From the Park to Parking: the Evolution of Suburban Mobility

FROM THE PARK TO PARKING 583 From the Park to Parking: The Evolution of Suburban Mobility IAN BALDWIN Wentworth Institute of Technology INTRODUCTION While its built environment homogenizes, sub- Like suburbia itself, the literature on suburbia is at urbia’s demographics have broadened. The edge first glance an exhausting sprawl. Since two semi- city boom of the 80s and 90s pulled the civic cen- nal books in 1980s—Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass ter from downtown to “post-urban” constellations Frontier (1985) and Robert Fishman’s Bourgeoisie of highway interchanges, malls, and office parks. Utopias (1987)—publishers have turned out several Americans of all ethnicities and economic classes hundred volumes of suburban study, from the fire- have resettled outside the urban core in border- and-brimstone damnation of James Howard Kun- lands, bedroom communities, and exurbs.3 stler’s The Geography of Nowhere (1994) to Robert Bruegmann’s contrarian defense, Sprawl: A Com- Today’s suburbanites are kitchen workers renting a pact History (2006). 1 bunk bed in a crowded bungalow, empty-nest cou- ples in vacant McMansions, and three-generation Architects and architectural historians have large- immigrant families crammed into modest town- ly been absent from this literary cottage industry, houses. Suburbia, like the United States itself, no preferring the richly familiar confines of the tra- longer defines a single cultural, economic, or ethnic ditional city. Their exurban excursions (Learning territory. Thus, the very definition of “suburban” from Las Vegas, most notably) have emphasized relies more than ever on the built environment. We the extremes of vernacular over the quotidian.2 The have not sufficiently examined the specificities of cultural, economic, social and technological bases this environment, nor the processes by which cul- of suburbia are well documented; its evolution as a tural assumptions, professional practices and de- designed physical environment much less so. sign responses created it. Design writers have indulged a handful of architect- WHO MADE THE SUBURBS? designed prototype developments and visionary proposals, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre This is especially true when it comes to that chari- City (1932) or Clarence Stein’s Radburn, New Jer- ot of suburbanization: the car. The DNA of the car sey (1928). Yet in the real suburbs, banality and seems to be encoded for dispersion and expansion, repetition cannot be traced to a design philosophy, so we have understood the Model T (1908) as sub- let alone an actual designer. Housing tracts, arterial urbia’s progenitor and the mass motorization of the roads and shopping centers seem less like places postwar era its everlasting guarantor. Automotive and more like commodities, standardized solutions and suburban expansion are now so culturally in- crafted by anonymous consensus and dropped from tertwined that we have forgotten their beginnings the sky fully formed. as unique forms of reaction to the industrialized city. 584 DIGITAL APTITUDES + OTHER OPENINGS This is not to say that the codependency of car and and technical wonder, had sullied the town square suburb is in any doubt. Rather, it is to suggest that with fumes, speed and noise. Many urban-design automobility and suburbanization enjoy a mutu- proposals, therefore, aimed to resolve the conflict ally supportive legend that has obscured and over- between cars and the traditional city. simplified the origins of the physical patterns that dominate 21st century America. This paper will at- Some tried to save the city through massive park- tempt a first step toward excavating those origins ing-structure insertions like Paul Rudolph’s 1963 by addressing the relationship between suburbs Temple Street Garage in New Haven6 or Louis Kahn’s and cars at their meeting point: the street. proposals for circular parking towers in Philadelphia. Others fantasized about structures with names like Street rights-of-way consume roughly one quarter of Motopia and Overstreet that cleverly stacked cars, urban land. Given the vast amount of land they oc- people, and buildings in adjacent layers7 or relocat- cupy in all environments—far more than buildings— ed traffic and other urban bodily functions outside it seems odd that we have invested so little time in a happily pedestrianized downtown.8 Suburbs were examining streets. The particular use that interests merely the place from which the cars came, not a me here, the suburban residential street, accounts site for design intervention in itself. for just 15 percent of total vehicle miles traveled yet makes up 80 percent of the national road stock.4 While architects and planners indulged these urban fantasies—and most remained just that—city New Urbanist readings of history, and particularly dwellers were not waiting for grand visions to ma- the works of Andres Duany and his followers, di- terialize. They were voting with their feet (more rect the most blame for suburban streets and their