The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The family room is where the kids park their bicycles and skateboards, their surfboards and skis. It is okay, in the family room, to find a sneaker on the coffee table, a fielder’s mitt on top of the television set, and a partly eaten apple wedged between the sofa cushions. All these details provide, after all, living proof of “living.” And yet it is possible that the permissive ambience of the family room—a phenomenon that did not exist a generation ago—has prompted many families, and many men in particular, to sour on the suburbs, which have disappointed them in other ways that they would not have dreamed possible, such as rising crime rates and traffic problems, reminiscent of the city they left behind.

  Perhaps, in the long run, the family room has been an unhealthy development. It has been popular, in recent years, to speak of urban communities as manifestations of a “sick society.” And yet there is very recent evidence that this may not be the case at all. Dr. Leo Srole, a psychiatric sociologist at Columbia University and a director of the Midtown Manhattan Study, has come up with new findings which indicate that, if the cities are sick, the suburbs and rural areas of America are even sicker. In a 1977 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, Dr. Srole reported that his researches indicated that, in general, mental health was better in the cities than in the suburbs. “At minimum,” he said, “the data stand in total refutation of the prejudgment continually pressed since the eighteenth century that urban mental health is on a one-way slide downward.”

  Dr. Srole referred to the anti-urban bias of many social commentators, politicians, and writers such as Erich Fromm as part of an “undocumented indictment”—or conspiracy—against the big cities, adding that cities may offer a far healthier accommodation to the human condition and spirit than small towns do. “We’ve got to realize that urban life does an awful lot of good through the cultural and other resources that it provides and that many people thrive on,” says Dr. Srole.

  To support his thesis, Dr. Srole produced a number of pieces of evidence, including an unpublished study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency. The survey, involving 6,700 subjects across the country, was designed to uncover signs of stress and other difficulties—such as trouble sleeping, feelings that “everyone is against me,” that a nervous breakdown was imminent, and that “worries get me down physically.” It was found that people who lived in rural areas and in towns of under 50,000 population had “symptom scores” nearly 20 percent higher than those who lived in cities of 50,000 or more. Another bit of interesting evidence came from a comparison of people living in midtown Manhattan with those in remote Stirling County, Nova Scotia, where the population density per square mile is twenty persons, compared with mid-Manhattan’s 75,000. After drawing subsamples from each group that matched demographically, Dr. Srole compared the mental health scores and found that the mid-Manhattanites were far better off. The scores, says Dr. Srole, “offer no support whatsoever to the antique presupposition of the superiority of rural mental health. On the contrary, Stirling County’s mental-morbidity rate is higher than midtown Manhattan’s by a wide and highly significant statistical margin.”

  Furthermore, Dr. Srole concludes that mental health in the cities has improved markedly over the years. Going back to a research project that was conducted in Manhattan in 1954, Srole reinterviewed as many of the original sample of 1,660 New Yorkers as he could find twenty years later—695 of the original group. Of these, 44 percent still lived in Manhattan, 17 percent had migrated to one of New York’s four other boroughs, and another 26 percent resided within the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area, figures that indicate a certain loyalty among New Yorkers to their city and to city living. Comparing the mental-health ratings of people who are in their forties today with those who were in their forties twenty years ago, Dr. Srole found that the proportion of those in need of psychiatric help had dropped by 50 percent. A similar decline was measured when people in their fifties today were compared with those in their fifties twenty years ago.

  Of course, other factors than “quality of life” in New York City must be taken into account when examining these rosy figures—such as a general improvement in social and economic conditions, parental influences, and the social forces that shaped the parents themselves in the era in which they grew up. Still, Dr. Srole’s findings are encouraging. It is currently quite the fashion among New Yorkers to deplore their city and the life it provides, and at Manhattan cocktail parties there is always a certain amount of agonized talk about rapes, muggings, and burglaries, from people who, it usually turns out, have never actually experienced any of these discomfitures. It may be that New Yorkers, like everyone else, enjoy acting out dramatic fantasies and are helping to feed a myth of New York as a dark and dangerous place—while in reality New York’s crime rate is lower than that of Cleveland, Houston, or Washington, D.C. New Yorkers, figuratively speaking, may be complaining happily all the way to the bank.*

  True, United States Census figures do show that urban areas have a higher divorce rate than suburban or rural areas. But since one out of five American marriages now ends in divorce, sociologists like Dr. Srole would probably not claim any connection between divorce and mental illness. In fact, he might conclude that divorce was a sign of mental health—our ability to make difficult decisions and to move away from unpleasant situations. What the lower suburban divorce rate may indicate, as we have noted, is that many unhappy suburban marriages are being held together merely by the weight of children, jointly owned property, and co-signed mortgages.

