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“Paradise” Found: the Suburbanization of One Baltimore Family Rachel Rettaliata

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“Paradise” Found: the Suburbanization of One Baltimore Family Rachel Rettaliata Editor: Kathleen M. Barry Volume 45 Spring 2016 Numbers 3 & 4 “Paradise” Found: The Suburbanization of One Baltimore Family Rachel Rettaliata Westview Park development, aerial view of area west of Beltway, c. 1965. Photo by Morton Tadder. Collections of the Historical Society of Baltimore County PAGE 2 History Trails There is a brick row home that stands on West departed in the postwar era in a mass migration to Lombard Street in Baltimore City. A real estate the suburbs. Because it is average, 819 West listing might reveal that it is three stories tall, is an Lombard offers us an ideal starting point for end unit, and enjoys the shade of one of the many exploring an average family’s experience of trees on the block; it has street parking and is suburbanization. This typical family’s move from conveniently located near the major highways and Baltimore City to the leafier suburbs in Baltimore the city center. Most likely, the real estate listing County helps us put a human face on a would not describe this row home as average, but transformation that profoundly reshaped the city that is exactly what it is. There is nothing and county, as well as the rest of Maryland and particularly distinctive about 819 West Lombard America in the middle decades of the twentieth Street compared to any other row home on West century. Lombard Street, on the block, or in the entire city. Dorothy Shifflett (née Hoffman) and her ten There are no spectacular architectural features, no brothers and sisters were raised at 819 West stained glass windows, and no reasons exist to give Lombard Street. The house offered only one this house a second glance—except that this row bathroom for all thirteen members of the Hoffman home offers a perfect example of the urban family, but boasted five bedrooms. There was a dwellings from which so many American families small, fenced backyard for the children to play in, “646 West Conway Street (House) & 819 West Lombard Street (House), Baltimore, Independent City, MD”: Measured drawing by Russell Wright (undated), Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS MD-932. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/item/md1042/). SUBURBANIZATION PAGE 3 which kept them out of the streets.1 Shifflett’s these social and economic developments of the parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman, had been raised in 1950s and 1960s in America. the city and their children attended public city schools, just as they had.2 Shifflett and her siblings What is Suburbia? experienced a typical childhood in the city. They would play sports in the park, socialize indoors The vast process of suburbanization was in full with friends in the parlor room, and, when they force by the time the Hoffman Family moved from carried on outside, they were harangued by their Baltimore City in 1961. The Baltimore Sun crotchety old neighbor, Ms. Mary. Just to featured countless articles and advertisements antagonize her, Shifflett and her sisters would endorsing suburban living at the time. One editorial swing in their backyard, loudly singing, “God Bless titled, “Act Early, Buyers Advised,” described the Mary’s underpants!”3 boom of the housing market and averred that early Despite the charms of city life, the Hoffman 1961 would be the best time to buy a house.9 These family moved from West Lombard Street in 1961.4 articles ran in the newspaper alongside pages full of The Hoffmans found their new home in the advertisements for new housing developments. One pleasant suburbs of Catonsville, Maryland, in a advertisement for a community named Edgewood neighborhood called Paradise.5 Shifflett joked, “I Meadows promised, “This is Livin,’ beautiful trees guess it was ‘paradise’ to [my parents] after living too!”10 Most of the advertisements for suburban in the city.”6 Perhaps surprisingly, the spacious, communities highlighted the “green spaces”11 and Cape Cod-style home on Prospect Avenue was “fresh air to breathe.”12 When asked how living in comprised of fewer rooms than the row home in the Paradise differed from the city, Shifflett recalled city, but some children had grown and married by that “it was pretty out there, a lot of green trees, and this time and the suburbs offered amenities that the city could not.7 In Paradise, there was tranquility, a sense of safety, and green space that was unparalleled in the city.8 To Shifflett and her family, the move from the city to suburb represented security, comfort, and upward mobility. The movement of families out of the city was not unusual at the time; the Hoffman family could have represented any family leaving Baltimore City in the post-World War II era. So what about this family’s move is special or unique? The answer is: absolutely nothing. But the Hoffmans’ move is historically significant precisely for its typicality, which allows us to explore