873, the Village of Evanston elected its first president and board.

Evanston's post-fire pace became frenetic. It had its own weekly, The Index, as of June 6, 1872 to chronicle the "rapidly unfolding life." The initial number, in true booster fashion, reported about "many" residents "painting and pruning and dressing up their property this spring" and advised that its continuation would add value to local real estate. The township council ordered "about three miles of new sidewalks" and gene ml street improvements. Evanston was said to have most everything required by a "respectable city" by the conclusion of 1872, including a variety of attractive retail stores, good railway facilities, a lakefront pier, the gas works, and a water plant scheduled for construction the next year. Upon the completion of the municipal water works in January 1875, citizens considered their quest for self-sufficiency within the metropolis complete.

The new water plant and the four-mile limit 55

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Right: Fm11ces Willard, lo11g-time preside11t of the Wome11s Chnslia11 Temperance Union, made Evanston headquarters of a national movement against d1111k. Northwestern's 'four-niile li1nil, which assured parenls thal Lheirsons would be safely disla11/ from templation, also helped define Evanston as a haven from this symbolic city vice.

11

Be low: Chicago saloon, early twentieth ce11tu1y.

56

Evanston soon were being touted as emblems of Evanston residents' safety from the dual ravag¡es of fire and liquor.

Evanston is best labeled during this period as discn:minating rather than exclusive in its estimation of its Qnvirons. Visitors, often groups on day excursions away from the city, sometimes received less than a warm welcome. "Chicago Takes A Vomit" reported The Index in one instance, adding: "Evanston was invaded .. . by the hardest and noisiest mob which as ever profaned the sacred atmosphere of this suburban Zion." Provided that decorum was maintained, however, no one was barred: "The colored folks, who came up from Chicago ... and picnicked [sic] in our village parks, made a very fine appearance as they marched through Davis Street." As for excursions from Evanston to the surrounding countryside, beginning¡ in 1876 the favored locale for the temperance minded and law abiding was the new Methodist-influenced camp meeting ground called Lake Bluff. On the shoreline immediately beyond Lake Forest, it was accessible by rail or lake steamer. "The near proximity of this Western Martha's Vineyard, about seventeen miles north," wrote its promoters, "will cause our citizens to be particularly interested in it .. .."

The single most important force in perpetuating the distinctive self-identity of Evanston was the Women's Christian Temperance Union. It evolved out of a nationwide women's crusade motivated at least initially by liquor-related issues, and had taken hold in December 1873 at Hillsboro, Ohio. Locally it manifested itself on March 17, 1874 with the formation of a predecessor organization known as the Women's Temperance Alliance. Frances Willard, regarded as " unquestionably America's leading heroine to her contemporaries and the most famous woman of her day, " served as the Union's national president from 1879 until her death in 1898. As a result of her prominent role , which over time earned her recognition of international proportions, many associated the WCTU with Evanston. And although Willard was not, in fact, among the founders, at home or beyond, historian Ruth Bordin estimates her importance to the movement as "a classic case of the right person, at the right place, at the right time."

The local objective of the Union was to transform Evanston, already idealized as a temper-

ance village . The members sought to eliminate anything which suggested otherwise. "Let all our people be temperance people," The Index editorialized. Like it or not, every citizen would have to accept this notion. A "moral climate" was to be created in which temperance would thrive, and keen-eyed members of the WCTU would discourage or apprehend violators. Its youth organizations, such as the Star Band of Hope, started late in 1875 and offered "wild and wreckless" boys military drill to inculcate them with "good habits." What came to be known as the Illinois School for Girls, beginning in 1877 in South Evanston, assisted the "poor" requiring instruction in "temperance, industry, cleanliness, et cetera." Although the four-mile limit had been in effect for nineteen years when the temperance crusade reached Evanston in 1874, unanimity on the issue did not exist in the village . At that very time, in fact, came allegations that liquor could be purchased on Davis Street and the enactment of an ordinance by the village board strengthening the existing anti-liquor provisions. Within two months, moreover, the newly organized Women's Temperance Alliance formed its own "committee on vigilance" to encourage citizens to cooperate with the authorities in pursuit of violators. onetheless, on two occasions in late summer of 1874 came further news of illega l sales. In 1877, despite the WCTU's creation of a new seven-member committee "to exercise all possible vigilance," violations continued. Little wonder that in the Union's annual report of 1878, Justine A. Pingree complained: "Many times do we hear the statement, 'O. there i nothing to do in Evanston."' Likewise, an anonymous letter writer informed readers of The Index about "a good many large cracks in the moral fence." When a "traveling saloon," taking advantage of a legal loophole pertaining to delivery wagons, traversed the streets and avenues, a leader of the Union proclaimed: "The fair name of our town is but a hoax." In the face of still more claims, largely emanating from the WCTU about breaches of the law, Chief of Police William Carney wrote a public letter in January 1880 that was tinged with exasperation: "It can safely be said that there is not now a dram shop in the village, nor has there been anything in the shape of one during the last three years." No one was immune from criticism when it came to upholding the morality 57

Chicago History, Summer 1984

Wide but muddy thoroughfares (above) were characteristic of early Eva7!slo7!. As the town grew, civicatte11tio11 divided between matters of moral control, like temperance, lo concem for ordinary urba11 amenities, like paved streets and public squares. Fo1111/ain Square, (nght) 1877, one year after its dedication.

of Evans ton. In the aftermath of al legations issued in 1881 that beer could be purchased on tr..e streets of Evanston, Justine Pingree, speaking for the Union, even scolded the trustees of Northwestern University for shirking their responsibilities to uphold the four-mile limit.

By the early 1880s, however, organized temperance was changing. Nationally the Union was becoming less single-minded as Frances Willard focused on a range of social and economic issues.

Locally the fervor of the 1870s evolved into an almost obligatory ritual. Temperance would only be invoked periodically when the village's historic legacy, encapsulated in the four-mile limit, appeared threatened. Indeed, the WCTU was now sharing its hold on the anti-liquor movement with three new organizations, The Citizen's League, a Prohibition Club, and The Four-Mile League, founded over a fourteen-year span beginning in 1882. Only in 1885 and 1886 would the 58

intensity associated with the WCTU be resurrected, causing two successive village presidents to rebuke overzealous temperance proponents.

The Lyman Bill, however, pending before the Illinois legislature in 1893, would have undermined the four-mile limit and citizens responded with a vengeance. A delegation of prominent citizens, including the venerated Orrington Lunt, was formed to testify in opposition in Springfield.

Evolving out of the furor over this proposed legislation (which met defeat) was the formation of The Four-Mile League at the call of President Henry Wade Rogers of orthwestern University, its objective being to stand vigilant against potential incursions in the future.

There were important changes in Evanston after 1880. Its population of 4,820 increased to 13,059 by 1890 and 19,259 by 1900. Enrollment at Northwestern University totalled 1,484 in 1890, with another 182 students attending Garrett

Evanston Biblical Institute. Evanston contained no less than twenty separate houses of worship as of 1894, a reflection of the diversity of its population.

This suggests Evanston's scale and complexity which by the 1880s contributed to the diminished imp?rtance of its original ethos-maintained previously through the temperence movement-and the ascent of a new, more material set of concerns. Its famous anti-liquor crusade now stood a discrete step removed from the center, although ready at a moment's notice to return if required. Greater attention would be directed hereafter to the physical surroundings of the village, not human salvation or social purification. Addressing the issue of paved streets in 1883, The Index captured the spirit of those who advocated physical improvements: "Good roads are always the outcome of a high civilization, and nothing impresses the stranger more powerfully with the public spirit of a community ...."

The Evanston Real Estate News, a one-time advertising supplement issued in 1886, admiringly labelled the village "the New Haven of the West" (while conveniently neglecting to mention that that university "town" had surpassed Hartford in 1860 as the largest city in Connecticut with a population of 40,CXXl). Evanston's railroad connections, water supply, sewerage system, telephone service, educational institutions, churches, public library, post office, and health department gave it a privileged stature.

But the accelerated pace of progress troubled some residents. The Village Improvement Society, organized in 1881 and concerned for the most part with beautification, issued a timely and strenuous objection to telephone poles and overhead wires along principal thoroughfares; within days . the village board ordered some of them relocated.

When building permits were issued to construct apartment houses, forty-six in all between 1893 and 1899, this turn was carefully rationalized: they were already evident in prestigious locations around metropolitan Boston like Newton and Brookline and were "in every way adapted to suburban requirements." But as the village board debated terms of a franchise for an electric railway during the early 1890s-an issue which took almost a decade to resolve- misgivings were expressed. Excessive noise, unsightly overhead wires, destruction of trees adorning street parkways, and frightened teams of horses, were

f

common concerns of well-established suburbs and aesthetically-minded cities faced with this latest technological innovation.

The founding of two country clubs in 1888 in many ways symbolizes the transformation of Evanston from sanctified village to domestic suburb. The Country Club and the Evanston Club were started within months of one another and given to pursuits social, athletic, and aesthetic.

Golfing proved the foremost attraction, although within a decade polo and tennis also would attain popularity. The Index, as ever the voice of the best Evanston could offer, spoke of "clubdom" with unbridled enthusiasm. Pointedly distinguishing such affairs from the temperance-related pursuits which had brought the community its fame, the Index asserted that those "who are devoted wholly to church life, or to the art of instructing or building up the ¡moral status of the world, will think this very foolish ...."

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Chicago History, Summer 1984

The founding of two country clubs in 1888 marked Evanston's coming of age as a dom estic suburb. H ere, the Eva11 sto11 Club c. 1897.

All this time as Evanston had been changing in important ways, it remained a village in the eyes of the state of Illinois. Some residents considered this legal status a virtue. An outgoing president of the village board told those assembled at a testimonial dinner held to honor him during May 1891: "May it be long before the simplicity and beauty of our village are lost and, in government methods and character, we become transformed into the typical American city." But this opinion was not necessarily widely shared.

Ever since 1874 when Evanston had consolidated with North Evanston, consideration had periodically been given to a union of Evanston and South Evanston. Some argued that the Village of Rogers Park, on the southern edge of South Evanston, should be included in this consolidation, but in the summer of 1892, Rogers Park joined with Chicago.

The long anticipated consolidation of Evanston and South Evanston, completing the unification

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of the "Triple Villages," fit into a familiar pattern.

The key element was the frustration experienced by citizens of small communities that coveted the same level of municipal services enjoyed by a larger, adjacent community. Dating back more than a decade, the village board of South Evanston (and those of Rogers Park and Wilmette) encountered what appeared insurmountable problems with drinking water and sewage disposal; between 1889 and 1891, tumultuous political campaigns were conducted as pro-improvement forces did battle with those who wished to minimize public expenditures. And those who favored further improvements could, and did, point to Evanston's high standards-symbolized by its water works, in continuous operation since 1875-as the desired objective.

Some residents of South Evanston wondered whether their portion of the new city that would be formed by their union with Evanston would share equally in existing public services; others

Evanston

Th e Country Club, Evanston. Its social and athletic character contrasted with Evanston 's earlier temperance and university ethos.

feared that such services would result in higher taxes. Exacerbating this debate was the revival of a long-standing controversy, dating from the 1860s and the source of considerable litigation, as to the impact that Northwestern University's extensive tax-exempt real estate holdings had upon Evanston's tax structure. Inevitably, questions also arose about the loss of autonomy. Reservations also arose within Evanston. On the day preceding the vote an advertisement appeared entitled "Why We Are Opposed To Annexation"; it was signed by seventy-five Evanstonians, including the famed architect Daniel H. Burnham.

The heart of this statement was that consolidation would not only fail to serve the best interests of South Evanston but would also foster "local jealousies" over municipal services and taxation.