  At least one Scarsdale man, recently divorced, says that it was the physical fact of the big suburban house which kept his marriage together longer than was good for either his former wife or himself—the house, the lawn, the garden, the swimming pool. “Owning a house means endless expenditures of time and money,” he says. “For years, while the marriage was going sourer and sourer, we could occupy ourselves—and keep our minds off the situation—with the house, with things that had to be done. The new roof, getting the place painted, keeping the hedges clipped, and getting rid of the crab grass.” Finally, he decided to divest himself of all this, and as usually happens, his former wife got the house. Also, as usually happens, he plans to move back to the city, where he feels life for a bachelor will be more congenial. “There’s an elegance to New York City social life that was always missing in the suburbs,” he says. “There’s a European quality, a ‘salon’ feeling that you get in cities like Paris and Rome and London and Madrid, when people uncertain. A salon in the suburbs is ridiculous on the face of it. But in a city, it is possible.”

  It is interesting that he should talk fondly of a “salon.” A salon is perhaps the direct antithesis to a family room—a room that city apartment dwellers are happy to live without.

  *It is curious, in New York, how stories circulate and how, if the story is good enough, it is repeated again and again, with each person who tells it prepared to swear that it happened to her or to him. There is the Bloomingdale’s ladies’ room handbag story, for example. It goes like this. The person telling the story went into the ladies’ room at Bloomingdale’s and, inside a booth, hung her handbag on a hook that projected from inside the door. After seating herself, she suddenly saw a hand reach over the door, remove her bag, and depart with it. She reported the incident to the store’s security department. A day or so later, she received a telephone call from a person who identified himself as a Bloomingdale’s detective. Her bag had been found. She must collect it at the store at a certain hour. When she arrived at the store, however, the security staff had no information on her bag and no idea who might have called her. Returning to her apartment after this fruitless trip, she found it had been burglarized. This author, being male, has never visited the ladies’ room at Bloomingdale’s to see whether the doors on the booths have inside hooks or apertures at the top through which a bag could be snatched. But having heard the tale from so many New York women who insisted that they had
been victimized in this identical fashion, he did check with the security department of Bloomingdale’s. The store has no record of any such incident.

  21

  Back to the City?

  Perhaps the reasons are psychological. Perhaps they are topographical. Perhaps topography influences psychology (the way ontogeny is alleged to recapitulate philogeny), but it is certainly true that some cities attract in-city dwelling—and a fiercely loyal band of “downtown” lovers—more than others. No one who could afford not to would want, say, to live in downtown Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, or Salt Lake City. Metropolitan apartment living is, on the other hand, quite acceptable in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. When a city provides views of water, in-city living tends to become more attractive. Four of New York’s five boroughs are on islands, and the fifth, the Bronx, which is not, is probably the least fashionable of the five in which to live—with the exception of the western strip, called Riverdale, which provides views of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. “River view” is an asset that is always stressed in advertisements for New York apartments that can boast one, which, as a rule, command higher rents.

  Our feelings about water are basic and complex. Our primordial origins were watery, and our bodies are largely composed of water. Water sustains our lives as importantly as air, along with the crops we eat, and has sustained trade since the beginning of human commerce. The great port cities of the world remind us of the success of that commerce. At the same time, in an almost paranoid way, we cast our wastes into the water, leaving it to carry away all unpleasant things. There is a perverse urge to toss the empty beer can over the side of the boat or to hurl the worn-out tire into the river. At the same time, when we look out over water we are somehow reassured.

  Chicago has its shimmering lakefront, and San Francisco’s hills overlook bay, ocean, and bridges. Because of San Francisco’s hills, city dwellers there can achieve their water views from hilltop town houses. In relatively flat New York and Chicago, the views of water are attained from tall apartment buildings, and city ordinances prevent new buildings from interfering with existing water views. Both San Francisco and Boston are peninsular cities, and where San Francisco has the bay, Boston’s Back Bay and Beacon Hill have the Charles River. Also peninsular, in a sense, is New Orleans, with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other, and so is Charleston, South Carolina, where downtown living near the water is even more fashionable than living in the suburbs. It could be theorized that cities which must be approached by bridges carry a special aura of mystery and romance—the excitement of getting there across a ribbon of pavement in the sky, a symbol of man’s conquest of water—that makes urban living in these cities more appealing. The recent renaissance of New York City’s Roosevelt Island, approachable via a thrilling aerial tramway, would fit this theory: it was created in the heart of the metropolis, and yet it is separate, apart, remote from it.

  Cincinnati is another hilly city that relishes its river views, which it likes to compare with the water views of San Francisco. Though the setting of Cincinnati’s Hyde Park section, where the best views are, is suburban, residents proudly point out that Hyde Park is technically a part of Cincinnati proper and is therefore “city.” Recently, “artistic” Cincinnatians have discovered the pretty hilltop of Mount Adams, which really is a part of downtown Cincinnati, and have been attractively renovating and restoring turn-of-the-century brick and frame town houses with river views. (A passer-by recently asked a pedestrian: “Is this the Mount Adams section where everybody’s fixing everything up?”) The great romantic cities of the world—London, Paris, Florence, Venice, Rome—have all been cities of bridges, and cities where urban living is treasured.

  Philadelphia, meanwhile, defies the water-view theory. Though Philadelphia has a river, downtown Philadelphia takes little advantage of it, and the parts of downtown where it is fashionable to live—Rittenhouse Square, for example—have no views of water. Los Angeles also turns its back on the water. In fact, Los Angeles is possibly the only port city in the world where if one lives near the beach, one lives in a slum.

