DECADES (Park Avenue Series, Book #1) by Ruth Harris

Author:Ruth Harris [Harris, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

By the time Nat and Evelyn left East Orange on Sunday, a June wedding had been agreed upon. Nat and Evelyn were starting a new life at exactly the same time that America, unconditional victor in the biggest, costliest and most destructive war in history, was dreaming golden dreams of the future.

The months rushed by for Nat and Evelyn in a blur of decisions, shopping lists, wedding plans and the pervasive musk of sex. Spring of 1946 was the season of Open City; of bebop, whose suggestive lyrics shocked parents, and of the housing shortage. The first thing returning veterans did when they got home was to get married and the second was to have babies. The postwar baby boom put enormous pressure on the American housing industry and changed the tenor and texture of American life.

Men like William Levitt saw opportunity in the problem, built Levittowns and grew rich. Apartment living became a new factor in American life, and the growth of urban complexes centering around major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York spilled out for hundreds of suburban miles in every direction. The traditional American rural ideal faded in a stampede to population centers and sociologists studied the new phenomena of depersonalization, anomie and isolation. Reverberations of the new life-styles of millions of Americans in a highly volatile and mobility-centered society were felt in every area of life—social, economic, political and artistic. Police departments noted a sharp rise in violent crime, the Dow Jones average soared to a new high of 212, Winston Churchill made the Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri and artists and sculptors like Hans Arp, Vasili Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp had smashed all connections with the aesthetic past.

Simon Edwards told Evelyn and Nat that he would buy them a house as a wedding gift. For a time, Evelyn had wanted to live in Greenwich Village; she had liked the taste of bohemian life to which Nat had introduced her in loft parties and smoky jazz clubs. But the dark basement apartments with mildew and cockroaches that Evelyn found picturesque only reminded Nat of the tenements in which he had grown up. Evelyn quickly acquiesced to Nat’s preferences and they accepted her father’s offer.

The purchase of the house was a dramatic object lesson to Nat in the power of the checkbook. Although “the housing shortage” consumed millions of words in newspapers and magazines, it miraculously disappeared as soon as a buyer with a substantial bank balance appeared. It was a demonstration of economic power that Nat was never to forget.

After five Sundays with real estate agents, Nat and Evelyn decided on a twenty-thousand split-level ranch house on a shady road in Great Neck. Split-level was the most modern concept in housing, an avant-garde breakaway from the Victorian and Colonial designs that had dominated American housing since the turn of the century. Split-level ranch houses were the latest thing, and Nat and Evelyn, conscious of style and status, were thrilled.

Once the papers were signed and the deed handed over, Evelyn began to furnish her new home.

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