A Cup of Coffee

Suburbia

Our class today dealt with the years gone after the Second World War and the rise of a Wellfare State in different countries. We were analysing and comparing the different ways the goverment provide benefits for the people in Sweden, Germany and the United States. I was surprised to see how minimal are those benefits in the States, even compared to what we have here (precariously, it is true), and how at risk those benefits can be when economy is not doing that well. But I don't want to bore anyone with an account of my fantastic class of today (it was really fabulous), just share something I saw there. We were examining the rise of the suburban communities in the United States, and the professor showed us pictures of a place called Levittown.

It was a community that flourished during the early 50s, in the New York area. It started with 2000 houses built with a revolutionary technique that incorporated the principles of the assembly line to construction. They went up so fast that by 1948 the builders were finishing 30 a day. They were also cheap and sold like hot cakes, so fast, that the builders ended up building more than 17 000. I look at the pictures and I am always amazed at how there are neighborhoods and neighborhoods with exactly the same houses everywhere. Here, we live in the city, mostly in high rises, and each building is different from the next. In the farther away areas, where there are houses, they are all different too. There were no fences in Levittown -- that was something determined by its builders. Each house had a large picture window at the backyard, overlooking other backyards and other picture windows. Everything looks so peaceful in the pictures: there are babies playing in a plastic pool, a barbecue, a living room spotting a TV set. I wonder if life was ever as easy as it looks now. Off the borders of the well groomed gardens, there was a world in motion. There was war in Korea. Cold War. Witch Hunt. A Civil Rights movement starting to become stronger. Chuck Berry. Elvis. Beatniks, and just around the corner of time, birth control pills, burning bras, Vietnan, Woodstock.

I wonder how it would be to grow in such a quiet, family neighborhood. I wonder how it would be to live in a place I would have to take a car to buy a slice of cheese. I wonder how it would be to live in a place with no bakeries (I am not talking the quaint, sophisticated kind you find sometimes in malls) and no fresh French rolls for breakfast. I wonder how it would be to know all my neighbors by name, and their children. Would I be a different person than I am now? Maybe I would have learned how to drive. Maybe I would have made love in the back seat of a car. Maybe I would have paraded my children around in Aprica strollers and I would have learned to bake muffins from scratch. Maybe I would have two cats and one dog, and today I would be tired of my daily chores, after putting the newly washed clothes in the dryer (what is a dryer? what is a dish washer? what is heating? central air conditioning? I would probably know then). Would I be writing an internet journal at all and asking those questions if I saw a documentary on TV about life in an underdeveloped, South American town? Would I be wondering how it would be if I were a single parent of three?

There is so much I'd wish to know, there is so much I'd wish to ask ( like Ariel, the Little Mermaid). But I don't want to disrupt the silence or bother the neighbors. So I just say, good night, Levittown, sleep tight.  

posted by Livia de Almeida @ 8:30 PM