  Mountain views seem, for some reason, to repel in-city dwellers, and urban living is unpopular in Salt Lake City, Denver, and Phoenix—cities which are, incidentally, virtually bridgeless. In cities like these, where the affluent have fled to the suburbs, to go “downtown” at night is to visit empty, and often dangerous, streets and sidewalks. These are the cities where the flight to the suburbs has left an inner city that falls to disuse and decay. Inner-city businesses fail, and shops are boarded up. Doctors, lawyers, and other professional people move their offices to the suburbs. Even the policemen in cities like these dislike the downtown beat at night; they would rather be in the suburbs.

  The problem of dealing with inner-city decay has been faced by a number of American cities over the last decade, and expensive attempts have been made to lure people back from the suburbs. Most of these, however, have been unsuccessful. Salt Lake City has lined its main shopping streets with tubs of trees, flowers, park benches, and reflecting pools, without noticeably increasing the number of downtown shoppers. Atlanta several years ago created “Underground Atlanta,” which flourished for a while as a tourist attraction and then, as expensive shops and restaurants failed to do the amount of business expected of them, gave way to cheap gift and novelty stores, poster shops, and “head” shops selling hash pipes of futuristic design. In downtown Salt Lake City, Trolley Square has been developed out of what was the city’s trolley car barn. Appealing though the idea might sound, Trolley Square has not been successful and is deserted after 5 P.M. In Houston, the same sort of thing was tried in Market Square. It, too, has fizzled, as the owners of buildings grew greedy and charged inflated rents, forcing shopkeepers to overprice ordinary “gifte shoppe” wares. In romantic San Francisco, on the other hand, where in-city living has always had charm and popularity, the renovation of Ghirardelli Square—originally the site of a chocolate factory—has won favor among residents and visitors alike, and is an economic success.

  Cleveland is another city with a lakefront but, unlike Chicago, Cleveland has turned its back upon the water and abandoned the shore to a sports arena, a gaggle of factories, and an airfield. The reason generally given for the two cities’ opposite feelings about their respective lakes is that Chicago is on the west shore of Lake Michigan, whereas Cleveland is on the south shore of Lake Erie. Great Lakes tides, it seems, move generally in a north-south direction, causing erosion on the southern and northern shores. Cleveland’s lakeshore keeps slipping into the lake, and near the water, billboards advertise for landfill. The situation could, of course, be corrected by levees, but these would be expensive, and Cleveland’s city fathers have addressed themselves to other matters rather than consider ways in which the lakefront could be improved. Cleveland’s lake is little used for boating or other water sports; though Lake Erie is now cleaner than it has been for years, no man-made beaches have been developed as they have been in Chicago; and though the big lake continues to provide a dramatic view, new buildings face the other way. From the new Holiday Inn, only the multilevel parking garage has a view of the lake. Cleveland blames political corruption for the fact that funds have not been made available to beautify and shore up the sagging lakefront but are now being proposed for a project, much more commercially alluring, to extend a giant jet runway into the water. This would surely destroy the lakefront forever. Still, the possibilities for graft in such an enterprise are mind-boggling.

  It is probably too early to assess Detroit’s recent attempt to “breathe new life” into its downtown area with the Renaissance Center, but if it follows the pattern of Cleveland’s Park Centre, the outlook is not cheerful. Park Centre was designed as an immense downtown apartment and shopping complex, with expensive shops and luxury housing. Again, it was hoped that so many attractive substitutes to suburban living would be offe
red that the flight to the suburbs would turn around, or at least be stemmed. Today, after a series of receiverships, most of Park Centre’s large apartments are untenanted. They have become popular, it is said, with Cleveland’s black gangsters, and a recent visitor was told: “Every numbers runner in town lives there.” From the street, one sees tattered curtains flap from broken windows in the apartment tower, and the building’s general appearance of poor maintenance and ill repair have done little to attract affluent suburbanites back to the inner city. In Cleveland, with its murder rate higher than either Washington’s or Houston’s, the local joke is that “Even the muggers and the hot-watch peddlers leave the city at night for lack of business—and head for Shaker Heights.” And even in Shaker Heights, that once famous pocket of suburban wealth, there is trouble as suburbanites move farther and farther out. The Shaker Square shopping center today looks almost as woebegone as Park Centre.

  Park Centre’s shopping mall is, meanwhile, in even worse shape than the apartment tower that rises above it. More than two thirds of the available shopping space is still unrented and uncompleted, and the wide indoor plazas, corridors, escalators, and courtyards are almost spookily deserted. More shops seem to close than open, and an air of fiscal failure is pervasive. As one wanders through these empty vistas, amid abandoned construction, one wonders what sort of folly could have prompted men and women of supposedly sound business sense to presume that such endeavors could possibly have succeeded. On the lower level, an area that has been given the name Eat Street boasts the largest seating capacity of any dining area in the state of Ohio, and in the unpatronized vastness of Eat Street’s many fast-food operations—offering everything from pizza to burgers to fried chicken and back again—one can easily believe this extravagant claim.