Despite foreboding, on February 20, 1892 the proposition passed with the required consent of the electorate in each community. The union was approved by 57 percent in South Evanston

and by 66 percent in Evanston. Then on March 29, in a follow-up election required by state law, almost 97 percent of the 810 voters approved adoption of a city charter for the newly constituted municipality. But what is most instructive about these events is what did not happen; virtually nothing had been said overtly about the question of liquor control. This is all the more important given the proclivity of segments of the population within South Evanston for circumventing the four-mile limit. Quite possibly the prevailing opinion within Evanston was that consolidating with South Evanston was the most effective means of exercising control over this problem . And surely, as some residents of Evanston recognized, this solution was preferrable to the prospect of South Evanston eventually being absorbed by Chicago.

Conflict surrounded the first municipal election and con firmed misgivings some had had about the union of Evanston with South Evanston.

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Chicago History, Summer 1984

GREATER EVANSTON Aeroplane Views of Territory West of Evanston Proposed for Annexation h not this territory adapted to de, clopment into one nf thi:; mu'it beautiful residential sections on the North ~horc?

"The Near West" Herc is tvanston's .. :'\lcar \Vest," the city's frontier just on her ,, estern outsl..irts. If it falls short of the ~:rnnston standard, that is the fault, not of the people Ii, inu there, but of the city that has denied that district those public improvement~ without which it could not be other than "hat it i',.

Shall this policy of neglect be continued till this same kind of de, elopmcnt shall h:n e spread to the "¡est and cm ercd the only area availahle for the future expansion of the city?

Beautiful Northwest Evanston Just to the north of the territory proposed for annexation and de, elopment lies heautiful nortlmest banston, one of the most delightful re,identtal districts on the North Shore. Shall th,s beautiful district be encouraged to extend to the southwest and con:r that "hole:: broad area "irh homes of the truly E\'anstonian type?

As this chamber of commerce announcement (c. 1923) indicates, the example of Evanston's amenities and general character was viewed by some as key to development of adjacent areas to the west. The larger question ofannexation - by Chicago ofEvans ton, or by Evans ton of Wilmette - is a constant theme of suburban history.

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Evanston A bitter campaign for Evanston's first mayor harkened back to issues concerning the origins and legacy of Evanston as a temperance village and divided the newly formed city. The two candidates were Oscar H . Mann and John R. Lindgren. Mann was a homeopathic physician who had been elected as president of Evanston's village board in 1891. He first had been elected to a seat on the village board as a pro-improvement candidate during the debate over whether Evanston should proceed with its water works.

Lindgren was a partner in a Chicago investment banking firm. He came across as a high-minded public benefactor by virtue of his support for the public library, the Children's Aid Society, and Chicago's Apollo Music Club (which in recent years had turned its attention to offering performances before working-class audiences.) Mann, whose political style can only be described as quixotic, intimated that the Lindgren candidacy reflected the designs of Northwestern University to enforce the four-mile limit and preserve the tax exempt status of its expansive real estate holdings. Another claim against Lindgren was that he was too much involved in the professional and charitable affairs of Chicago. As for Mann, according to Lindgren followers, he was not the choice of those citizens who wished to have a mayor who reflected the best attributes of Evanston.

The election was extremely close and a great disappointment to those who continued to subscribe to the visage of Evanston as "the classic village." Mann prevailed by a mere 25 out of 2,351 votes, a margin of 1 percent. Lindgren carried the original village of Evanston, his greatest strength drawn from the three lakefront wards which produced 50 percent of the city's total vote. Mann drew his support from the northern, western, and southern extremes- the newcomers. Lindgren supporters claimed to be "certain" that liquor had been offered to influence some voters; charges of ballot irregularities, including participation by aliens, also were issued.

But it was the editorial estimation of The Chicago Evening Post that best told what had transpired in Evanston and what loomed ahead: "All the devices of older and hardened communities, the tricks of ward politics and subterfuges of the city heeler instantly took root in that virgin soil. ... The election yesterday was the first fruit of the new order."

Over the next months Evanston's citizens watched their new government become embroiled in a succession of controversies and minor scandals including the court-ordered reversal of the outcome of an aldermanic contest in the Fifth Ward because of fraudulent ballot counting.

There was opposition to Mayor Mann's nominee for director of public works, an aldermanic committee was appointed to investigate allegations of bribery lodged against a member of the city council; and a dispute arose over the appropriation of $600 for the expense account of the mayor.

"We are a city," editorialized The Index in a fit of frustration after the election, adding: "A number of things have occured in connection with our own municipal affairs .. . giving evidence to that fact."

Embarrassing as this was to residents who prided themselves on Evanston's reputation, they marked only the beginning of their difficulties.

In January 1894 a movement of uncertain origins pressed for the first serious consideration of union with Chicago. The results of the April 17 election have been mentioned; the impassioned and successful anti-annexation campaign at once made plain that most residents of Evanstondespite its growth and status as city-persisted in cherishing its independence and the oddities of a suburban ethos that stretched back to its preCivil War origins as a "sanctified village."

Compounding this question of identity was a petition submitted by the citizens of Wilmette seeking consolidation with Evanston . "There is no doubt," said a resident of Wilmette who had forseen such a union in 1892, "that Evanston is the Athens of suburbs and united as it is with South Evanston would make it. .. one of the finest cities in the United States if Wilmette were added to it." Since the late 1880s Wilmette had been struggling, not unlike South Evanston and Rogers Park, over costly public improvements. The village's population had grown from 419 in 1880 to 1,458 by 1890. Consolidation, some claimed, would bring it improved public safety, more economical government, the enrollment of its student-age residents at the Evanston Township High School, and, of course, its residents would secure the advantages of the neighboring city's water works. The Index touched at the heart of the matter in an editorial advocating ~onsolidation: "Every good work which Evanston is interested 63

Chicago History, Summer 1984

in, education, prohibition of liquor traffic, etc., would receive added support by the annexation of Wilmette." Not everyone proved as enthusiastic. An anti-annexation broadside issued by citizens of Wilmette stated: "We want to remain as we are, continue our good work, now more than two-thirds finished, until it would make your hearts rejoice at the lovely surroundings on every hand; beautiful walks, lovely shade trees, and smiling cheerful faces peering out from every window pane in all our happy homes ...."

