by Joel Garreau
7 a casual glance at most Yellow Pages: In the 1989 Bell Atlantic Yellow Pages for the District of Columbia (not its Maryland or Virginia “suburbs,” which are served by separate directories), eighty-five numbers were listed under “Television & Radio—Dealers.” Of those, only ten could be construed as being in the area’s otherwise large and thriving downtown. Of those ten dealers, more than half were located in neighborhoods that stretched the definition of “downtown”—Georgetown or southwest D.C., for instance.
8 urban villages: Christopher B. Leinberger and Charles Lockwood, “How Business Is Reshaping America,” Atlantic, October 1986.
9 technoburbs: Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
10 suburban downtowns: Truman A. Hartshorn and Peter O. Muller, “Suburban Downtowns and the Transformation of Metropolitan Atlanta’s Business Landscape,” Urban Geography 10, no. 4 (1989).
11 suburban activity centers: Urban Land Institute, Washington, D.C.
12 major diversified centers: Thomas Baerwald, “Major Diversified Centers in Midwestern Metropolises” (Paper presented to the West Lakes Division of the Association of American Geographers, November 1983).
13 urban cores: Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Los Angeles.
14 galactic city: Peirce F. Lewis, “The Galactic Metropolis,” in Beyond the Urban Fringe, ed. Rutherford H. Platt and George Macinko (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
15 pepperoni-pizza cities: Peter O. Muller, University of Miami.
16 a city of realms: James E. Vance, Jr., This Scene of Man: The Role and Structure of the City in the Geography of Western Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 408–9.
17 superburbia: Philadelphia magazine.
18 disurb: Short for “dense, industrial, and self-contained suburban region.” Mark Baldassare, University of California, Irvine.
19 service cities, perimeter cities, and even peripheral centers. James Timberlake, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris, Philadelphia.
20 Tomorrowland: David Beers, “Tomorrowland: We Have Seen the Future, and It Is Pleasanton,” San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, January 18, 1987, Image magazine.
21 majority of Americans: The 1970 Census showed that the U.S. population included more suburbanites than city dwellers or farm residents. The 1980 Census showed that in the fifteen largest U.S. metropolitan areas, the majority of residents lived outside the central city in every one except Houston, which had an aggressive policy of annexing former suburbs.
22 Ninety-two percent of the people: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1987 estimate for New York-northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-CT CMSA: 18,053,800. New York County, 1989 update: 1,428,285, or 7.91 percent of the total.
23 Who put Captain Kirk in charge: I am indebted to the Wall Street Journal for first addressing this burning question.
24 “barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world”: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (1892; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1955).
25 “hog-stomping Baroque exuberance”: Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
26 “Nonsense is talked by our big skyscraperites”: Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 81. This book incorporates the work published under the title When Democracy Builds (1945).
27 “After all is said and done”: Ibid., 81–82.
28 “regenerative power is located in the natural terrain”: Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 228.
29 Barlowe: Ibid., 36–37.
30 Shakespeare: Ibid., 41.
31 Bradford: Ibid., 41–42.
Chapter 2 New Jersey: Tomorrowland
1 “For these are not as they might seem to be”: John Cheever, “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” in The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1978), 467.
2 It is the first state … to be more urban: New Jersey, 1027.3 people per square mile; Japan, 844.9 people per square mile. New Jersey, 89 percent urban; Japan, 76.7 percent urban. Mark S. Hoffman, ed., The World Almanac and Book of Facts (New York: Pharos Books); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 110th ed. (Washington, D.C., 1990).
3 It has 127 miles of beaches: Hoffman, World Almanac, 634.
4 Its truck farms supply local supermarket chains: Communities of Place: The New Jersey Preliminary State Development and Redevelopment Plan, vol. 1, A Legacy for the Next Generation (New Jersey State Planning Commission, November 1988), 7.
5 largest such horizon-to-horizon wild area: New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Parks and Forestry, Region 1.
6 In the late 1980s, New Jersey’s Edge Cities grew more rapidly: Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, The Almanac of American Politics 1990 (Washington, D.C.: National Journal, 1990), 742.
7 for the last eight thousand years, cities have been shaped by seven purposes: See, for example, Lewis Mumford, The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961); James E. Vance, Jr., This Scene of Man: The Role and Structure of the City in the Geography of Western Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols. 1 and 2, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Edmund N. Bacon, Design of Cities (New York: Penguin Books, 1976).
8 “High costs of land in Manhattan,” “high living costs,” and “the urban noise and dirt”: “Facilities Planning at the Laboratories, 1925–1942,” (Warren, N.J.: AT&T Bell Laboratories, n.d.).
9 That is more than exists in downtown Seattle: The Office Network, Houston, February 1990.
10 It contains more than sixteen million leasable square feet: Thérèse E. Byrne, The Edge City as a Paradigm: Remodeling the I-78 Corridor (New York: Salomon Brothers, 1989).
