Rethinking Home

I have been thinking about my last post and feel oddly disturbed for dissing Levittown.

So, in the effort to relieve my guilt and to be fair, let me mention some of the upsides of Levittown.

In theory, Levittown embodied a promise: a piece of the American Dream for young, working class families. Here families could potentially own a single-family home and raise their kids in a safe and neighborly environment. And to some degree, this proved true in my case.

I grew up on a block with 14 other kids all within a year or two in age of one another. There was always someone to play with, someone to hang with. In the warm weather we hung out in the street playing frisbee, wiffle ball, and a game we just called chase, which involved teams and a kind of elaborate hide and seek that finding and capturing your opponents. We swam in above ground backyard pools (remember "Marco Polo," anyone?). We rode our bikes to the local parks or to the beach. In the evenings we sat on the curb or in someone's backyard, listening to the radio, talking, joking, flirting, being.

We were also well-supervised as every parent on the block had "bossing rights" over us and every parent knew every kid. Politeness required calling our friends' folks Mr. or Mrs., but the formality belied the familiarity that underwrote these relationships.

The homogeneity that the suburbs tends to promote can be insidious. On the other hand, last Spring, I was back in Levittown for a visit and spent a lovely Saturday having lunch with Lisa, Linda, Junior and Ant'ny... kids from the block now 20 plus years later. And, we picked up the conversation as if we'd seen each other yesterday. There is something to be said for this.

Going home

Well, a funny thing happened right after I set up this blog to investigate my adopted home in the Inland Empire...

I spent the better part of week in NY, at a conference that was held about 7 miles from where I grew up and where my mom still lives in the house we lived in.

Levittown. My friends and I called it Leave-it-town. It is the original suburb -- designed by Sam Levitt to provide affordable housing for returning WWII vets. The center of Levittown is filled with Levitt houses... each house exactly the same on little square plots of land. The story is that when people first moved in, they'd often walk into their neighbors' houses, mistaking them for their own... that's how much alike everything was. My section of Levittown was built a little later... in my neighborhood, there are two kinds of houses: ranch, ranch, cape, ranch, ranch cape, ranch, ranch, cape....

We lived in a cape, next to a ranch on one side and an empty parking lot that eventually became a garden apartment complex.

Running through the center of the area, from the University I was visiting (Hofstra) to well past the turn for my mom's house, is a 6 or is it 8 lane street called Hempstead Turnpike... it is strip mall, fast food, gas station bleak. I had forgotten how ugly it is, how much I hate its retail insistence, its flatness, its mundanity. Is that a word? Looking at it, I suddenly realized how much like so many sections of So Cal it is... and it dawned on me why the IE felt oddly familiar when I moved here.