accurately, their rubber tires) and flowing into sub- shortcomings at modernist architects and planners. urbs that promised a yard, a driveway and a cheap This charge has been widely repeated but is sup- mortgage. Developers and local bureaucrats were ported by little factual evidence. eager to accommodate this demand, which had been pent up during the war’s rationing and mate- Generally, it is true that urban-planning manifestoes rial shortages, and carried on with the task of turn- produced in the 1930s and 40s by Le Corbusier, Jo- ing farm fields and forests at the city’s edge into sep Lluis Sert, and CIAM captured the imagination of new subdivisions. many architects and planners. Their influence was indirect, however, and their application was severely Their blueprints were not the proclamations of Cor- limited by a lack of attention to practicalities. bu and CIAM. Far more influential were two technical bulletins on suggested subdivision designs Historian John Gold has argued that these interwar published by the Federal Housing Administration prototypes were “spare-time, low-budget” polem- in 1936 and 1938. Based on the work of Clarence ics better at proclaiming the death of the street Perry a decade earlier, these publications contained than in detailing its successor. No less a modernist the genetic code of what we now know as “subur- than Erno Goldfinger (the designer of London’s Trel- ban”: cul-de-sacs, curvilinear local-access streets, lick Tower) noted that Le Corbusier’s drawings were limited intersections, woodland buffers and bound- wonderful to look at but “they did not tell you how ary arterials.9 to build the houses and streets or where to dig the drains.”5 Further, the reliance upon large swathes of After 1938, the FHA’s Land Planning Division re- state-supplied towers in the park as a solution to viewed individual subdivision plats and awarded the housing problem was directly at odds with the conditional commitment to approved designs, which American preference for lassiez-faire capitalism, meant that developers could assure prospective buy- detached houses and decentralized government. ers they would qualify for FHA-backed mortgages.10 This was a powerful incentive for developers to hew The modernist intent, however misguided and closely to the FHA’s published recommendations. poorly applied, was to improve the urban core. The negative effects of mass motorization were painfully Another New Urbanist charge is that suburban apparent by the mid-20th century. A frequent lam- streets are sized for the largest vehicle that might entation was that the motor vehicle, for all its brio use them (the common 30-foot cul-de-sac radius is FROM THE PARK TO PARKING 585 said to represent the turning radius of the largest complete American suburb. It has little in common firefighting equipment).11 with today’s subdivisions. Under towering trees (Ol- mstead planted 39,000) are sinuous carriage drives While fire departments certainly exercise influence gently merging and splitting without sharp intersec- in many local zoning and planning decisions, nothing tions, 700 acres of public grounds [fig. 1] and a lake in the professional handbooks I surveyed explicitly for swimming, boating, and ice skating.14 advises emergency-vehicle access as a design pa- rameter. The American Association of State Highway On the flat prairie outside Chicago, Olmstead and Transportation Officials’ “Green Book” details crafted a picturesque oasis inspired by Liverpool’s the turning radii of various trucks and buses (not Birkenhead Park and its surrounding villas, using emergency vehicles) and does not recommend the the intricate terrain manipulations he had mas- dimensions be incorporated into residential areas.12 tered while building Central and Prospect Parks in the previous decade. A best-practices guide of the early 1970s, Resi- dential Streets, went out of its way to explain that Riverside also accommodated the evangelical cul- newer fire equipment had smaller turning radii, ture that had intertwined with suburban develop- and in any case, the scenario of a hook and lad- ment in the mid-19th century.15 Riverside’s resi- der truck having to quickly reverse direction in a dents joined a community of similar tastes and cul-de-sac was extremely unlikely. Similar explana- stature, ensconced within the morally superior tions stressed that moving vans, snowplows, and environs of the country and free to celebrate “the garbage trucks were all capable of taking care of grand fact that they are Christians, loving one an- themselves without special design consideration.13 other, and not Pagans, fearing one another.”16 Denied the a conspiratorial axis of modernist de- The Christian bonhomie took place 20 minutes by signers and fire marshals as an easy answer to train from downtown Chicago. Olmstead thought the shortcomings of suburban form, we must turn the train “unsatisfactory,” and pressed ahead with back to the history of its design as embodied in two the second and, to him, more critical phase of the seminal developments.

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