The union of Wilmette and Evanston was never to be. Three times in 1894 the electorates of the two communities failed to achieve the necessary

64

mutual consent. In the first round the citizens of Evanston approved consolidation but Wilmette rejected it, the decision was reversed in the next vote. On the third try the voters united in their opposition , disposing of the question once and for all. The best analysis of why the consolidation propositions failed is that the question became enmeshed with the matter of consolidation with Chicago. Also, at no time did a substantial majority of citizens in Wilmette support the union. Indeed, it may have been the specter of Evanston's difficult transition from village to city in 1892 that lingered in the minds of voters in Wilmette and influenced their decision.

Evanston century. The manifest symbol of this change was the establishment of the Evanston Country Club in 1888. Shedding its status as a village and joining with South Evanston in 1892 was a further mark, more tangible in nature, in this progre sion. Still, the specter of absorption into Chicago-denying Evanston its autonomy, identity, and what remained of its original ethos-did prompt leaders of the community to resort to an invocation of its historic legacy, encapsulated in the words of Frances E. Willard as "the ideal temperance village." Old-fashioned and ill-fitting as this nostrum was in the face of contemporary circumstances, it reinforced those valued and trusted verities central to the original spirit and character of Evanston.

For Further Reading

Eva11 s/011 's sp ecial ethos began with edu cation al No rth westem and the need to maintain an e,ivironm ent congenial to it. H eirs of that spirit, dig nita1ies here lay the corn erstone of Evanston 's Central School in 1893, the yea r after Evanston shed its status as a village .

The year 1894 constitutes a significant benchmark in the history of Evanston. Although much enlarged and now garbed as a city, the community remained much admired, envied , and even coveted; that year's thwarted designs of Chicago and Wilmette respectively for consolidation were the most recent affirmations of this fact. But the Evanston of old-ardently and proudly a temperance haven founded by those devoted Methodists from Chicago before the Civil War- had been transformed slowly over the ensuing half

Elizabeth Bloomfield, "Community, Ethos and Local Initiative: Review of a Theme in Canadian Urban History," Urban History Yearbook (1983): 53-72 has proven instructive conceptually. See also Michael H. Ebner, "'In the Suburbes of Toun': Chicago's North Shore to 1871," Chicago History 11 (Summer, 1982): 66-77, and Barbara M. Posadas, "Suburb into City: The Transformation of Urban Identity on Chicago's PeripheryIrving Park as a Case Study, 1870-1910," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 86 (Autumn, 1983): 162-176.

Robert D . Sheppard and Harvey B. Hurd , editors, A History of Northwestern University and Evanston (Chicago: Munsell Publishing Company, 1906) remains the single best source for the history of this community and should be supplemented with Clyde D. Foster, Evanston's Yesterdays, Stories of Early Evanston and Sketches of Some of its Pioneers (Privately Printed , 1956), and Harold F. Williamson and Payson S. Wild, Northwestern Universit)\ A History, 1850-1975 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1976).

The liquor issue as it impinged upon Evanston , the North Shore, and Chicago is best appreciated by turning to Perry R. Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983). The standard biographical treatment of the foremost individual in the temperance movement is Mary Earhart, Frances Willard, From Prayer to Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1944). Much more recent and offering critical, if differing, perspectives are: Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance, The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981) and Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).

The author gratefully acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Albert Beveridge Fund for Research in American History, and the American Association for State and Local History.

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REVIEW ESSAY Suburban historian Carol O'Connor looks at some recent books field and suggests dÂŁrections for further work.

IN 1974 a parody of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" appeared in the pages of the inimitable magazine known as Mad. Accompanied by an appropriately mawkish illustration, "Chicago Suburb" began: Hog Barbecuer for the World, School Segregator, Mower of Lawns, Player with Golf Clubs and the Nations' Wife Swapper; Bigoted, snobbish, flaunting Suburb of the White Collars.

This depiction sounds familiar not because it encapsulates the truth about the suburbs, but because-since the time of the social criticism of the fifties and the political rhetoric of the sixties-it has been fashionable to mock them.

But, as this edition of Chicago History makes clear, a growing number of scholars have begun to examine America's suburbs from a more balanced perspective. Taking their inspiration from Sam Bass Warner, Jr.'s study of Boston's Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962) and sociologist Herbert Gans's discussion of The Levittowners (New York : Pantheon Books, 1967), they are concerned about the implications of suburban growth for the central city. More fundamentally, they want to explain the sources of suburbia's attraction and to do justice to the variety of the suburban experience.

The major figure in this group is Kenneth T. Jackson, who has written a series of essays on the history of suburbanization in the United States and a forthcoming comprehensive study of the topic, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). By defining key terms and setting forth basic interpretations, Jackson's writings have provided a framework for additional research.

For example, in "The Crabgrass Frontier," an article that appeared in Raymond A. Mohl and James F. Richardson's The Urban Experience Carol O 'Connor is associate professor of history at Utah State University.

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in

the

(Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1973, pp . 197-207), Jackson explained that while suburbs, "low-density, [largely] residential areas ... at the edge of the built-up portion of large cities ... are about as old as cities," suburbanization, "the systematic and regular growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of central areas," is a relatively recent phenomenon that began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, Jackson argued that suburbanization occurred first in the United States, that it developed extremely rapidly here, and that, aside from Canada, other countries have followed this "North American pattern" only belatedly and on a small scale.

Jackson's ideas have evolved concerning the reasons for the distinctiveness of the North American pattern. In "The Crabgrass Frontier," he said that the pattern owed much to the nation's "antiurban heritage and agrarian tradition." In practical terms that heritage led to a preference for single-family, detached houses, a preference underwritten by Congress through its program of long-term, low-interest loans and reflected in the zoning laws of numerous suburban communities.

