White Picket Fences
The chiaroscuro heritage of suburbia
Here’s another piece in my ongoing series about the role of home in American life. This one is about my Long Island hometown. Hope you like it. —Jim
I think of suburbia as the child of a shotgun marriage between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, two founding parents who loathed each other. From Jefferson, the suburb draws on a dream of nature and small stakeholders constituting a stable society; from Hamilton, one that emphasizes the importance of cities and commerce as sources of economic vitality. The resulting union was pastoral, a managed geography designed to blend the best of both worlds.
As with so many phenomena in American life, the suburb was originally of British descent. In contrast to the rest of the Western world, Anglo-Saxons of means have shown a penchant for the edge, not the urban core, as a site of choice for family homes. (Like rich people everywhere, they also tend to like second homes in the country.) Nowhere, however, was the suburb embraced on the scale it was in the United States, where the combination of detached houses, expansive parking lots, and open space made it the lifestyle of choice for a vast middle class. Suburbs grew in population until the end of the century, and after a brief reversal at the expense of cities early in the twenty-first century, appear to have once again become the preferred locale. Fifty-three percent of Americans described themselves as living in suburbia by 2015, and there was a flurry of suburban migration amid the pandemic that hit five years later, fueled by new possibilities of remote work that may yet ultimately reconfigure the nation’s demographic geography. The Industrial Revolution notwithstanding, it appears Jefferson’s anti-urban bias continues to animate American life, most notably in presidential elections since 2016, though much of that came from the rural population; suburbs, reflecting their mixed heritage, tended to split.
Of course, suburbia has its critics as well. Such criticism includes sometimes elitist complaints about its mediocrity (architectural, among other kinds, usually falling under a general rubric of conformity) as well as the environmental degradation caused by urban sprawl. But no criticism has been as powerful as that condemning the racism that has always lay at the very heart of suburbia’s appeal. Suburbanization can’t simply be conflated with racism; a series of social, economic and cultural imperatives drove the process whereby millions of Americans realized multigenerational aspirations for safety, stability, and financial status. But there’s little question that its appeal also drew heavily on visceral desires to avoid the mere presence of “others” (usually black people), combined with more structural factors (like the financing of school systems) that shut racial minorities out. This exclusion, while near total in some cases, was not entirely sustainable—the Civil Rights movement made a difference—and by the early twenty-first century, minorities began edging into the nation’s suburbs, both by forming their own enclaves and also through some degree of integration, a trend that has quickened recently.
I was pulled into the suburban vortex when I was six years old. My parents had been lifelong outer borough residents who would have preferred to spend the rest of their lives in Queens. But the looming prospect of school redistricting for the sake of racial integration led them to join the exodus of white flight. As far as they were concerned, their children would not be guinea pigs for the sake of social engineering in the form of busing my sister and me to remote locations in uncertain neighborhoods. Charity began at home. Which meant finding a different one.
I regard my family’s flight from Queens as my original sin, an act of social injustice committed in my name for which I had no knowledge or choice, and for which I will forever bear some shame. If nothing else, it means that the words you’re now reading should not be understood as a demand for an uncritical acceptance of the American Dream as it has in fact been pursued and achieved. If I can’t help but take a feral pleasure in the sated hungers my childhood represents, I also cannot in good conscience insist its virtue or even necessity. I’m here to testify, and, in all candor, to celebrate, as I feel I must. You will draw your own conclusions.
My parents felt they needed to leave Queens, but they were not in a financial position to do suburbia “right,” which is to say to buy a home. My father had two loving older sisters, the elder of whom was in a position to extend material support. When, after the first and only time he had gone abroad—to serve a hitch in the U.S. Army in Germany from 1956 to 1958—she gave him a temporary home in the Long Island town of Hempstead. This aunt of mine had married well to an upwardly mobile child of Italian immigrants who had fought at D-Day. In 1969, she prevailed on her in-laws to rent an apartment to our family in the affluent inner suburb of Port Washington, where I would spend the next four years.
My memories of Queens are shadowy. I have flickering images in my head: our row-house apartment; the corner where I waited for a school bus; a dark preschool gym; watching the New York Jets on television (another new franchise from the time of my birth, also based in Queens); the delivery of my first bed (June 4, 1968, the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated). But my Port Washington memories are in full color—the cavernous green park where I played football with my father; the light blue floor of the town pool where I learned to swim and spent most of my summers; the yellow brick of my elementary school, whose playground was the proving ground for my first friendships. This is where I became aware of a wider world: I recall seeing images of the Vietnam War on our living room television set; wearing a t-shirt commemorating the first moon landing; hearing a friend’s big brother play the new Beatles album, Let It Be. It’s also where I first came to understand that I was living on an island: for the rest of my childhood, I would be aware of the ports and beaches of Long Island’s north shore, its hilliness in contrast with the flatter, squatter landscape of the south shore and its expansive, roaring ocean beaches, where I would turn lobster-red at the start of each season and tumble in towering, frothy waves.
Demographically speaking, however, my family was in over its head in Port Washington. We were renters, not owners, and as such my parents felt like interlopers. More importantly, they had concerns about my sister and me getting exposed to lifestyles they considered neither attainable nor healthy; family lore has it that my family decided to move after calling my parents from a friend’s car phone. Like most people, they felt they would feel most comfortable around those like themselves (“like” here an elastic term encompassing racial, class, or ideological kinship). My father’s veteran status allowed him to get a mortgage for a cookie-cutter split-level ranch in the town of Northport, about forty miles east of Manhattan in western Suffolk County (which was getting toward the outer limit of commutability, though the fact that my father worked out of a firehouse in Brooklyn—not on the island of Manhattan, literally and figuratively a bridge too far—made the drive tolerable, especially since he worked odd hours that included nights and weekends when traffic wouldn’t be that bad.
If you include my college career (during which I was gone a lot of the time), I had only had a dozen Northport years. But they were of course the crucible of my life, among other ways in forming my character as a small-town boy. This was anchored in my schooling, especially Northport High School, which furnished the source of my social life, and thus a series of satellite locations at the homes of my friends. Most were more affluent than I was; many were Jewish, though I had one close childhood buddy who was the son of a mixed-race couple. He lived around the corner, and I spent a lot of time in his home. It was there that I saw black musicians on television as well as watched Richard Nixon resign from office. These were days when parents—a great many parents, rich and poor, urban and rural, of multiple races—told their children to go outside and play, and we would disappear for hours at a time roaming the neighborhood on our bikes or by traipsing our way through woods and the backyards of our neighbors.
The wider geography of my childhood included Main Street, whose trolley tracks remained in place even if the trolley itself had long since stopped running, and which ended at the town docks (the other end housed the Roman Catholic Church I attended erratically). Main Street was a hub that included the 5 & 10-cent store (whose wooden floors were another reminder of receding worlds), a bargain movie theater (where I had my first kiss), and a bus stop that could take me to the local mall in Huntington. I also spent considerable time at the Northport Public Library, where I had a job for most of my high school years and which furnished me with sustained contact with books. Northport was home—the homiest home I’d ever call home in my life.
It was also a home I always expected to leave—had to leave if I was going to achieve the still inchoate dreams taking shape in my heart and my brain. And so I joined the stream of tens of millions of Americans of my time and went off to college. Little did I know that it would be my wife, a lifelong New Englander, who would bring us back (again to the edge) of the great metropolis.
Next: The journey toward settling down.
Nice evocation of Northport and an interesting history of suburbia. I also learned a lot about my friend Jim, not least of which is that he wasn’t born in our hometown!