Friday Night Brawl in the Mall

[urbie]

Absolutely, the parking garage and everywhere else should feel safe and be safe. But no amount of reality is going to change some people's idea of what "the city" means- scary, hard to park in, full of undesireables. Some people just don't want what cities offer, they want the suburbs. We can't please everyone.

Reading this thread, I can't help recalling the first time I took the Orange Line home from my office at the Pru to my apartment in Jamaica Plain. Having grown up in a lily-white suburb of Boston, I had a pretty sheltered life, and my view of the whole urban scene was pretty much just what I got from TV. Roxbury was a place I only knew about from "Eyewitness News," and it was always because there was a stabbing, drive-by shooting, or some kind of gang bust there. (The fact that the best jazz clubs in town were there was something I didn't find out about 'til much later.)

Nonetheless, after one too many interminable commutes on the Huntington Ave. bus, I decided to brave the Orange Line. (This was in '86 or so -- a few months before the old Orange Line came down.)

I got on the thing, kept a wary eye on all the well-tanned faces in the subway car, expecting trouble from any one of them at some point, to where I'd have regretted my lack of a firearm with which to do a Bernard Goetz self-defense/vigilante shootout.

As it turned out, I discovered that the only difference between the Orange Line and any other subway line was that it was quieter and not as crowded, and that the level of courtesy/discourtesy among the passengers was roughly comparable with the Red Line, and much better than the Green Line.

I rode the Orange Line for the rest of the time I worked at the Pru, and felt pretty sheepish and stupid for having thought I was in for trouble, just because I was taking a subway line that went through the bronze belt.

The suburbs suck, for many reasons. Sheltered life, promotes bigotry/bias, basically a boring place to grow up -- and I didn't even develop a decent Boston accent, because of the lack of working-class people to listen to!

Urb

[Recchia]

The suburbs suck, for many reasons. Sheltered life, promotes bigotry/bias, basically a boring place to grow up -- and I didn't even develop a decent Boston accent, because of the lack of working-class people to listen to!

Urb

Ahh, I agree, as someone who was also raised in the suburbs. Luckily I had a lot of city exposure growing up though and was introduced to things like mass transit and people of different races and ethnicities early on. I despise suburbs.

[CtownMikey]

anyone go to the mall on friday?? i had to work so im curious as to how busy it was..

[Frankie811]

anyone go to the mall on friday?? i had to work so im curious as to how busy it was..

My past experiences at PPM on the Friday after Thanksgiving was the same as the day after Christmas & New Years. It's a late arriving crowd. But boy, what a crowd. They don't start coming untill after 12 noon. I've seen traffic backed-up to Dean St/Pleasant Valley Pkwy.

[Garris]

The suburbs suck, for many reasons. Sheltered life, promotes bigotry/bias, basically a boring place to grow up -- and I didn't even develop a decent Boston accent, because of the lack of working-class people to listen to!

Great post Urbie... I was just discussing this with my parents this past Thanksgiving. They have always lived in either suburbs or rural areas (despite going to college in Albany, NY, I don't think they ever left the suburbs there and went into the city). I too resultingly grew up in a suburb.

For years, my parents couldn't understand my attraction to city living after I left home. Now, with a lot of exposure to my place in Providence, they're finally starting to get it, and they're starting to realize how isolating, inefficient, and sheltered the suburbs really are.

The thing that kills me every time I go home, though, is the absolute "certainty in ignorance" that suburbanities have. Despite a complete lack of insight or knowledge of how other people live, they have an absolute moral certainty that they are at the top of the societial pyramid, that they've "made it" and look down on the rest of us not "priviledged" to live along side them (but not too close!) in their leafy municipality...

- Garris

[Frankie811]

I see nothing wrong at all with living in the suburbs. What's wrong with providing your family with a nice home in a safe community with good schools? Why bring up your family in a concrete jungle? If I were a successful businessman working in NYC, Phily, Chicago or LA you'd better believe that I'd be living in a bedroom community. If I were single, then most likely I would be living in a city center.

[Citydweller]

In numerous marketing studies for metropolitain regions around the county, it is consistantly found that 1/3 of people want to live in the suburbs and they love it, about a third want to live in the countryside with their guns and their dogs, and the final third want to live in a real mixed-use neighborhood, town, city. This is the third of the market that has not been provided for in the last 50 years and where the hope lies for our existing cities and neighborhoods, as well as creating new ones (hopefully all with good schools!)

[Recchia]

The suburbs seem like the ideal place to raise a family, until you analyze the situation more. Your kids are stuck at home unless you drive them somewhere cause you can't walk anywhere or take transit anywhere. All they can do is play video games all day and get fat. many times they grow up in a white only suburb and therefore have no exposure to any diversity and become afraid when they see diversity outside of their community. No sense of community unless you happen to live in one of those former small town like suburbs. Plain and simple, kids are pedestrians since they can't legally drive yet, and the suburbs as we all know suck for pedestrians and therefore suck for kids.