In addition. in his early essays Jackson argued that the changing nature of the urban population - the increased presence of masses of foreign immigrants in the nineteenth century and of poor blacks in the twentieth century- prompted those who could afford the cost of commutation to move away from the urban core.

Recently, however, Jackson showed that he has revised his views on suburbanization. In a talk before the Chicago Historical Society's Urban History Seminar Jackson said that "the reasons most often given to account for the dramatic deconcentration of American metropolitan areas in the last forty years-racial prejudice and an anti-city attitude- do not adequately explain the rapid proliferation of suburbs in the United States." He now believes that "the fundamental

causes and necessary conditions for suburbanization are largely economic in nature." In his opinion "the affordability of shelter in the United States has been most responsible for the suburban phenomenon," and while governmental financing not only of housing programs but of highway construction has contributed to the relative affordability of housing in this country, other factors-such as per capita wealth, inexpensive land, an innovative transportation technology, simple construction techniques, and capitalism have played an equally basic part.

In his early writings, while trying to understand the development of suburbia, he was clearly an advocate of the urban core. In 1973 his language was strident: "Cities can thrive only if people accept the proposition that affluent rings around dying cores will ultimately prove disastrous for both the cities and the suburbs." His recent talk in Chicago, however, suggests that Jackson now sees that the same type of factors that spurred suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century are currently working to retard it.

Increased land, home heating, and transportation costs; a shortage of money for home building; completion of the highway construction program; and a shift in the age structure of the population in metropolitan areas are causing the cities to become more attractive as residential centers while the suburbs are beginning to lose their appeal. Because these factors are affecting metropolitan areas around the world, Jackson concludes that "the United States is not only the first suburban nation but also the last."

Given the insight, scope, and daring of Jackson's recent talk, his forthcoming book promises to bring a new standard of analysis to the discussion of American suburbs. Still, his early writings have succeeded in generating some lasting contributions to the field.

Jon C. Teaford's City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), expands on a pair of questions raised by Jackson in his first essay on suburbia: why were so many cities able to absorb their suburbs in the nineteenth century; why have so few done so in the twentieth century? While Teaford 's answers to these questions, at least in the first half of the book, follow the lines suggested by Jackson in "Metropolitan Government Versus Suburban Auton-

omy" (in Cities in American History, edited by Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1972, pp. 442-462), the sources Teaford draws on are so varied, the examples he cites so memorable, and the arguments he makes so bold yet balanced, that the work deserves a thorough reading. Teaford explains how metropolitan America became the jumble that it is, not by creating villains and victims, but by underscoring the multiplicity of human desires and setting them within the political and technological context of a particular era.

According to Teaford, urban Americans have long been of a divided mind on the relative merits of centralization, with its prospect of increased efficiency and equity, and decentralization, with its promise of greater citizen participation and local self-control. While in the midnineteenth century most states established laws that facilitated municipal incorporation and prevented arbitrary annexations and consolidations, down to the end of that century many independent communities voted to join the city mainly to secure the benefits of better services at a cheaper rate . As many residents of Lake, Lake View, and Hyde Park saw things in the 1880s, union with Chicago meant "we will no longer be obliged to drink our own sewage." Rather, they would enjoy "the best water works in the United States, the best police, and the best fire department and ... [be] a part of the best city" in the nation.

By the twentieth century, however, Teaford argues, technological improvements made it possible for many suburbs to secure services of good quality at a reasonable cost. The establishment of special-purpose metropolitan districts, such as the Chicago Sanitary District, accomplished the same end. Thus suburban residents no longer had a tangible reason to consolidate themselves with the central city.

Yet in what are the book's most original chapters, Teaford shows that these suburbanites did not, as many have assumed, disregard the city's claim to their interest and their pocketbooks.

Instead many suburbanites, especially in greater Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland, became involved in struggles to establish dual-level federative governments for their metropolitan areas.

In the end the plans failed, but as Teaford proves, they were defeated by farmers and factory workers, not by the commuters.

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Review Essay The City and the Suburb is a model of thorough research, effective organization, and engaging prose. Teaford presents an intriguing historical alternative to the current metropolitan jigsaw; then he clearly explains why such a logical reform failed to win approval.

While a key strength of Tea ford 's work lies in its national scope and comparative dimension, the major contribution of two other books is their intensive look at individual suburbs. One of these is Zane L. Miller's Suburb: Neighborhood and Community in Forest Park, Ohio, 1935-1976 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

After a highly theoretical introduction, Miller provides a detailed ana lysis of Forest Park's history from the time when its 3,400 acres served as an undeveloped greenbelt for one of the planned communities of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, through its purchase and consequent subdivision by the Warner-Kantner corporation, one of the major builders of suburban housing during the 1950s and 60s, down to the mid-1970s when Forest Park, beset by fiscal problems and neighborhood tensions, reconsidered its long·-term plans for growth.

These plans had aimed for a balance in industrial, commercial, and residential development.

But while all of the parties interested in Forest Park's future agreed on this premise, they disagreed on the amounts of land to be allotted for various uses and particularly on the provision for multifamily, as opposed to single-family, housing construction. Throughout the book Miller describes the clash of interests among· planners, developers, citizens, and municipal officials, but his analysis becomes especially absorbing in the final chapters when issues of class and race combined with the impact of inflation and a downturn in the housing market to aggTavate the differences among groups in the community.

As these comments suggest, Miller's book emphasizes the role of urban planning in Forest Park. Nevertheless, it contains useful insights on other issues such as the developers' early interest in creating a sense of community and the significance of the later estab li shment of a tax on earnings. Moreover, the work is informed by Miller's sure sense of broader developments in the Cincinnati metropolitan region of which Forest Park is a part. Thus the reader is always aware that Forest Park is only one of many new suburbs 68

vying to attract the limited number of clean industries, handsome office complexes, prestigious stores, and middle-class homebuyers wanting to purchase sites on Cincinnati's circumferential interstate highway.

