by Joel Garreau
19 “the people’s architect”: Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1990, A6.
20 but not before he was summoned to a high inquisition: Dan Martin, office of John Portman, Atlanta.
21 Hudson Street: A reference to the street in New York on which Jane Jacobs lived and to which she frequently referred in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
22 “Messy vitality over obvious unity”: Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 16.
Chapter 8 Southern California: Community
1 “Man is returning to the descendants”: Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 26.
2 the Irvine that has been such a market success: Median home prices, second quarter of 1990: Honolulu, $345,000; San Francisco, $263,000; Anaheim-Santa Ana, $248,900; Los Angeles, $216,000; Bergen-Passaic, $193,000. National Association of Realtors.
3 the outpouring of journalism, fiction, and sociology: I am indebted to Nicholas Lemann, “Stressed Out in Suburbia: A Generation After the Postwar Boom, Life in the Suburbs Has Changed, Even if Our Picture of It Hasn’t,” Atlantic, November 1989, 34, for many of the literary citations here.
4 pungently described the shots: Herbert J. Gans: The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon, 1967), xv.
5 “myth of suburbia”: Phrase coined by Bennett Berger. Ibid.
6 “For literally nothing down”: John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956).
7 “If suburban life was as undesirable and unhealthy”: Gans, Levittowners, xvi.
8 Here we were, more than thirty years after: The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950, The Organization Man in 1956.
9 But the third, the size of downtown Seattle: Downtown Seattle was at 21.9 million square feet (Office Network) when the John Wayne Airport area, including Newport Beach-Fashion Island, was at 25.6 million (Grubb & Ellis, Newport Beach).
10 The Californias: Quoted by Edward W. Soja, “The Orange County Exopolis: A Contemporary Screenplay,” unpublished.
11 It was no less than an attempt to create from scratch: Gans, Levittowners, xvii.
12 In his book The Urban Villagers: Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962).
13 “an aggregate of people”: Ibid., 104.
14 “I expected emotional statements about their attachment”: Ibid., 104–5.
15 There’s Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Sherwood Anderson’s Wines-burg, Ohio: Main Street (1920), Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
16 Stadtluft macht frei: 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), 12, 150.
17 Richard Louv: Childhood’s Future: Listening to the American Family; New Hope for the Next Generation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
18 Americans think nothing of moving: Between 1987 and 1988, 17.6 percent of the American population (one in every 5.7 Americans) moved to a different house within the United States. In the West, 21.3 percent (one in every 4.7 people) moved in that one year. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990, 110th ed. (Washington, D.C., 1990), chart 25, p. 19.
19 “Avoid eccentricities”: Barbara Jane Hall, 101 Easy Ways to Make Your Home Sell Faster (New York: Ballantine, 1985), 18.
20 “A community is more than a set of customs”: Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977), 222, 39, and passim.
21 If you were to draw a circle: Security Pacific Bank has pioneered the metaphor of the Sixty-Mile Circle as a way of looking at the Los Angeles region as one place. It periodically issues invaluable reports based on that image. Many of the numbers in this portion of the chapter are drawn from Entering the 21st Century/Portrait for Progress: The Economy of Los Angeles County and the Sixty-Mile Circle Region (Los Angeles: Security Pacific Bank, July 1988).
22 Greater Los Angeles is served by five major commercial airports: Los Angeles International (LAX), Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, and John Wayne.
23 “We are going to be different from anywhere”: Marc Wilder, quoted by Joel Kotkin, “Fear and Reality in the Los Angeles Melting Pot,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, November 5, 1989.
24 In Los Angeles, white Anglos are down: David Shulman of Salomon Brothers, interview with the author.
25 when the common good was faced with narrow: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975).
26 “ ‘Individualism’ is a word recently coined”: Ibid. 2:506–8.
27 “Americans are forever forming”: Ibid., 513–17.
28 In fact, Timmons is running something of a spiritual shopping mall: I am indebted to Dan Morgan of the Washington Post for this idea.
Chapter 9 The San Francisco Bay Area: Soul
1 “Until it has had a poet, a place is not a place”: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 137.
2 in Petaluma, the widening of a freeway: See especially David E. Do wall, The Suburban Squeeze: Land Conversion and Regulation in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29.
3 “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe”: Prince Charles at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Hampton Court, 1984, cited by Benjamin Forgey, “Prince Charles, Architecture’s Royal Pain: Continuing the Great Debate over Modernism,” Washington Post, February 22, 1990, B1, and Steve Lohr, “Critic Charles Spurs Debate by Londoners,” New York Times, Sunday, December 6, 1987, sec. 1, 9.
4 One project, he said, came out “still a bit more funky than I would have liked”: Christopher Alexander, quoted in Stephen Grabow, Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture (Stocksfield: Oriel Press, 1983), 170.
