Word: suburbanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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South of Los Angeles and inland from Manhattan Beach is a flat suburban area that was once semidesert. It had no surface water, but under its tight clay subsoil lay water-saturated gravel. When real-estate boomers discovered this treasure, they drilled well after well, and the well water, used recklessly, made the land salable for home sites and industries. Now the "west basin," as the geologists call it, has oil refineries and factories, as well as 500,000 people. But its underground water is almost gone. The water table is some 50 to 60 ft. below sea level...
...Artillery, Charge!" Wood concentrates just as hard in his off hours, whether at bridge (10? a point), hunting, riding, or reading in his 14-room white brick house in suburban Lake Forest. A voracious reader, he races through three or four volumes a week, mostly history and biography. For years he took an early-morning canter on his chestnut-colored Arabian horse Kebar, but has recently been forced to take up golf because all his friends "got too old" to ride. A hunter who used to go after mountain goats, moose and grizzlies, he now limits himself to smaller game...
When Shoppers World, an $8,000,000, 44-store suburban shopping center, opened last fall at Framingham, Mass., 20 miles west of Boston, it tried an experiment. Its shops decided to stay open until 9 p.m. each Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The experiment worked so well that the stores stayed open five nights a week during the Christmas rush, and last week all but three of the shops decided to go right on staying open three nights a week. Reason: they did more business at night than in the daytime...
Much remains for his graduates to accomplish, Gropius says. In the U.S., "you go along a big street that is lined for miles & miles with filling stations and restaurants that have absolutely no relationship to the setting, a hodgepodge of ugliness ... Or some suburban developer comes along, cutting down the trees, bulldozing the site and befouling our habitat." A purist with a sad, cold eye, Gropius believes that the main reason for the architectural ugliness he finds everywhere is "inertia of the heart. Man still clings to some visible reminder of Grandpa...
Living in a comfortable house in suburban London, he begins a workday at 8 a.m. with three or four cups of tea, ends it with a straight gin before dinner at 7. In between, he sometimes dictates up to 2,200 words, delivers frequent talks over the BBC, only regrets that he can no longer walk more than five miles at a stretch. Whatever shocks he has left to give to the 20th century he is putting into his autobiography, to be published after his death. There are no shockers in his latest book, New Hopes for a Changing World...