11 That’s larger than downtown New Orleans: The Office Network.
12 “One lure may lie in the basically unsettled nature of life on the edge”: Inc., March 1989, 90.
13 In 1850 … 85 percent of the U.S. population was rural: Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 41.
14 only 3 percent of all Americans farm: Statistically defined as directly employed in agriculture.
15 more than three quarters are metropolitan slickers: As of 1987, 76.9 percent of the U.S. population lived in OMB-defined metropolitan areas. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract, 1989, chart 32, p. 29.
16 it makes a ton of steel with fewer work hours than any nation on earth: Business Week, January 8, 1990, 71.
17 sank below 50 percent: Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961), 52.
18 critical mass at five million square feet of leasable office space: Christopher B. Leinberger was the first to suggest this number. He is the managing partner of Robert Charles Lesser & Co. and co-author of the seminal article “How Business Is Reshaping America,” Atlantic, October 1986.
19 “like today’s autostrada:” Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 1:276.
20 For all of its attenuation: see especially John Herber’s The New Heartland: America’s Flight Beyond the Suburbs and How It Is Changing Our Future (New York Times Books, 1986) and Richard Louv, America II (Los Angeles, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1988).
21 Richard Milhous Nixon lives and writes his books in these parts: Nixon put his 1968-built, fifteen-room, 7000-to-8000-square-foot Saddle River home on four acres, thirty minutes from Manhattan, on the market for $3.25 million to move to a “very elegant” Tudor town house in nearby Park Ridge. Los Angeles Times, Sunday, June 24, 1990, K1.
22 Today, the Lehigh Valley is booming: William Glaberson, “The Little Engines That Could … and Do
: In Allentown and Elsewhere, Small Companies Are Fueling a Big Growth in Jobs,” New York Times, Sunday, May 1, 1988, sec. 3, 1.
23 General Electric, the corporation that in the 1990s began to challenge IBM: Measured in market capitalization: stock price times number of shares outstanding. Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1990, C1.
24 Even in Nassau County, which, like Suffolk, is comparable to Manhattan in population: Nassau County, 1.3 million; Suffolk County, 1.3 million; New York County, 1.4 million. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1989 update of 1980 final count.
25 62 percent never leave the Island to go to work: Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Los Angeles.
26 “the heart of Constantinople”: Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 1:312.
27 Granada and Madrid were primarily governmental: Ibid., 323, 348.
28 Babylonia was ruled by a Council of the Gods: Mumford, The City in History, 19.
29 “Gilgamesh”: Ibid., 220.
30 Walled cities with gates that closed at night: Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World 1:371.
31 “slurb” … “cliché conformity”: Ada Louise Huxtable, quoted by Robert Fishman, “Megalopolis Unbound,” Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1990): 43.
32 “corporate campuses are designed as refuges for wildlife” and “our homes in new subdivisions are clustered”: Communities of Place 1:15.
33 A relationship with nature is seen as a key element: Gallup Organization, “New Jersey Land Use Planning: A Survey of Public Opinion,” prepared for the New Jersey State Planning Commission, Technical Reference Document 86–3, December 1986, 13–14.
34 76 percent of all Americans consider themselves environmentalists: Harper’s Index, Harper’s, January 1990, 41.
35 the Institute for Advanced Study had to name a Wildlife Control Officer: James P. Sterba, “Even a Real Genius Notes That Bambi Is a Relevant Factor: When Deer Hunting Starts in Princeton, Equations Become Really Complex,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 1989, A1.
36 the hottest topic among foresters today: Henry H. Webster, “Urban Development in Forests: Sources of American Difficulties and Possible Approaches,” Renewable Resources Journal 6, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 8. Also see “Forest Resources in the Northeast: Contributing to Economic Development and Social Well Being,” prepared by the state foresters of the twenty northeastern states, July 1985 (2nd printing), 37.
37 Tourism is now the number one industry in New York City … It is also the fastest growing: Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Knopf, 1990), 66, 87.
38 “Tourists don’t like to visit office districts”: Ibid., 87.
39 Only 8 percent of all Americans live in politically defined cities: All percentages by calculation from the 1986 and 1988 U.S. Census estimates. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract.
40 “In these ancient paleolithic sanctuaries”: Mumford, The City in History, 8.
41 Cotton Mather wrote of the Massachusetts minister: D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 108.
42 A large modern church functions like nothing so much as a spiritual shopping mall: I am indebted to Dan Morgan of the Washington Post for this concept.
Chapter 3 Boston: Edge City Limits
1 “Form ever follows function”: Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s, March 1886.
2 Companies that made history clustered around the verdant interstates: The Edge Cities of the Boston area have had more prime office space than its downtown since 1984. Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Los Angeles, 1987.
3 Massachusetts Miracle of the 1980s: In the 1970s, when per capita income figures were correlated with cost of living figures, New Englanders, state by state, were less well off than Southerners. Figures as of 1986.