5 Indeed, Reynar Banham … succinctly stated what can be described as the Establishment position: Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 1986, 15.
6 “What really irks many people about Alexander”: Pilar Viladas, “Harmony and Wholeness,” Progressive Architecture (June 1986): 92.
7 “Like Thoreau, Alexander marches to a different drummer”: Robert Campbell, Technology Review (October 1984): 14.
8 “The crucial thing”: Christopher Alexander, “The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe” (Draft manuscript, 1988), 14.
9 “form ever follows function”: Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s, March 1886.
10 “a house is a machine for living in”: Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, 1923.
11 Charles rails against: Charles, Prince of Wales, A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (London: Doubleday, 1989), 7–10.
12335 “paradigm shift”: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Also see Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957).
13 “Modern architecture no longer produces buildings that satisfy people’s needs”: Grabow, Christopher Alexander, 3.
14 “the existing or current paradigm”: Ibid., 4.
15 “Like H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, or Teilhard de Chardin”: Ibid., xvi.
16 “It was Edmund Burke who wrote that a healthy civilisation”: Charles, Prince of Wales, A Vision of Britain, 155.
Chapter 10 Washington: The Land Part I Manassas: Long Ago and Far Away
1 “The past is never dead”: Quoted by Willie Morris, The National Geographic, March 1989.
Part II Present at Creation
1 “In the beginning all the world was America”: Quoted in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964),
120.
2 a landscape that John Rolfe Gardiner referred to: In the Heart of the Whole World (New York: Knopf, 1988).
3 the largest urban agglomeration between Washington and Atlanta: Also larger than any submarket in the Miami, Kansas City, St. Louis, or New Orleans areas.
4 Arlington County … is more densely populated than Dallas or Denver or Cincinnati: Arlington County 1980 population density, 5,869.2 (Virginia Statistical Abstract, 1987, table 16.17, p. 489); 1988 population densities: Dallas, 2,965; Denver, 4,609; Cincinnati, 4,750 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990, table 40, p. 34).
5 Its airport, Washington National: Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract, chart 1067, p. 622.
6 Urdu: Sharon Cavileer, “Arlington: A World Ahead,” Washington Flyer, November-December 1990, A-8.
7 a motorist caught in the rain: Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), 3.
8 “people feel the ground give way beneath their feet”: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalistic Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 2:911.
9 By the time Hazel was two: Barone, Our Country, 43.
10 Birth rates … had plummeted: Ibid., 43–44.
11 At the time of first founding: Conrad M. Arensberg, “American Communities,” American Anthropologist 57 (1955): 1151, cited by 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), 155.
12 Indeed, almost nobody in America expected this: Barone, Our Country, 185, 197. Barone notes that in 1945, when asked by the Gallup Poll to cite a problem facing the country, 42 percent of Americans volunteered “jobs”—a larger percentage than mentioned any other issue.
13 The pessimists’ worst fears seemed confirmed: Ibid., 186, 197.
14 Following 1948, America’s gross national product … at an average rate of 4.0 percent every year: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 1:226–27, 229. Cited by Barone, Our Country, 197.
15 That kind of sustained boom: Barone, Our Country, 197.
Part III The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise
1 “Man aint really evil, he jest aint got any sense”: Quoted by Willie Morris, The National Geographic, March 1989.
2 limestone from Ontario to Indiana, iron ore from northern Michigan: Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 59–60.
3 Again and again, our most respected writers: I am indebted for most of these literary references to Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, especially pages 10 and 16.
4 There is in the writings of these Americans a constant yearning: Ibid., 13.
5 “The train stands for a more sophisticated, complex style of life”: Ibid., 24.
6 “regenerative power is located in the natural terrain”: Ibid., 228.
7 Seventy-six percent of all Americans describe themselves as environmentalists: Harper’s Index, Harper’s, January 1990, 41.
8 “freedom from the grip of the external landscape”: Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), cited by Marx, Machine in the Garden, 8, 9.
9 “By placing the machine in opposition to the tranquillity and order”: Ibid., 18.
10 The idea of progress originated in the belief: Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 10.
11 The Greeks saw the natural growth … They got this idea in part: Ibid., 47–48.
12 As early as Augustine’s The City of God: Ibid., 76.
13 By 1750, progress was not simply an important idea among many: Ibid., 171.
14 More important, they became seen as the very goal of progress: Ibid., 236.
15 By the 1800s, the idea of progress … For it was thought that the redemption and salvation: Ibid., 237.
16 “I have been over into the future, and it works”: On Steffens’ return from the Bullitt mission, 1919. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (1931), chap. 18.
17 The Nazis’ Final Solution was so called in order that it be viewed as—progress: Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 287.
