There were two overarching reasons for condemning the suburbs, during the ’50s and early ’60s, as the most rotten locale in civilized life: class and money. Most of the people leaving the cities for the suburbs in the 1950s were tradespeople, modest businessmen, teachers and the like. They were, in other words, members of the middle-class, the impassioned rejection of which has been the chief rite de passage of the modern American artist and intellectual. With the growth of suburban towns, the liberal American intellectual now had a concrete geography to house his acute sense of outrage.
Yet if the suburbs were becoming the headquarters of the American middle-class, they were also becoming associated with the enviable characteristics of upward mobility: a decent salary, home ownership, access to superior public education and services. “We’re going to have to move back to the city,” the callous but suddenly redeemed advertising man grimly says to his wife after quitting his job in disgust in the popular 1959 film “The Last Angry Man” — moving from suburban Connecticut to hardscrabble Manhattan being proof of his redemption. (What a socioeconomic difference 50 years makes!)
Art and intellect are solitary vocations, and their practitioners often require a common enemy to sustain the lonely effort. The suburbs continued to serve that purpose, but the type of antipathy toward them changed in the late ’60s and ’70s.
I loved the last line “Hollywood is the most illusion-soaked, soul-hardened and materialistic suburb in the world.”
In truth, they hate (and fear) that which they do not understand. That’s why the U.S. Military is always the most evil force on the face of the earth.
Is this posted as a metaphor for those who feel millenia of tradition should count for more than justice/equality strawmen and don’t feel the need to radically reinterpret Holy Scripture based on their feelings/spirit, and how the hierarchy of TEC feels about them?! 🙂
“Hollywood,” which today is little more than the big-screen propaganda arm of the Left, is hostile to suburbia because suburbia is a physical representation of peoples’ rejection of virtually everything the modern Left champions: Collectivist voting blocs, welfare-state economics, social coercion and identity politics. When presented with the ability to flee the Left’s political dominion in the big cities, those with that ability fled. What an insult to our moral and political betters!
It’s about control.
There are legitimate concerns over sprawl. The extension of roads and utilities over vast low density areas causes long term costs that may not be sustainable. That having been said, there is an Elitism in assuming that people who are happy with their neighborhoods should not be.
i personally think suburbs are dreadful; horrible architecture and horrible sprawl; there is a lot to dislike about them, but i can understand the reasons people move there. unfortunately, most housing is more affordable there too.
Well, it’s nice when the good guy wins sometimes. Just remember, there is only One perfect guy.
bl
When I read this I thought of “Tobacco Road”. It is strange how 75 years can change ones view of living conditions that are soul killing! Maybe Yates would prefer to live like Jeeter?
Five types of people live in major Southern urban areas like Houston and Dallas – 1) the very wealthy; 2) bohemians (no not the Czechs); 3) single people from surburban backgrounds who intend to move to suburbs once they marry and buy a house; 4) poor people and 5) the lower middle class (and older people who choose not to leave the homes they have been in) who now live in run down older suburbs which are now urban in everything but name. The middle and upper middle class (along with some very wealthy people who do not like the city) with kids live in the outer suburbs. Southern elites in the city have a much more milder dislike of the suburbs than their yankee and west coast breatheren – because most of them lived in the surburbs for some period of their lives. The interesting trend in Houston and Dallas has been the gentrification of areas I considered no-go growing up.
My wife and I attended a very nice wedding in the Hamptons a few years back and it was interesting that her friends were considering moving to the same neighborhoods Queens that Archie Bunker and his contempories were abandoning in the 1960’s for outer surburbia. (what is really scarry is to look at a map of the revolutionary battle of Brooklyn Heights and realize that there was nothing there at all)
the irony here is that Hollywood itself (and Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Brentwood etc.) are suburbs too. Try to catch a bus on Mulholland Drive, it ain’t happening…..
Hollywood is not a suburb. It’s part of the core city of LA. Some suburbs, such as Berkeley, Calif., are completely urban in nature.
magnolia,
if you think the architecture in the burbs is horrible, you should see the upscale loft-and-condo-industrial-chic that is now “infilling” downtown San Diego! FEH!