08 31 05

Every so often you find a line that gives the author away in a fashion not intended – a line meant to be unremarkable and beyond dispute, at least among the thinking class. In Entertainment Weekly ran a review of a novel about a family of Kansas City suburban developers. You expect a novel full of the sound of grinding axes bent to the abrading wheel, but one line in the review made me want to read the book:

“The only thing to be said against ‘The King of Kings County’ is that there should be more of it: (the author) could bite harder when it coems to the city dwellers who flee to suburbia.”

Bite harder. How? And why? Because when the roads opened up to the suburbs, people decided that living in small dilapidated houses crammed close together wasn’t as attractive as something new with a big lawn and fresh appliances and a basement with knotty pine? Bite harder. Because they left? Because apparently it’s your moral obligation to live in the city?

I’m writing this in a suburb about 35 miles from my house via surface streets. The trip is interesting, and I enjoy it; we go from our neighborhood, which dates from the 1920s, down a busy artery lined with houses from the same era. When we pass the city limits we’re in one of the first high-toned suburbs from the 20s, now indistinguishable from many other neighborhoods in Minneapolis. A bit richer and better maintained, perhaps. Then the houses retreat behind the trees, and the road winds and dips and wanders down a route laid out by pioneers. Periodically the trees thin, the road widens; there’s a freeway below, your choice of ramps. East or West, as you please m’lord. Wander down the road and another highway appears. North or South, whichever you desire. Then the trees close in again. It’s very dense, actually – it’s just not arranged along a grid and punctuated with light-rail stops. Bad suburb. Density is not enough. You have to be economically diverse with stores every six blocks so people can tote back slabs of bean curd in hemp bags, I guess.

As it happens, the suburb in which I’m sitting now is denser than my city. There are vast townhouse projects cropping up on every ridge, spilling along the highway. Not ugly ones, either. None of those “ticky-tacky” houses that so offended the sneering sensibilities of ungrateful Boomer brats forced to do childhood in the godless potato fields of Long Island, dreaming of the day when they could move to the city, live on the fourth floor, read Kerouc by a candle stuck in a fiasco, and wake to the sound of beer bottles dumped out when the bar closed. Real life. True life. What do you have in the burbs but starlight and silence? What’s real about that?

But I digress. Many of these townhouses are starter condos for young professionals; a few big flat blocks, apartments from the 70s when the burb had a false start, house retail workers and immigrants. (Although many immigrants commute; I see many lawn crews from the company that does the yard at Jasperwood; they’re all recent arrivals, and they all drive to the job sites in company trucks.) In some ways place is more compact than my city; it’s just arranged differently. It’s built around the car, and while this bothers some, it means that you can get the necessities of life far more efficiently than you can in a city.

If you’re buying bulk, that is. And bulk is good. The main road rings a mall. Within the mall are the things you want; around the mall are stores with the things you need. Instead of having foodstuffs, clothing, cafes and boozeatoriums spread out along the long spine of Broadway or Main, it’s concentrated in one dense blob of free-standing structures. You can buy what you need for the week and go about your life. Now: some will find this less attractive than the daily urban forage, the small thrill of bringing home your daily sustenance in thin plastic bags, the undeniable contented pleasure of shopping in a tiny corner market. I’m serious – you do feel like a Man of the World sometimes when you’re poking through the produce at Smiler’s or Dean and Delucca. The big city growling outside, the unpredictable clientele, the stolid storekeeper, the mix of chaos and order, the skyscraper lights, the smear of dusk in the indistinct distance – New York enobles the smallest task. I never feel more cosmopolitan than when I’m getting supplies at this grocery in the Roosevelt Hotel or the thin typical joint across from the Millennium, right up to the moment when they tell me I owe them $36.93 for muffins and a beer. There’s just a buzz in these places, be it ten PM or 8 AM. The city is full of juice and it spills into every shop. A steam table with fried rice and Knickerbocker beer and Danish candy and fresh oranges and big Rice Krispee bars in Saran Wrap and the great calamitous kaleidoscope of Manhattan just yards away. I understand the attraction.

But sometimes I just want to get groceries and get them in the car without wading through Life’s Rich Pageant. I suppose that’s why I live here. Day to day I want the easy way. I want the parking lot, the car, the bags in the back, the short trip home. Say what you will about Costco, there’s pleasure in buying 24 cans of chicken soup to get you through the winter. In New York you’d have to strap it to your back. In suburbia you think: better get two.

Mind you, I don’t live in suburbia. But I understand why people do.

And I don’t hold it against them.

This makes me an Enemy of the People for some, I guess. But there’s something else. Having spent the last few weeks in this burb, I’ve noticed how it thumb-jams the eyes of all the dull clichés. The library is huge, the parking lot jammed. Diversity? Well, if you mean skin pigmentation, the coffee shop today has two Somali women in full drape, an Indian fellow scowling at his computer, two gay guys by the window discussing restaurant politics. According to a sign in the window, a classical guitarist will give a free concert here Thursday night.

Bite down hard on the people here! Harder! And again!

There’s something else that irritates the urban purists. It’s so clean. Suspiciously so. There’s a road I take every day, a frontage road alongside a highway. A giant noise-abatement wall stretches for five city blocks; it’s made of concrete and wood with elegant minimal decoration. Not a trace of graffiti. Not a spot. No tags, no silly pictures, no stencils of dead pro wrestlers. Just a smooth clean surface. You can imagine whatever you’d like, because no one’s been rude enough to ruin the canvas. Wild flowers and prairie grass line the road. Why, there’s even a sidewalk. Turn the corner and you’re in a housing development that’s almost as dense as my neighborhood, rolling up hills, curling into cul-de-sacs. I could never live here – I like the old houses, the neighborhoods with roots in the early days of the previous century, the creek and the great lakes of Minneapolis. But I can see why people like it.

Bite harder.

Why? And how, exactly? Imagine a book review about the suburbs that congratulated parents for moving to a place where their kids could run barefoot through the endless lawns, sit on the steps watching stars pop out, grow up in a world where a siren was rare.

The colonies no doubt had settlers happy to be free of urban England, elated to have a plot of their own. Jamestown was an exurb of London. For some, sprawl is our original sin. For the rest of us, it’s all the same – the end of the block, the burb on the edge of the map, the messy world outside the corner deli. As long as it’s America, it’s all frontier.

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perm link. (Title comes from "Suburbia," by the Pet Shop Boys. Great tune.)