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Suburbia is a particular kind of American phenomenon, and its roots lie in a particular kind of American heritage. In a casual, ill-planned way it is the meeting ground between the growing, thriving city and the authentic U.S. legend of smalltown life. Says Sociologist Alvin Scaff, who lives in Los Angeles' suburban Claremont: "If you live in the city, you may be a good citizen and interest yourself in a school-board election, but it is seldom meaningful in human terms. In a suburb, the chances are you know the man who is running for the school board, and you vote for or against him with more understanding." Says Don C. Peters, president of Pittsburgh's Mellon-Stuart Co. (construction) and chairman of the board of supervisors of suburban Pine Township: "The American suburb is the last outpost of democracy, the only level left on which the individual citizen can make his wishes felt, directly and immediately. I think there's something idealistic about the search for a home in the suburbs. Call it a return to the soil. It's something that calls most people some time in their lives.'' When France's Charles de Gaulle saw San Francisco's suburban Palo Alto on his trip to the U.S. six weeks ago, he hailed Suburbia as "magnifique."
Hell Is a City. Man has been moving to the suburbs ever since he invented the urbs. "Rus mihi dulce sub urbe est," sang the Roman epigrammatist Martial in the ist century A.D. "To me, the country on the outskirts of the city is sweet." And small wonder, for the towns and walled cities of Europe, from ancient times through the Middle Ages and beyond, were airless, fetid places choking with humanity. The big crisis of the cities came with the Industrial Revolution. In England lonely voices cried out against the grime and stench of the cities. "Hell is a city much like London," wrote Shelley, "a populous and smoky city."
By the early 20th century, middle-class Suburbia was a reality in England, and Social Historian C.F.G. Masterman was perhaps the first of a legion of urban critics to draw a bead on it. Each little red house, he wrote in 1909, "boasts its pleasant drawing room, its bow window, its little front garden . . . The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get. and so exacting when found, find time hangs rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centers in the West End and pious sociabilities, occasional theater visits and the interests of home."
Flowering Green. Long before England's Masterman had his say, Philadelphians and Bostonians were moving to the outskirts of town. Ben Franklin packed up, left Philadelphia's High Street and unpacked again at the corner of Second and Sassafras, grumbling that "the din of the Market increases upon me: and that with frequent interruptions has, I find, made me say some things twice over." And after all, as one proud New Englander says, "When Paul Revere needed help for the city of Boston, where did he go? The suburbs!"