[urbie]

The suburbs seem like the ideal place to raise a family, until you analyze the situation more. Your kids are stuck at home unless you drive them somewhere cause you can't walk anywhere or take transit anywhere. All they can do is play video games all day and get fat. many times they grow up in a white only suburb and therefore have no exposure to any diversity and become afraid when they see diversity outside of their community. No sense of community unless you happen to live in one of those former small town like suburbs. Plain and simple, kids are pedestrians since they can't legally drive yet, and the suburbs as we all know suck for pedestrians and therefore suck for kids.

That's an exact description of the town I grew up in. I guess I sort of liked it at the time, but that's because I didn't know anything else. There was absolutely NOTHING to do, other than what you could stir up with neighborhood kids. The standard condition of life was boredom -- after school, you go home and you're stuck in a single-use-zoned residential area with nothing. The only reason there were a few black kids in the neighborhood was that there was a small National Guard base up the street, so there were a few service kids -- other than that, there was exactly one black person in town, a Boston Globe editor who was briefly in the news because a couple of local knuckleheads burned a cross on his lawn (much was made of the incident, but I knew the kids who did it, and I can guarantee they were just trying to get their names in the paper by being stupid; it wasn't anything personal against the Globe guy, who I doubt they'd even met).

All the usual knocks against suburbia were there in spades, and it was a classic example of James Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere." Sure, it was a nice town -- clean, well maintained, nothing much tended to happen there, certainly a very safe place to live -- but geezus, there was absolutely no there, there.

Oh -- and let me take this opportunity to blast expensive suburban schools. We had one of the best public school systems in the state -- but despite the money they threw at it, the education I got was decidedly mediocre. They had such a "progressive" English program that unless you sought out the honors classes, the run-of-the-mill student (like me) never read a decent book in 12 years. No Shakespeare, Hemingway, Dickens, or any of the classic authors -- instead, they gave us Kurt Vonnegut (a writer I enjoy, but he's a hack) and, in one case, had us watch movies instead of reading books. In an English class!

Anyhow, that's why I say "suburbia sucks." That's where I grew up, and it did.

Urb

[pdxstreetcar]

The suburbs seem like the ideal place to raise a family, until you analyze the situation more. Your kids are stuck at home unless you drive them somewhere cause you can't walk anywhere or take transit anywhere. All they can do is play video games all day and get fat. many times they grow up in a white only suburb and therefore have no exposure to any diversity and become afraid when they see diversity outside of their community. No sense of community unless you happen to live in one of those former small town like suburbs. Plain and simple, kids are pedestrians since they can't legally drive yet, and the suburbs as we all know suck for pedestrians and therefore suck for kids.

You gotta see the movie "Over the Edge"

Its about kids growing up in the suburbs in the late 1970s with nothing to do. Its an old movie that just came out on DVD a few months ago.

[Cotuit]

I grew up in a decidedly suburban area of the Cape. However we had many natural areas to play in. Woods, streams, lakes. We rode bikes and built forts. When we were old enough we would ride our bikes into the village center (we couldn't walk there, but we could bike). When we were younger, building forts and such was enough, as we grew into our teens we wanted to hang out in the village.

Now all the woods I played in as a kid have been developed and there's not many places left to play. It's the overwhealming sprawl that is the problem with the suburbs. The suburban lifestyle is ok, but when you set houses on one acre lots with no open space, and no easy access to village centers, is when the suburbs become lifeless.

[monsoon]

How much of this "suburban living sucks" discussion is really more of wanting to do something different from your parents? Every generation does this as it starts in your teens and lasts until you probably hit your 30s. I have done volunteer work with inner city kids who would have loved to have grown up in a nice safe suburban home with decent schools, no worries about crime, and had access to the resources found in these places. I am not trying to paint the suburbs as the ultimate answer to family living, but sometimes its easy to see that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence but when you get there, you find out there are piles of dog poop there too.

[Recchia]

How much of this "suburban living sucks" discussion is really more of wanting to do something different from your parents? Every generation does this as it starts in your teens and lasts until you probably hit your 30s. I have done volunteer work with inner city kids who would have loved to have grown up in a nice safe suburban home with decent schools, no worries about crime, and had access to the resources found in these places. I am not trying to paint the suburbs as the ultimate answer to family living, but sometimes its easy to see that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence but when you get there, you find out there are piles of dog poop there too.

You're probably right somewhat. I've always hoped that it isn't just a generation gap though, and really that it's people finally realizing that suburbia isn't the utopia it was once thought of as being. I hope my kids (who I will no doubt raise in an urban place) will not turn around and decide that suburban living is better to rebel against me. Only time will tell I guess.

[brick]

You're probably right somewhat. I've always hoped that it isn't just a generation gap though, and really that it's people finally realizing that suburbia isn't the utopia it was once thought of as being. I hope my kids (who I will no doubt raise in an urban place) will not turn around and decide that suburban living is better to rebel against me. Only time will tell I guess.

