If the suburbanization of the 1940s and 1950s was based on the car culture, the suburbanization of the 1890s and 1900s was based on the construction of railroads. “Little boxes on the hillside,” Pete Seeger sung in Little Boxes, his savage attack on post-war American suburbia, “little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.” Most of the grand mansions and solidly built colonial revivals, on the other hand, the houses that have retained their value in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, were built during the less well-understood, but probably more important phase of economic development that unfolded during the two decades before the First World War. The massive construction of working-class suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s that came out of the Baby Boom and the G.I Bill is fairly well known. The currently existing landscape of northern New Jersey was built in two waves. Unless you have a very sharp eye, however, you won’t notice much of the state’s colonial heritage, and for a very good reason. Westfield, the most important town in the western part of the county, was settled in 1712, and contains a house that dates all the way back to New Amsterdam. Elizabeth, the nearest big city, was founded in 1664. My hometown of Roselle, NJ is in a very old part of the United States. A revolutionary novel by a forgotten reactionary novelist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |