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This fascinating study of the suburbs of Long Island, New York (and by analogy, those across America) arose from the authors' daily commute from Manhattan to SUNY Old Westbury, which is near Levittown, one of the earliest and perhaps the most famous of American suburbs. Initially they had imagined suburbia "as an anaesthetized state of mind, a no place dominated by a culture of conformity and consumption." Their research quickly taught them otherwise. While Picture Windows does document a growing obsession with middle-class consumer goods, like the televisions that came with 1950 houses at Levittown, it disrupts the myth of suburban serenity to reveal "a rich and stormy history" of political and social conflict. The planners and visionaries of suburbia, as the authors attest, tried to create a place "where ordinary people, not just the elite, would have access to affordable, attractive modern housing in communities with parks, gardens, recreation, stores, and cooperative town meeting places." Shunning the "snobbery" of cultural critics who deplored the "neat little toy houses on their neat little patches of lawn," Baxandall and Ewen find much to celebrate in the burgeoning suburbs. Most of those who flocked to the new towns had been crowded into city slums during the depression and war; they never questioned the architectural conformity of the suburbs, but only rejoiced in the chance of owning their own brand-new homes, places empty of anyone else's memories and rich with potential. Picture Windows is a quintessentially American story, told with skill and conviction. --Regina Marler
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From Publishers Weekly
Held up as postwar dream communities, the suburbs have since come to represent a conformist, antisocial and emotionally stultifying life for their residents. Baxandall and Ewen, both professors of American studies at the State University of New York-Old Westbury, revisit the 'burbs and place their conception and growth in a broad political, cultural and economic context, tracing the many changes that have occurred since the '50s. Based on new historical research and interviews with more than 230 suburbanites (many have been residents since the 1920s, '30s and '40s), Baxandall and Ewen present a detailed overview of how the interplay between urban populations and outlying areas produced the suburbs. They are at their best highlighting instances of racial and class tensions (i.e., in the 1920s one in eight residents of the new suburb of Freeport, Long Island, alarmed by the influx of immigrants and blacks, were members of the Ku Klux Klan). But the most enlightening part of their study details how postwar conservative Republicans, working with the building industry, assailed the concept of public housing in the first stage of their all-out attack on the domestic policies of the New Deal. At federal hearings on public housing led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1947, the senator essentially scuttled federally financed public housing by calling it a "breeding ground for communists." While Baxandall and Ewen never quite shake off the charges against 1950s suburbs, they do make a convincing case that economic, racial and ethnic diversity as well as new opportunities for women make contemporary suburbs substantively different from their predecessors. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