While Miller places Forest Park in a metropolitan context, my study, A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891-1981 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), places New York City's best-known suburb in a national setting. Scarsdale's citizens, drawn from many backgrounds but by the early twentieth century consisting largely of members of the upper-middle class , consciously sought to provide a model for the ideal suburban community. Whether their concern was restrictive zoning in the 1920s or integrated schooling in the 1960s, they intended that the policies they established would be taken up elsewhere.

In the absence of a number of similar suburban community studies, it is impossible to measure whether Scarsdale's pioneering actions had the impact that its citizens intended. It is clear, however, that the elite suburbs of various cities were conscious of competing against one another, p1·imarily in the area of public education (references to developments in the Winnetka schools recur frequently in the records of Scarsdale's board of education), but also with regard to the quality of their municipal services, the level of their local taxes, and the efficiency of their local governments. The larger world also had an impact on Scarsdale-from Progressivism , which was viewed favorably in Scarsdale, to the New Deal , which was loathed, to McCarthyism, which pointed up the liberalism of the majority of Scarsdale's residents, to the fractures of the 1960s which ultimately defined th e limits of that liberalism. Class, ethnicity, the racial structure of the community, and the chang·ing role of women there also clearly set developments in Scarsdale in a national con text.

Readers interested in an introduction to the dive1·sity of modern suburban living and the impact of suburbanization on the social structure and economy of American cities will want to consult another work. In Contemporary Suburban America (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: PrenticeHall , Inc. , 1981), Peter 0. Muller provides a collection of the best books and articles, both scholarly and popular, on the subject. His thesis is that "suburbia has become the essence of the

contempora1·y American city" and in this slender volume, he provides statistics, models, and examples to show "why this momentous transformation came about so suddenly and what it portends for our urban way of life."

Although Muller's book contains a solid chapter on "Th~ Historical Evolution of American Suburbs," he is most interested in the developments that have occurred since World War II in what he calls the "Freeway Era." The construction of thousands of miles of high-speed intraurban roadways has opened up millions of acres on the peripheries of American cities not only for residential construction but also for the building of shopping centers, industrial parks, and corporate headquarters. In fact, so many people, stores, and jobs have migrated to the suburbs in recent decades that American cities no longer conform to the concentric ring model developed by sociologists in the early twentieth century.

Now the American metropolis has a polycentric structure with a declining urban core and several rising "minicities" -those developments that usually emerge at major airports, the intersections of key freeways, and elsewhere along the circumferential highways or beltways of urban areas. According to Muller it is these peripheral nodes, and not the central business district, that currently offer the prestigious locations so important to the public image of many types of enterprise.

Regarding· the human consequences of the suburbanization of the metropolis, Muller's views are mixed. On the one hand he criticizes suburban zoning laws and discriminatory practices that limit the access of the poor and blacks to area housing and consequently to a growing proportion of the metropolis's jobs. On the other hand he applauds the suburbs for providing "the most comfortable mass-living conditions ever achieved" and doing so for an increasingly heterogeneous population. It is this last factor more than any other that leads Muller to assert that the suburbanization process will not only be "ongoing" but that it is in fact "i rreversible."

Whether Muller in this assertion or Kenneth Jackson , who has said that a trend back to city living has already started, is correct remains a question. But at least recent scholarship is reaching far beyond the old humorous considerations of barbecues, golf, and lawn-mowing.

BooK REvrEws FIELDS

I

TO BRICKS

The Rise of Suburbia FM.L. Thompson, Editor NC'w York: St. Martin's Press. 40.

Tl IE EAR LIEST ENGLISH SUBURB . communities of outsiders and undesirnbles banished beyond the boundaries of medieval and early modern towns, were regarded with mistrust and contempt. Those feelings were never fully ernclicatecl during the gradual turnabout which led to a house outside the town being seen as highly clesirablf' rathe1· than a place of last resort. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centu1·ies those who could afford it discovered the advantages of living at walking distance. or better still riding distance, from the town center and so planted the surrnuncling countryside with villas or with terraced housing which looked curiously stranded in so open a setting. Their piecemeal ventures pioneered a more genernl movement after 1815 which continued, with occasional fluctuations or stops to catch breath, until it was encircled and controlled by planning legislation after World War II .

The suburban experience, which became so familiar to so many people, was never quite accepted, being classed as a necessity for those in retrnat from the city but seldom a virtue in itself. "A modern suburb," wrote a journalist in 1876. "is a place which is neither one thing nor the other; it has neither the advantage of the town nor the open freedom of the count1·y, but manages to combine in nice equality of proportion the disadvantages of both." Perhaps because of that ambiguity suburban growth never received much investigation while it was in p1·ogrnss, except in reports of its ill effect~; and local historians avoided what was staring them in the face to look elsewhere for evidence of earlier historical episodes. It was not until the 1950s that, as pan of th e swelling interest in all those featu,·es of English life which conventional historians had pushed into the background. the suburbs began to be properly analyzed. The late Professo1· H.J. Dyos, the founding impressario of English u1·ban history, chose to explore a south London suburb called Camberwcll, known to most people as somewhere to be trave1·sed on the way to more familiar destinations rnther than a place worthy of attention in its own right.

His study Victoria11 Suburb was published in 1961, to be followC'd a year later by its American cow1terpart, Sam Bass \Varner, J1·.'s Streetcar Suburbs. Over the next twenty years the Dyos method was applied to a number of English and Scottish subu,·bs, and four of those studies have now been gathered together under the eel itorsh i p of F.M. L. Thompson. Three concern segments of outer London. two of them almost neighboring on Camberwell, while the fourth deals with the northern suburbs of Leeds in Yorkshire. Their publication can be

69

Chicago History, Summer 1984 regarded as the culmination of a phase of research, forming a good point for considering what the next directions may be and what comparisons may be drawn with the history of American suburbia.