4 In 1988, New Hampshire posted the lowest state unemployment rate: New England Monthly, February 1987, special section called “Boom!”
5 “In almost every category”: Larry Tye, “The Boom Produces a Boomerang,” Boston Globe, March 1, 1988, 1.
6 “The confidence had been excessive”: Frederick Lewis Allen, quoted by Chip Jones, “That Was Some Party,” Virginia Business, 5, no. 12 (December 1990): 62.
7 healthier than downtown: Spalding & Slye, Boston.
8 the Chicago market became so comparatively healthy: Report by Spalding & Slye Colliers, cited by Kirstin Downey, “Office Rents Are Declining Abroad: U.S. Not Alone in Seeing Construction Outpace Demand,” Washington Post, January 12, 1991, F1.
9 “Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), chap. 1.
10 highest mountain range: Christopher B. Leinberger, “Urban Cores: Development Trends and Real Estate Opportunities in the 1990s,” Urban Land (December 1990): 4.
11 The typical single-family home in 1987 in the Boston area: Peter Dreier, David C. Schwartz, and Ann Greiner, “Special Report: What Every Business Can Do About Housing,” Harvard Business Review (September-October 1988).
12 “The reasons for the slowdown”: Christopher J. Chipello, “Real Estate Market in New England States Hits Slump: Banks Are Feeling the Pinch as Sales Slow and Prices Lose Ground,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1989, A2.
13 “people simply cannot afford to move to Boston”: Dreier, Schwartz, and Greiner, “Special Report.”
14 In Hollis, New Hampshire: Douglas R. Porter, “Deflecting Growth in Exurban New Hampshire,” Urban Land (June 1989): 34.
15 Boston area’s four million … half the area’s land: Boston-Lawrence-Salem, MA-NH Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1988 statistics: population estimate, 4,109,900; land area, 3097.7 square miles; population density, 2.07 per acre, by calculation. Wellesley 1988 population estimate, 27,000; land area, 10.35 square miles; population density, 4.08 per acre, by calculation.
16 maximum desirable commute has been forty-five minutes: Ronald F. Abler, Geography Department, Pennsylvania State University, interview with the author. Also see James E. Vance, Jr., This Scene of Man: The Role and Structure of the City in the Geography of Western Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
17 a city like Istanbul: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols, 1 and 2, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 1:348.
18 Law of Accessibility: Pamela Manfre, partner, Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Washington, D.C.
19 a great map: William H. Whyte: City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 288.
20 “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: New American Library, 1960), 10.
21 “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”: Ibid., 66.
22 “At a certain season of our life”: Ibid., 59, 60.
23 “None can be an impartial or wise observer”: 14, 15, 16.
24 “Love your life”: Ibid., 216, 217, 218.
Chapter 4 Detroit: The Automobile, Individualism, and Time
1 “Americans are in the habit of never walking”: Quoted in Barry Bruce-Briggs, The War Against the Automobile (New York: Dutton, 1977).
2 thirty cents an hour: Robert Conot, American Odyssey (New York: Morrow 1974), 6.
3 Oklahoma land rush: Ibid.
4 The key ingredient for a high-rise city: Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 59.
5 Travel time and freight costs: Conot, American Odyssey, 8ff.
6 In 1848, a railroad cut the travel time: Ibid., 42.
7 “the electrical system gave every point in a region”: Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 186.
8 “Indeed, it is not too much to say”: H. G. Wells, “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities,” in Anticipations and Other Papers, vol.
4 of The Works of H. G. Wells (New York: Scribner’s, 192 4), 41.
9 “smeared mass of humanity”: Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977), 50.
10 In 1919, General Motors started building: Conot, American Odyssey, 242.
11 But it was also close to GM’s factories: Ibid., 213.
12 River Rouge plant: Ibid., 253.
13 from 1970 to 1987, the number of cars in America more than doubled: The increase was 103 percent over seventeen years: 1970, 89.2 million; 1987, 181.0 million.
14 Population growth in America: The increase was 19 percent over seventeen years: 1970, 204 million; 1987, 243 million. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990, 110th ed. (Washington, D.C., 1990).
15 there were basically only two states … growth and high crime: Joe Schwartz and Thomas Exter, “Crime Stoppers,” American Demographics (November 1990): 27.
16 “The main point to keep in mind”: Quoted in Diane Katz, “Metro Detroit Rated World’s 6th Best Spot to Live,” Detroit News, Sunday, November 19, 1990, A1.
17 anyone parking a chariot: Catherine G. Miller, Carscape: A Parking Handbook (Columbus, Ind.: Washington Street Press, 1988).
18 But that’s the highest building density you’re going to get: It is actually possible for a clever developer to squeeze an FAR of 0.45 out of a piece of land without having to build structured parking. But explaining how that trick works is too daunting for me to get into.