The Suburbs

THE SUBURBS

Suburbs and the Automobile

The city offered economic opportunity and cultural excitement, but it also provoked in many Americans of the decade a nostalgia for the small-town or rural homes of their childhood—a desire for a private refuge from the traffic, noise, air pollution, and general commotion of the urban scene. The 1920s saw a boom in the housing industry, with 767,000 units built in 1922 and 1,048,000 units in 1925, most of these in the expanding suburbs. The middle class could elect to move to the suburbs because automobiles—the primary form of transportation between the job in the city and the home in the suburbs—were becoming more affordable. New and used Model Ts and other relatively inexpensive cars were widely available, and by 1930 more than 22 million of these vehicles were on American roads.

Affordable Middle-Class Housing

Although flight from the city had begun during the prewar period as an upper-class phenomenon, such exclusive suburban neighborhoods as Grosse Point, Michigan; Lake Forest, Illinois; or Tuxedo Park, New York, were gradually joined by humbler middle-class subdivisions. An annual family income of $2,500 and the newly popular installment plan made it possible for an upper-level bank clerk or a manager of a shoe store to purchase both an inexpensive automobile and a small suburban bungalow-style home. Standard contractor-designed bungalows, in a variety of styles, carried price tags of $3,000 to $10,000 in 1920. Although many of these less affluent bungalow-filled suburbs grew randomly, with little concern for consistency in architectural design or size of the homes in a given neighborhood, the 1920s also saw a movement toward regional styles, particularly in slightly more expensive middle-class housing. For example, the Southwest and Florida often produced Spanish-style homes— Addison Mizner planned two-bedroom $7,000 Spanish-style villas for the working people of Boca Raton, and about twenty of these bungalows were completed before the collapse of the Florida real-estate market; California also embraced the Spanish style, as well as architect William W. Wurster's simple, modest houses in what would later be called the ranch style. On the lower end of the scale, inexpensive prefabricated homes were widely advertised but never popular in America. An Aladdin Company ad of 1923 offered plans, precut lumber, and hardware for a simple five-room frame house ($538) and for a twelve-room Dutch Colonial house ($1,932) in an effort to attract the less-well-off potential homeowner who had handyman skills.

Planned Communities

For the most part, suburbs in the 1920s haphazardly sprawled around cities, yet two American architects, Henry Wright (1878-1936) and Clarence S. Stein (1882-1975), countered this tendency as they campaigned for and designed several planned communities: Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York (1924-1928); Radburn, New Jersey (begun in 1928 and partially completed in the early 1930s); and Chatham Village, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1931-1935). Each of these communities was different from the others, and both Radburn and Chatham Village contained buildings by other architects; but all three developments featured homes set back from major traffic thoroughfares and facing onto landscaped commons or parks. Sunnyside Gardens was filled with graceful two-story row houses on rectangular superblocks with garages grouped on the periphery of the "neighborhoods." Radburn placed single- and multifamily structures on amoeba-shaped super-blocks. All three planned communities attempted to honor and preserve the topography of their sites with homes angling down the sides of hills and ancient trees and new hedges preserving the privacy of residents. Although these communities ultimately became middle- to upper-middle-class enclaves, Wright seized every opportunity to make them affordable to lower-income groups. Both he and Stein were firm believers in landscape architecture as an antidote to air pollution and noise, and Stein used his editorship of the AIA Journal (1918-1921) to support beautification and conservation causes. Although the planned communities that Wright and Stein designed did not have a strong influence on the direction of suburban development during the 1920s, they did provide models for city planners in later decades of the twentieth century.

Estates and Wealthy Suburbs

The country estates and great suburban houses of the 1920s combined the latest in modern technology—electricity, running hot and cold water, telephones, gas or electric stoves, electric refrigerators, steam heat—with a taste for the past in the designs of the homes themselves. Building on country estates might embody virtually any historical style from French Provincial to English Tudor to Spanish Colonial to rustic rural; the most popular of country-house architects during the period was Harrie T. Lindeberg, who designed estate homes in virtually every style. The finest suburban homes were also consciously "historicist," often blending styles to achieve what has been labeled "Tudorbethan" (from the words Tudor and Elizabethan) or "Stockbroker's Tudor." These luxurious homes might include stained glass, half-timbering, gables, exposed interior beams, paneling, and grand staircases. Even the innovative industrial architect Albert Kahn, whose factories embodied streamlined modern designs, produced romantic historicist homes for his auto-magnate clients in Grosse Point; the Cotswald style house—with paneling, slate, and even workmen imported from England—that Kahn designed for Edsel Ford in 1927 was among the best of these great suburban structures. The splendid, generically medieval homes that were built around a market square in Lake Forest, Illinois, some twenty miles from downtown Chicago, were largely the work of skilled society architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. During the 1920s a few modernistic luxury houses were being built in California by such architects as Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. But the stockbrokers, automobile manufacturers, and captains of industry of every sort—men who daily immersed themselves in modern technology, business, and finance—chose to lead their private lives in homes that recalled a supposedly more leisurely, elegant, and romantic past.

Sources:

John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History (Boston: Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1961);

Stephen Calloway and Elizabeth Cromley, eds., The Elements of Style (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991);

Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986);

Donald W. Curl, Mizner's Florida: American Resort Architecture (New York: Architectural History Foundation / Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984);

Grant Hildebrand, The Architecture of Albert Kahn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974);

Edgar R. Jones, Those Were the Good Old Days: A Happy Look at American Advertising, 1880-1930 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989): 286;

Leland M. Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1979);

Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger, 1969).