The Suburbs Have Won
The great movement of
Americans during the 20 th century has been from the countryside and
small cities into big metropolitan areas. But within metropolitan areas the
movement has been outward, from the cities to the suburbs. The next census, in
2000, will show that the United States has become majority-suburban: Most
Americans, that is, now live in metropolitan areas but outside the city
limits.
New York
is the biggest city in the country by a wide margin, and it is the most urban
in character--but don't let that deceive you. Seventy percent of New Yorkers
live in the suburbs. New York has been majority-suburban for decades, since
before there was Levittown or Newsday or Please Don't Eat the
Daisies . About one in 20 Americans is a New York suburbanite.
The suburbs dominate popular culture. The default setting
for movies, television shows, and even rock music is the suburbs. Anything with
an urban or a rural setting is self-consciously played as "different." The
suburbs dominate politics, especially national politics. Newt Gingrich is the
first suburban speaker of the House. Every presidential campaign is now
conceived of by strategists as a battle for the soul of the suburbs. (The
presidential electorate became majority-suburban years before the country as a
whole did.) The dominant political machine in New York is a suburban one, Al
D'Amato's.
Forget every Sunday-newspaper
trend story you've ever read about gentrification, or about harried
metropolitans fleeing to small towns, or about good-hearted buppies returning
to the 'hood. Those are statistical blips, or anecdotes, or fantasies. Urban
America is still losing population. Rural America is still losing population.
Black people are suburbanizing faster than white people. The suburbs are
unstoppable, inescapable.
It is
still possible to hear the suburbs described, especially by professional city
planners and other urbanologists, as a kind of temporary and revocable
aberration. You know the argument: They were subsidized by the federal
government through the interstate-highway program and cheap Veterans
Administration mortgages. They were forced upon New Yorkers by a road-crazy,
mass-transit-hating Robert Moses. Their growth was a pure product of race
prejudice. Millions of people, especially New Yorkers, are poised, ready,
waiting, eager to move back into the city, if only ... I'm sorry. Forget about
it. The main reason for the growth of the suburbs is that Americans like
suburbs. They like houses. They like lawns. They like cars. Most low-income
city people would move to the suburbs if they could. Mass commitment to
urbanism has never existed in the United States--even in New York, which seems
more urban than it really is because it annexed most of its suburbs (that is,
the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island) long ago. What's remarkable
about New York's suburbs is not their demographic success--that's a
characteristic of all suburbs--but their cultural failure. New York has the
most out-of-it, least happening suburbs of any big American city.
Only New York has no suburb with an essentially
yuppie character--by which I mean dotted with little strip centers containing,
perhaps, one or two casually chic restaurants, a Starbucks, a Borders, an
upscale food market, an art gallery, a Merchant-Ivory-type movie theater, and a
mildly stylish home-furnishings store. Palo Alto, Shaker Heights, and
University City, Mo., have far more of a patina of sophistication than any New
York suburb.
New York also doesn't have a
full-blown suburban-nirvana "edge city" suburb, such as Plano, Texas, or
Bloomington, Minn., or Tysons Corner, Va.--the kind of suburb that has shiny,
enormous malls and "totally planned communities" with spindly little trees and
curving streets and thatchy English names.
Meanwhile, a truly hip suburb (no, that's not oxymoronic--go visit West Lake
Hills, Texas, or Berkeley or Topanga, Calif.), where there would be leaflets
stapled to the telephone poles and vegetarian restaurants and rave clubs, is
completely out of the question in New York, the only American city where there
is still a total overlap between "downtown" and "bohemian." It's the only city
where the actual city is still the center not just of the metropolis's official
high culture but of its everyday culture too.
Westchester County, where I live, is suburbia set in amber.
Its population has barely fluctuated for three-quarters of a century. You like
prewar buildings? Virtually the whole county of Westchester below Interstate
287 is prewar buildings--it could be a movie set. There are very few malls.
Superstores are just starting. There is ethnicity. There are country clubs--the
old undemocratic kind, not the new kind that are essentially outdoor health
clubs. The expensive restaurants still serve "continental cuisine." The
communities are all villages with sidewalked main streets containing rows of
brick buildings: just what brave suburban reformers in the Sun Belt are
struggling desperately to coax into existence.
