day after the shootings at Columbine High, many newspapers ran a 2" x 2" inset map of the school neighborhood in Littleton, Colorado. There was a grid of high-speed roads a mile to a block. There were residential cul-de-sacs squiggling into empty quadrants. And looming up in the corner like a 747 hangar was the monolithic high-school building.
Such brand-new landscapes, almost wholly unfamiliar to northeasterners, make up virtually all of the middle-class neighborhoods in any western metropolis -- Phoenix, Albuquerque, Houston. What was odd was that the Littleton map generally ran amid columns of copy seeking out the root causes of the shooting, and seeking them most everywhere: guns, television, affluence, big schools, divorce, Hollywood, the Internet, Goth music. Looking for simple explanations for a tragedy like Littleton is probably a fool's errand. But if one is going to engage in the exercise, the suburban layout described in the little map belongs on the list.
In the weeks following the massacre, many Americans have begun to think so too. News articles and television specials have cast towns like Littleton as un-"nurturing" at best, an adolescent hell on earth at worst. People are once again deeply troubled by "suburbia." Fifty-five percent of Americans live in suburbs now -- but only 25 percent of that number mention the suburbs as the place they'd most like to live.
Well, yeah, yeah, one might say. People have been beating up on suburbs since Bill Levitt developed his first neighborhood on Long Island in 1947. So what else is new?
As it turns out, everything is new.
The argument over the sterility of suburban developments like the various Levittowns was thrashed out decades ago, and largely settled in favor of suburbia. Witnesses for the prosecution began appearing in the 1950s: Allen Ginsberg's poetry, the Pete Seeger folk song (written by Malvina Reynolds) called "Little Boxes" (". . . made of ticky-tacky / And they all look the same"), novels of corporate anomie like Sloan Wilson's Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. For the campus protestors of the 1960s, the suburbs were synonymous with conformity, repression, and racism. For the radicals' largely conservative opponents, they meant family, patriotism, and decency. In retrospect, we can view this as an early sign of the Left's conversion to elite snobbery: What really bothered the Left about Levittowns was that they were so working class. Happily, and unsurprisingly, conservatives won this battle.
But the Littleton problem is not the Levittown problem. And conservatives' victory in earlier battles has made them too quick to dismiss the complaints that have spawned dozens of panicky books in the past two years and have come to a boil in the wake of the shootings. Al Gore's attacks on suburban "sprawl" may retain much of the earlier anti-suburban liberal snobbery. The "livability agenda" that he plugs may lack intellectual seriousness. But Gore's very lack of seriousness should alert us that there's a real problem here. The vice president is a sufficiently unoriginal man that he would not be flailing about for a solution if he hadn't already found deep discontent in suburban focus groups.
The problem with Levittown was its physical monotony, a problem that diminishes over time, as trees grow and suburbanites modify their homes. What's more, since Tocqueville we've been told that a tendency to uniformity comes with the democratic territory. The problem in affluent "McMansion" suburbs like Littleton is that children grow up in almost hermetic seclusion -- a newer and more soul-destroying condition, with dismal implications for democracy. Large lots, dead-end streets, and draconian zoning laws mean that there are vast distances to travel to reach any kind of public space. For parents, this means dependence on cars. For children unlucky enough to inhabit a dead-end that has no children on it, this means: No friends for you. Until adolescence, not even a child who is an ambitious walker can escape, since other neighborhoods are separated from his not by streets but by highways. (Town planners may christen them "avenues" or "boulevards," and real-estate agents may sell them as such, but they're highways.) No child in Levittown faced this problem.
This seclusion, in turn, creates an abject dependence on parents for automobile travel, and with it, a breakdown in any socialization of children that could be called normal. In the largely suburban eastern town where I grew up, a 5-year-old could walk about the neighborhood, and a 10-year-old could walk all over town. Twelve-year-olds could ride their bikes most places, and 14-year-olds could ride them to other towns. When you were 16, you could take the car if you really needed it. Entry into adult mobility was gradual and supervised. By contrast, a 15-year-old Littleton resident lives in a state of dependence considerably greater than that of my 5-year-old neighbors -- or of 5-year-olds in any Levittown, for that matter. When a child of the western suburbs reaches driving age, his parents face a choice: either maintain the kid in his infantile seclusion until you send him off to college (where he can go nuts) or buy him a car and unleash him as a demigod of the highways.
There are, no doubt, cultural and historic factors at work along with questions of suburban landscape. For one, anonymity-which the locals describe as "privacy" -- is a cherished cultural value in the western United States. (So is rootlessness: How many kids in Littleton High have parents from Littleton? How many were born in Littleton themselves?) For another, western suburbs were always doomed to be more sterile than their eastern counterparts, since the East was already too heavily settled for automobile-based suburbs to gain absolute dominion over the landscape: Drive out of a planned development in Massachusetts or New Jersey and you can easily wind up on a village green.
The upshot is that Levittown has as much in common with the Olde Village Greene as it does with Littleton -- and is a much better place to live for that reason. The ghastly solitude of much of the American upper-middle class was well evoked by Edward Luttwak in his recent book Turbo-Capitalism: "There is a lot of lonely space not only between but inside the ideal dwellings of the American dream, the veritable mansions of the richest suburbs, which could house parents, grown children and their children in familial communion if only all were poor enough, but which mostly house only one ever-so-busy male and as busy a female, with surviving parents in their own retirement abodes, distant children pursuing their budding careers, and few friends, whose degree of loyal commitment might rate them as mere acquaintances in other climes."
Littleton is perhaps best described as Levittown plus affluence plus limitless buildable land -- and the result is something qualitatively different, even unprecedented. If in Levittown the issue is conformity, in Littleton it's identity. In Levittown, you get kids banding together lamenting that their life is less heroic than that of their parents: It's Rebel Without a Cause. In Littleton, you get kids building the wildest fantasies in their interminable solitude, with the help of their computers, their televisions, and their stereos: It's a high-tech version of The Wild Boy of Aveyron. (As the architecture professor William Morrish told the New York Times: "They're basically an unseen population until they pierce their noses.")
Critics of the Fifties complained that Levittown's sameness could lead to conformity -- although there was never much proof that it did. Today's critics warn that the loneliness of Littleton produces something very like the opposite of conformity. We can only hope that the evidence they're right doesn't continue to mount.