What time might really tell is whether you actually decide to raise your kids in an urban setting.

It's fun to speculate on what you might do as you grow older, but you will find that you change your mind, at times drastically, as you grow older. There is a good chance that you will want to move to the suburbs anyway. And even if you are not, it's really quite important to understand that there are different kinds of people in the world. That's the only reason I even made my snide remark in the first place. Yeah, for *you* the suburbs might not be the best thing, but there are plenty (in fact I'd say the majority) who would rather have a little space. To totally dismiss them as just being wrong about their choice is the worst kind of egotism.

That said, suburban life could obviously use some improvement. But so could urban life.

[Recchia]

I will absolutely not raise my kids in any suburban type setting. I want them to be independent and be able to walk their asses to school and to the store and to the movies on a Friday night when they're bored. I don't think a big yard and space is necessary at all, in fact I think it's pretty selfish (and this is just my opinion, I'm not trying to knock people who prefer suburbs, I just disagree with them). And hopefuly by then, it won't just be suburbs that have the good schools and the safe neighborhoods, but rather the cities, as they are reinvested in more and more.

[urbie]

How much of this "suburban living sucks" discussion is really more of wanting to do something different from your parents? Every generation does this as it starts in your teens and lasts until you probably hit your 30s.

Don't look at me -- I'm 42.

Seriously, when I moved to Jamaica Plain after college, I thought it was a great place to live. I was on South St., out by the Arboretum -- you want trees, they got trees by the thousands out there. At the time (20 years ago), it was a neighborhood in transition (read: starting to get gentrified, but still a lot more crime than the 'burbs), but you could get on the bus or the Orange Line and get into town and do pretty much whatever you wanted.

In the town I grew up in, you could do NOTHING without a car. Even with a car, there wasn't much to do; the town had an old downtown core where there had, pre-war, been a main-street kind of thing, but by the time I came along, it was like any other generic suburb.

This is not just rebelling-against-parents -- suburbia really does suck. But this is starting to get into a "does not, does too" discussion. If you like the 'burbs, you're welcome to 'em. Let's just not hear any complaining about the price of gas, though....

Urb

[Garris]

How much of this "suburban living sucks" discussion is really more of wanting to do something different from your parents? Every generation does this as it starts in your teens and lasts until you probably hit your 30s.

I've thought a lot about this, and I'm not sure it totally holds water... My parents grew up in suburbs and they went to a rural area, which they thought would be better at providing the "utopian" aspects of suburban living they felt the suburbs actually failed to deliver on...

Most people I know who live in Providence, Boston, or NYC either grew up in cities or in suburbs very close to cities.

Certainly, as we've discussed before, a driving issue bringing people to the suburbs is school quality. Who knows, one day, I may very well make the same decision, which would be a shame, because I truly believe people stagnate in the suburbs.

To answer (I think it was) Frankie, while I actually do think there are actually very discrete things wrong with suburban living, I certainly defend people's right to live the way they wish. And there are, as it is current manifest, lots of things wrong with urban living right now. There's no perfect lifestyle.

I very strongly believe that the majority of a nation living a suburban lifestyle (a threshold we just recently crossed in the last 5 years nationwide, I believe) really is a problem, though, from an economic, environmental, social, religious, and political perspective. When you have the majority of a populace living in isolation and seclusion from one another, when the majority of the populace lives in a "home is a castle" mentality rather than a communal, civic mentality, when the majority of a populace is seeking a "utopian" lifestyle of privacy, space, and luxury securely away from the danger of the perceived "other," I think that's really a problem. When you add the fact that these communities tend to be relatively devoid of architecture, arts, music, civic life, etc, it compounds the problem.

Is that the lifestyle what we look up to as a society? Is that what we aspire to be? Look at the downtown the denizens of Providence built in the 19th and early 20th century. It said something. It aspired to something. It envisioned a glorious future for itself that never arrived because it (and the nation) changed...

Where is our increasing suburbanization taking us collectively? What does it say to the world?

[soapbox mode off]

- Garris

[monsoon]

Where is our increasing suburbanization taking us collectively? What does it say to the world?

- Garris

I think it is the other way around. Surburbanization is a symptom of our changing society. We have talked about this on this site before, but the reasons that cities were created in the past (work concentrators & common defense), really don't apply anymore. Many people don't need to work in a city and the days of cities created for common defense are long long gone. Sure people still commute to the CBDs to work, but as a percentage of the workforce, this number continues to fall. Telecommuting, offshoring, edge development, transformation to a service economy are all affecting the need to go to a city.

So why do we need cities today and in the future? It's a hard question to answer.

I think the rest of the world still looks at what goes on in the USA with a guarded fascination and is copying much of what we do. For example we all what Paris looks like but many don't realize that more than 2/3rds of the population there live in suburbs and they are having a big issue in France where automobile oriented development is spreading across former farms. And in crowded Shangahi, they are building cities as we did in the 1950s.... Gleaming towers that are surrounded by plazas and super highways that are totally pedestrian unfriendly.