Dyos looked at the turning of fields into bricks and mortar and revealed that what had been regarded as an inexorable progress guided by unseen forces was actually the work of hundreds of individuals, each with an identifiable interest in the success of the outcome . The leading role was played by the ground landlord, who had to gauge the right moment to release his land for development and to establish the overall form to be followed-the type and density of housing, the road layout, and provisions for shops, pubs, stabling, churches, and other extras thought necessary to attract the best tenants. If the development was to be leased rather than sold (as was largely the case in London, Birmingham, and some other major cities), the landowner had as much of an eye for the enduring reputation of his estate as for immediate profit. He had to hope that when all the properties he had seen built reverted to his successors in 80 or 99 years time their value would not have diminished. But few landowners took control to the extent of managing the whole process of development themselves: most preferred to share the risks with developers and speculative builders who took the main responsibility once the broad outline had been decided . Tracing their roles, and who they relied on to finance their parts, takes the historian into a tortuous world of title deeds, mortgages, building agreements, and leases in which no single development seems quite like the previous one. 1 a mes that are familiar one year disappear from view the next with nothing to signal their dispatch except an obl ique reference to "an embarrassment of circumstances." The lawyers who unravelled these mysteries as they happened remain themselves the most obscure figures of all-writing letters, drawing up documents, and funnelling loans from distant sources, but never setting a tangible mark on the end product.

In trying to identify who did what in building the suburbs it has never been thought very worthwhile to look for the names of architects; none of the essays in the Thompson volume gives them much attention.

The customary type of housing, in terraces or rows, had been adopted in the suburbs well before the nineteenth-century boom: indeed the earliest surviving example, dated 1658, stands in a north London suburb a good bus ride from the center. Narrow-fronted terraced housing best suited the capabilities of small builders working in the suburbs, as well as offering the maximum return from the site for the middleman developers, but it did not lend itself to much architectural expression . Architects for their part were ready to concur that housebuilding was too straightforward an exercise to merit their attention, or at least that they couldn't make a reputation from it as they could from the design of church or civic buildings .

Yet the part played by architects cannot be wholly overlooked. Large landowners entrusted their developments to experts, either surveyors or architects, who

70

showed as much interest in elevational design as in layout or services . Their schemes, sometimes known through publication, provided models for small-fry builders and developers to imitate. In the second half of the nineteenth century their turn came to use architects at first hand. As local autho1¡ities introduced building codes (London was exceptional in having had such codes since the seventeenth century), the need to obey new standards and to demonstrate the right intentions through application drawings encouraged house builders to employ architects to oversee that part of their work. Leafing through those applications, where sets of them have survived, there is not much sign that the architects enlisted used the opportunity to change existing practices beyond the necessary minimum. The involvement of architects from the bottom rung of the profession, parochial in outlook and too ready to do as asked, did not amount to much. But it was the thin end of a mighty wedge.

When the Feaction set in against the banality of by-law housing, healthy and safe but tedious in its repetitiousness, it was architects who provided the alternative cottage designs for garden cities and garden suburbs .

This is a topic too well covered already to need repeating in the Thompson volume, but it is bound to haunt any discussion of what has happened to English suburbia since 1900.

It is easy, having mustered the cast of those involved in building the suburbs, to assume the inevitability of their progress, but more often it is their vulnerability that cries out. The limits to what was possible were legion-the lie of the land, the supply of capital, the provision of outside services, and above all the problem of persuading tenants to occupy the newly opened territory. The first constraint was what was there before development was eve1¡ dreamed of. Any traveller through an English suburb will be struck by the irregularities in its layout, irregularities which are not the result of conscious planning, but of pre-existing field patterns and land divisions, all of which have left an enduring mark even when no other rustic signs remain. There may also be a cluster of much earlier buildings, substantial enough once to have been a village or small town enjoying an independent existence. That too will have had an impact on the suburb which overtook it, perhaps by lending its reputation to the new development in ways which are now hard to recognize. In a much broader sense the locality-which side of the town the suburb was on and the character of preceding developments closer to the center-limited what could be achieved even by the most enterprising builders.

Transpol"lation appears to be the second obvious precondition in shaping a suburb. Yet in many places, especially outside London, it was not an essential factor.

Within a radius of Fi:! or 2 miles developments could be regarded as "walking suburbs," or if slightly further out, could manage with horse buses which needed no great capital to establish. Because of its size London began to depend on its railways in the 1850s and 1860s, but the relationship was seldom one in which railways took the upper hand by opening stations in deserted

Book Reviews spots in the hope that houses would follow. As Thompson puts it, the "omnibus and suburban train should be regarded as permitting, rather than creating, the [English] suburb." When mass transit became more widely available at the end of the century-cheap trains and municipally run electric streetcars-it threatened the carefully nurtured respectability of suburbs fifty or mor·e years old, sending their inhabitants scurrying yet further out of town.

Even if the first essentials of the suburban formula were achieved-a site on the right side of town with an adequate means of access-the landowner and his cohorts could still miss their opportunity by misjudging their market. The exodus from the city became so widespread a phenomenon that it was easy to believe that no one engaged in satisfying it could fail, but within the general demand the most sought-after tenants were a small and infuriatingly fickle minority.

Their loyalty lasted no longer than the one- or threeyear lease on their new house, by the end of which time they were ready to uproot in search of yet another version of the suburban ideal. The usual causes of such constant restlessness-unfriendly neighbors, or a change of job-might be beyond the housebuilders' influence, but the finer points of house design, not to mention the standard of construction , could make all the difference in achieving their aim. In the midnineteenth century the most successful were those alert to the growing taste for detached and semi-detached houses, which seemed so much more suitable than terraced housing as a setting for domestic seclusion.

The feeling that the terrace and the square were layouts which thr·ew families too much into the public gaze began to be frequently voiced in the 1850s, with the clear implication that those confined to such a life were simply waiting till they could afford or find a more private Elysium.