suburbanization on a personal scale. Suburbanization exploded in the years following World War II for many reasons; improvements in transportation systems, the growing affordability of housing, and the escalation of racial tensions all played a role in the growth of the American suburbs. How and why the Hoffman family relocated from the city to Street scene, Colonial Village in Pikeville, c. 1955. the county helps us see the interplay of Collections of the Historical Society of Baltimore County PAGE 4 History Trails From Baltimore County Department of Public Works: Progress and Accomplishments, 1951-1957 (1958), p.89. Collections of the Historical Society of Baltimore County all that, and my father loved the ground.”13 The possessions and perhaps even blood type are Hoffman’s house on Prospect Avenue had a rolling precisely like yours.”15 Similarly, leftist activist and backyard, with an area akin to a secret garden. folk singer Malvina Reynolds wrote scathingly in There was a wrought-iron rocking bench-for-two 1962 of “Little boxes of ticky tacky… And they all tucked behind huge honeysuckle and rose bushes look just the same,” in a song called “Little and a stone path that wound around the lot. Boxes.”16 Aerial photographs of postwar suburban Apparently, American families did truly covet the housing developments like Levittown captured the greenery of the suburbs and, as a result, the notion uniformity of design that critics like Keating and of the picturesque suburb surrounded by nature Reynolds derided. proved to be highly marketable for housing Contrary to such portrayals, however, not all developers. The lure of the suburbs caused suburbs were comprised of monostylistic, low-cost Baltimore County’s population to more than triple tract housing built after WWII. The Hoffmans’ between 1940 and 1960.14 house, for instance, was situated in a spacious Yet even before 1961, the suburbs were not neighborhood, full of character and cultivated without their critics. In 1956, John Keats published lawns. As historian Kenneth T. Jackson made clear his cynical views on suburbanization in The Crack in his widely influential study, Crabgrass Frontier: in the Picture Window. Keats condemned the The Suburbanization of the United States, there was shoddy workmanship of suburban housing no single mold from which all suburbs were developers and the G.I. Bill of Rights for increasing created. The suburban neighborhood might come the affordability of housing, which allowed for the into existence by happenstance, gradual progress, rapid expansion of the suburbs. “You too,” Keats or it could be designed intentionally.17 Jackson wrote in his introduction, “can find a box of your surmised, “Suburbia is both a planning type and a own in one of the fresh air slums we’re building state of mind based on imagery and symbolism.”18 around the edges of America’s cities…you can be By his definition, the postwar suburbs included the certain all other houses will be precisely like yours, new sprawling developments that troubled critics inhabited by people whose age, income, number of like Keats; but the “suburbs” also encompassed children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, neighborhoods formed outside of cities that varied quite a bit from one another in ethnic diversity, SUBURBANIZATION PAGE 5 affluence, and age, among other things.19 Thus the black family to move in until 1959.24 There were Hoffman family’s move to Paradise in Catonsville, many barriers at mid-century that prevented with its previously owned homes, tree-lined streets African Americans from living wherever they and mature landscapes, was as much a part of could afford to and wanted to live. As an economist suburbanization as other families’ move to new who studies racial issues in housing explains, these homes in new subdivisions across the country. included “racially restrictive covenants among white property owners, biased lending practices of Race and Suburbanization banks and government institutions, strong social norms against selling or renting property to blacks Although Keats’ concept of the contagiousness outside established black neighborhoods, and of the “Levittown” suburb was exaggerated, the harassment of blacks seeking residence in neighborhood of Paradise did fit Keats’ description otherwise white neighborhoods.”25 in one aspect: the socio-economic uniformity The disproportionate distribution of benefits among residents.20 Paradise was inhabited by 21 from the G.I. Bill of Rights offers a clear example white, lower-middle to middle class families. The of racial disparities in suburbanization.26 While the 1960 census showed that Baltimore County overall Hoffman family did not directly utilize or benefit was nearly all white, with a mere four percent of 27 22 from the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the population listed as non-white. These figures also known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, it improved seem almost improbable due to the high level of the affordability for housing by guaranteeing home disparity.
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