Life
revolves around children. If you lead any kind of "alternative lifestyle," you
will be left blessedly alone, rather than being ostracized, but you won't find
much in the way of an affinity culture. At dinner parties, people argue whether
the kid who wrote "bitch" on a toilet stall in the middle-school bathroom
should be expelled. My suburb, Pelham, is Westchester's alleged literary-media
colony, but I have never been to a single social event here where a hothouse
conversation about the Industry could be sustained for more than about half an
hour before it slowly flutters back to home ground: the town and the kids.
(Yes, this was the case even the week that Pelhamite Joe Klein was unmasked as
the author of Primary
Colors .)
Virtually all the cultural imagery pertaining
to Westchester dates from the 1950s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
era, and is now out of date. But nothing has replaced it. Martinis, barbecues,
cigarettes, adultery--all are now vestigial, but where are the new suburban
symbolic hooks?
Back in
the 1950s, twin colossi sat astride the Hudson, figuratively glowering at each
other: Betty Friedan in Grandview on the West Bank, writing The Feminine
Mystique , and John Cheever in Scarborough on the East Bank, writing the
Wapshot books and the short stories. She, upset about the limited role accorded
educated upper-middle-class women; he, upset about how little comfort the
unlimited role accorded upper-middle-class male Episcopalians seemed to bring.
Since then at least one monumental social change has swept across
suburbia--namely the entry of married women into the work force--without
generating a literature. The best Westchester novel of the past
quarter-century, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime , is set in 1910.
When I moved to New York from Texas, people kept pulling me
aside and saying, helpfully, that my life would be completely ruined if I chose
to live in the suburbs (or the city). All my friends who had grown up in the
organic New York suburbs had, at some point around age 14, taken a blood oath
never ever to live in the suburbs as adults. People who did move to the suburbs
had to obey an unwritten conversational rule that you had to justify it in
stagy and fake terms, either by exaggerating the hellishness of the city for
children or by pretending that the suburbs were really not that far away and
had lots of great Korean groceries. I felt as if I had wandered in in the
middle of the second act--why did it make such a big difference? What had
happened to all those people when they were 14 that was so horrifying?
I now
realize that what all this was really about was, first, the extreme difference
in New York between suburban and urban culture (which doesn't exist in most
other cities because they don't really have an urban culture for middle-class
parents any more); and, second, status. The status point is a tricky one. In
the minor leagues of status, where most people play, the city is for the poor
and the suburbs are for the rich, so to move out to the suburbs is to move up
as well. But in the major leagues of status, the city outranks the suburbs. The
city is where the real players live. The city is for the aristocracy, and the
suburbs are for the bourgeoisie.
In the major leagues, when you live in the
suburbs, it means that you haven't made it enough to afford the basic setup of
co-op apartment-private school-weekend house. Or it means that you're not New
York-savvy enough to be able to arrange for yourself one of those special
little deals the city is full of, such as, mainly, a rent-controlled apartment.
Or it means that you're not artful enough to be able to live charmingly as a
bohemian. If you have major-league aspirations and can't manage to live in the
city, you're better off moving out past the suburban Zone of Shame and living
full time in the kind of lovely small town where major leaguers spend weekends
and summers. At least then you're plausibly rustic and creative.
When I'm off the Eastern
Seaboard and people ask me where I'm from, I say "New York." When closer to
home I have to answer in apologetic question-language: "A suburb of New York?
In Westchester County? Called 'Pelham'?" Think of a real New York big
shot--Felix, Spike, Brooke, Donna, Mick, Anna--and then try to picture that
person standing on a train platform listening to a humanoid voice announce over
a microphone, 1984 -style, "Attention! The 8:19 train to ... New York ...
will be 13 minutes late due to ... operating difficulties." It doesn't work,
does it?
More than the Democratic
Party, more than major-league baseball, more than the Social Security system,
more than the Hollywood salary structure, the New York suburbs need to be
reinvented. They need a real animating idea that isn't a half-century old. Or,
at the very least, a new set of clichés.
