Word: suburbias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Suburbia has long had a special place in American social mythology. Its chroniclers in fiction are John Cheever and Peter De Vries, its poet laureate Phyllis McGinley. The $50,000 split level is its castle, the barbecue chef its master of the revels, the station wagon its chariot, the 8:03 or the clogged expressway its cup of doom. Few modern Americans feel much nostalgia for the farm or the small town, and most now find the once glittering big cities tarnished with decay. The pull of the suburb has been so strong that suburbanites are becoming the most numerous...
With that many Americans in the suburbs, the myth has shattered in diversity. Suburbia is something more than the stereotype of buttoned-down Wasp commuters and wives who slurp "tee many martoonis" at the country club. "Gary is as much a suburb of Chicago as Evanston," says Political Analyst Richard Scammon. The suburbs have become increasingly heterogeneous with the influx of blue-collar workers who now have middle-class incomes and attitudes. As Scammon puts it: "Workers now aren't concerned about Taft-Hartley; they're concerned about crabgrass." Along with crabgrass, ironically, come many of the problems...
...like a clenched fist at a garden party. Discreet ads presented their accustomed celebration of the good life. Rolls-Royces at $31,600. Bracelets at $1,200 each ("Two will give you a beautiful necklace"). The cartoons included the customary chuckle at suburbia. White space set off John Updike's latest four-line poem, "Upon Shaving Off One's Beard." But leading off last week's "Talk of the Town" section, with Eustace Tilley presiding at the top of the page as usual, was the sternest editorial The New Yorker has ever...
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 5% of black Americans live in the suburbs. Yet suburbia is where nearly 80% of the nation's new jobs are. During the 1960s, industries increasingly settled there, lured by the cheap land, low taxes, pleasant environment. But the blue-collar jobs they create remain inaccessible to blacks trapped in the inner cities. When the National Bureau of Standards left Washington to relocate in Gaithersburg, Md., for example, the total number of employees increased by 125. But black employment decreased by 73; blacks could not afford suburban housing and the commute took...
...possibility of escaping such tragic knowledge by taking sanctuary in moral equivocation, racial chauvinism or the advantage of superior social status. There is no point in complaining over the past or apologizing for one's fate. But for blacks there are no hiding places down here, not in suburbia or in penthouses, neither in country nor in city. They are an American people who are geared to what is and who yet are driven by a sense of what it is possible for human life to be in this society. The nation could not survive being deprived of their...