18 That is the point … from which the technological imperative “If possible, then necessary,” rang hollow: Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 714 ff.
19 But in 1776, James Boswell described the moment of epiphany: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
20 In Soho he visited a factory: Marx, Machine in the Garden, 145.
21 During the dawn of the Industrial Age here … No other country could match even one of these boasts: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6.
22 “We will fight with all our might”: Umbro Apocconio, ed., The Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking, 1973), 24–25.
23 “What is the future of the idea of progress”: Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 322, 323.
24 “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”: William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 184.
25 “Only, it seems evident from the historical record”: Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 357.
Part IV Pilgrim’s Progress: Boom
1 “For we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill”: John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), a sermon delivered on board the Arbella.
2 Melpar: The name is formed from the last names of its founders, Thomas Meloy and Joseph Parks.
3 atomic bomb: E. M. Risse, Synergy Planning, Fairfax, Virginia.
4 the Beltway would become known as Washington’s Main Street: Washington demographers George and Eunice Grier coined this formulation.
5 In 1954 … In 1965, William Levitt: Associated Press, “Great Dates in Suburban History,” released January 8, 1990.
6 Clarke was charged with being the kingpin of a scheme: The Washington Post in a page one story on September 20, 1966, reported:
The indictment charges:
• Checks totaling $27,487 were to go from Clarke to Burrage, paid either directly to him or put into banks on his behalf, in exchange for his favorable recommendation for the rezoning, in four separate payments—of $16,287; $8100; $2700 and $400.
• $10,000 was to be put in a bank for Schumann, in exchange for his support.
• The sum of $15,000 was to be set aside for Clarke, from which he would make “contributions” to the Board of Supervisors.
Out of the $15,000, according to the indictment, Clarke paid:
• $2000 to a campaign fund for Parrish.
• $3000 to DeBell and $3000 to Leigh.
• $1000 to a campaign fund for Cotten and $1000 to a campaign fund for Moss.
• $2000 to Cotten himself.
The indictment read: “The Grand Jury charges: That from on or about September 13, 1961 to on or about July 1, 1962, in the Eastern District of Virginia and within the jurisdiction of this Court, the defendants Andrew W. Clarke [and] William C. Burrage did travel in interstate commerce, use facilities in interstate commerce, and willfully cause the travel in interstate commerce and the use of facilities in interstate commerce with the intent to promote, manage and carry on and to facilitate the promotion, management and carrying on of an unlawful activity, to wit, bribery …” Northern Virginia Sun, September 21, 1966.
7 Next, he got the federal counts dismissed: Maurine McLaughlin, “1 Fairfax Bribe Case May Be Thrown Out, Law Voted Too Late,” Washington Post, November 16, 1966, B1.
8 By the time the population of Fairfax had passed half a million: Thomas Grubisich, “Lawyer Alters Fairfax Patterns, Its Population,” Washington Post, April 27, 1975, B1.
9 America …
was changing profoundly: For much in my discussion of the history of the idea of ecology, I am indebted to Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
10 man’s foremost allegiance had to be to his planet: Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, 211.
11 The answer that deeply penetrated the national consciousness: Ibid., 238.
12 change specifically did not mean progress: Ibid., 4.
13 No culture can truly survive … It was not progress: Ibid., 241.
14 “Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures”: Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (New York: Scribner’s, 1986), 38.
15 “crack open watersheds”: Grubisich, “Lawyer Alters Fairfax Patterns.”
16 Meanwhile, the hookups resumed: “Board Allows Fairfax Sewer Hookups,” Washington Post, June 16, 1970.
17 an “unlawful, imprudent intrusion into the rights of private business”: Kenneth Bredemeier, “7 Builders Launch Attack on Fairfax’s Housing Law,” Washington Post, October 29, 1971.
18 Elected on a platform of skepticism toward growth: Grubisich, “Lawyer Alters Fairfax Patterns.”
19 “I think your approach is bankrupt”: Joseph D. Whitaker, “Rezoning Ban Held Illegal: Judge Calls Fairfax Move ‘Capricious,’ ” Washington Post, March 9, 1972, B1.
20 “You’d have thought we were out to rape the county”: Bill McAllister, “High Court Bars Va. Zoning Case,” Washington Post, November 4, 1975.
21 He described the county’s attempts to limit growth as “pie in the sky”: Grubisich, “Lawyer Alters Fairfax Patterns.”
22 “We’ve got a tiger by the tail”: Ibid.
23 becoming one of the larger local jurisdictions in America: John Ward Anderson, “Lambert Tenders Letter of Resignation to Fairfax Board,” Washington Post, October 31, 1990, B1.
24 He saw that as a waste: “Tract Zoned for Homes in Fairfax,” Washington Post, September 12, 1967.