As the Thompson collection confirms, English studies of suburban growth have concentrated on the analysis of the building process with little attention given to the aspirations and outlook of those for whom the houses were built. The strength of American work in the same field, for instance Gwendolyn Wright's Morahsm and the Model Home (1980), has been almost the reverse: rich in chronicling changing attitudes to the home as reflected in novels, women's magazines, and the most down-to-earth sections of the building press. English historians may have been wary of discussing suburban attitudes because the sources for studying them cannot match the precision of title deeds or mortgages, but a more venturesome approach is bound to come. The accumulation of local histories of the Dyos kind is now much less likely to be of help than work that gets above the parochial level to ask why the suburban impulse has been so strong and so enduring.

ROBERT THORNE GREATER LONDO COUNCIL

CLASS SCH 00 LS Class Politics & Public Schools : Chicago, 1900-1950

by Julia Wrigley 1

ew Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, $28.00.

Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley edited by Robert L. Reid Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, $22.95.

THESE BOOKS MAKE A substantial contribution to the history of Chicago and to the history of American education.Julia Wrigley tackles the tough question of the relevance of class to the politics of education. Like other good historians of education today, she moves beyond the two competing models of interpretation that have shaped debates for the past fifteen years.

School systems exemplify democratic evolution, said the traditionalists. No, responded the radical revisionists, school systems illustrate the bureaucratic imposition of social control on the working class. Recently, some historians have emphasized that public school systems are the result of contests between conflicting ideals and conflicting class and interest groups. This is Julia Wrigley's position in Class Politics & Public Schools.

In contrast with writers of the "imposition" school, Wrigley stresses that workers often supported expanded public schooling; that when they resisted particular educational innovations, labor groups sometimes got their way; that businessmen did not always see expanded schooling as an opportunity for social control, but instead recognized a danger in education's "doubleedged character"; and that civic reform groups often differed from businessmen in their educational ideology and policies. The lively and contentious history of Chicago's educational politics provides much evidence for this point of view. The confrontations were often fierce in Chicago, and the class basis of conflict was explicit. A fascinating cast of characters contributed to the drama.

Although Wrigley is trained in sociology, her book is not very theor·etical. Her attention is focused on what drove the politics of education in Chicago; she does not generalize beyond her case study or test a general model. Nor does her book attempt the difficult task of assessing working people's attitudes toward schooling or the role of education in their lives. It is, rather, a good combination of traditional labor history and the history of educational politics. It is a story of organizations and their positions, of official actions and public reactions and within these confines Class Pohtics & Public Schools is very successful. Wrigley makes clear that there were more than two sides in this class war. Even a simplified roster of participants includes teachers (with internal divisions between women and men), labor (with a split between the AFL and the CIO), civic reformers (ambivalent and shifting), businessmen (who seem quite monolithic in this account), and machine politicians _(who, of course, were merely expedient).

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Chicago History, Summer 1984

Margaret A . H aley (i11 white dress a11d /,a.t), shown here in a 1911 suffrage parade. As business represe ntative of th e Chicago Teachers Fed e rntion from 1900 until 1939, Haley was a re11ow11 ed lab or leade ,; e du ca tor, and bete n o ir of antiunion businessmen.

The Chicago Teachers Federation , h eaded by Margaret Haley and Catharine Goggins, was more strongly affiliated with organized labor than were teach~rs in other cities. But their main ally, the Chicago Federation of Labor, proved unreliable in the long run because its leaders had to respond also to school janitors and other loyal machine employees whose interests diverged from the teachers. Liberal civic reformers were not reliable allies either. People like Jane Addams and Charles Merriam played a shifting role, sometimes sympathetic to teacher participation and democratic school policies, yet also attracted by the contrasting doctrines of efficiency and administrative expertise. Although the civic reformers differeJ from each other on various issues, the general drift over the first three decades of the twentieth century was from the teachers' side to the administrators' side.

For example, civic reformers sided strongly with teachers and labor groups against the dual-track vocational idea of former superintendent Edwin Cooley at the turn of the century. But in the 1920s they tended to support superintendent William McAndrew's advocacy of I.Q. tests, challenged by teachers as the "quackery of the efficiency engineer." Nonetheless, when big business allied with the Democratic machine to slash school budgets in the 1930s, liberal reformers rejoined the teachers in opposition. Alliances in Chicago school politics changed in kaleidoscopic fashion , but there was an underlying shift from class politics to pluralist politics, from the assertion of broad social programs to narrower group interests. Wrigley's account of these changing alliances is clear and instructive. Her book should find an appreciative audience among those interested in Chicago history as well as among educational historians.

Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley 72

is a perfect companion to Wrigley's book and a wonderful addition to our stock of memoirs by educators. Business representative of the Chicago Teachers Federation from 1900 until her death in 1939, Haley wrote the autobiography in her last years, when both her health and her union were waning. It found no publisher and appears in print for the first time in this edition . Like Julia Wrigley's book , Haley's autobiography is about groups and politics, about the perceptions and actions of the leading players in a drama of four decades. Battleground is an apt title for it. Haley begins, "I never wanted to fight. .. It was my lot, however, to come into maturity just when women were struggling for political, economic, and social independence."

And fight she did, continuously and effectively.

Battleground is not a reflective work . It is a detailed account of Haley's tactics, strategies, allies, skirmishes, victories, and defeats.

A a leader of teachers and the labor movement, Haley went on to fight for better salaries, teacher councils, and women's participation in the National Education Association . She and the CTF fought against corporate collusion to avoid property taxes and administrative schemes to test and track children. She was a thorn in the side of many school superintendents and was the bete noir of anti-union businessmen , but she was widely admired in her own time, and she stands now as one of the exceptional educators of the twentieth century. This first edition of Ballleground is handsomely printed and expertly edited. Robert Reid provides a brief introduction and helpful footnotes .

Historians should congratulate Professor Reid and the University of Illinois Press for making this interesting document available.

CARL KAESTLE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON